The discovery and capture of an Ichneumon wasp one burning afternoon deep in the north Texan swamp was met with the usual deference afforded to that ubiquitous family of insects. The creature, tagged RJI ENT.3 T-SEE 489, that would one day become Megarhyssa Petrolis possessed few unique features save for its notable size, a curious oily slickness on its chitin and a strange iridescence particularly prominent in its fluid-like wings.

The entomologist that captured that first specimen was attached to the Richards-Jones Institution's Texan Swamp Encroachment Expedition team. T-SEE, as it was known, was tasked with tracking the spread of wetlands across the Gulf of Mexico and with cataloguing the flora and fauna that came with its inexorable advance. Of the six members of the team; a zoologist, a hydrologist, an ecologist, a botanist and an evolutionary biologist, the entomologist was the youngest and had the most to prove.

He was then a recent graduate of relatively unremarkable grade. He didn't quite make the cut for one of the big agriculture or pharmaceutical corporations and so resigned himself to a life of mediocrity in poorly-funded and largely ignored public research within the crumbling Richards-Jones Institution. Nonetheless, he possessed an eagerness for fieldwork that had yet to be jaded by the melancholic rot that had eaten away the heart of academic science. Throughout the weeks that they had trekked through the sticky undergrowth, former farmland and all-but-abandoned towns he had imagined himself in the footsteps of nameless great scientist-explorers of the past centuries. To a certain extent, this was uncharted territory; both governance and science had long ago turned their back on trying to mitigate nature's wrath. T-SEE was one of the very few teams to have secured enough sympathy to justify funding in what was really only a vain attempt to somehow quantify humanity's inevitable destruction.

The rest of the team attached a distracted importance to their work. For them, an oppressive helplessness was kept just out of sight, so obvious and so unfathomable. They had dedicated themselves to a lost cause and the way they lethargically dredged through the swamp's landscape; eyes fixed to the ground or distractedly refreshing local network streams betrayed their real belief. The belief that crept in to replace hope - that there was no 'wicked' solution, no global consensus could save them all; God, in whatever form, had abandoned humanity.

Weeks later when it came to filing reports, the T-SEE team dutifully and predictably retold the well-trodden narrative: Valuable farmland across the central south was becoming alternately desertified or swamped. Invasive species were killing off crops and shrinking biodiversity in the region. Change was advancing with more vicious rapidity with each season. The south would be lost to the sea. Meanwhile, the oil mega-corporation Global Petroleum maintained it's dominion over the area as it hoarded the drying reserves of crude oil.

The wasp RJI ENT.3 T-SEE 489 joined the thousands of specimens genetically sampled, databased and then deposited with the Richards-Jones Institution for further study that was forever on hiatus. The entomologist succeeded in petitioning some conscientious soul in management for permission to conduct further exams on it but the out-dated resources of the Institution could not bring any light to bear on the curious attributes of the creature.

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The years passed and the encroaching swamps and deserts hungrily swallowed arable land and local economies faltered as oil passed its fabled peak. A creeping darkness spread across the stagnating civilisation of the US. The slick claw of Global Petroleum curled around the heart of America as reactionary extremist politics predictably sprung to life. A vast array of neo-technophobic doomsday cultists preached hate for the science that seemed to have brought the undignified ending humanity would have to face up to. They berated and harried the mega-corporations in their elite citadels to little effect and explosive antagonism in the form of riots and assassinations became more common and less shocking every day.

To Global Petroleum, these minor infractions were to be expected. Politico-preachers provided little in the way of fight for a mega-corporation twice the size of a state. Elsewhere however, across the giant extent of the behemoth, cracks in Global Petroleum were appearing, kept hidden from prying eyes: Equipment was wearing out faster than normal, oil would clog up into fibrous balls in pipes if exposed for too long and workers found themselves harried by huge insects that swarmed around open outlets. Global Petorleum's secretive and shadowy Innovation Labs become a hive of activity as the problems affecting the pipeline network were turned over by the cherry-picked and pampered scientists housed within the unit.

The Innovation Labs had run the troublesome insects harrying their pipelines through the finest equipment available. That they were Megarhyssa, the well-known parisitoids of caterpillars and larvae, was obvious but their behaviour was confusing. Captured specimens would die after a few days. They'd had a complete survey of local caterpillars and larvae taken from sites around Texas and flown in but the wasps refused to reproduce in order that they could be researched further.

Eventually they had delved into national records hoping to find a link, they scanned DNA databases around the world hoping to find some link, some thread of a story that would help them tie this creature into the scientific narrative. Eventually, and almost as an after-thought, the mothballed Richards-Jones Institution was scanned over and there they found a solitary reply.

Ten years after the T-SEE expedition, the quiet, lifeless halls of the Richards-Jones Institution were disturbed by a frantic request from Global Petroleum's Innovation Labs for the rapid high-priority confidential transport of an obscure and insignificant specimen. Hurriedly, but excited at the sudden attention, the caretakers of the Institution's anachronistic collections hunted through the ancient computer database for a creature named RJI ENT.3 T-SEE 489. They found it, still unsorted in a selection from the forgotten expedition: A large wasp. There were more notable examples of the species - wasps with shinier, more stunning carapaces, more elegant and delicate limbs, but this one possessed a certain sheen, a slickness and a smoothness in form that made the specimen hunters pause. What could possibly be so significant about this particular wasp that the Richards-Jones Institution had been roused from it's dilapidated slumber to answer the call of commercial science?

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To the eye, the comparative link between the two was hard to make. The golden brown monster buzzing around pipelines across the south was vastly different from the more diminutive though still large specimen from T-SEE all those years ago.

