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It was already dark when my family and I climbed into the big white pickup truck with Marcelo Jorge. A drizzly May night in the Ozarks; everything seemed soggy and muted. Jorge was upbeat, though. It was the peak of fawning season, and so far this year, his team had captured and collared a dozen fawns. The more deer they could collar, the more data they could collect about a disease threatening deer and their relatives.

Jorge is leading a multiyear study at the University of Georgia on chronic wasting disease, an always-fatal neurological illness. Ubiquitous deer may be, but in CWD, they face a serious threat. From its first appearance in Colorado in the late 1960s, CWD has crawled steadily across the country. It is now found in more than 30 states and multiple Canadian provinces.

Deer are all over the United States, trampling suburban lawns, running across highways, nibbling at crops. But, though seemingly counterintuitive, American deer might be on the decline. The trend is uncertain, but an estimate from G. Kent Webb, a professor emeritus at San Jose State University, suggests that deer’s total population peaked around the turn of the millennium, at about 38 million; we’re now at perhaps 35 million after a recent rebound. Although the more common white-tailed deer has been resilient, habitat loss and climate change are especially taking their toll on mule deer out west, which have declined substantially since their mid-20th-century peak. And CWD may have the potential to spread to every state. Even as deer numbers remain large, their slow disappearance would be a chilling prospect. Few of us have contemplated what a world without deer would look like.

In Jorge’s truck, we went bumping along dark gravel roads that threaded the forest; upslope, downhill, near rushing creeks, and along the flanks of steep dolomite hills. Forest crowded the roads on both sides. Prescribed burns by the state’s wildlife agency, Jorge told us, helped support the local deer by encouraging low, bushy vegetation that makes good deer food. But CWD was likely pulling the numbers the other way. The disease wasn’t detected until 2016 in this part of Arkansas, but the state soon learned it had probably been in the area for decades and, in some parts of the state, was infecting more than one in five deer.

[Read: We’re giving up on the (frog) pandemic]

CWD is caused by a misfolded protein called a prion, which deer transmit through direct contact or by shedding prions into the environment. Ingested or inhaled, the prions slowly eat away at the animal’s brain and spinal cord. A deer can take well more than a year to show symptoms, but at some point the disease will leave it confused and weak. The deer’s body wastes away, and eventually, it dies. There is no treatment. Most ominously of all, the prions can bind with soil, where they can remain viable for more than a decade, Jorge told me, and can even be taken up by plants, time bombs in the leaves waiting to infect more animals. Any member of the cervid family, which includes elk and moose, can be infected.

It’s the deer equivalent of mad-cow disease, and though it’s never been known to jump to a human, the possibility lurks like a black cloud in the back of many studies, articles, and public notices about CWD. COVID, ebola, swine flu—all sorts of recent pathogens are suspected to have come from animals. CWD “seems like a juggernaut of a disease,” Jorge said. “It’s a very insidious and scary thing.”

As CWD has moved around the U.S., it has also brought human concern and confusion. Jorge and others have compared the situation to the coronavirus pandemic: Each state creates its own regulations, with piecemeal national policy, and much of the public is often skeptical. That regulatory patchwork is especially troubling when it allows deer to be shipped across state lines. A major vector for CWD is thought to be the transport of captive deer by the deer-farm industry, which breeds deer for venison and antlers, and as game animals. When captive deer are sold, they may get driven long distances, possibly carrying prions with them. One Wisconsin deer farm discovered an outbreak of CWD among its animals in 2021; reportedly, officials soon realized that over the previous five years, the farm had shipped nearly 400 potentially infected deer around Wisconsin and to six other states.

Because the disease can be transmitted by a positive animal long before it causes symptoms, it’s especially hard for wildlife agencies to get a handle on what’s happening with deer in a given area. “We can’t see them until it’s too late,” Jeannine Fleegle, a wildlife biologist at the Pennsylvania Game Commission, told me. “I wish the disease would evolve to make them sicker, faster.”

