: 1 :

When the end of the world came, Jeremy Braxton had just finished his 2L, his second summer of internship, at the district attorney’s office in Cobb County, Georgia. He now sat in horror, staring at a message that made no sense. HERE YOU GO, said the note on the wall. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU. The message, written on a tiny neon green sticky note, had caught his attention as soon as he’d entered the phonebooth. Outside on the sidewalk, beside Highway 92 and right where Interstate 75 connected, everyone was dying. In utter shock, Jeremy had just dipped inside a restaurant called Mickey’s Pork & Porch. He looked away from the note someone had left on the wall, and stared instead at the cell phone in his hand. It still worked, but it wouldn’t call anybody. Most devices were inoperable now, the Ecophage had seen to that.

The restaurant was closed. At least, no one inside it was alive. The patrons lay in puddles of gray sludge, vestiges of ribcages poking out of the stuff, a few hints of skull or other bone fragments were visible in each puddle, the outlines merely suggestive of human remains. Jeremy didn’t understand it. Eight weeks ago, there had been a report out of India about an “unconventional attack” of some kind, and then someone at Freddy’s Truck Stop, where Jeremy had stopped for gas, had been ranting and raving about the end of the world. The next Jeremy knew, his phone was blowing up with messages from friends, videos being shared from Myanmar and Sri Lanka, a Buddhist temple in Bhutan, a group of Christian missionaries in Maldives, all showing human beings exploding and turning into gray goop.

That’s AI, Jeremy had thought at the time. That’s gotta be AI. AI-generated videos made by ChatGPT or Gopher or ChimXZ or any of the others. No way that’s real. No way.

So, he’d tucked his phone back in his pocket, gotten into his silver Tacoma that was badly in need of a wash, shaking his head at how easily some people could be fooled by anything on the Internet, and headed south on I-75 to meet with Nicole Berry about a post-grad judicial clerkship. That had been weeks ago. Weeks before the end of the world was so clearly near.

The heavyset woman, who was presently banging her head on the pavement outside, looked beyond terrified. Even as the flesh was pulled away from her bones by the unseen Ecophage, she did not break her rhythm of banging her head solidly against the pavement. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And all the while, she kept screaming.

Jeremy looked at the neon green sticky note on the wall, and read its message: HERE YOU GO, it said in big bold letters, quickly scribbled by someone’s sharpie. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU.

He thought back to how it all came to be this way.

: 2 :

8 WEEKS PRIOR

Glad to no longer have to make the commute into Atlanta for school every day, Jeremy had sipped his Starbucks and ate a bagel while he drove south, steering with his knees, getting a few honks from people as he veered into their lanes. He ignored them. In his mind, he was already working for Judge Egan Perry, a twenty-year veteran of Cobb County Courthouse, and was rewriting his Tinder profile in his mind to somehow include this new windfall. Jeremy’s time in school had paid off, his sleepless nights of cramming had culminated into what his father called had “A very fine thing for you.” High praise coming from the old man, whose idea of showing affection usually meant being present for his birthday.

Very soon, Jeremy Braxton expected to be well on his way to a life more successful than the rest of his Gen Z contemporaries. He foresaw being in court every day, watching how law was interpreted, how legal precedents were started and cited later. He was looking forward to sharpening his legal writing skills.

But that day, after the interview had been rescheduled, and he was sitting alone in the apartment he shared with Arnold, Tynesha and Halen, wondering where they had all gone, Jeremy would be washing clothes and sifting through reaction videos on YouTube, when he kept coming upon videos out of Bangladesh, on a street called Bangabandhu in the capital city of Dhaka—Jeremy had never been good with other countries and their geography, and had forgotten Dhaka was even a place. But that night, slurping ramen out of a bowl, he was all too aware of Dhaka, and the horrific videos that, according to CNN, were not AI-generated.

The people dying on Bangabandhu Avenue in faraway Dhaka looked like horrors stepped out of a movie. It happened different for everyone. Some people melted from the head down, some started with their feet or hands, while others seemed to burst from their midsection, almost like that Alien movie, except no alien came out, just the red wet sacks of their guts. Their bodies turned pale white, then gray, even as they fell screaming and writhing to the ground, women clawing at their hijabs. One woman clutched her baby in her arms, even as the child turned to gray mulch, its bloody skull rolling out of its bundle and onto the street as someone continued to film using their cell phone.

