《A-279》


 Hate

    I hate you. Yes, you personally. And that guy, that woman, that couple, all of you. Don¡¯t think that this is one of the misanthropic ?I hate humanity, but individual people can be ok¡° things. No, I hate all of you, individually and collectively. In fact, the closer you come to me, the more personal you make it, the more I hate you.


    I pretend to have friends, when it is useful. I became quite good at it. Most of you are insanely easy to trick, because you all want to be acknowledged, accepted, admired. Me not. I¡¯m a sociopath. That¡¯s not a hollow phrase. I qualify for almost all of the 6 criteria of antisocial personality disorder according to the ICD-10 definition. I don¡¯t care about other peoples feelings. I respect social norms if it serves my purpose, not out of any sense of obligation. I don¡¯t maintain any relationships, though I can charm others quickly to use them for my needs. I have never felt guilt for anything I¡¯ve done. And of course whenever I clash with persons or society at large, it is never my fault. Never. One thing doesn¡¯t fit: I do have a healthy tolerance to frustration, and I can control myself very well. I need that to complete my revenge, my punishment, my crusade against you, and you, and you all.


    You see, despite being a loner until halfway through school, I never felt that I was missing something. Human contact or warmth or such things. Later on I read about Maslow¡¯s hierarchy of needs. Aside from the first, trivially obvious levels, I found it questionable at best, and more likely ideologically and culturally imprinted nonsense. I hear that further research has since come to the same conclusion as my 16 year old self.


    I am smarter than you. That is a fact. My IQ was measured at 183 the last time I cared about it, and since IQ tests are fundamentally flawed, a part of that is because I trained for it. Much of what makes me smarter than you is not measured in IQ tests. But the analytical thinking it does measure helped me study with best marks, and get a scholarship at Harvard, the most respected university for molecular biology. I studied hard and while my utter disinterest in some subjects that have no place on a proper curriculum made me fail a perfect diploma, I finished in the top of my class, together with my future wife, whom I had strategically befriended halfway through the whole charade.


    I went on to get my PhD while she went straight into a pharmaceutical lab. Well paid, too. But I had higher ambitions.


    Biology was interesting to me for two reasons. One, it was an emotionless field of immediate consequences. And it gave me the opportunity to work on something that I really wanted. We married on her fathers money. While she had a scholarship herself, other than me she could have gone to Harvard without it. But I did not marry for the money. Firstly she was not that rich and secondly there was something else I wanted from her. Nothing in my life after 14 or 15 happened by coincidence.


    Getting my PhD was painless. My wife¡¯s money helped, as did another scholarship, and I already had a reputation that got me through some doors closed to the less gifted. It was much work, and long hours, but my research was both important and interesting. Had a bit of trouble keeping up the good marriage near the end, but keeping sight of my goals helped.


    You see, I needed to pass any background checks with flying colours. My circle of seeming friends was not too large, as I tried to minimise the maintenance work necessary to keep them, and my father, my mother having died from some surprise cancer when I was small, while not being detrimental to my career, was also not a big plus. So I kept a few people at arm¡¯s length.


    My wife and her family, on the other hand, gave me the credibility I needed for top secret clearances. They were solid people, well connected, reasonably wealthy, healthy family. With her at my back, I was indeed approached by the Army research division shortly after starting my career. That I already had become an expert in biological warfare, just called by its civilian name, contagious diseases, was the main reason, of course.


    Officially, my job description was research into protecting the American people from biological weapons developed by our enemies. Anyone with half a brain understood, of course, that in reality the department I worked for was developing just such weapons. Sure, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention made that illegal, but the loopholes were placed intentionally and all they did was force me to not speak openly about my work, which suited me well. Things became a little more hot with the Bioweapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, making the work done in my lab a crime, but the military command assured the scientists of full backing.


    At that time, I should mention, I had already stopped doing active research. Ten years gave me plenty of pathogens to play with, but the security protocols were flawless and I saw no chance to further my plans. Unless, and that is what I did, I came out of the laboratory and was put in charge of it. So I trained management skills, became first an informal, than official team leader, and after a few years of paving the way, the lead scientist who spent most of his time managing the lab efforts. It was another five years, and an almost incident at an Israeli lab, until the military fools realised that they needed an expert in charge of security, not a soldier. So in 1986, roles and protocols were updated and I became responsible for the security of the lab. Nothing would enter or leave it without my approval.


