I don't think I ever made an actual choice about the direction of my life until I was in my 20s. My parents' philosophy was that I had to do everything they told me to do or they would kick me out of the house as soon as I became an adult. They told me to go to the best school I possibly could, so I could go to the best college I possibly could, so my degree would make me nice and successful working for the Nakunan Empire. When my teachers told them I might be gifted, they saw dollar signs and rushed to get me tested. When my teachers told them there might be something wrong with me, they refused and scoffed about how the teachers just didn't want to do their jobs. So I wound up on the biology track in literally the highest-ranking science academy in all of the Nakunan Empire with a bunch of undiagnosed mental problems making things even more stressful.

In my second year, things got so bad that I got in a fight with a wolverine that put him in the hospital. I don't feel bad about it, he was a bully and the teachers wouldn't do anything about him. In a weird way it was kind of a blessing, because I got expelled over it. My parents pitched a huge fit about me failing them and squandering the opportunity they worked so hard to get me, so they sent me to military school.

I behaved and my parents weren't there, so I was doing even better than I had been before. So much so that I got to graduate a year early so I could get a head start studying biologics for the military.

I was 17 years old, all I knew about the world was vidcons and the propaganda they taught me in school. I thought I was going to be making the world a better place and helping fight the bad guys. Better that than designing more addictive snack foods or cheaper furniture lacquer, right?

Eight years in university. Four years in residency at a Nakunan microbiotics laboratory. I celebrate my 30th birthday as a new hire at a blacksite and by my 35th birthday they've got me doing field work.

Big mistake.

I'm a nerd. I do my work, I go home to watch movies and drink. I don't have a lot of friends, and I don't like debating with people. I was perfectly happy to be ignorant of the world around me so long as I had what I needed and I was comfortable.

Looking back, I should have realized that the war wasn't doing as great as they said it was when they promoted me to field work. That was the kind of fucked-up, boots-on-the-ground stuff they usually contracted out. Because taking a lab nerd and dropping them into a conflict zone with a bunch of war criminals is a recipe for disaster.

I was on my third consultation, helping a forward operating base on Ryzeen. The population of a nearby conflict zone was susceptible to a parasite and we were using it as a delivery vehicle for a virus, high-level stuff. One of the mercenary psychos working there was someone I went to gifted school with. I knew him when he was a teenager, when he was all about playing vidcons and trying to get abs so girls would like him. I went drinking with him after hours once to catch up. He was gleefully talking about how all these humans deserved to die. How great it was that we were all out there making the world a better place by getting rid of them. How one day, if we were lucky, they wouldn't exist at all anymore. It fucking sucked so much, but I was stuck there for two weeks so I just had to sit there and listen to him. He could tell that it bothered me and he liked it, because he started approaching me in the halls whenever we bumped into each other. He would have his fellow Squaddies with him, too. They were really mean.

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At the labs we always talk about what we do as harm reduction: avoiding the casualties and conflicts of direct combat. I just kind of assumed that mercenaries were the same way, that it was just a job for them.

I didn't realize what a load-bearing rationalization that was until I didn't have it anymore. Those were some of the darkest and most miserable weeks of my life, I was literally counting down the days until I could leave this nightmare behind.

Then the Mark Starr Syndrome outbreak happened and everything shut down overnight. I was stuck there on Ryzeen with these assholes. I didn't know when I was going to get to leave. At first, we didn't even know if we were going to keep receiving supplies. By this point the psychos were bored with me so I got to spend most of my time in my bunk wishing I was dead and watching the casualties rise across the galaxy.

I dedicated my life to making pathogens that kill people, and now for the first time in my life I was on the receiving end of that. There was nothing I could do. I couldn't even help fight it; Telomerics is all about controlling the vectors of manufactured sickness, it can't do anything to help cure a naturally-occurring one.

So my life's work is meaningless at best and genocide at worst. All the comforts of home that my good fortune and hard work brought me are gone and I may not even live long enough to see them again. My only company are war criminals who keep trophies of their victims and think that sexual assault is an icebreaker. The only thing I have left is the Nakunan Empire itself, the great social experiment that I ostensibly sold my soul to. And every day I watch the death toll climb by millions and the citizens of the empire regress further into barbarism as their leaders do nothing.

The thing that really kicked off this whole plan was the mercenary psychos. They were people whose whole thing was being able to kill any obstacle in their way, so when the pandemic started of course they thought they didn't count because they were special. All the people who died were weak; we are strong, so obviously we won't die.

I'll never forget the evening that I was walking into the canteen to get a snack and the mercenaries were all hanging out drinking and talking shit. Their leader, my former high school friend, was a jackrabbit named Lance Mōdel. They were gathered around a speaker, playing cards in a cloud of smoke, and the broadcast they were listening to was interrupted by an ad break talking about how everyone needs to be vigilant because everyone is vulnerable to Mark Starr Syndrome.

"Bull-fuckin'-shit!" Lance called out to chuckles and smirks, "Gentlemen, if Mark Starr himself were here in this room? We could all take turns fucking him and kissing him on the lips when we finished and we wouldn't even get a cold."

And I thought to myself as I walked by: bull-fucking-shit. You talk a big game but your cells run on the Krebs Cycle just like everyone else's. If this was a planet with a Mark Starr on it, you'd be cooking to death on your own body heat same as anyone else.

When I was walking back to my room with a diet cola and a bag of soy snacks, I was imagining what it would be like for Lance and his friends to die to Mark Starr Syndrome. I imagined the inhaled metastasis catching in their sinuses, spreading through their body in mere hours. I imagined the creeping realization as they started to feel hotter and hotter. I imagined the final hours of psychosis where they would have an insatiable need to shave or pluck out their fur; an awful last-ditch attempt by a dying lizard brain to do anything to help release heat from the inferno burning inside its cells. And then I imagined his proteins denaturing and the electricity leaving his neurons, never able to think or feel or hurt anyone ever again.

I really liked imagining that.

Then I realized: I don't have to just imagine this.

I can make this happen for real.

What's stopping me from wiping that smirk off Lance's face forever?