The Blight

If you would have asked a person twenty years ago if a non-living thing could get sick, they would have laughed at you or made some crack about computer viruses. But that was before we knew better, before the Blight.

It began small, infecting things like wooden chairs, causing them to weaken and break. People chalked it up to age or rot or termites at first. Then clothes began to tear and develop small holes, but as much of the textile industry had been outsourced and shipped off to the lowest bidder, people simply begrudged low production standards and bought replacements. Then it spread to plastics, which could become brittle with age and poor treatment, but even so, it happened so quickly to so many items, even brand new things still on store shelves. Soon glass, concrete structures, metal objects, all began to weaken and crumble.

Try though they might, researchers couldn’t identify the cause, only trace its path as it extended its reach across the continent, growing stronger and more powerful, crumbling entire buildings in a matter of hours. It spread like a virus, which put to mind the idea of identifying the Blight’s patient zero. Carefully tracking what records remained, communication lines having disintegrated and paper not having fared any better, researchers were able to trace it back to a pile of rubble that had once been research lab in Kansas City.

Over decades tracking down surviving researchers and piecing together what fragile remaining bits of records could be found, the team sent to discover the cause of the Blight found that in an effort to “vaccinate” objects against entropy and create more durable goods, scientists had to create a means to accelerate entropy to check the strength of the vaccine. The Blight, a wasting disease for unloving things.

Not that this did anyone any good. The Blight devoured most anything man-made in days if not sooner, and any attempts to recreate the technology in hopes of reversing the Blight were destroyed before completion, literally undone by its own success.

- Originally mailed to Z.B. in New Mexico