The older specimen had almost entirely avoided any analysis. The Richards-Jones Institution's budget stretched to feeding its skeleton staff and another wasp was hardly likely to gain attention but the various specimens collected at the Innovation Labs had undergone every test known to man. No element of the creature was unknown and yet the story was still incomplete. It was as if they could see and feel the edge of some vast crater but peering in, trying to understand or construct meaning form these tests, just presented them with a hot void. The startling result was simple: the biochemistry of the golden beast was tied inexorably to petroleum. That three of the specimens had caught fire would be comic were it not for the tragedy of the confirmation that each small discovery reinforced - that this was life unknown.

And here, lying next to it now was some progenitor. Smaller, weaker, and slightly less cryptic but still, one that seemed to work with less refined petroleum. A progenitor in the ancient oil of the earth.

A rushed message was sent out to the Global Petroleum refineries to send oil and petrol samples. On introduction, it was not as if the scientists were surprised to find that the wasps lustfully buzzed around petri dishes of petroleum in the lab, depositing eggs and fighting each other for dominance of the only thing the craved. The resource they needed to breed.

The implications were unthinkable. A slow dread descended upon those informed of developments. Even those paranoid executives, focussed solely on returning the refineries to full working order were forced to pause. The scientists and researchers involved in those frenzied days felt the entire monolith of scientific understanding begin to collapse around them.

For hundreds, thousands of years those like them had constructed definitions, meanings and boundaries. Since the first man, they had divided the natural from the unnatural and proceeded to twist and mutate those definitions in attempts to outpace nature and each other. The cracking and controlling of DNA was the decisive blow in that domination, whether for good or evil, the final limitations of nature could be understood and subsumed into man's technological empire. However, the overarching knowledge that the tenets within which they worked were ineffable was never questioned. Whether placed by God or physical law, a fundamental framework within which life could be read was constructed behind the sheen of progressive science.

But here was a monster, a creature of alien definitions that sat across these boundaries and defied these laws. It was a dreadful miracle that seemed to derail the selfish melancholia, to upset the established rhythms of man's inevitable destruction and the egotistic distractions they had constructed around it.

The origins of the monster were shrouded. Its rapid evolution pointed to engineering but these wasps were well known to rapidly evolve anyway, engaged as they were in a constant arms race with their prey. The creature's programming read as natural: There seemed to be little indication of the rigid logic of scientific engineering in its makeup and yet, any biological construction sufficiently advanced would of course appear indistinguishable form nature. Even positioning the wasp was impossible, its very being was unknowable.

The next question was on what should be done. Practically, Global Petroleum executives saw it as a pest, but a pest that resisted all known pesticides. Nets and tents were erected around outlets to try and stop insects entering and extermination and sealant teams were sent out in naive attempts to combat infections on the pipelines. The Gulf of Mexico became a nightmarish festival to an outsider; all panicked noise, colour and big-top tents surrounding refineries as Global Petroleum scrambled to protect its lifeblood.

The tightened veil of secrecy around the Innovation Labs began to weaken. Leaks trickled out into the media at a pace matched by the spread of the wasps down the refinery chain. They began to appear at commercial gas station as scientists from the Innovation Labs began to defy their paymasters and enter into public debate around what they were finding. The markets went into shock before PR consultants were wheeled out to quell fears of a run on petroleum amidst plummeting profits and dwindling share value. Quietly, and behind the very human concerns of global capital, biologists around the US and shortly around the world began to dissect this creature in every manner possible. Modern science could simply not read the monster and many became hysterical at the abomination, lofting it high as a symbol of man's impending doom, as a message from the heavens or as the vengeance being wrought by nature.

The maligned politico-preachers suddenly found themselves at the center of the political sphere. Paying little heed to the truth of the story, the creature became a symbol without context for the perversions of science the technophobes touted. Suddenly, the fear of the unknown demise, long suppressed into dizzying numbness by collective consciousness leapt to life. If the very fundamentals of science could be questioned then so could the dominant ideologies that dragged humanity ever downward. There were marches, even riots in some major cities as civilisation heaved out of acquiescence and the complicity of its own irresponsibility. Whether through extremism or enlightenment, people were awoken to the true place humanity held and a chaotic energy gripped the world.

Global Petroleum went into meltdown, gas stations across the south were shut down in a slash-and-burn attempt to contain the biological and financial epidemic but the behemoth continued to collapse to a shadow, unable to adapt to the rules of a new world growing around it.

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Late one evening, an orderly was ticking off final checks of some of the Megarhyssa Petrolis specimens in Global Petroleum's Innovation Labs. He ambled along cases lit by bright fluorescents to the distant hum of the fume extractors and the smell of sterility. He was close to the end of the rows of bioplastic boxes when suddenly he noticed something unexpected. Stopping, he crouched down to one of the lower boxes that the wasps were kept in. The label said this one was 410th generation female. Her captured ancestor would have been dead for almost fifteen years.

She was squatting on the wall of her bioplastic box, circling around and scratching her antennae along the wall. Suddenly, as if disturbed, she froze. After a second or two the familiar arching of her abdomen began, her legs crouched, coiling up her long ovipositor and poking around for a spot in the wall of her sterile home. She buzzed her wings off and on like an alarm, forcing herself onto the wall as she struggled to find purchase. The orderly watched aghast as she pumped a sliver of eggs out of her abdomen, through the ovipositor and into the centimeter-thick wall of her cell as Ichneumon had done for millions of years into all manner of host.

The orderly crouched frozen as the Megarhyssa inelegantly un-embedded itself from the bioplastic and returned to the normal routine of apparently random twitching and scrabbling. For five more minutes the orderly could do nothing. Slowly the hum of the extractors returned to him and, as if stung, he stood, turned and bounded, shouting for anyone still there at this late hour, up the stairs and into the main lab.