As those of you savvy enough to read bylines know by now, my name is Robert Brockway. What you may not know is that I wrote a book called Everything is Going to Kill Everybody. Now, I don't want to overstate anything here, but I heard it wins the Pulitzer next year, reading it raises your IQ by a factor of 460 points, and I once saw it kill a guy in a bar-fight (you wouldn't have heard about that; the police covered it up because they couldn't catch it. It's really fast.)

It's a non-fiction book about the apocalypse - and while that sounds like I'm proclaiming myself a prophet, I assure you that it's all quite factual, so there's no need to burn me at the stake. Everything is Going to Kill Everybody runs down the many bizarre, frightening, and very real ways the world may soon - or already almost did - die screaming. This is a sample chapter pulled straight from the book (though we've added images and other such shiny things, because the internet is a very distracting place):

In the 1990s, A European biotech company prepared to commercially release a genetically engineered soil bacterium for use by farmers. They were operating under two very reasonable assumptions:

1. Nobody likes plant waste.

2. Everybody likes booze.

Whereas the common man might address these issues by simply not doing any plowing and opting to get plowed instead, scientists at the biotech company thought of a much more elegant solution: Engineer a bacterium that aggressively decomposes dead plant material--specifically wheat--into alcohol. And in 1990, they did exactly that. The bacterium was called Klebsiella planticola, and it nearly murdered everybody; you just don't know it yet.

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