“[C]one snail venomics has already exponentially expanded the number of novel venom peptide sequences identified from the species investigated, although most novel conotoxins remain to be pharmacologically characterised.” — S.W.A. Himaya and R.J. Lewis (2025). Venomics-accelerated cone snail venom peptide discovery. International Journal of Molecular Sciences 2018, 19(3), 788.
1. Dennis
“I’m telling you babe, I can’t feel a thing.”
Dennis was doing squats. With a mai tai in each hand (biting the straw of one) and the back of a palm tree for balance, he sank almost to the sand, held it for three seconds, and ascended triumphant.
“Cut that out right now,” said Ellen. “And give me my drink.”
He dipped once more to drive the point home. He had to avert his gaze from the sight of his gut compressing over his trunks. He’d been debilitated for so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to care about his physique.
He joined his wife and their friends in the cabana. Ellen took her mai tai and Dennis finished his. He wished he’d grabbed a third, then realized it would really be no problem to walk back to the pool bar and felt excited. Two years since the injury. He could walk to any bar he wanted now. He could cartwheel there.
“So how was it?” Markos asked. He was working on a drink of his own and had already amassed a cluster of empties. Markos drank an insane amount, Dennis thought, for such a health nut. He never seemed drunk either. Dennis had been learning that a lot depended on genes.
“It was totally smooth,” he said. “The painkillers have had more testing than some of the other stuff, apparently. And the compound I matched with is a common one. The doctor called it a slam dunk for chronic back pain.”
“I’m surprised they’re letting you drink right after,” said Sloan, Markos’s wife.
“I guess this stuff is so targeted it doesn’t interact with much beyond whatever it’s aimed at. According to the doctor.”
“Are they doctors?” Ellen swooped her bangs off her sunglasses. “I get more of a tech vibe from this place. Which is just fine. The mainstream medical industry has gone off the rails. Did you know the life expectancy in the U.S. has been declining for a decade? All that time and money we spend at the doctor and they’re getting worse at their job. I don’t know if it’s the same in Greece, Markos, but—”
“So basically I don’t feel any pain at all now.” Dennis cut her off. He hoped the facility had matched his wife with something to replace her Adderall. For a moment the only sound was the lagoon sloshing gently onto the beach, and the Pacific sloshing less gently onto the barrier reef in the distance, and the clinking of ice, gentlest of all, in their glasses.
Dennis felt like a miracle. Like a leper healed by the touch of Christ, if Christ took the form of a highly venomous marine gastropod. In advance of the retreat the four of them had sent in DNA samples. On arrival, they each received a menu—a detailed explanation of which cone snail compounds the facility’s AI had identified as therapeutic for their individual complaints. This was the promise of “targeted conotherapy,” pioneered by the startup behind the Kasita Wellness Retreat. With over 800 identified Conidae species, each producing a thousand different venom components, there were upwards of a million unique compounds to be investigated for medical use. But the real scale of possibility was much larger, as cone snails in the wild have been found to both mutate rapidly and to freely recombine their peptide sequences into unique new venoms on the fly. Considering there could be medically significant amalgams that the snails themselves haven’t gotten around to producing, the number of permutations explodes beyond anything traditional biomedicine could hope to explore.
But the startup, undeterred, managed to subdue this infinity with the magic of machine learning models (here things reached beyond Dennis’s pay grade). The AI could analyze and match each client’s medical needs, physiological profile, and genetic sequence against the boundless array of real and imagined conotoxins. This resulted in recommendations for ultra-targeted medicines which could circumvent the usual process of drug candidate identification, double-blind testing, and regulatory review. The treatments could simply be synthesized and administered on-demand, with the risk of side effects at a statistical minimum.
All of this was wildly expensive—really it was out of their price range, and each of them earned seven or eight figures. But there was no arguing with the results. Dennis was certain that with enough time, technologies like this would disrupt the pharmaceutical industry to oblivion, and one-size-fits-all prescriptions would go the way of bloodletting. Maybe he could invest, get in on the ground floor. Now there’s an idea.