This isn’t real, Jeremy thought. None of this is real. It was an election year and so he assumed this was China or Russia fucking with Americans again, trying to make them afraid. When Americans were afraid, they acted stupid, everybody knew that. Oldest trick in the playbook. That’s what this is. Fake videos. Or exaggerated attacks to make Americans think this could happen here. Something like that, right? Like how the Border Crisis always comes back around or there’s another Depression on the way.

And yet the videos kept coming, shared across Instagram and TikTok. Some of the victims’ faces were corroded quickly, as if peeled back by an invisible hand, their teeth and eye sockets clearly on display as their blood turned into a black, viscous soup that exploded out of them and quickly became a vapor. After these first stages, it was as if everybody melted in fast-forward, like they were in lava, but there was no heat, no flames, only their flesh and muscles and bones turning to gray goo.

The details of their deaths were always a little different, but it always happened with the same frightening speed. And Jeremy watched the chilling footage, sometimes disassociating and burying himself in episodes of The Mandalorian, occasionally getting texts from family or friends, which he tried to answer in an orderly fashion, but then his thoughts weren’t orderly. Indeed, alone in his cramped apartment, his disorganized mind was reeling. Nothing about these videos made any sense. Surely this had to be a hoax, some Russian or Chinese plot to scare Americans. Surely.

Jeremy had heard the term spontaneous human combustion somewhere in school, and remembered a teacher talking about rare events when a person seemed to suddenly go up in flames without any apparent cause. He wondered if that was what this was, but somehow on a large scale.

Yes, he told himself, cuing up his PlayStation 5 to start a new game of Jedi: Survivor. If it’s not AI, then it’s definitely some kind of attack that makes people combust, or whatever. But that won’t happen here. Nothing ever comes to America. Remember when they said Ebola was going to run amok? And what happened? Like, three people died in all of the U.S.

In those weeks, Jeremy, along with the rest of the world, would go into a kind of info-dump coma, learning all about nanomachines, or nanites as they were sometimes called, and he would hear the news anchors and science advisors start using the word Ecophage for the first time. He would alternate between believing it and not believing it. Some days he would totally forget about it. He would frequently alternate between being afraid of going outside his door, like he had during that first year of Covid, and then tossing all caution to the wind and going to hang out with his friends, who all had their various wild and uninformed theories about what was really going on in other parts of the world.

It was also during this time that Jeremy began talking to a girl named Alysse on Tinder. She was a brunette, a mischievous smile in every picture, her hair done up in double buns like Princess Leia in one of them. She was a regular at DragonCon, the sci-fi convention held in Atlanta every year. Alysse was a violinist with aspirations of getting into Julliard, and who was also polyamorous and assured him that her other two boyfriends and her one girlfriend were okay with her entering into a sexual relationship with him.

Jeremy had never been a part of such a relationship, but he was open-minded. In those weeks while the Ecophage tore through parts of Asia, and then apparently died down, the United States government would demand people stay indoors, enforcing curfews, keeping Jeremy from meeting Alysse in real life. But he bought books on Kindle that covered polyamory, to be better informed when he finally met Alysse in person.

He also swapped book recs with her. She recommended him some classics he’d never read, like Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice—chick stuff, but not bad. And he had recommended the Star Wars novelization of the original 1977 film, written by Alan Dean Foster. Jeremy had been very happy to learn that Alysse was apparently a Star Wars fan like himself, though she’d only ever seen the prequels.

We can remedy that! he’d texted her excitedly, while watching videos of a family being immolated in front of the Lungshan Temple in Taiwan. Jeremy had the original trilogy, not the Special Editions where George Lucas had gone in and added new footage or taken out other important bits. He had them on VHS, the only way to get the true, unaltered versions. Alysse texted back: SUPER excited to watch those! 😊

But all that was eight weeks ago, before the Ecophage made a sudden return in a small town called Kalmar, in Sweden—In fucking Sweden of all places! Who attacks Sweden?! he’d thought—and by that point no one was denying that it was real. Now began the question of “Who is doing this to us?”

Was it an escaped virus, like in that Stephen King novel where a military-made superflu kills the whole planet? Or was it a purposeful attack, something that someone in North Korea or Syria had cooked up in secret laboratories, and now had unleashed upon their enemies? Or was it the world’s billionaire elite, trying to whittle down Earth’s population in order to create a more perfect utopia for themselves? Could it be a naturally-occurring virus? Was that even possible? Or what about this—could it be an ancient virus that was only recently released from where it had been frozen in glaciers, dormant for millions of years, and released when the glaciers all began to melt?