Deer are one of evolution’s best survivors, having come back in the 20th century from severe overhunting. But a mostly invisible, universally fatal disease that persists in the environment for years sounds like a recipe for disaster. I found myself asking Jorge a question that, despite having researched an entire book about deer, had never even crossed my mind before: Could CWD actually cause the extinction of deer? “I think it’s a possibility that is on the table,” he said. But he emphasized that extinction is only one of a spectrum of outcomes, and no one really knows what will happen.

One possibility: The many species of deer could limp along in a diminished fashion. Preventing transmission to future generations is nearly impossible; CWD might be passed from mother to fawn in the first couple of hours after birth, Jorge said, as the mother uses her tongue to groom her baby. That’s the same amount of time that he and his team try to give newborn fawns to adjust to life on Earth before they descend on them with collars. That night, I witnessed them catch and take samples from a fawn whose soft hooves suggested that she was only a few hours old. She might have already been carrying her very first few CWD prions, which could kill her by about the age of two. In that length of time, deer can reproduce—meaning that one possibility, Jorge said, “is that we will have a deer population, but they’ll all have CWD” and die by the age of two or three.  

[Read: Eagles are falling, bears are going blind]

Another possibility: In some areas, deer may begin to vanish. Such local declines might not seem dramatic, especially for an animal as globally abundant as deer, but they add up nonetheless. Small-scale dwindlings threaten all kinds of species across our warming planet. CWD is most prevalent in the upper Midwest, the Great Plains, and the mid-Atlantic; in places where other members of the deer family are also found, those animals are also at risk.

To ward off disaster, several states have tried culls to slow the spread. But many hunters oppose these actions, and they also show sometimes-spotty compliance with rules about transporting their kills and getting them tested. And deer farmers, like the members of any industry, can be skeptical of any new regulation on their work.

Jorge’s study will try to model the effects of different management actions, but there aren’t a lot of great options. CWD spreads in stealth, and it seems that all officials can do is try to slow it down. In some areas, more than half of adult bucks are likely already infected. States declare containment zones where they find infections, but without a clear picture of where the prions actually exist, these aren’t always effective.

Because CWD-infected animals look normal until the end stages of illness, Jorge said, the disease is difficult for people to believe in. Humans “are really bad at looking into the future. You see the deer now, and most of them look healthy. If we say, ‘They could go extinct,’ it’s hard to grasp.” He drew an analogy to climate change: It’s hard to fathom how large numbers of seemingly healthy animals could vanish, just as it was hard to imagine historic flooding and wildfires devastating many chunks of the country until it became the norm.

But in this part of Arkansas, Jorge told me, you can sometimes see CWD plainly. Near death, deer look and act weird. Their front legs splay out; they lose the alertness and wariness that is their very essence. “They’re very obvious,” he said. “We just drove by one last week—a deer hanging out on the side of the road.” He pulled off the highway. “I started walking toward it and it just kind of stared. It was very skinny. Cars were driving a foot away from it and it wasn’t even flinching.” Locals have told him similar stories.

Thirty-five million deer, of course, remains a lot of deer. Even if local declines lower their numbers by millions more, hunters and ecologists might at first be the only ones to notice. Yet whether we think of them or not, deer are part of everyone’s life; most of us see them at least occasionally, and they are icons in art, literature, and design. They are also key members of the ecosystems they inhabit and a flagship game animal in the $45 billion American hunting industry. A disease that could drastically change their presence in our world might be a quiet force. But it’s one we should consider deadly serious.

This article has been adapted from Erika Howsare’s forthcoming book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship With Our Wild Neighbors.

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The sounds came out of my mouth with an unexpected urgency. The cadence was deliberate—more befitting of an incantation than an order: one large strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The words hung in the air for a moment, giving way to a stillness punctuated only by the soft whir of distant fluorescent lights and the gentle hum of a Muzak cover of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain.”

The time was 9:03 a.m.; the sun had been up for only one hour. I watched the kind woman behind the counter stifle an eye roll, a small mercy for which I will be eternally grateful. Her look indicated that she’d been through this before, enough times to see through my bravado. I was just another man standing in front of a Panera Bread employee, asking her to hand me 30 fluid ounces of allegedly deadly lemonade. (I would have procured it myself, but it was kept behind the counter, like a controlled substance.)