Markos finished his drink and produced another as if out of the aether. “Did they let you see your snails? The ones they extracted your medicine from?”
“No. They’ll do that?”
“If they like you.” Markos smirked. “In fact, I’ll be getting a private tour of the specimen room soon.”
“How’d you set that up?”
“Chatting up this cute little Japanese lab tech. Let’s just say she was interested in letting me peek behind the scenes.”
Sloan smacked him on the shoulder. Markos and Sloan had an open marriage. It came with arcane bylaws of which Dennis only understood the basics: no bringing partners home, no overnights, no mutual friends (not that he’d asked). He didn’t think they were supposed to talk about it so blatantly either, but maybe Markos had been joking. Or maybe Sloan didn’t care. Or maybe they were all drunk at two in the afternoon on a tropical island, offering their maladies to the blessings of snails.
“Well wouldn’t you know,” Sloan announced, “I’ve been selected for a special procedure this afternoon. Top secret, reserved for only the most high-profile clients.” Sloan was so fit and healthy it was hard for Dennis to imagine what she needed a medical intervention for. Maybe she needed to reduce her clinical levels of looking that good in a swimsuit.
“What about you, Ellen?” Markos asked. “Do you have a treatment today, or something else?”
“Oh god, what time is it? I almost forgot my appointment!” Ellen sprung up, threw a beach robe over her swimsuit, brushed her lips past Dennis’s cheek. “You relax today, hear me? You’ll hurt yourself all over again. Trust me, I’m practically an expert on herniated discs at this point. Just because the nerve roots are numb doesn’t mean the underlying compression—”
“Yeah babe, I got it. Don’t be late.”
Ellen hurried off. Not long afterwards, Markos left to meet his new friend at the facility’s wet lab. Then came a solid hour where Dennis and Sloan were alone in the cabana. He did a good job of not staring, and when the seagull stole Sloan’s half-eaten croissant he chased it down onto the beach, bounding over the soft sand, feeling each footfall radiate painlessly up his body, and all the way into the ocean where he flailed at the bird like a madman, cold, cured, elated.
He knew his wife was correct and he should relax. But this was a whole new beginning to his life—he should be celebrating. Maybe tonight he’d get on Markos’s level. Four vodkas an hour, mix in one of Ellen’s pills and rage until sunrise. He’d never liked dancing. Now he thought he might give it a try.
While he kicked in the surf he finally felt something—a dull, familiar ache flowed from his right-side hip, causing his stomach to clench. At first he felt despair, but he remembered this first treatment had really been a microdose, something to ensure he wouldn’t have any unexpected reactions. His first taste of restoration may be waning, but there was plenty more where that came from. He didn’t even mention it to Sloan when he toweled off in the cabana, just told her good luck as she left to prepare for her own treatment, and watched her from behind as she headed for the elevator.
