The Immortal Mucosa

More about The Immortal Mucosa

It began with good intentions—doesn’t it always? Dr. Lena Voss had been trying to save the Tasmanian Devil. The facial tumor virus was wiping out the species, and she thought she could edit it—splice in a gene that triggered immune rejection instead of proliferation. “Just a tweak,” she said, as if language could soften the monstrous scale of what she was doing.

The tweak worked. The cancer didn’t kill its host—it integrated. The devils didn’t die; they regenerated. Flesh repairing itself faster than it could decay. But then the virus jumped species. A possum, then a kangaroo, then the handlers.

Then us.

The infection didn’t cause death or pain. It caused continuity. Skin folded into itself, cells replicating without pause, a biological recursion of meat. The world became a warm, undulating fabric of living tissue. Buildings collapsed under the weight of growing dermis; cities turned into coral reefs of mucous, muscle, and fat. The air smelled of copper and milk.

Lena’s team tried to stop it, but the virus rewrote DNA like graffiti—tagging every living sequence with one message: Live forever.

But immortality was not consciousness. It was hunger without end. Trees absorbed it, turning to flesh. Oceans thickened into pulsing mats. Birds dissolved mid-flight, leaving behind dripping strands that hung from the clouds. The moonlight reflected off a planet that looked less like a world and more like a wound.

Lena survived longer than most, sealed inside a glass dome with filtered air. She watched the horizon ripple. Her instruments beeped nonsense—the biosphere had no data type for what Earth had become. It wasn’t life or death. It was something else.

In her final entry she wrote:
We have created a God that does not think, only grows.
It knows no end. It consumes time. It has no death, therefore no meaning.

Outside, the organism pressed against the dome, moist and patient. Its folds quivered as though listening. It didn’t need to break the glass. Eventually, Lena would open it. Everyone did. Not out of fear, but recognition.

When she finally stepped out, the world sighed—softly, like a lung exhaling—and welcomed her home. She dissolved into it, her last thought folding into a million others, endlessly replicating.

The experiment was a success.
The Tasmanian Devil was saved.
So was everything else.
Forever.