It's the largest oil spill in history: a crashed supertanker in San Francisco Bay. Desperate to avert environmental damageand a PR disasterthe multinational oil company releases an untested "designer microbe" to break up the spill. An "oil-eating" microbe, designed to consume anything made of petrocarbons: oil, gasoline, synthetic fabrics, and of course plastic. What the company doesn't realize is that their microbe propagates through the air. But when every car in the Bay Area turns up with an empty gas tank, they begin to suspect something is terribly wrong. And when, in just a few days, every piece of plastic in the world has dissolved, it's too late...