In an abandoned storm water channel deep beneath the city, various bacteria fed for years on the synthetic rubber waste that occasionally leaked down from the petrochemical plant up on the surface. But one day an accidental spill from a biotech company made its way through the water pipes down to the channel. The bacteria fed on this new liquid alongside their regular diet of rubber.

Within weeks the bacteria had mutated into a mass of rubber-like goo, a conglomerate of millions of tiny mutants working together to form an entirely new creature. Soon they developed into big globs of moving rubber, which some would come to call "rubber slugs" even though they more resembled sea urchins than slugs. And they started to go out into the pipes to find people to snatch into their blobby mass and bring them down to the hive. Not to eat them, but instead to use their unfortunate victims for both milking and to help breed more rubber slugs.

The more people fell to the creatures, the more the rubber mass grew in size. It spread out further along the channel, and the slugs grew both in number and in boldness in catching prey. Sometimes, a few individuals would wander into their territory, falling victim to the slugs and the sticky strands of rubber. Stripped of clothing, kept alive in tight sacks and subjected to hypnosis, the prisoners provided the rubber hive what it needed to grow, expand and evolve...