    I prepared the extraction for three years. My wife had done great in her career, and her weekends were busy with the social life that I had largely burdened her with. Keeping up our circle of friends was necessary for my regular background checks, but she was better at it and, other than me, actually cared for some of them. I had carefully removed myself from some of these commitments and found myself a mistress. One that was easy to please and manipulate, as my interest was not so much in the sex, but the fact that I could use her to buy a holiday hut in the nearby mountains, from my money but on her name, so that it was not linked to me. Once she was out of the picture, any good friends whom she had of course told about her affair would at best have the fake name that I had used with her.


    In late April, the lab was running another security exercise. The scenario was a rogue scientist, who had been paid a million dollars by some made-up islamic terror group, would try to smuggle a mix of recent viral research results out of the lab. During the drafting phase, I had shifted the emphasis of the scenario. We had trained similar responses for years, locking down the lab, searching every corner of it, shutting down the perimeter, protocols to establish fast what was missing, alarm chains, and so on. This time, thanks to my input, we would go one step further and assume that the culprit would manage to leave the base with an active biological weapon. In order to stay low profile, his ?home¡° was a training building at another military base, and the purpose of that part of the drill was to subdue him without releasing the bio-weapon into the atmosphere.


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.And while everyone was focussed on bringing down our fake terrorist with a fake product six miles away, the real one quietly took three canisters of active pathogens and drove into the mountains. What I had taken was a research sample, nothing more. I needed to grow more of it, multiply the pathogens. And I did. Over the years, I had slowly collected all the parts needed for my own lab and had stored them at a storage facility halfway en route, container rented under another fake name. Identity checks these days are pathetic at anything that is not a military institution. On my way, I picked up the various parts and pieces of equipment and set them up in the holiday house. My mistress was away on one of her business trips, and I had filled the car with food for two weeks at a supermarket intentionally the other way from the base, then made sure I didn¡¯t stop anywhere until I reached the hut.


    They would be searching for me soon. That is why I had booked a flight to Russia going from Toronto the day after tomorrow. They would, of course, go through my e-mails and my credit card data and find it. The story would fit the current political narrative of Russia as the re-awakened old enemy, who had somehow bought me out. The trip was made to look like an amateurs attempt at secrecy. The first flight going to Amsterdam and the connecting flight booked with my second credit card through a different travel agency using a throwaway e-mail address.


    So they would wait for me at the airport and, depending how fast they found it all, search along the scenic route to Canada. There was a good chance that they would mount not a full-scale national search, because our research was, strictly speaking, the preparation for war crimes and conflicted with multiple international treaties. So they had to keep things somewhat hush-hush, which worked to my advantage. But even so, I had two, at most four days before I had to move places or the chance of discovery would become too high.


    There is a reason bio-terrorism is not a thing: It is actually far from simple. Explosives are so much easier, so much wider understood and so much easier to get or mix. Biology is hard and far less predictable. And biological weapons are entirely in their own league. Which is why I opted for something reasonably simple, straightforward and reliable.


    A-279 is a group of pathogens, three of which we had active samples for. They are genetically related but different enough from each other that most cures against one of them are ineffective against the other variants. I had made sure to contaminate and thus spoil the reserves of cures we had, and managed to introduce errors into the documentation so at least the first few batches made after the outbreak would have reduced efficiency and with any luck some nasty side effects.


    A-279 multiplies rapidly under the correct conditions, and can spread both through the air and through water. It is a wonderful biological weapon, with the usual problem of containing an outbreak that is the primary reason that they were never used in actual warfare. Most bio-weapons developed during the Cold War were invented as doomsday weapons. If you are going to die anyway, at least take the other guy and the rest of the planet down with you. A doomsday weapon is what I wanted.


    For the first time in decades, I felt truly happy, mixing the samples I had taken into the growing vats where they would find heavenly conditions for multiplying. Finally, I felt something that for lack of a better word I would call love. It is the opposite of hate, is it not? There, in front of me, was the end of humanity as we know it, and since I¡¯ve always had hated the lot of you, the antidote to the human disease was naturally an object of my deepest affection.


