4. FUCKING ANOMALIES.

Except I was wrong. Not about Caitlin. Who fucking cares about Caitlin? The Anomaly they found was in the South Island, not near Waiheke. It was inland from Timaru, near the foot of the Southern Alps, somewhere between Fairlie and Lake Tekapo. The armed forces were scrambling to blow it up because this one wasn’t mutating anything. It was killing everything. Plants, animals, everything. The person who found it is in critical condition in Timaru Hospital and is not expected to live.

There were some aerial photos showing a circle of dead vegetation. Fuck. This means there are different types of energy coming from these things. Some mutate, some kill some … do what? nothing? Yeah right. Dangerous fucking things. I could be dead if it were a different energy. I could be a slime on the floor as well. Dead is probably better.

The world is definitely going to shit.

I skim-read some more. Conservationists were concerned about the destruction of the local wildlife etc. Nothing important. What about the soon-to-be-dead person? They are lucky this didn’t appear in a town, or the death toll would be much higher.

Then, something triggered a thought. They could measure how fast it was growing by the dead zone. Different energy might have different growth rates, but it was something. How much would the Waiheke Anomaly have grown in the last two days?

Then I noticed the time. Shit, I am going to be late to meet Susie. I rushed into the house. Shit, I need pants. And a shirt. And maybe gloves so I don’t poison anybody by accident. I got dressed quickly and grabbed my riding gear, including the gloves.

I don’t usually ride my motorbike around town. I catch the bus to work. I bought it to get to the West Coast beaches. The roads wind through the bush and are fun to ride. Then you get a beach with some decent surf and a wild coastline. It is my favourite place to be.

It didn't take me long to get to downtown Auckland, and I saw Susie sitting in an outdoor cafe with another woman. There are no stopping lines on the road, but I am on a bike, so I pull up on the curb next to them and pull off my helmet. I leave the engine running and my gloves on.

“Hi, Susie.”

“Oh, hi, Bob. This is my wife, Rosie.”

I smiled to give the impression I cared, “Hi, Rosie, nice to meet you. I can’t stop.” I indicated the no-stopping lines on the road.

“Right,” Susie scrambled for the bag, “Here you go. Sorry about not getting it to you yesterday. I had a bit too much of a good time, you know?”

“No problem at all,” seeing as I wasn’t even awake. “I am really grateful for this. The phone, you know?”

“Yeah, can’t live without them.”

“OK, thanks again. I’ll catch up after the holidays.” I put my helmet back on and strapped the bag down. I gave them a final wave and merged back into the traffic. Quick and clean. That is how I like it.

I stopped at the fruit shop and got a variety of fruit, including a couple of Watermelons. That should test things.

I was back in my apartment in under an hour. I put my phone on charge. Then I put my e-reader on charge. Priorities.

I made another cup of tea and took a bowl of fruit out on the deck. First up, laptop. Jellyfish. The tentacles have something called Nematocysts, which is a type of Cnidocyte, ever the fuck that is. I am not a biologist or cell whatever. I am a Civil Engineer. OK, here is something close to English.

Nematocyst is the injection mechanism, it penetrates into the skin or exoskeleton. That is interesting. It must get through fish scales. It injects a Hypnotoxin that paralyses or kills the victim. It apparently attacks the nervous system.

So what am I seeing on the fruit? I look closer. Ah. I have injected the poison. It is just not doing anything.

Ok. Now, we are getting somewhere. How much would it take to kill a cockroach? A mouse? A dog? A human? How long would it take? All good questions. I opened a document on my laptop and noted all this down.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I am massive compared to a jellyfish; hence, I only have a welt from its attack. Going the other way should make a big difference. Revenge will be mine!

Next question. Am I immune from my own poison? The jellyfish eat what they poison. Should I? I looked at the browning apple suspiciously. Internet first. That was a harder question to find an answer for. So the answer is probably. Animals with venom usually build up resistance to their specific venom. Usually. I am not ready to test that yet. My resistances haven't had long to build up. I tossed the apple in the bin.