The online conversation shifted dramatically when a video appeared online from a scientist in Bangkok, and he was the first one to say that he and a team of scientists from the World Health Organization had identified the presence of nanites in the gray, gooey remains of the dead.

In the intervening weeks between talking the pros and cons of the Star Wars prequels with Alysse, and sitting inside Mickey’s Pork & Porch watching the world be eaten, Jeremy would learn a lot about how nanites could theoretically work. Scientists appearing on MSNBC and FOX News carefully explained how nanomachines made here on Earth had been able to move about in the air, flying about using little tacked-on, undulating ridges. Those undulating ridges could act like little propellers, allowing them to climb the viscosity of the air. They could literally fly.

He’d learned from one of those Neil DeGrasse Tyson types on CNN that nanomachines could, in theory, travel through space in enormous clouds, sailing through the cosmos on long journeys using solar winds, and could gather up materials along their journey and harvest the hydrogen from water wherever they found it, expelling that hydrogen to propel themselves through space. They could even dive, as one colossal cloud, towards huge planets like Jupiter in something called an “Oberth maneuver,” picking up speed by getting close to the planet and borrowing energy and momentum from its gravitational pull, then zipping around the planet and propelling themselves even faster through interstellar space.

But Jeremy hadn’t really believed any of that. Not truly. Because no one expected to be among those to see the actual end of the world. That was something that was surely going to be reserved for others. Not him. Maybe you.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

But not me.

: 3 :

Lockdowns were predicted, and lockdowns had occurred, just as they had during Covid, except this time they were regional. The U.S. government got this big idea that “We’re not going to make the same mistakes we did last time that nearly broke the economy, so this time there will be rolling lockdowns.” Certain states would be shut down for a week or two, then the neighboring states. This made no sense to Jeremy but he obeyed, as did his roommates, who he wound up cooped up with for days on end.

They broke out the boardgames. Tynesha had a collection of new Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and she’d proven herself a pretty mean Dungeon Master throughout their college years. Halen had a game called Pandemic that everybody loved, and Arnold had his Warhammer games that he shared, and together they could go all night. Movie marathons became popular. Jeremy put on the original Star Wars trilogy, and Tynesha and Halen made their special hashbrown casserole and served it to everyone during such marathons.

Occasionally, they shared a new video out of Hong Kong or Tokyo, people dying, being eaten alive by the Invisible Enemy. Nanites, Jeremy thought, watching Luke Skywalker flip through the air with his green lightsaber and facing off against Darth Vader. He’d stuffed his face with popcorn and thought, Fucking nanites. Who saw this coming?

When his roommates inevitably fell asleep by the middle of the third movie—“The weakest in the trilogy, in my humble opinion,” Arnold had said, which had started an argument—Jeremy would always wind up texting Alysse, asking her how she was doing, giving her updates about himself, what was going on in the apartment, which part of the Wars were his favorite.

Late one night, while he sat sipping a beer and listening to his friends snore while Lando was flying into the heart of the Death Star alongside Nien Nunb, Jeremy received this text from Alysse: Question…and I don’t mean anything negative by this. Why do you love these movies so much?

Jeremy smiled, then frowned. No one had ever asked him that. They had asked him what parts he liked, which characters were his favorite and why, but never why he had liked the films so much that he’d watched them countless times and could recite them the way a Swifty could recite all of Taylor Swift’s songs by heart.

I guess it’s the mythology? he wrote back, as part of a lengthy text message. I mean, Luke starts off as a whiny little teenager in the first one, then a cocky, self-assured guy in the second movie, because he’s been training to use the Force. But he gets his ass kicked by Vader in the end, loses his hand. But then in the third one, he’s ascended to manhood. He’s become a Jedi Knight, no longer whiny or cocky. He’s matured. It’s a true, full hero’s journey. And the way he “defeated” the Emperor without even having to throw a single punch or kill him with his lightsaber—he just counted on his father’s love, to turn him back to the Light Side of the Force, to betray the Emperor and save his son.

Jeremy had written more, damn near a treatise on his adoration for the Wars, as he and his friends had called it as children. He’d waited to see how Alysse would respond to that, wondering if she’d be horrified by his overzealous geekiness, or charmed by his enthusiasm and openness. After several minutes of no response, and of the message reading as only DELIVERED and not READ, he texted her again to ask if she was okay.

Her text back was more disturbing that he’d expected: The military has trucks on our street. It’s weird. What’s going on?

