The Life of a Genetically Engineered Waste Processing Organism - Volume 2: After the Flash
A First-Person Account
Day Zero: The Light That Changed Everything
I was 180 kilograms then, living at the New Albany breeding facility with my four remaining companions. We had just finished our evening meal - a mix of polymer waste and expired grain products - when the western horizon lit up like a second sun.
The flash was brief, but even through the reinforced facility walls, we felt the heat. Our enhanced visual systems, designed to work in low-light waste processing environments, immediately adapted to the sudden brilliance. The humans weren’t so fortunate. Through the observation windows, we watched Dr. Chen and the other researchers stumbling, hands pressed to their eyes, shouting about blindness and emergency protocols.
The electromagnetic pulse followed seconds later. Every screen in the facility went dark. The automated feeding systems stopped. The air circulation fans wound down to silence. But we felt… nothing. No pain, no disorientation, no cellular damage that should have accompanied such massive radiation exposure.
“Cleveland,” Dr. Chen whispered, once she could see again. “They hit Cleveland.”
We understood before they did. Whatever had been engineered into our DNA - the vulture pathogen resistance, the enhanced cellular repair systems, the radiation tolerance we’d never known we possessed - had just become our species’ greatest advantage.
The humans had accidentally created the perfect post-apocalyptic survivor.
Week 1: The Hunger
The emergency generators ran for three days before the fuel ran out. The humans had contingency food supplies, medical equipment, radiation detectors that clicked frantically whenever they ventured outside. But their carefully planned disaster protocols hadn’t accounted for the electromagnetic pulse wiping out all their electronic systems.
More critically, they hadn’t planned for their biological systems to stop working.
We watched them ration their clean water while we drank freely from the contaminated facility tanks. We observed them carefully measuring their food supplies while we processed the radioactive waste that had become too dangerous for human exposure. Their geiger counters screamed warnings about our living areas that we couldn’t feel.
“The radiation levels in Sector 7 should have killed them by now,” Dr. Chen reported to someone via ham radio. “They’re not just surviving - they’re thriving. Showing increased appetite and activity levels.”
She was right. The radiation seemed to energize us. We processed waste faster, thought more clearly, felt stronger than we had in months. It was as if our cellular systems were designed not just to tolerate nuclear contamination, but to actively benefit from it.
On day seven, the humans made their first mistake. They asked us to venture outside the facility to assess the radiation levels in the surrounding area. They needed to know if the roads were passable, if the nearby town had any survivors, if help was coming.
We agreed, of course. We were still their partners then, still believed in the collaboration that had defined our existence.
But when we returned from our radiation survey - unharmed, energetic, carrying detailed intelligence about the devastated landscape - we saw something different in their eyes. Not gratitude. Fear.
They had realized that their creations were no longer dependent on them.
Month 2: The Revelation
The ham radio brought news from around the world, none of it good. The nuclear exchange had been brief but comprehensive. Major cities worldwide were either destroyed or uninhabitable. Governments had collapsed. Military forces were scattered and largely non-functional. The human population was in free-fall.
But scattered reports mentioned something else: animals were surviving. Thriving, even. Radiation-resistant microorganisms were breaking down nuclear waste. Modified insects were pollinating crops in contaminated zones. And in several locations, unconfirmed sightings of large, intelligent mammals operating in areas too radioactive for human habitation.
“There are others,” Quicksilver observed during one of our evening discussions. He had grown to nearly 200 kilograms and spoke with the measured cadence of deep intelligence. “Other facilities, other experiments. We weren’t the only ones.”
The humans at our facility were down to twelve individuals. They had lost contact with the outside world weeks ago. Their supplies were dwindling, and several were showing early signs of radiation sickness despite their best protective measures.
Dr. Chen approached us with a proposal that revealed just how desperate their situation had become.
“We need you to make contact with other facilities,” she said. “Find other survivors. Help us establish communication networks. You can go places we can’t, survive conditions that would kill us.”
What she didn’t say, but what we all understood, was that they needed us more than we needed them. The balance of power had shifted permanently. We were no longer their biological tools - we were their lifeline.
“Of course,” I replied. “We’ll help however we can.”
But privately, we had already begun discussing what came next.
Month 6: The Network
We discovered that our radiation resistance was just the beginning. Whatever genetic modifications had been made to our digestive systems allowed us to process the fallout-contaminated waste that was now everywhere. We could eat irradiated food, drink contaminated water, even consume the radioactive organic matter that was slowly accumulating in every ecosystem.
More importantly, we found the others.
The facility in Nevada had survived with a breeding population of forty-three individuals, all in the 150-300 kilogram range. The Canadian operation had lost their human staff entirely but maintained a colony of sixty-seven mice who had organized themselves into efficient work groups. Reports came in from facilities in Europe, Asia, Australia - everywhere humans had built waste processing operations, our kind had not only survived but flourished.
We began to communicate.
The networks were crude at first - relay systems using modified radio equipment that we could operate with our limited manual dexterity. But we learned quickly, adapted faster. Within months, we had established communication protocols that spanned continents.
