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of constipation and bloody diarrhea, severe lethargy, loss of consciousness. And death.
    Death by the most agonizing route imaginable.
    The diet-spouting pseudo-nutritionist quite suddenly vanished from the airwaves, chased by accusations he was skimming funds from his non-profit organization. He was last rumored to be building schools somewhere in Mongolia. People now flocked to hear what the once-ridiculed physician had been trying to preach about the risks. Greenies — the aliens — became reviled as haters of humanity. God was cursed.
    And zombie-lovers celebrated the sudden resurgence of the undead.
    By the time they found Manhattan’s Mountain Man Willie — better known as Mark Williams, thanks to a timely tip from a well-read blog owned and written by a former entrepreneur from Union City, California — he was deathly sick and suffering terribly.
    The reporter’s camera recorded his final heartbreaking moments. His stomach was grossly distended, his skin pocked by weeping cancers, his hair falling out in clumps. He was a shrunken shell of a man in an overlarge package. Incredibly, even in his weakened state, he continued to shove Greenies into his mouth. He said he couldn’t stop eating them.
    The sensitive microphone picked up his last words just before he expired, including this enigmatic utterance: “We shouldn’t have gimbled in the gyre.”
    A world-wide ban on Greenie-eating had been enacted, of course, but by then the damage had already been done.
    It seemed that the naysayers had been correct from the very beginning: the aliens had put the Greenies here to destroy us.
    Nobody seemed to recall that it was we, not them, who had conceived of eating the crap in the first place.
    *   *   *
    The final ship appeared in the sky above Billings, Montana, on a drizzly afternoon in June, almost exactly a year to the day after the first one arrived over Manhattan. It came, just like the others, hovered a few thousand feet up, and released its torrent of Greenies to the ground. For those who were present there that day, there would be universal agreement regarding the vessel’s size: it was big, yes, but certainly not inconceivably so. “Huge” seemed to be a perfectly suitable term. The Montana sky, now, that’s ginormous.
    Forty-one minutes after it arrived, the ship was gone. The Greenies it left behind began almost immediately to blow across the prairie. They settled into nooks and corners, fell down gopher holes, and rolled beneath unpainted wooden stairs and aluminum horse troughs. They crystallized, broke apart, and the pieces attached themselves and spread even further. Where they settled, dust blew onto them and buried them. They would not decompose, not for another ten thousand years. The scientists had at least figured this much out.
    From the International Space Station, high above the surface of the planet, the world had turned a uniform shade of teal. Even the seas and the deserts. It was the same shade its sister planets had recently assumed.
    *   *   *
    Having unloaded its cargo, the captain of the final ship gave the order to rejoin the convoy. From somewhere far below it, the bay doors clanked shut and the surface of the planet receded away.
    Out of curiosity, the alien checked its logs and confirmed that it had visited this particular rock on at least one previous occasion. It had been a while, roughly seventy-five million years in the past. It chuckled, thinking how the place had looked vaguely familiar. One doesn’t easily forget such ugliness in such a desolate region of space.
    Well , it thought to itself, at least those lumbering creatures that were here last time are gone. It hadn’t liked the looks of them. They were too big to be natural. Almost indescribably so.
    The alien, which wasn’t much larger than a medium-sized Earth rodent, carefully piloted the scow beyond the planet’s lone asteroid, then punched in the coordinates for its own galaxy. Why did the journey back