For historical purposes, let’s be clear: No one actually knows how this whole thing got started. No one can say with absolute impunity when or where the first case happened. Reports on Reddit claim Incident Zero happened as far back as fifteen years ago in the Costa Rican jungle. Other internet sleuths argue, “Bullshit, where’s the proof?” There is, however, general consensus that the first recorded instance of a human turning into an animal was just over ten years ago in Kansas. Not Kansas City. Somewhere, you know, out in Kansas.

It started as a routine domestic disturbance call. Police testimony described the scene in the following officer’s debrief. It should be noted that the interview was cut short when the other officers questioned the entire incident as a way to get medical leave and discharge from service:

I responded to a domestic disturbance call from Debbie Sandoval, a neighbor down the road. Debbie said that when she was driving home from the grocery mart, she saw the couple agitated on the front porch. Someone was waving a gun. No clarity on who was waving the gun, however, just that there was a lot of shouting and gun waving. So I head on down there because this would be the third time this summer I’ve been called down to deal with the Tellers. After meeting the couple outside, who were still arguing by the time we arrived, my partner and I de-escalated the situation. Something about leaving silverware on top of the dishwasher instead of putting the forks inside. Sarah goes to start arguing again, but she got really red in the face. Red in the eyes. Never seen anything like it. And then she was a wolf. There was no in-between. She was a woman, ready to fight over a few spoons and forks. The next she was a wolf. I’m telling you, the woman turned into a god damn animal!

Officer Alimony, I need you to calm down and finish the debrief. Just tell us what you saw, not your feelings on the matter.

Fuck you, Chief! If you saw a woman turn into a feral monster right in front of you, you wouldn’t have even come back to work!

Andrew, let’s take five. You want a smoke? You want to call Alyssa? She’s probably making dinner with the kids, right? She can pick up the phone, talk you down a little, yeah?

The tape stops. Thirteen minutes later, the debrief continues.

Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, Sarah. So over the next hour, my partner and I, we chased the wolf, first on foot and then in the cop car. The wolf jumped the fence to Debbie’s house, the one who had put in the call in the first place. We race over there to find the she-wolf devouring the neighbor’s entire flock of chickens. Neither of us knew whether we should shoot the thing or not. Before we could decide whether or not to use force, I pointed my gun in the air, shooting upwards to shock it. This wolf, kind of blonde but mostly red, huge golden eyes, looks at me like I’m not worth the dirt under her feet, or paws or whatever. She takes off running, launching herself over the next perimeter fence about 2 miles from the initial site of the incident. We lost visual in the hedgerow. That’s when we decided we needed to head back here to figure out, you know, what the fuck just happened.

That’s the first recorded incidence with proof from a reliable source of a human turning into an animal. The debrief didn’t make it out of the local precinct but the official report did get its fifteen minutes of fame. In that report, there’s a small ominous line that no one at the time thought much of: “Officer Andrew Alimony indicated that the 16-year-old daughter didn’t appear surprised by the turn of events at all. The report quotes Jessica Teller as saying, “Turning into a wolf seems like a fucking great way to get out of a shitty life.” She shifted eight months later.

The full incident report failed to find its footing. The report’s last digital footprint shows it being emailing it over to someone who could supposedly get ahold of someone else at Area 51. Without anything to poke, prod, or study, the report simply gathered dust in the digital ether.

Two weeks after the official, minimal report was leaked, global reports surfaced with eerily similar accounts of women turning into wild animals. Cell phone footage was posted on social media of mothers, sisters, daughters, cousins, grandmothers, turning into creatures large, small, furry, flying, crawling during moments of heightened emotional distress. Arguments broke out in public about whether the video proof was augmented, AI versions of a reality that didn’t actually exist. Over time, more and more evidence came forward, bolstering the truth. “Spontaneous animal transformation” or SATs, an acronym shared out by some podcaster, hit every headline and every trending hashtag.

Whispers of a reckoning, the Rapture, crawled out of the non-secular crowds. Evil women were invoking the spirit of the Devil in order to take down good Christian men. Can’t say it didn’t feel like it at the time. An anonymous woman called in to a Sunday church radio broadcast saying Lilith infiltrated her mind. The woman claimed that the deep female voice hissed poisonous promises into her ears. It vowed that her vengeance would usher in a reckoning. The soundbite was too good to pass up. “Lilith’s Vengeance” became a euphemism for SATs who shifted during altercations with men.

A year after Sarah Teller disappeared, video footage from a drone illegally flying over state park lands in coastal Texas captured a massive red wolf with golden eyes leading a full pack. The drone footage posted to a guerrilla news forum, proclaiming Sarah Teller was gathering all the wolf-women to take down the US government. Without any guidance from the scientific community to negate the story, it circulated over and over again in the news cycle.

In the first year, there were all kinds of claims of airborne toxins, new chemical agents released by foreign powers: sarin, hydrogen cyanide, 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate (QNB). Superpowers blamed one another for sabotage, trying to disrupt the global economy in their favor. I’ve never seen any proof of any chemical warfare so my conjecture stops there.

By the two year mark, no matter the population of your hometown, you knew someone who was a SAT. “Did you hear about so-and-so? My kids played with hers last week. Who would have thought?” That’s when the sheriff and police stations, in both big cities and small towns, called in animal control units to teach them how to capture an animal alive versus shooting to kill. We started to wonder: how does this end?

Shifters, the colloquial term for women-turned-animals were captured, experimented on, in hopes of a vaccination or cure. Mass protests appeared. Former hippies, environmental groups, and allies of women the world over clamored for Shifters to have a safe space away from civilization to live out the rest of their animal lives.