I came to Panera to touch the face of God or, at the very least, experience the low-grade anxiety and body sweats one can expect from consuming 237 milligrams of caffeine in 15 minutes. Really, the internet sent me. Since its release last year, Panera’s highly caffeinated Charged Lemonade has become a popular meme—most notably on TikTok, where people vlog from the front seat of their car about how hopped up they are after chugging the neon beverage. Last December, a tongue-in-cheek Slate headline asked, “Is Panera Bread Trying to Kill Us?”

In the following months, two wrongful-death lawsuits were indeed filed against the restaurant chain, arguing that Panera was responsible for not adequately advertising the caffeine content of the drink. The suits allege that Charged Lemonade contributed to the fatal cardiac arrests of a 21-year-old college student and a 46-year-old man. Panera did not respond to my request for comment but has argued that both lawsuits are without merit and that it “stands firmly by the safety of our products.” In October, Panera changed the labeling of its Charged Lemonade to warn people who may be “sensitive to caffeine.”

The allegations seem to have done the impossible: They’ve made a suburban chain best known for its bread bowls feel exciting, even dangerous. The memes have escalated. Search death lemonade on any platform, and you’ll see a cascade of grimly ironic posts about everything from lemonade-assisted suicide to being able to peer into alternate dimensions after sipping the juice. Much like its late-aughts boozy predecessor Four Loko, Charged Lemonade is riding a wave of popularity because of the implication that consuming it is possibly unsafe. One viral post from October put it best: “Panera has apparently discovered the fifth loko.”

Like many internet-poisoned men and women before me, I possess both a classic Freudian death drive and an embarrassing desire to experience memes in the physical world—an effort, perhaps, to situate my human form among the algorithms and timelines that dominate my life. But there is another reason I was in a strip mall on the shortest day of the year, allowing the recommended daily allowance of caffeine to Evil Knievel its way across my blood-brain barrier. I came to make sense of a year that was defined by existential threats—and by a strange, pervasive celebration of them.

In 2023, I spent a lot of time listening to smart people talk about the end of the world. This was the year that AI supposedly “ate the internet”: The arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 shifted something in the public consciousness. After decades of promise, the contours of an AI-powered world felt to some as if they were taking shape. Will these tools come for our jobs, our culture, even our humanity? Are they truly revolutionary or just showy—like spicier versions of autocorrect?

Some of the biggest players in tech—along with a flood of start-ups—are racing to develop their own generative-AI products. The technology has developed swiftly, lending a frenzied, disorienting feeling to the past several months. “I don’t think we’re ready for what we’re creating,” one AI entrepreneur told me ominously and unbidden when we spoke earlier this year. Civilizational extinction has moved from pure science fiction to immediate concern. Geoffrey Hinton, a well-known AI researcher who quit Google this year to warn against the dangers of the technology, suggested that there was as high as a 10 percent chance of extinction in the next 30 years. “I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, told my colleague Ross Andersen this past spring.

In May, hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and tech luminaries including Bill Gates signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it read. Debates once contained to a small subculture of technologists and rationalists on niche online forums such as LessWrong became fodder for the press. Normal people trying to keep up with the news had to hack through a jungle of new terminology: x-risk, e/acc, alignment, p(doom). By mid-year, the AI-doomerism conversation was fully mainstreamed; existential calamity was in the air (and, we joked, in our fast-casual lemonades).

[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]

Then, as if by cosmic coincidence, this strain of apocalyptic thought fused perfectly with pop culture in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. As the atomic-bomb creator’s biopic took over the box office, AI researchers toted around the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, suggesting that they too were pushing humanity into an uncertain, possibly apocalyptic future. The parallels between Los Alamos and Silicon Valley, however facile, needled at a question that had been bothering me all year: What would compel a person to build something if they had any reasonable belief that it might end life on Earth?

