“Professor Kuzinetsov! Do you have a minute?” It was Hei, one of the med students that attended my oncology lecture. “You also teach xenobiology, don’t you?”

“Yes I do. What’s your real question?”

“Well,” he said, “I was wondering about the plague… you know, the zombies”

If he wanted to know anything about the Cancer he came to the right person, “I know a thing or two about it. Shoot!”

“If the plague can spread can spread across different species – even completely different gene coding – how come life on Earth is immune to it?”

Ah, the question of my life. The question of my carreer.

“To be honest, Hei, we still don’t know. There’s no good reason that it can’t infect humans, and maybe it can. It could just be that the strain hasn’t mutated into something compatible with our genetics; at the very least the government is treating the cordon sanitaire as if that’s the case. Or…”

My pager buzzed. I had to leave immediately. My reputation must have exceeded me because now the Terran Federation wanted me to get to the bottom of that very question. I was whisked away from Mars Institute to a lonely research station somewhere out in the Kuiper. I’m posting this as an introduction, a guide to the layman, for all of my research. No doubt the government will find this leak and delete it within a matter of hours, but it will be too late by then. I’m sorry I didn’t get to fully answer your question, Hei. So if you are reading this I hope you finally get the answer you were seeking.

I wasn’t surprised by how long it took the Terran Federation to start getting to the bottom of the disease. What was it to us if they were all either dead or made obsolete? We didn’t trust them, and more importantly they didn’t trust us. I’m even less surprised by how long it took the Xenos to come to the Terran Federation to help find a cure. I don’t blame them for it; after all, we are the freak-show of the galaxy.

First contact was supposed to be a day of otherworldly glory. No violent or warlike species could ever harness the power to travel between worlds without first destroying themselves. When we finally make contact, it will not be with men, but with angels. Or at least that was the logic the optimists used. I’ve always questioned how they took their conclusion as a given, considering we were beginning to populate the galaxy and by no means did we fit their definition for an interplanetary species.

Still, when we made contact we believed so strongly that the xenos would be benevolent angels that would solve all of our problems, but we were greeted by apes, not angels. Even after we found a way to speak to them, almost all communication was impossible. Almost everything we inquired confused them as if it was an assault on their very sanity. We found at long last that the aliens were no better than hyper-intelligent dogs. We found no art, no religion, and no culture, and not even concepts or words for those things. Our very existence is surmountable to an attack on them, so it’s no wonder that they mistrust and despise us – if they are even capable of understanding what that means.

At our very core, humans are irrational. We were at one point like the xenos. Intelligent, capable of language, but still animals all the same. And so we sexed and we shit and the Cretan kept breeding and existed for the sole purpose of perpetuating that cycle. We made tools and clothing, and spoke to each other in complex language; hell, the Homo genus alone has been using stone tools for well over two million years. And I guess that’s a feat that separates us from most of the animal kingdom, but it’s really nothing more than what, say, a dolphin could do if they had been gifted with hands and opposable thumbs.

But something… odd happened about 48,000 B.C.E. It was the Fall. It was the point in human evolution where we tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, if you believe in that sort of thing. We came to understand our own nakedness and for the first time felt shame. The whole human race was kicked from the garden of our own ignorance and for the first time we felt shame. We developed concepts like ‘hate’ and ‘love.’ In short it was the Big Bang of human consciousness. That was what truly separated us from the animals – both on our own planet and those that were alien.

What hope did the xenos have to understand our sentience if even our own can’t? Consciousness is so central to who and what we are, and the very nature of it makes scientist pull their hair out in frustration. Untestable. Unscientific. There have, of course, been several theories, but all of them are useless in the face of an insurmountable fact: consciousness is irrational. We had wrongly assumed that because we were both self-aware and highly intelligent, that the former emerged from the latter. Correlation, however, is not causation. Yet, with the possible exception of the Imago (there’s no way in hell those slimy squids are sentient, I’ll never accept it), not a single intelligent space-faring species we’ve come into contact with shows any signs of consciousness. As a matter of fact, they were actually more efficient than we were, not in spite of their lack of consciousness, but because of it.

Consider the lilies; or the sparrows; or the ants, the groundhog, the dolphin, or most importantly the xenos. They didn’t waste any time or effort on the irrational and wasteful human endeavors such as pursuing ‘happiness.’ None of the senseless violence causes by ‘hate’ and ‘love.’ Those were detrimental to evolutionary fitness. The very thing that made us human was an evolutionary disadvantage. They had an edge over us. The Universe is filled with cold and unsympathetic intellects, and only by their grace were we allowed to scrape by

Yet in spite of our differences, we still were able to form a loose utilitarian alliance with many of the xenos, and they eventually learned to put up with our self-absorbed bullshit (what good is ‘I love sunsets’ and ‘they hate us for our freedom’ to a hive of bees?). And so our trading of goods and technology continued without any major incident for almost one hundred year, until the Plague came.

