Jinxing Digestive Organ Decay Plague

The digestive-organ plague on Venus was an incurable disease that threatened the human settlers after their migration from Earth. Its suspected connection to the altered ocean water tied the settlers’ biological crisis to the very environment they had tried to remake, while the disease’s arrival amid other planetary and social shocks deepened a wider collapse of confidence.

Emergence amid the hazards of Venus

The settlers had attempted to adapt Venus to human life, but the planet remained difficult to inhabit. Its long day and night produced extreme temperature differences, violent storms, electrical disturbances, and dense fog. Oxygen was scarce, and hydrogen released during electrolysis could remain in the atmosphere, where it sometimes formed an explosive mixture. Atmospheric flashes repeatedly destroyed settlements and further depleted oxygen; expanding vegetation eventually made it possible to stop the hazardous electrolysis process.

The digestive disease appeared after the migration, following these recurring atmospheric disasters. It began as a rare disorder but, within a few centuries, threatened to destroy humanity. By the time it spread, the settlers were already weakened by the environmental conditions and by a series of crises that had unsettled their sense of security.

Suspected cause and absence of a cure

The disease was eventually traced to something in the Venerian water. Investigators suspected that it arose from molecular groupings that had once been rare but were subsequently fostered by terrestrial organic matter in the ocean. The account presents this explanation as a supposition, not a confirmed mechanism; the cause remained mysterious even as the water became the focus of suspicion.

No cure was discovered. The failure to master the disease was itself consequential: the physical threat was accompanied by psychological distress, and the settlers’ highly organized mentality began to show signs of derangement. The plague was therefore not only a medical danger but also a further blow to a population whose confidence had already been shaken.

Compounding crises and decline

The disease struck in a setting shadowed by other threats. The Moon’s unpredictable behavior and the settlers’ deep-seated, irrational sense of guilt over the extermination of the Venerians had already weakened their self-assurance. A further plague arose when Martian units used for telepathic communication, never fully assimilated by human tissue, proliferated without control and caused a disease of the nervous system. The digestive disorder thus belonged to a cumulative crisis rather than an isolated episode.

The wider conditions worsened as the heat persisted and hopes of human adaptation proved unfounded. Within a thousand years, the once-populous polar islands were nearly deserted; only a small fraction of the great residential towers remained occupied, sheltering a few ill and dispirited survivors. The account does not attribute this final depopulation to the digestive disease alone, but places it among the afflictions that helped render the Venusian settlement increasingly untenable.