A surprising number of teenagers were developing additional tissue in the chest and genital regions. Most common was the development of extra nipples and breast tissue, regardless of gender. Not many boys had changed early on, but some did discover additional testicles. In one rare case, a vaginal cavity formed just below a boy’s scrotum.
At first, scientists suspected the water supply. Tests revealed nothing. Little did they know, Erica and her family had been spreading the alien infection since the pod landed in their yard so many years earlier. Humans had no way to decode or even detect the message. So instead of sharing an array of biological knowledge, the messenger inadvertently accelerated human evolution, mostly centered around reproduction.
Nobody could explain it. With so many cases in one place, the CDC was called in to investigate. For a few months, Erica’s home town was quarantined. It was inconvenient, but soon deemed unnecessary as changes began to appear in a number of other cities.
In time, they tracked it back to Ben and Amy’s family, though that information stayed classified since the officials who transported the pod away from the city had inadvertently created another zone of influence, spreading the infection to every worker involved.
The mutations spread far and wide, affecting nearly half a generation and a number of adults. Doctors were baffled by the surge, but nobody could find anything harmful in these transformations. The only major discovery was that very few mutated people were ever ill. In fact, those that did catch a bug seemed to recover much quicker than people who hadn’t changed. Doctors kept an eye on several families whose children were affected, but never found anything harmful. No viral infections, no bacteria or disease, nothing at all...