Three years after that first confirmed case, men were in trouble. Cigars were puffed on porches into deep stretches of the night. Queries for detention camps were spoken aloud in pool halls and segregated restrooms. A roar clamoring for something, anything, to be done reverberated beyond the invisible walls of the internet. Concerns about population decline and overcrowding at animal sanctuaries were on the rise. Men hiding out in XY Camps, not allowing anyone with XX chromosomes in under the guise of self-preservation, threatened to cede from the union. Idiots, the whole lot of them. Their message wasn’t survival; it was “there’s no escaping this.”

By Year Four, it was estimated that one in every four women was a victim of SAT. Scientists sent out graphs of data with hockey stick growth lines: exponential growth. Human society unraveled as shifting found its way across class, economic, and immigration status.

And this wasn’t something that only happened in what was formerly the United States. Dictators, democratically elected leaders, and monarchs across the globe whittled down their options, landing on an iron-fist approach. Kill or Be Killed replaced Keep Calm and Carry On. Code Name: Project Euthanasia. Vigilante groups of firearm-carrying Americans stamped out the threat of impending wilderness in a last-ditch claim of a superior race. Some of the most vicious groups were all-female battalions, women clutching at a past long out of reach, haunted by Lilith’s laughter in their ears.

The wildest thing happened though. As if in response to this brutal, absolutionist approach to beating the problem into the ground until it went away, the Shifters came out looking like they were the civilized beings. Using drone surveillance, government entities watched in baffled horror as the wolves gathered food from abandoned grocery stores, made nests out of blankets carefully carried out of empty cookie-cutter homes, and previously silent public parks turned into meeting places. Predator and prey coexisted harmoniously.

In Year Five of the Downhill Era, empirical proof emerged, cementing the permanence of the Shifter colonies. Footage of a great migration into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska made it clear where all the migrating animals were going. An uptick in attacks on fishing enterprises, Alaskan cruises, and oil companies grew exponentially over Years 3 and 4. Data sometimes gets passed over when the world is at war with itself.

Six months after it began, any results from Project Euthanasia were slim. It turns out that most people are reluctant to shoot animals that were previously their mothers, sisters, wives, and children. And statistically, the limited data scientists were able to collect on SATs showed that Shifters who weren’t confronted would rarely attack humans.

In fact, with all the women turning into animals, scientists were reluctantly voicing that maybe this was “kind of a good thing?” for the environment. It was one unexpected, cataclysmic boon for animal repopulation. Birdwatchers noted how many women were turning into critically endangered species: the Maui parrotbill, the California condor, Seychelles Scops owls, and Indian vulture. It went unconfirmed but there was one guy online who for three years was convinced he’d seen a woolly mammoth during a flight over the Canadian Yukon. Without enough scientists to validate the claims, unverified eyewitness accounts exploded of women shifting into species that were presumed extinct, like the Vaquita (extinct 2026), the Saola (extinct 2029), and even the Black Rhino (extinct 2032). Very few men were interested in heading out into the wilderness to verify if the photo posted on the internet was actually of a Western Gorilla (extinct 2038) or if they were being trolled. Eventually, we all just kind of agreed that yeah, if women were going to turn into animals, why couldn’t they be turning into endangered species? It’s not like weirder things weren’t happening.

The call for non-confrontation grew. The remaining men (and few women who hadn’t shifted yet) were tired. Warfare with their loved ones, no matter how furry and beasty they’d become, was taking a toll. Prayers to higher powers remained unanswered.

The final falling domino happened about a year ago when litters of Shifter puppies were photographed in one of the longest established wolf territories. That old joke from Biology class, about how women don’t actually need men to get pregnant because of the mitochondria or whatever it was? A sick joke turned into reality, really. The public assumption was that Shifters were using the native animal populations to reproduce. I suppose we’ll never know for certain.

Speaking of jokes, the big joke back in those days (not that many people were telling jokes) was that if the captain goes down with the ship, with the way Humanity is going, God must be going down with it. Made me laugh the first time I heard it.

There’s not much to laugh about these days. It’s Year 10. Technology is stagnant, development at a standstill. It’s as if every time there’s a breakthrough to weaponize machines, AI, or robotics in the war against SATs, the natural world/fate/God swipes in to reset the odds back to zero. The nuclear option didn’t get us anywhere except poisoning the air we breathe and it doesn’t seem to bother SATs all that much.

What remaining scientists, engineers, and mathematicians we have left, well, there aren’t that many of them left, let’s put it that way. Those that blink back to life every morning in the online forums seem to be fewer and fewer. Forums are the place to discuss what it looks like living through the end of the world as we know it.

I was talking online with a guy last week, says he gets population estimates from all over the world. Puts timelines together for the government, or what’s left of it. He guesses we’re at about 350 million humans.

It’s hard to remember when there were 10 billion of us fighting for space on this big floating rock. Seems impossible these days. It was loud back then. Planes flying overhead, electricity buzzing through power lines. The sound of civilizations perpetually rumbling forward until we didn’t.

When I log on to my usual online forum groups, there’s one question always simmering near the surface: can we do anything at all? Every scientific question, experiment, and hypothesis reaches a dead end. The real question left is, “Is Planet Earth chuckling to herself, reminiscing with irony on how we used to believe we were truly the top of the food chain, masters of our own destiny?”

My guess is that we’ve got about a year or two left. Sometimes I think to myself, what if I could turn into a wolf too? Will my howls echo back at me against the full moon, now that the nights haunt me with their silence? I can feel it: I don’t have much time left. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle every time I go outside. The horizon beckons. It takes all my willpower to go back inside, pointing my boots away from the wilderness, resisting the urge to run.

When I see the stars, I imagine Alyssa and my girls out there somewhere, hopefully together, and through their animal eyes, they gaze up at the infinite stretch of the cosmos and see me looking back at them, too.

Signing off,

Andrew Alimony