2. Ellen
“—nerally prefer topicals, so this really leapt off the menu for me. Back home they always want to pump you full of systemic stuff. It’s like, do I have a gut microbiome or don’t I? That’s what made me pull the trigger on the retreat in the first place, once I heard you did topicals. I don’t even do botox anymore. That’s something you offer, right? Conotox. Oh my god, is that actually what you call it? Well it makes sense given the use cases of the venom in the wild. Such crafty little predators. They’re cooking up more than just venom down there, you know. From what I read they can literally produce the sex hormones of their prey species. Imagine you’re a little undersea ragworm bopping around the corals, just living life, and all of a sudden you catch a whiff of what must be the cutest little ragworm gal you can imagine, so you go buy your little ragworm corsage and pull up at her crevasse, already hot and bothered, and then BANG! Cone snail harpoon straight to the throat. Can’t move a muscle, never gonna get to again. I didn’t go to prom. No one asked me—can you believe that? Well, if you knew me then… Sometimes I think about throwing one of my own, an adult prom, I’ve heard of people doing that. By the way, what’s your background? Is ‘Fijian’ the right term or do you prefer ‘Melanesian?’ Did you have prom in school? Oh, please make sure you rub in enough on my upper arm there. The wrinkles drive me nuts, so distracting. I get distracted by everything. I do have ADHD. You have no idea what it’s like trying to get a d-x as an adult—sorry, diagnosis. I’m a bit of a medical nerd. I even tried pre-med in undergrad, but I couldn’t make it through orgo. I still like to stay informed on these things. You can’t trust the experts anymore—it’s like you have to be the expert. Oh, that’s good, it’s like I can feel the skin rejuvenating! Orgo is organic chemistry, by the way. I wound up switching over to business school. I was talking to my girlfriend about how exciting it must be to manage a company like this. Have you met Sloan yet? She’s incredible. She runs marathons. She’s a Senior Compliance Officer by day and moonlights as a DJ, produces her own tracks and everything, and her husband is this big muscular European sex guy. They have a dungeon at their house. Ça alors! Sometimes I feel vexed about the whole life extension thing. It really depends on whether you believe in Heaven, but I change whether I do all the time. Meanwhile I keep getting older. Although, maybe not today. Do you think you can get my back now? There are a couple of spots I swear have gotten flabby. I love your tattoos—”
3. Markos
The wet lab was a maze of tanks, stacked three-high and punctuated by metal workstations. Each station had a rack of dissection equipment, a stack of plastic totes, and a boxy machine with a retro-looking monitor. The room roared with the combined hum of hundreds of water filters running at once. It was cold. Markos was wearing a tank top.
The technician he’d met was fresh out of university, petite, soft spoken. She wore a white lab coat and black skinny jeans and spoke English with an accent he thought aspired to Australian. She’d come to Kasita under a guest worker program. This was good. It spoke to a certain adventurousness.
She led him down the rows of tanks, pointing out the more notable species of snail as they went. “This is C. magus, one of the first species to be prospected for pharmaceuticals. One of its compounds was approved for use in hospitals all the way back in 2004. But it caused hallucinations in some people, so most doctors stuck with morphine. As if morphine doesn’t have side effects! A good example of why targeted therapy is much better.”
“I see,” said Markos. The animal’s shell had a splotchy beige pattern like coffee spilled on tablecloth. The technician smiled while she watched it. He looked, too, then glanced around the wet lab. At least three other scientists darted through the aisles, offering worms or little fish to the captive snails. Not exactly what he’d call a private tour.
“This next one is C. geographus.” She pointed out a tank at eye level where a large pink-and-chestnut shell crept slowly towards a feeder fish, its fleshy siphon extended. “This is probably the deadliest marine invertebrate in the world. They call it the cigarette snail because that’s all the time you have if one stings you.” She made a smoking gesture with her fingers. As she did, the snail extended a second appendage under its siphon. It shot its spear into the fish, causing an eruption of violence which lasted a few seconds, then the fish was completely stunned. The snail’s mouth (“rostrum,” the girl called it) opened wide and engulfed its prey in one smooth motion.
Markos could appreciate the beauty of this one, he really could. But he was far more interested in the girl’s description of the thing. He could detect, yes, some subtext in her lecturing. The way her voice lilted over words like proboscis. This was a nice game.
“This one is on my menu,” he said. “You might not think it, but I was born a Type 1 diabetic. And apparently our little geographer is full of insulin.”
“Yes,” said the technician. “It produces the specific types of insulin found in its fish prey. We’re working towards harnessing that capability. It will take AI targeting, of course, but imagine if we could impart a human pancreas with this tightly controlled, reactive insulin production process. Right now we only have transient treatments, but with more research, we’re looking at curing diabetes.”
“Incredible,” said Markos. “It’s as if God put these creatures on Earth as the key to our well-being. And made them lethal, as one of his little jokes.”
“That’s funny. The insulin venom I mentioned is referred to as nirvana cabal. Rather mystical terminology.”
“You’ve got quite the brain on you,” he said. “I wonder what else you might show off.”
