parasitoid paranoia

Every story starts with a birth. Or maybe every birth begins a story, the writing of a life, and sometimes the writing of a death at the same time. Parasitoids do just that - they rewrite the story of a beetle's life to instead birth a fly from said beetle's pupae. They rewrite the story of a spider's molt to instead birth a parasitic wasp in Costa Rica. Parasitoids eat their host from the inside out, and until recently, the only reason they haven't inspired more horror stories was that human beings were never victims of their destruction. 

Yes, parasitoids rewrite many creature's stories, and the most common are parasitoid wasps, some of which are known as Darwin wasps. They can smell a sawfly larvae inside of an oak tree, ovipositor positioned like a dart to inject the egg directly into their prey. That sawfly lives its larval life, unaware when it pupates, another creature will be replacing it in the adult chain of life.

When the apocalypse came, it didn't start with a virus or bacteria, with an outbreak from a lab with chimpanzees or a defrosted Neanderthal. No, it started with the one biological activity humanity cared about protecting most: crops. Bioengineered wasps from North America were made to target more and more pests, starting with the caterpillars they always had but from farther away places, only then scientists became curiouser, farmers more ambitious. What if we could create wasps that infected rodents in our fields? Couldn't that more easily protect our yields?

And it could, by eating away at the rodents' free will, similarly to how other parasitoids do. Make a mouse get eaten by a cat, and your parasite can reproduce within the cat. Make a pig fly, and you can reproduce inside a fly that fed from the pig.

The climbing temperatures made insects have more reproductive periods within a given year, speeding up their evolution. The genes inserted within these parasitoids initially targeted rodents, but feral hogs became a pest in the American Southwest long before these wasps started being touted as a solution for every farmer's woe. 

When they started stinging people, at first, nobody knew what was going on. Whether these were wasps gone rogue, whether the genetic modifications had made them more aggressive, or if there was some sort of side effect likely to occur from being stung by a wasp genetically engineered to target mammals rather than their usual arthropod prey. 

Nobody knew, but not very many scientists were trying to study the problem either, since it predominantly occurred on people and animals low to the ground, like dogs, children, and little people. I'm a little person, and part of why I'm writing this is so if I suddenly drop dead, people will have a recording of how it happened. I was stung by one of these modified wasps. Scientists have since begun studying what's killing animals and children, but these studies are mainly autopsies. I want to record my experience after having been infected, before I die.

I feel like a zombie now, almost in the metaphorical tech-zombie sense. I start having headaches and losing the ability to think clearly when I'm not near a screen, like a computer, phone, or tablet. I eat almost exclusively vegetables though, which is almost the opposite of what a zombie would. Maybe I've become half-wasp, like how they fly near lightbulbs. Is that wasps? I think so, I vaguely remember a paper wasp nest built by a lamp. Aren't most vegetables flowers? That sounds about right, and wasps pollinate flowers, so maybe that's what's attracting me to salads.

The hard part is the inability to think. It also clears up when I'm near other forms of electricity, like radio towers, so I spend a lot of time near there, pacing. I did before I was stung too, that might've even been where I was stung. Memories are difficult to keep hold of, that's why I wrote most of this story from words I had read, just repeating them back out through typing the words. Typing is as close to normal communication as I'm capable of again, since I've also lost my ability to speak. Or maybe I just have no desire to anymore. It's hard to know.

Everything is hard to know when thinking is difficult. If I knew what was wrong with me, I'd be able to have some kind of community, I guess, but I don't. I've read other headlines, children being diagnosed with apraxia of speech after going apple picking, then dying months later, hundreds of parasitoid wasps emerging later near the child's grave. I can't bring myself to care if that's what's going on inside me. I'd be honored to house a hundred or so wasps, creating a new generation of life. Beats being a recluse incapable of functioning within humanity. I hope the new larvae won’t go one to become adults passing this disorder on, but it’s impossible to know what specifically went wrong when I’m not a geneticist and those who are are uninterested in solving the crisis. Most infected people can still work, if they had jobs before. I was just unlucky enough to have been unemployed before I was stung.

Is sting even the correct word for what occurred? After all, this wasp laid eggs inside me, probably. Inside those children featured in newspaper obituaries, definitely. The autopsies had found holes in bodies' fat deposits, like Swiss cheese. Maybe that's why I have no hunger anymore - the larvae inside me are eating away at my storage organs.

I get lost staring at insects in the field, watching ants go about their business, the inside of my brain a staticky drum of incoherent chtchtchshshshsh. My brain gets like that regardless nowadays. Eating doesn't help, proximity of electricity doesn't help. It's uncontrollable, a sign my life might be over soon, and somehow that doesn't scare me. I know at one point it would have, know the fact I'm unafraid ought to inspire fear, but I somehow feel entirely calm.