My parents had high expectations of me as a kid. Cure cancer, start a business that makes a billion dollars, invent a machine that takes carbon out of the atmosphere. To that last one I'd always say, I couldn't invent that, they've already done it, it's called "plants". And some algae.

But it is funny. Because once they did work out how to take carbon out of the atmosphere - stop putting more in it and let the plants and some algae do it - the next thing that parents were asking their kids to invent was a way of getting plastic out of the environment. Unlike plants, that hadn't been invented yet.

Algae was a good idea. Actually, the solution was protozoa, but close enough. Microorganisms. It was certainly a solution, anyway, and it's too late to try any more. I won't say that it was my idea and I certainly won't say I'm responsible. Especially in situations where one might seem liable I want to stress that science is a team effort. I am one of the many co-authors on that paper.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I honestly still believe it was. 20 years of research and untold cost to corporate and government sponsors, but we bioengineered a protozoa that could digest basically any synthetic polymer (that is, plastic). I must stress that it was never meant to be that effective. By the time we were done single-use plastic was pretty much dead, so we just needed a way of getting all the plastic already in the environment out of it, however slowly.

We also never planned to just release it, into the environment. We weren't foolish. We just may have been a bit... careless. The efficacy of our work surprised even us, at first, which led us to perhaps rush it to market. This was, coincidentally, around the time that the health impacts of microplastics on humans was beginning to be understood - we had some very interesting collaborations going, potential careful use of the organisms to scrub microplastics from blood, which ultimately became entirely moot.

It wasn't a single incident. It was multiple. It doesn't matter. We had partners in industry who were seeding colonies of the organisms in landfills, which would turn them into giant compost piles: the organisms would digest the plastics leaving behind a sort of mush, most of what was left could be recycled, and the mush could become fertiliser for new growth. We never considered just how easily disturbances to the landfills could send the organisms airborne.

Even then. Even then it wouldn't have mattered. They couldn't live in the atmosphere, they needed a certain amount of pressure, a constant stream of food. Except, of course, all life evolves. And these things reproduced fast, when they had a large food source like a dump full of plastic. It was only a matter of time before one of them picked up just the right mutation.

You know there are mould spores like, everywhere, right? It's like pollen, as any hayfever sufferer will tell you. (Fun fact, if I hadn't been picked up to work on this, curing hayfever was going to be my thing). That's why if you leave out bread it'll go mouldy within a few days. So once those things - our organisms - got into the atmosphere, that was it. All plastic, everywhere, became food. Bread. But not for us.

You know this part already. This is the origin story of the Rot. It's quite something for a major part of human life to suddenly fall out from under us, never to be quite so useful again. It's quite something altogether to be in some part responsible for it (but not in a way that has ever been established in court). I won't identify myself. I've changed names, quit the industry, and you don't need to know what I'm up to now. I'm sorry, for the very small part I played. I helped, but they would have released the Rot eventually without me.

You're here now, anyway. You know we turned out fine, as a society, we found other materials, though nothing quite as versatile. There's actually quite a lot less of those microbes now that there's hardly anything left for them for them to eat. But still just enough that new projects to make plastic don't work. At least there isn't any of that stuff in our blood anymore. You can thank us for that.

Unrelated but did you know that chocolate used to be this big thing? We put it in like, everything. Super popular. It used to be a lot easier to get.