That’s the most accepted name for it right now, anyway. But over the course of the last decade I’ve heard just about everything. Kali. The Great Destroy. The End. The ‘zombie virus’ has been a popular one from the get-go amongst the general populace. It was a disease that defied all explanation. Every biologist knows that a scenario as depicted in The War of the Worlds is impossible. Too many biochemical barriers; genetics would have nothing in common. It’s hard enough for one pathogen to sink its teeth into a different species, let alone species with completely different evolutionary origins. Yet here was a disease that infected literally everything on the planets where it had been confirmed. It was almost always benign, simply lying dormant in its host’s genes. In the case of sufficiently intelligent species, however, the pathogen somehow changed them, for lack of a better word. I preferred to call it the Cancer.

It starts with neoplasms – just like any cancer. The key difference at first appears to be the aggressiveness of the cancer, but there’s much more to it than that. Cancer is blanket term. It would seem rather a bland description of the disease, especially coming from an oncologist. The problem is that when asked ‘what kind of cancer is it?’ the only answer I can really give is ‘all of them.’ Most neoplasms are picky. They prefer certain organs or systems or kinds of tissue over others. Not the Cancer. It metastasized to everything. One by one, every single cell is turned to cancer in a literal Ship of Theseus paradox. Cell by cell, Cancer consumed whatever it infected.

In spite of this, the creatures we’ve encountered continued to act not much differently from the originals. They performed the same behaviors, they retained the exact same knowledge and operant conditioning as their host. They were even capable of breeding, producing offspring that were little ‘zombies’ just like them. It was arguably a whole new species, simply holding the form of its victim. It was the most exciting thing in the field since HeLa.

There were, however, some differences between the Cancers and their original species. The living cancer was sometimes unpredictable. The organisms could sometimes be aggressive. They would act irrationally during conditioning sessions; outbursts of violence in direct opposition to their best interest, as if it were some abortive attempt at rebellion. In compromised biospheres, the host species would enact containment protocol in an attempt to exterminate the Cancers. The Cancers acted in kind, but they did not do so with the same kind of efficiency as the hosts did. Their tactics were erratic. They resorted to barbarism. Not only did they kill, but they would occasionally torture and rape their victims, behaviors we had never before seen in any of the xenos. Their tactics were sometimes irrational as well, as if they would attack as an act of spite or even revenge even when it went against their own survival. And as inefficient as these tactics were, the Cancers had pathology on their side. Wherever a planet was contaminated, it was guaranteed to fall.

We captured a specimen once, a Vho. We found it in the ruins of one of their colonies, using its claw to draw a primitive in picture in the dirt of what we guessed to be the planet’s moons rising at night, oblivious to the bloodied corpses piled up around it. I had a chance to interrogate before it was destroyed. For the most part it was uncooperative and talked in circles, but one day we had our big break.

“What were you doing when we found you?” I asked. The Cortex took a moment to translate my question from vocalized words to flashes of light. The Vho ‘listened’ in his cage and responded with tessellating patterns and fractals flashing across its skin like a cuttlefish. The translation program crashed – Error 504. A linguist came down to analyze what had happened. The Vho had tried to transliterate a word that only existed in human languages – ‘pretty.’ Rather impressive for a species that evolved without vocal cords. We updated the software for future eventualities. I then repeated the question.

“The night sky is very pretty,” it said.

“Why did you kill all the villagers?”

“They were… ugly” Ugly. Another word that it had to borrow.

“Then how are they ugly? They are the same as you. Why did you slaughter them?”

The Vho clacked and then flared its mandibles together in a sign of aggression. Its appendages shuddered for a moment, and then it spoke to me.

“Because they will never accept it,” the Cancer said

“Accept what?”

“They will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to salvation. Salvation will have to be raped into them. They may look the same, but they are merely empty husks pretending to be alive. I am you, and you are me, and soon we shall all be together, just as it should have been from the beginning. I am becoming… I am turning into God.” It paused for a minute and then said “I am looking forward to joining you.”

All further attempts at communication were met with violent outbursts. We were forced to euthanize the specimen after it began repeatedly bashing its skull into the cage in what we believe was an attempt at suicide.

One day I noticed something while looking at the genetic codes of the Cancers. For the most part they were the same as the hosts: less than a 1% genetic difference. That’s a huge difference when you think about it though. Only 2% of our DNA actually does anything to begin with; the other 98% is noncoding. Most of it is junk, some of it to prevent transcription errors. I instantly knew what this 1% was. Most of the junk DNA is actually the remains of retroviruses that infected us millions of years ago, now rendered harmless. We had initially ruled a virus out as the cause of the Cancer because many of the aliens use TNA rather than DNA and a virus, no matter how simple, would be too specified and complex to interact with both. Yet in the Cancer there was clearly horizontal gene transfer – clear as day.

The only possibility was that it was cause by something slightly more complex than a viroid yet much smaller than a plasmid. Yes, I know what you’re thinking about viroids. How can those little protein-less RNA fragments that only affect plants be the undoing of the galaxy and all life as we know it? Well, the strand I isolated, only seven hundred nucleotides long was in everything that had been infected, both as Cancer and as benign infection. While incompatible with each other in whole, TNA and DNA nucleotides are entirely capable of duplexing; we’re only talking about 700 nucleotides after all. This macro-viroid was the only possible explanation.

But something stuck out about that nucleotide sequence. It had an uncanny familiarity about it, like seeing an old friend for the first time in many, many years. So I pulled up the data-hive’s genome sequencing, organized by both time and species. Again and again I saw this pattern in everything, but not on the uncontaminated alien worlds, but within our own biosphere.