"Mr. Ellen, something's happened. Everyone's cells are aging at an accelerated rate... No, it's not aging. They've been locked. The apoptosis mechanism has stopped!"
"The cells won't die anymore. After wounds heal, what grows back is still rotten flesh. The decay doesn't stop, but neither do the people die... We tried burning them, drowning them, cutting them apart..."
The transmission cut out, then resumed in fits and starts:
"...All failed."
"The severed fragments are still moving. Skin, muscle, bone fragments are clinging to every solid surface, still breathing... They're still breathing..."
Then the transmission died completely and never came back.
At the time, Ellen sat before the console in silence for a long while. He pulled up the automatic recorder data from that base and studied it for a full three hours.
The curves, waveforms, and readings on the screen all told him the same thing: the fundamental rules of the world had changed.
The mechanism of apoptosis in human cells had been completely locked. Natural death no longer existed.
This was not something that could be reversed. It was not something drugs or surgery could fix. It was a system-level malfunction, an alteration welded into the very foundation of life.
He did not panic, nor did he immediately try to find a way to reverse it like the colleagues in his laboratory.
Because he understood better than they did that if the rules themselves had been rewritten, every treatment based on the old rules would fail.
In the end, he spent several months gathering data, observing phenomena, and analyzing trends.
From the people whose bodies had begun to collapse into rot, the remains whose fragments still writhed after dismemberment, and the tiny particles of tissue scattered through soil, grass, and trees, he reached a conclusion: this was not a