Originally Posted by
Thanqol
The roomba comfortingly polishes your arm.
It's only a matter of time before you find a memorial that includes an obituary.
Today we mourn the loss of Idra Gears, loving daughter taken too soon. Her long struggle with Rx poisoning came to a quiet end on 2/4/2130, surrounded by her family and friends. Her parents and sister hope that she will be the last claimed by this terrible disease.
Rx poisoning was a global epidemic following the explosion of the particle accelerator a hundred years ago. While some people developed superpowers from exposure to pure Rx in the atmosphere, some people just got sick. The atmospheric scrubbers were not just devices to reduce the rate of uncontrolled superpowers (or, cynically, to harvest Rx for its own use) - they were part of a vast public health initiative that Doctor Gears spent a great deal of his life working on.
It's strange to find this answer so quietly, with such an absence of drama. You, Ferra, were created from someone already dying. Your body was already laced through with concentrations of Rx before it was condensed into one of the world's most stable Rx pieces. That's all there is to it.
(And, thinking, it suddenly makes sense why the human harvesting Rx apocalypse hasn't fully manifested despite Comstar's revelations - no doubt corporations have tried but without the combination of factors it likely wouldn't produce pepper nearly high quality enough to justify the cost. The only person who knows that secret is still Comstar.)