    So I gave it all my attention and prepared it with the utmost caution. Not just because a small mistake would turn me into a dead wannabe-terrorist, but because I genuinely cared.


    Of course I was under no illusion to wipe out humanity. Even in the most optimistic simulations conducted by the military, pockets of human life would survive a world-wide pandemic. There were still isolated tribes that would not have contact with the dead outside world until the pathogens had succumbed due to a lack of hosts. There were too many inhabited islands that could easily be closed off and had a reasonable chance at basic survival even when isolated. You see, the basic problem with islands is not that pathogens could come through the air or water even when the ports and airports are closed. If you are distant enough from the nearest land, that chance is manageable and if you isolate the few random infections it might cause quickly enough, you can weather the pandemic. But most islands, especially the smaller ones, are not self-sufficient. They cannot feed even a fraction of their population without imports.


    But one way or the other, humans would survive. But human civilisation would not. It would start again almost from scratch. The world is so connected, supply lines are so fragile and interdependencies so large, that national and international communication networks will be down within one day, two at most, of a pandemic on the scale that I was preparing. Power would fail quickly once the majority of workers were deceased. Transport networks would be next, with air travel failing first, then trains and cars and finally ships. Petrol has half a year of shelf life these days, and most petrol stations have stored only a few days of sales. Once the logistics chain is interrupted, and people start to hoard, it will all collapse quickly. Without supply chains, cities become death traps. What will you eat when the supermarket is plundered? There¡¯s no fruits or harvest and very little animals to slaughter. Your dog will feed your family for a day and then what? To get to the countryside you need the transport network. Not to mention that within the densely populated areas, the pathogens would spread the quickest.


    I estimated a week between the outbreak and the total collapse of civilisation. There are so many movies about these topics, but they all ignore the psychological factor. In wars, humans managed hardships because there was a common enemy against which you could unite. In a pandemic, every other human is potentially infected and thus your enemy. You have no friends. People will understand this very, very quickly. Or rather: Those who don¡¯t understand it will die.


    Humanity¡¯s light will go out in agony, in fear and in distrust.


    I couldn¡¯t wait to see it happen.

 Love

    ?I love you¡° were the last words I said to my wife. It was the morning of Thursday, July 6th. Who could forget that day?


    I was halfway through my daily commute when my mobile phone rang.


    ?Colonel Brandon, INSCOM¡°


    ?Sir, you are requested at HQ immediately, Sir. Order of General Wilson.¡°


    ?On my way. ETA 20 minutes.¡°


    It was going to be a long day.


    I lived off-site, and the drive to Fort Belvoir was usually pleasant. That day, it was a bit less so than usual, with the drizzle and the overcast sky. Little did I know what was about to come.


    ?Colonel, take a seat.¡° I was welcomed into the conference room already occupied by General Wilson, acting commander of INSCOM as well as two other Colonels and four Majors under him. Major Simmons brought me to my assigned seat with the briefing material waiting for me.


    I flipped through the pages, picking up the most important information before settling in for a full read. Two more Majors were still due to arrive, according to the name plates on their seats, but the General started the meeting within minutes, and I had managed only half of the papers.


    ?Yesterday evening¡°, Colonel Roberts summed up the events, ?A senior official at an army research facility was found AWOL. The research subject of the facility is biological weapons, and several containers with live material were found to be missing.¡°


    ?Is the FBI on the case?¡°, one of the Majors asked.


    ?Due to the sensitive nature of the material, the army is handling this as an internal matter. Military police has searched the suspects residence during the night and is still questioning his wife. This meeting was called due to a finding of the early morning. General?¡°


    The general sat upright in his seat and addressed the small group: ?He took precautions to secure his home computer with hard drive encryption and he wiped his phone before leaving it in his office. We can¡¯t get his credit card transactions without a court order, which would mean involving the FBI. But early in the morning we involved the NSA and got a copy of his last text messages. There were confirmation messages for two credit card transactions from last week among them, which indicate that he booked two flights. The amounts given point to international flights. Our suspect is planning to leave the country.¡°


    Colonel Roberts continued: ?My team is trying to narrow down the possible flights and sift through the evidence we found and the statements of his wife. We are also reviewing footage of traffic cameras trying to find his car. He probably dumped it somewhere and took a rental, but we cannot be certain of that until we get his credit card data. We will compile a profile of the suspect and send to all of you.


