That is what my family calls that year, anyway. Other people around here have different names for the event, but right up front I want to remind you that whatever they have to say, they wouldn’t be saying it if they had starved to death.
Life on a colony is never easy in those first few years; you are on a planet that has plenty of protein (or something like protein), but nothing the human newcomers can metabolize. There follows a time of biological warfare, as humans try to assert flora and fauna friendly to their metabolisms into the local ecology. There is a great deal of preparation, and megahours of simulation time, but sometimes the unexpected happens, and colonies die.
The scientific papers now call it a “loose gene”, but at our colony on Peridon IV we called it “What the fuck just happened?” Any time you thought you had a handle on things, everything changed. A new virus, a new weed, or perhaps new Big Fucking Bugs.
We had managed to establish a grain with a distant relationship to barley, but the planet had resisted most of our other imports, in a rolling battle with our geneticists, who were ever trying to gain the upper hand. We were making progress, however, and the barley was the triumph that would give us a little more time to tame the planet.
While the planet had sported hundreds of catalogued varieties of Large Interesting Bugs, the BFB’s came from nowhere. They were 10cm armored appetites, implacable and fearless in their quest for nutrition. And while our vegetation was just as unpalatable to their pests as their vegetation was to us, somehow the BFB’s had evolved over two growing seasons to be voracious for our barley. Just like that, Peridon IV’s loose gene had surmounted the protein gap.
We threw everything we had at the BFB’s of course — chemicals, viruses, you name it. They adapted around each attempt to eradicate them. Enter Uncle Solomon.
He was not, technically speaking, a scientist, and it is not officially known how he got access to the genetics lab. (Unofficially, he was sleeping with the chief scientist.) But Uncle Solomon was in the “Live to regret it” school of action, and on the day we were preparing to burn half our fields so that we might save the other half, my uncle emerged from the lab with a very large box, which he pulled behind him on a motorized wagon.
“Stay your flames!” he cried out, and perhaps because of the archaic language we paused. He smiled, stopped next to one of the infested fields, opened his box, and unto Peridon came the Even Bigger Fucking Spiders.
Uncle Solomon has been vague about where some of the DNA for his creation came from. The loose gene is in there, however, along with the BFB’s crossover metabolism. Uncle Solomon’s spiders were an enormous success, demolishing the BFB population.
And, alas, the Large Interesting Bug population. And all the other indigenous bugs as well. The crops were saved. WE were saved.
We just have to be a little more careful now, is all. Our crops are absolutely safe — there are no vegetarian spiders, and Uncle Solomon’s creations (and the loose-gene spinoffs) are true to that rule. And after the spiders eradicated the pollinators we needed to sustain our crops, a new sort of spider emerged to fill that role. That has to mean something, yes?
It will be a few more years (or at least months) before the spiders evolve to the point they can breach body armor or penetrate a reinforced home. That’s plenty of time for Uncle Solomon to come up with something that can eat the spiders.
