The last one to slowly decay into a festering pool of goop, colonized by competing microorganisms seeking to dominate the goop with their own tiny idea of what

The last one to slowly decay into a festering pool of goop, colonized by competing microorganisms seeking to dominate the goop with their own tiny idea of what success looks like, while higher ad-versaries extract sustenance from them and the goop for a short while, until a sticky dead equilibrium is reached.