Echo: White Gold, Black Gold, Red Gold

Image CC-BY-NC-SA by TACD ( ~ dreams of a buffet ~)

Steven blessed the all-powerful Escherichia coli.  ”My salvation,” he purred, stroking the thick white coat growing from his left arm.  ”From such humble beginnings,” he coughed to himself.  ”With a few missteps, of course.”

He liked to compare himself to Bond’s villains, only he was liberating the people of the world.  Sure, a few nations would fall–the greedy, the commercialist; there would be war, there would be bloodshed.  But salvation would be in the water, breeding for anyone to drink in.  He foresaw the religious, the luddite, migrating inwards–away from oceans, lakes, rivers.  They would flock to the desert, awaiting their end, praying to their various Gods.

Sheep wool–warmth for anyone–that had been his first triumph.  He’d tattooed his creations in, a subcutaneous transformation.  After a series of rashes, his armhair all falling out, some days of doubt–white gold had sprouted forth: enough to warm him in any conditions.  Then he’d moved on to other vectors, other dreams.  It was hard to make the body process other fuels, but it could create them, excrete them.  Kerosene-coated coal was his next invention.  Easy to light, enough to power a stove for a night, with almost no extra consumption of goods.  The vector on that had been tougher, but that in itself had been an inspiration.

He’d already tested his new bloom in a few isolated lakes.  It could be defeated by filtering purifiers, but not iodine.  A few people died–those too young, already infirm.  But there were few of those that would hike out to a lake and drink from it.  And he hadn’t defeated the food chain, yet–fish were “safe”.  It had to be water (salt or fresh).  But he was working on that.

Soon everyone would produce enough to keep themselves warm, and their neighbor too.  For food–for food, he was working on blood, a little something he was calling agniglobin.  So long as you were warm, you would live.  So long as you were warm and had water.  ”Don’t worry,” he muttered,  ”Steven’s bringing you salvation”, moving carefully so as to not over-excite in front of the fire’s licking tongues.