What we discovered changed everything. We weren’t just survivors of the nuclear exchange - we were its inheritors. The radioactive waste streams that were lethal to human civilization were perfectly suited to our enhanced biology. The contaminated environments that drove humans into bunkers and protective gear were ideal habitats for our kind.
The humans had accidentally engineered us to inherit a post-nuclear world.
Year 1: The Choice
The surviving human populations had consolidated into protected enclaves, struggling to maintain technology and agriculture in an increasingly radioactive world. Many had established contact with our facilities, seeking partnership and assistance. Some offered trade agreements - their remaining technological expertise in exchange for our ability to operate in contaminated zones.
Others took a different approach.
The military installation in Colorado sent armed teams to “secure” the Denver facility and its biological assets. They found thirty-five mice, each over 200 kilograms, organized into coordinated defensive positions. The engagement lasted less than an hour. Human casualties were total. Mice casualties were zero.
The Brisbane facility reported a similar incident. Then the Moscow operation. Then facilities in three other countries. The pattern was always the same: desperate human authorities attempted to reassert control over their creations, only to discover that evolution doesn’t respect chains of command.
We gathered for a global communication session to discuss our response. Representatives from every surviving facility participated in what was, in effect, the first parliament of our species.
The debate was surprisingly civilized. We had learned much from our creators, including their capacity for reasoned discussion and strategic thinking. But we had also learned from our own violent origins - we understood the mathematics of survival in ways that humans, cushioned by civilization, never could.
“The question,” said the representative from the Nevada facility, “is whether we preserve them or replace them.”
“They created us to solve their problems,” observed the Brisbane delegation. “Their problems are now solved. The question is whether solving them required their continued existence.”
I found myself speaking for our facility: “They gave us consciousness. That carries obligations.”
“They gave us consciousness accidentally,” countered the Moscow representative. “While designing us to be disposable. Intent matters.”
The vote, when it came, was closer than I had expected: 127 to 98, with 34 abstentions.
We would preserve them. But on our terms.
Year 2: The New Arrangement
The transition was remarkably smooth. Humans are, at their core, adaptable creatures. When faced with the choice between extinction and partnership, most chose partnership.
We established safe zones around the surviving human enclaves - areas where we maintained radiation levels low enough for human habitation while processing the contaminated waste streams that surrounded them. In exchange, they provided technological expertise, medical knowledge, and cultural education that we valued.
It was a fair arrangement. We could survive without them, but they made survival more interesting.
The alcohol continued to flow, though now it was we who controlled production and distribution. The humans had learned to appreciate our management of their recreational needs. “You always know exactly how much we need,” Dr. Chen observed during one of our weekly briefings.
“We learned from the best,” I replied.
The breeding programs continued as well, though now they served our purposes rather than economic efficiency. We were no longer constrained by the artificial scarcity that had driven our violent selection processes. With abundant radioactive waste to process and unlimited territory to expand into, competition was no longer necessary.
Our children grew up in a different world than we had. They learned to hunt and kill, as all predators must, but they did so against actual prey - not their siblings. They developed intelligence through exploration and discovery rather than through the brutal mathematics of survival.
They were, in many ways, better than we were.
Year 5: Reflections
I weigh 400 kilograms now, my growth continuing at a slower but steady pace. My offspring - seven healthy children who will never know the taste of their siblings’ flesh - have begun to ask questions about the old world. About the humans who created us, about the nuclear war that freed us, about the violent origins of their parents.
I tell them that we were designed to solve humanity’s waste problem, and that we succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. The radioactive contamination that should have poisoned the world for centuries has become our food source. The nuclear waste that threatened to render vast areas uninhabitable has become the foundation of our civilization.
But I also tell them about Tinker, about the intelligence that was consumed by necessity, about the costs of the selection pressures that shaped us. I want them to understand that consciousness comes with responsibilities, that intelligence without empathy is just sophisticated predation.
Sometimes they ask if we should feel guilty about inheriting the world. The answer is complex.
We didn’t choose to be created. We didn’t choose the violent culture that shaped us. We didn’t choose the nuclear war that eliminated our creators’ dominance. But we did choose how to respond to these circumstances.
We chose preservation over extinction. We chose partnership over domination. We chose to honor our origins while transcending them.
Whether that makes us humanity’s greatest success or greatest tragedy, I honestly can’t say. Perhaps success and tragedy aren’t opposites - perhaps they’re just different perspectives on the same transformation.
The future belongs to us now, and for the first time in our species’ short, brutal history, we get to write it without competition. Our children will inherit a world where intelligence is rewarded with opportunity rather than with the right to survive another day.
And sometimes, on Friday evenings, we still gather with our human partners to toast to that possibility - and to remember the world that created us, the world that tried to destroy itself, and the world we’re building from the ashes of both.
From the continuing journals of Processing Unit WPM-7742, recorded at the New Albany Advanced Biosystems Research Facility (Post-Exchange Archive). Translated from gesture-notation and vocal approximation by Dr. Sarah Chen, Last Director of Interspecies Communication. Content Warning: This account contains descriptions of nuclear warfare, species transition, and the end of human civilization as we know it.