Others can also build resistance. So if I continually poison someone and they don't die, they will gradually build resistance. I can think of a few people I would like to test that on. But I shouldn't.

Ok, that's enough for now on the toxin. I bought all the fruit for nothing. I need to go to the pet store. Luckily, I like fruit.

Now, the anomalies. I need some actual scientific sources, although I am aware that public information might be restricted. I opened a document to note the key points from all the technical jargon I expected to find.

There is a lot of information available on mutated plants and animals. The animal pics go viral, but the plants provide the most information because they are the most numerous, and outside the anomalies, there are the same plants in the same soil and conditions to compare with.

From a thousand blades of grass, there might be between four hundred and six hundred different mutations. Roughly fifty percent of them die. Of the ones that live, half are beneficial to the animals that eat them, and half are detrimental. There is a lot of neutral ground in the middle. There are some extremes.

When eaten, the mutations were not passed on to the one dining on it unless it was eaten under the influence of the anomaly. The chances increased the closer to the anomaly.

What was concluded from that was the stronger the energy being emitted then, the higher the mutation chance. Just because you mutated once doesn't mean you don't mutate a second time, or a third or a fourth etc., all of which have a fifty percent chance of dying.

We are fucked.

The anomalies only affect living things. There is no change to rocks or dirt. From that, I assume it is not in the water. It is in the microorganisms, though.

The anomalies are increasing. What is on land is only a part of them. They are in the ocean, so I assume they are also in the atmosphere and buried in the earth. Are they in outer space? On the moon? Who knows?

My conclusion is, this world is fucked.

You can blow up an anomaly. It takes a lot of high explosives, but it seems to disappear. Hence, it is affected by the physical world. It can be seen, so it emits light in the visible spectrum. They are not all the same colour, though. I will add here that the ones we have found are visible. There may be ones that can’t be seen or emitted in the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums, etc.

God, we are so fucked.

Enclosing one in lead-lined concrete containers has no measurable effect. Or any containers. We can’t move them. It passes through the container when it is moved. So it is physical and not physical?

Yeah, we are fucked.

There is no mention anywhere of human mutation. It is an obvious conclusion from the data, but nowhere is it mentioned that I could find.

The only way to survive would be to find a way to block the energy the anomalies are emitting. We can't blow up all the anomalies because we can't access them, so we have to stop the energy.

The trouble is nobody can even measure the energy or test it except for observing its effect on living things.

We're just fucked.

I have been close to an anomaly, and I have mutated. Is this energy I sense inside me the same as the energy emitted from the anomaly? I don't know. I probably don't have any way to find out.

This is not a mutate-or-die situation. This is a keep mutating until you die situation.

Fucked to death.

We have to find a way to stop mutating regardless of the energy. Are there some animals that mutate less than others? Does each mutation let you build resistance?

There are different types of undetectable energy. Some are instant kill. Some are mutate. Do some anomalies have stronger mutations than others? Are there some safe anomalies? Safe zones would be good.

What happens when the energy from one anomaly meets the different types of energy from another? Do they clash? Do they merge? What the hell are they? Why now? How fast will they appear? Will they grow? Their influence will spread, but will they grow stronger?

I have so many questions, but there are no more answers I can find.

Why aren't there more people panicking? The information is there if you look. I guess it was not that easy to find, and there was a lot of technobabble to sort through. But I did it in an evening. Ok, most of the night, it is almost morning. But the point is I am not the brightest bulb out there by far. Others can find this info.

I guess people don't know to look for this. It is just strange pictures of mutated animals. Or maybe they don't want to know. I didn't know to look until this weekend.

I am not sure I can sleep with all this rattling around in my brain. Maybe I will pop down for an early morning swim and then go to bed. After all, I am on holiday now.

I don't know what I am going to do. What I do know is, that we are fucked.