She turned and led him further down the aisle.
“This is my personal favorite,” she said. “Conus textiles, the cloth-of-gold snail. Isn’t she beautiful?”
This shell lay in a shallow plastic tub on a workstation next to some measuring equipment. It did have a striking pattern. It was like someone had tried to draw snakeskin with their eyes closed. He suspected it was significant that she’d taken him to her favorite now, just as the other activity in the lab was calming down.
“The venom is particularly nasty,” the girl said in a low voice. “It targets a particular ion channel that modulates the pain pathway. It kills by increasing the sensation of pain to a physically unbearable level. But we’ve been able to modify it to shut those channels off instead.”
“A friend of mine received something like this today.”
She nodded. “I probably worked on his treatment. On the extraction side, that is. Analysis and synthesis of the modified, targeted version is another department.”
Her gaze was fixed on the tank. The snail shook against the artificial current of its water filter. Markos looked around, didn’t see any of the other technicians. He placed a hand gently on the girl’s arm.
“Tiny and deadly,” he said.
She whirled around, showing her body to him. She started to say something.
He took charge.
“Maybe we should get somewhere a little less fishy smelling? Although, to be honest with you, I don’t mind it…”
Later, competing narratives would emerge regarding the sequence of events which led to Markos’s envenomation. In his own version, he simply hadn’t been keeping track of where his limbs were, and what kind of lab technician leaves a deadly invertebrate lying out in the open anyway? The statement given by the startup’s Public Relations Department agreed that it had been an accident, though they denied any negligence or malfeasance on the part of their staff. But the version disseminated by Homura, star employee of the Biologics Department, through the company’s confidential internal channels and largely corroborated by security footage, was different.
Sloan would learn of this third version, but not before Markos suffered the effects of acute C. textiles envenomation. For Markos, this would be a life-altering experience of unfathomable, almost ecstatic pain, an ordeal he only survived because he was stung at the only place on earth where cone snail antivenom is available. He would emerge with a permanent movement disorder and a post-traumatic hatred of the sea and its creatures. He would never again visit his archipelagic home. Sloan would be furious about all of this forever. There would be regular talk of divorce. There would be complexities—but Markos and his wife had always thrived on those.
4. Sloan
Sloan’s body lay on the operating table. A thin film of drool slipped through the crack in her lips. Two men stood nearby. One was an anesthesiologist, the other a biostatistician.
“She’s out,” said the anesthesiologist. “Vitals look fine.”
On the wall behind her body was a large green chalkboard. The anesthesiologist walked over and wrote:
SMILES
OF
VIOLACEOUS
CHITIN
Sloan read this phrase a few times, turned it over in her mind.
She tried to approach the table. She found she could only move a few inches at a time, then swung back to wherever “she” had been. It was like sitting on a very long swing with only her body weight to create momentum. Orienting herself in the room was confusing too—if she remained still, with her gaze on the chalkboard, she thought she was in the upper corner nearest the door, but if she looked around, all three dimensions seemed to swivel in unpredictable ways, leaving her somewhere else. “She” only remained in one place so long as she kept her perspective fixed.
She was not afraid. She felt utterly calm, and warm.
She faced her body, causing the room to shift about 120 degrees on a diagonal. She’d never seen herself sleeping before. She felt a kind of reverence about it. She’d come a long way in life. It was good that she was getting some decent rest.
Smiles of violaceous chitin.
How was she able to see any of this? She could rule out dreaming—this was nothing like a dream—but she had no alternate theory, no frame of reference for the experience.
A sound came from—below? From around the room. The biostatistician’s voice.
“So level with me, now that it’s just us. The anesthetic compound works perfectly, but we knew that already. What are we actually doing here?”
“You didn’t read my paper,” said the anesthesiologist.
“No, I did not.”
“My research focuses on the neural correlates of consciousness, and whether they are sufficient to explain the phenomenon.”
“Okay. I’m familiar with the field. I’m even interested in it—but her EEG is a flatline, she’s beyond sound asleep. What ‘consciousness’ do you expect you’ll detect?”