Richard Rhodes, the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, offered me one explanation, using a concept from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. At the core of quantum physics is the idea of complementarity, which describes how objects have conflicting properties that cannot be observed at the same time. Complementarity, he argued, was also the same principle that governed innovation: A weapon of mass destruction could also be a tool to avert war.

[Read: Oppenheimer’s cry of despair in The Atlantic]

Rhodes, an 86-year-old who’s spent most of his adult life thinking about our most destructive innovations and speaking with the men who built the bomb, told me that he believes this duality to be at the core of human progress. Pursuing our greatest ambitions may give way to an unthinkable nightmare, or it may allow our dreams to come true. The answer to my question, he offered, was somewhere on that thin line between the excitement and terror of true discovery.

Roughly 10 minutes and 15 ounces into my strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade, I felt a gentle twinge of euphoria—a barely perceptible effervescence taking place at a cellular level. I was alone in the restaurant, ensconced in a booth and checking my Instagram messages. I’d shared a picture of the giant cup sweating modestly on my table, a cheap bid for some online engagement that had paid off. “I hope you live,” one friend had written in response. I glanced down at my smartwatch, where my heart rate measured a pleasant 20 beats per minute higher than usual. The inside of my mouth felt wrong. I ran my tongue over my teeth, noticing a fine dusting of sugar blanketing the enamel.

I did not feel the warm creep of death’s sweet embrace, only a sensation that the lights were very bright. This was accompanied by an edgy feeling that I would characterize as the antithesis of focus. I stood up to ask a Panera employee if they’d been getting a lot of Charged Lemonade tourism around these parts. “I think there’s been a lot, but honestly most of them order it through the drive-through or online order,” they said. “Not many come up here like you did.” I retreated to my booth to let my brain vibrate in my skull.

It is absurd to imagine that lemonade could kill you—no less lemonade from a soda fountain within steps of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. That absurdity is a large part of what makes Panera lemonade a good meme. But there’s something deeper too, a truth lodged in the banality of a strip-mall drink: Death is everywhere. Today, you might worry about getting shot at school or in a movie theater, or killed by police at a traffic stop; you also understand that you could contract a deadly virus at the grocery store or in the office. Meanwhile, most everyone carries on like everything’s fine. We tolerate what feels like it should be intolerable. This is the mood baked into the meme: Death by lemonade is ridiculous, but in 2023, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched, either.

The same goes for computers and large language models. Our lives already feel influenced beyond our control by the computations of algorithms we don’t understand and cannot see. Maybe it’s ludicrous to imagine a chatbot as the seed of a sentient intelligence that eradicates human life. Then again, it would have been hard in 2006 to imagine Facebook playing a role in the Rohingya genocide, in Myanmar.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat for the next hour next to my now-empty vessel, anticipating some kind of side effect like the recipient of a novel vaccination. Around the time I could sense myself peaking, I grew quite cold. But that was it. No interdimensional vision, no heart palpitations. The room never melted into a Dalí painting. From behind my laptop, I watched a group of three teenagers, all dressed exactly like Kurt Cobain, grab their neon caffeine receptacles from the online-pickup stand and walk away. Each wore an indelible look of boredom incompatible with the respect one ought to have for death lemonade. I began to feel sheepish about my juice expedition and packed up my belongings.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel slightly ripped off; it’s an odd sensation, wanting a glass of lemonade to walk you right up to the edge of oblivion. But a hint of impending danger has always been an excellent marketing tool—one that can obscure reality. A quick glance at the Starbucks website revealed that my go-to order—a barely defensible Venti Pike Place roast with an added espresso shot—contains approximately 560 milligrams of caffeine, which is more than double that of a large Charged Lemonade. But I wanted to believe that the food engineers at Panera had pushed the bounds of the possible.

Some of us are drawn to (allegedly) killer lemonade for the same reason others fixate on potential Skynet scenarios. The world feels like it is becoming more chaotic and unknowable, hostile and exciting. AI and a ridiculous fast-casual death beverage may not be the same thing, but they both tap into this energy. We will always find ways to create new, glorious, terrifying things—some that may ultimately kill us. We may not want to die, but in 2023, it was hard to forget that we will.

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