: 4 :

When the military vehicles started appearing on I-75 and Highway 41, and all along the other main junctions, turning vehicles around and keeping them from crossing state lines, that was when Jeremy (whose college thesis had partially included citations and research about the few times martial law had been declared in the U.S.) began to worry. When he’d gotten out of his car and shouted at a soldier to explain himself, all the 19-year-old kid had to say was, “They just want to contain this thing, sir. That’s all. Just a precaution.”

Contain it?

Contain. It?!

It was apparent the kid had said too much, because a large bald man carrying a rifle and wearing more stripes on his uniform came storming over and bellowed for the kid to shut the fuck up. Red-faced and furious, he’d also tore into Jeremy and told him to get back in his Tacoma (which he took the time to insult by saying it needed a severe fucking wash) and get the hell out of here.

That night, he sat alone in the apartment again. Arnold, Tynesha and Halen were all staying at their parents’ houses. Things seemed to be getting very serious, and people were afraid. Jeremy’s father was dead, his mother was in Montana with her new husband Frank, and she’d never been much of a caller or texter anyway, so he’d sat there, facing the glowing television, occasionally texting Alysse to ask her what it was like where she was.

One of her texts said: I really want to meet soon. Can we meet? I feel like if we don’t meet soon we never will.

Skating past the potential ominous inference there, Jeremy texted back: Yes, of course. Would love to. But how?

She texted: I don’t know, but I would like to find a wait. Then she texted: *way, stupid autocorrect.

Jeremy sent back a thumbs-up. Then he thought that was probably too impersonal and juvenile, so texted a kiss emoji and hoped that wasn’t crossing a line. But when she returned the kiss emoji, some small part of his world, which had felt like it was under threat of structural collapse, suddenly had returned to it a bracing column. Stability. Or, if not stability, then at least hope. And he would certainly take some of that right now.

The next day, the video from Yellowstone National Park went viral, and everyone saw the trees turning rust-brown, then flaking off like old burned wood. As with the human victims, there were no signs of flames, but all the trees, grass and flowers still acted as though they were on fire, even leaving behind a gray, wispy cloud. They turned gray and black, flaking off, parts of them oozing and collapsing into puddles of the same gray goo he’d seen the people in Dhaka and Kalmar turn into.

Three days later, a video from eco-protesters in the Amazon showed something similar happening to the rainforests, but because they were eco-protesters most people believed it was fake. That is, until the Brazilian government released drone footage that showed the rainforests being turned to rippling sludge. The view from five hundred feet in the air was terrifying, watching all that greenery go up in black clouds and gray goo.

By this time, Jeremy had already forgotten about his clerkship at the courthouse. He’d forgotten about everything except Alysse, who texted him every night: Just checking in on you, the first text would say, followed by them sharing Ecophage videos back and forth, occasionally discussing theories, plans for where they would go if it started happening here. Alysse said she was staying with her brothers in Atlanta, on the southside, and that her brothers believed these invisible nanite clouds were the work of alien invaders.

Later that night, that very theory was brought up on CNN’s panel discussion on the “Ecophage Problem,” as it was being referred to. Jeremy thought that was a tad underselling it, as though the Ecophage was merely a rash that just needed a little cream applied. In any case, one of the panelists was a woman named Dr. Erin Gilmore, a consultant for Homeland Security and the National Security Agency. And Jeremy Braxton would always remember where he was when this interview aired, because when asked, for the first time ever on national television, if this threat really could be of extraterrestrial origin, Dr. Gilmore had responded calmly with, “I think so. But not the way you’re thinking.”

“What do you mean?” one of the CNN hosts asked.

“I mean, if someone could create this, then they could destroy us without having to go through all of this. And why destroy us when we are no threat to them? Why wipe us out in this way, which will render the planet lifeless?”

One of the other hosts almost spat up her coffee, and lowered her cup. “I’m sorry, did you say ‘will render the planet lifeless’?”

Looking like she’d just realized she’d misspoken (Or just being honest? Jeremy wondered), Dr. Gilmore said, “What I mean to say is—wouldn’t they want this planet intact, rather than destroy its ecosystem? But now that we’re on the subject…” She trailed off, and to Jeremy, who leaned forward on the sofa in rapt attention, Dr. Gilmore looked like a woman intensely considering just how honest she should be. “We’ve been calling it an Ecophage, and that is precisely what an ecophagic threat describes. It devours all biomass. Flora, fauna, all of it.”

“So…” said the male CNN host, who blinked a few times in apparent confusion (or despair?). He finally said, “So…what are we looking at here, Doctor?”