The anesthesiologist cleared his throat. “It’s a simpler experiment than you’re probably thinking. Behind the patient, I’ve written a phrase which (1) was not there before she was sedated, (2) is not a phrase she’s likely to have ever encountered before, and (3) is positioned outside her field of vision. What we’ll observe is whether she can recite the phrase upon waking.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It sounds silly, but it’s quite rigorous. Under the conditions we’ve established, any positive result would provide evidence of awareness independent of a neural substrate. Now I know what you’re thinking, and I’m the first to admit these tests typically produce a null result. But so far they’ve only been conducted using traditional anesthesia. With your so-called targeted conotherapy, we may produce the first truly verifiable out-of-body experience.”
Sloan spun reality around her until she could see both their faces. She wanted to get their attention. But when she tried to speak, her voice reflected back as if from several directions at once—and the scientists didn’t react.
“A success would also suggest there’s something to these conotoxin sequences, something beyond what we see in the chemical formulae.”
“What, like at the subatomic level? Or something totally non-physical?”
The anesthesiologist grinned and shrugged. Smiles of violaceous chitin. “Don’t you think it’s odd that these unassuming little animals possess such a vast capacity to harm and heal humans? That these chemicals, which evolved independent of any interactions with us, can impact us in such profound, specific ways?”
“It’s not odd at all,” said the biostatistician. “Plenty of animals produce biotoxins that affect species they wouldn’t normally encounter. Your argument is like those people who say because bananas fit so well in the human hand, they must have been designed for humans to hold. In reality, bananas are curved because they grow towards the sun, and cone snails have diabetes harpoons because they can kill lots of fish that way.”
“And why do they produce the exact amino acid sequences required for flawless, eminently stable human anesthesia?”
The biostatistician shook his head. “You’re a true believer. I thought the company’s people were crazy about cone snails, and here you come along talking like they’re some secret codex sent from on high so we can decipher the mysteries of human consciousness.”
“Surely it’s better than these millionaires who come and treat them like toys.”
“At least the millionaires are realistic! You’ve got the classic hot-hand fallacy—the snails have produced a few successes, so you assume they’ll keep succeeding, revealing more and greater truths. If you ask me, it’s far more likely the AI already found all the good stuff, and we’re about to be neck-deep in placebos, false positives, hallucinations.”
“Well, you may be right. But then it falls on us to rule those things out! Hence the experiment.”
“Hence the experiment,” the biostatistician agreed. “She’s cute, isn’t she?”
“Careful,” said the anesthesiologist. “She’s about to wake up.”
He hustled over to the chalkboard and erased the message. Sloan tried to catch a glimpse of her body, then decided she should try to move “herself” as far from her body as she could, to see what would happen.
The world tunneled and spun. There was a period of darkness.
Sloan sat up on the operating table. She was very tired. Two men stood beside her. One was a biostatistician, and the other was an anesthesiologist. She recalled from before the procedure that she’d liked one but not the other. But she couldn’t remember which was which.
“Welcome back,” said the one.
“I know you’re getting your bearings,” said the other, “but I have one important question to ask you. Are you ready?”
Her head was swimming. She nodded.
“Earlier, was anything written on the chalkboard behind you?”
She turned. The chalkboard was recently wiped down. She was sure it had been blank when she’d arrived for the procedure. But then something hit her—yes, she had seen a phrase on it! But which phrase? It was like trying to remember a dream from three nights ago. She replayed the whole day: breakfast at the buffet, yoga on the beach, drinks in the cabana, Dennis’s successful treatment, Dennis’s failure to act normal when they were alone… prep for the procedure, signing the forms, changing into scrubs, vitals, electrodes, a shot in the arm, lying on the table, sleep…
“No,” she said. “I don’t remember a thing.”
— Karter Mycroft is a writer, musician, and fisheries scientist based in Los Angeles. He is not afraid of needles. You can find him on Twitter and IG @karterAKA.