Once there was a teenage girl who was playing outside her home when a wasp stung her. The girl fell immediately into a deathlike coma. Her parents were overcome with sadness, for there was no antidote to that wasp's poison. Still, they clung to hope. Perhaps one day, a cure would be found.
And so the father slipped his daughter into a cryogenic chamber where she would not age, but sleep peacefully until they had discovered the antidote and could wake her. The girl's mother was heartbroken that she might age and die as they awaited the cure, and so she decided to join her daughter in the cryogenic chamber. Knowing he'd be lonely without his family, the father decided that he, too, should sleep. Slowly, the servants began to back away from the family. "Not so fast!" the father exclaimed. And into the cryogenic chamber went all of the servants of the house. The father promised they would be amply compensated.
Only one young chemist remained awake. Deep beneath the house was a state-of-the-art laboratory where this chemist could experiment to find the antidote to the wasp's sting. Working long hours and all alone, the chemist convinced himself that he must be in love with the girl, though he'd never spoken to her before the coma.
When ten years had passed, the chemist hoped he had a cure, and so he awakened the girl to try it out. She was thawed but still unconscious. When a mere ten minutes had passed, the chemist knew the antidote had failed and he froze her again. In another ten years, he tried again. And in another ten, he tried again.
For every interval that passed, the girl aged only ten minutes, but the chemist aged a full ten years. Eventually, the chemist knew that he would not find the antidote in his lifetime, so he hired an apprentice to train and take his place.
This new chemist tried out a new antidote every ten years. This chemist also convinced herself to fall in love with the sleeping beauty whom she never truly met.
When the chemist grew old, she trained a younger apprentice to take her place. For hundreds of years, then thousands of years, chemists trained apprentices to work on the antidote and the girl slept. Her parents and her household slept beside her. After a time, the girl was no longer a girl–she aged slowly, ten minutes per ten years, but she still aged.
Eventually, the species of wasp that had stung the girl went extinct, and there was no longer any venom to study to make the anti-venom. All hope was lost.
The final chemist, who had decided like all the others to be in love, went empty-handed to her cryogenic chamber, determined to give the woman a single kiss before giving up completely, unplugging her chamber, and waking the household.
But time is strange, after all, and it can move slowly for thousands of years, but it can also move very quickly and all at once.
Biology is strange too. It wasn't venom that had sent the girl-now-woman into her coma, but a thousand tiny wasp eggs deposited into her blood stream. These eggs had been slowed by the cryogenics, but not stopped. During the last ten years of her slumber, the eggs had turned to larvae then to pupae, then grew wings. They had eaten through the blood vessels, then the muscles of the woman, then the skin. They filled the chamber with a low buzz.
The apprentice leaned awkwardly into the pod to kiss the princess. But. Ouch! It was more like a sting. The chemist fell immediately into a deathlike coma.
Out of the cryogenic chamber flew wasp after wasp until the entire room was filled with them, swarming. One by one, the wasps stung all of the sleeping household, who never woke again.
Then the wasps repopulated the earth, and humans went extinct.