The Troop

“DEVOURER VERSUS CONQUEROR WORMS: THE DUAL NATURE OF THE MODIFIED HYDATID”

^{Excerpt from a paper given by Dr. Cynthia Preston, MD, Microbiology and Immunology, at the 27th International Papillomavirus Conference and Clinical Workshop at the University of Boston, Massachusetts.}

The evidence found in Dr. Edgerton’s laboratory is breathtaking both in the groundbreaking nature of what he was able to accomplish and in the savage expediency of his methods.

Edgerton was viewed by his contemporaries as pathologically secretive. Conversations with him, according to the few who spent time in his presence, were narrowly focused on his work or the work of his rivals.

Edgerton was an only child. His parents passed away in an automobile accident while he was attending graduate school. By all outward signs he lived for his work.

His fellow researchers remember him as a hardliner known to play fast and loose with scientific ethics. One oft-reported incident—especially telling in light of the events at Falstaff Island—recounts an evening when Edgerton was discovered by campus police at his alma mater. He’d snuck into a lab using a stolen passkey and was discovered in the process of destroying the work of his closest rival, a senior by the name of Edward Trusskins. Trusskins had been working on a skin graft technique involving lab mice. Edgerton was caught red-handed, as they say, with a syringe of strychnine.

Despite this infraction and the chilling mind-set it signaled, he was soon pursuing his work at another institute. He was simply too talented. He also could be convincingly sincere when circumstances compelled it.

There are those who say the best scientists occupy that dangerous headspace teetering at the edge of madness. By this definition Dr. Edgerton was most certainly a world-class scientist.

Edgerton’s work with the hydatid worm rivaled what Dr. Jonas Salk did for immunology in the 1950s—not in terms of its immediate social benefit (all Edgerton actually created was the most adaptable and survivable parasite known to mankind), but in his successful genetic manipulation of this planet’s simplest life-form.

He took a simple planarian worm and unlocked its genetic code. In doing so he allowed it to modify its basic anatomic and gastric substructure in ways heretofore thought impossible for any life-form. He enabled the hydatid worm to adapt to its environment on the fly. His stated aim was to rob the worm of its natural defenses in the interests of quarantining it within its host… what he accomplished was the exact opposite.

He opened a genetic Pandora’s box.

When his hydatid was confronted with a cliff, it grew wings. Confronted with an unbridgeable sea, it grew gills. Its adaptability enabled it to mutate in a dizzying variety of ways. Just like snowflakes, no two of Dr. Edgerton’s hydatids were exactly alike.

His worms broke down into two broad categories. In the interests of distinction let’s call them “devourer worms” and “conqueror worms.”

Some species of tapeworm will enter into a parasitic symbiosis with their hosts; they can live in the host for years, eating only enough to survive. But even unmutated hydatids do not behave this way: their genetic imperative is to populate and eventually overrun their hosts, overtaxing their immunodeficiency systems and essentially starving them to death.

This rarely happens; even the worst hydatid infestation can be flushed out with proper medication. But the video footage recovered from the Edgerton lab indicates that the modified hydatid is both extremely hardy and extremely aggressive: it spawns far faster, devours far more, and grows far larger.

As such, it is the equivalent of a Kamikaze pilot: its appetite quickens its own extinction cycle.

The mutated “devourer” hydatid does two things: eats and reproduces. After the infestation reaches critical mass it begins to consume the living tissues of its host—this behavior distinguishes it from the common hydatid, which is incapable of digesting anything beyond waste matter. A devourer will consume protein, fat, muscle tissue, even bone marrow and the vitreous jelly of a host’s eyes. This accounts for much of the “wasting” effect on its host: they come to look like longtime starvation victims in a matter of hours.

The devastation is intensified by the fact that every molecule of nourishment a devourer consumes serves a singular purpose: to make more of itself. A devourer eats and lays eggs. It is not uncommon for a devourer colony to reach a critical state after an incubation period of only a few hours.

It is simply impossible for a host to take in enough nourishment to satisfy a devourer colony—whatever the host eats produces more creatures seeking more nourishment…