The shiny, blue crystals brought pain and death

From DATELINE ZERO — The Last Word On Nothing has a strange and heart-wrenching story of how a town in Brazil ended up contaminated with radioactive cesium chloride.

Goiânia, the capital of the state of Goiás in central Brazil, was host to a clinic using a “radiation therapy machine” in 1971. The practice was later abandoned, and the clinic shut down. They left the machine behind, which sounds like something from a science fiction film; “looks like a cross between an enormous telescope and a dentist’s chair.”

What happens later also seems like the stuff of fiction. In fact, I’m writing a follow up to the title story from The Savior Machine: A brief collection of weird fiction. In it, a health facility using an experiential treatment is closed down. Some dangerous equipment is left behind and, as you probably guessed, people get hurt.

Guess I don’t need to worry that the plot seems contrived. Well, not that part of the plot anyhow.

From the story at The Last Word On Nothing:

… His curiosity was rewarded with about a third of an ounce of sparkling, glowing blue powder. The consistency was variable—some crystals were as big as rice grains; others the size of dust. …

The Last Word On Nothing: “Contamination in Goiânia” [via Boing Boing]

Read more like this at datelinezero.com.