“Satellite footage indicates this came from out-system, and heat blooms suggest there could be more on the way. That’s all supposed to be classified but I’m sharing it anyway. Because…fuck it.” Dr. Gilmore was talking rapidly now, and she was glancing off-screen somewhere, as if she expected to be tackled and told to shut up any second. She went on, “Deep-field scanning suggests Earth may be ringed with a cloud of these nanites—”

“Excuse me? Ringed with them? Like Saturn’s rings?”

“Yes. That’s why some countries along the equator are reporting a sort of ‘diffusion’ of sunlight. We think we are utterly surrounded by these clouds. Increased radio signals across the X-hand suggest…suggest they may be communicating with the rest of their cloud.”

“What—I’m sorry, Dr. Gilmore, but what exactly are you—”

“Whoever created these nanites are long dead. And these nanites currently moving towards us are probably not even the same ones created by that alien civilization. The swarm likely began as von Neumann probes, possibly as big as factories, who knows?”

“Sorry, what’s a…a von Neumann—”

“They were self-replicating probes, possibly used for exploration, possibly for warfare. We’ll never know. They were likely built millions or billions of years ago and were sent out to land on moons, asteroids, comets, probably meant to mine them for resources, using some of those resources to self-replicate—”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Dr. Gilmore, but how do you know that—”

“—and they likely were controlled by an artificial intelligence,” Gilmore went on, talking faster. And…was that sweat on her brow? Jeremy thought it was. He was texting to Alysse: Are you WATCHING THIS SHIT ON CNN? Gilmore continued, “That artificial intelligence would’ve no doubt had at least some parameters for self-preservation, as mandated by its need to self-replicate. It could learn to defend, learn to evade, learn to attack, and ultimately learn to iterate upon itself. It would’ve created newer, more advanced versions of itself. Each generation improving upon the previous, until at last you had the most efficient collectors. A hive-mind of nanites, likely several different clouds that spread far and wide, looking for resources.”

The CNN host said, “And…Earth is the only planet with those resources?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Venus, they all have valuable resources. These nanite swarms are currently moving in towards all of them, as well. Three of Jupiter’s moons have been discovered to have these swarms orbiting them.”

“Jupiter’s moons have—”

“Yes.”

“So these nanites are mining our entire solar system?”

“Yes.”

“So, they’re not just trying to…to…devour us,” said the host, struggling to even say the word. “But they’re devouring everything else?”

“Everything else in their wake, yes. Scientists have long theorized this possibility, we call it the ‘gray goo’ concept and, well…from the videos you’ve seen, it looks like our simulations were correct. Once an ecophage like this takes over, all that’s left is useless compounds, chemical waste from their eating process, nothing else useful to them.”

A text had come in from Alysse: Oh my God.

So, she was watching it. He texted her back, asking her what she was making out of all of this. Alysse didn’t answer back immediately, and that had him worried. A sudden creeping terror lived in his guts, in his testicles, making him sick, as sick as he’d been after eating that bad steak at Karl’s Diner three years ago at Arnold’s birthday dinner.

Jeremy shot to his feet and started pacing.

Dr. Gilmore went on, tossing out jargon like bounce-wave readings and cosmic microwave background and Oort cloud mining and a dozen other things, pointing out how the alien-made nanomachines likely took advantage of their exponential growth and devoured their creators. “The nanites that are currently falling on us are descendants of those original, probably-now-obsolete probes. The ones who created them are long dead, all gobbled up. You can just about bet the bank on that.”

“You’re…you’re sure about that?” The host had gone pale. Jeremy looked into his eyes, and imagined that right at that moment, the CNN host was thinking about his children, his family, his pet cat, his everything.

“There are a few universal constants you can count on,” Dr. Gilmore said, and started removing the mic that was hooked to her jacket collar, getting ready to leave the interview. A tear fell from her left eye. Jeremy couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “And there’s one universal rule that all life follows. Life must feed, and if doesn’t, it dies. So, you tell me what that means, because my bosses at the Agency just don’t seem to be able to get that into their fucking heads.”

“I—er—uh—Dr. Gilmore, is there a vaccine that we can—”

“A vaccine?” she laughed mirthlessly. “A vaccine for fucking nanomachines? Do you imbeciles think that’s how anything works? Maybe if this country had ever picked up a fucking science book since they graduated high school, maybe we would’ve had a population scientifically literate enough to understand that you can’t just—”

The rest of her words were lost. Dr. Gilmore walked off camera, leaving Jeremy alone in his apartment again, staring at the TV, at his phone, and out the window at a clear Atlanta night sky.

His phone chimed. A text from Alysse. It said: We need to meet soon.