    ?The bad news is that the stuff that he took should not have been there. Its existence is a violation of the Biological Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act. Everything in that lab is classified as Top Secret and we cannot allow anyone without the necessary clearance to even find out what went missing. That is why we cannot involve the FBI, not even under a pretence. If they find our man and arrest him, they will likely also find the bio-weapon material. So this one is on us.¡°


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.?Colonel Brandon¡°, the general turned to me, ?You will lead the investigation in and around the research facility. A helicopter is waiting for you and your team.


    ?Colonel Manning¡°, he turned to the third Colonel in the room, ?You will work with the CBP. Put him on the watch list for the border guards so we know the moment he shows his passport at an airport. Set up a plan and a team for arresting him safely, as we have to assume he carries the bio-weapon on his body.


    ?Dismissed.¡°


    Two hours later, we touched down near the research lab and a car brought me and a small team to the facility, which had been put under lockdown by its deputy security chief.


    Five hours later, we had conducted our initial observation and interviews and had a reasonably good picture of the timeline of events.


    Six hours later, General Wilson had a preliminary report on his desk and I took my first break of the day and made time for a phone call to my wife, who had only gotten a few text messages during the helicopter flight so far. I couldn¡¯t tell her where I was and how long I would be, but this had happened to us before. I was certain by then that I would not be home that night.


    A conference call was scheduled a little after my break and we exchanged our progress so far. Manning had compiled a profile of our suspect and it alarmed us all. A typical high-performance individual possibly approached by the enemy. His wife passed all interviews and wasn¡¯t a suspect. We found no evidence of other co-conspirators, either. Roberts had success with one of the travel agencies who had caved in under pressure and gave the flight details without a proper court order. The second one had a lawyer and insisted on proper procedure. This was anyway a breakthrough and the reason for the conference call. Our suspect had booked a flight from Toronto, Canada to Amsterdam, Netherlands.


    Amsterdams Schiphol Airport is one of the busiest airports in Europe, with connecting flights almost everywhere. They were planning to add a sixth runway.


    But we had his exact flight times. Mannings team would work with the Customs and Border Protection to monitor the likely border crossings into Canada. General Wilson would work his connections and try to get the Canadians to arrest our suspect when he showed up at the airport.


    Roberts and my team would continue our investigation. The whole flight bookings might be a ruse, I thought. For a smart guy in charge of the security of a secret military base, they were just not hidden well enough.


    The entire call lasted half an hour, and was followed up by encrypted mails containing the reports of everyone so far. I distributed the material around my team for reading and took to the compiled profile myself.


    We spent two more hours on the base, investigating camera footage, conducting interviews and checking several times both our suspects office and the lab that had contained the pathogens.


    At around nine in the evening, I arrived at a small hotel nearby. The base was a research facility and had no housing. After a long phone call to my wife, I showered and went to bed.


    We spend all of the next day following clues and collecting evidence, but to no avail. Then we got the call from the other unit that he had not shown up for the flight. It was neither entirely surprising nor expected with certainty, but it gave our investigation a renewed focus.

 Contempt

    I despise you. You are all so pathetic, and it pains me to think down to the level of common humans. Three or four days, by my estimate, was the time it would take them to follow what trails I could not avoid and find the cottage. By that time, of course, I was long gone. I did not leave them any traps or explosives. That is childish movie stuff, and it takes time and resources that are better spent elsewhere.


    I had left them something else. The bio-weapon samples that I took from the lab. Re-sealed and stuffed back into the original bag that I had used to smuggle them out. I left everything else as if I had left in a hurry. A couple of forged documents of the kind an amateur can fake - car documents, train tickets, hotel reservations. A pile of other crap to sift through - pieces of old bills, the part with the date torn off, an old motorbike oil can, flyers of a boat rental company. If I had missed any traces they could use to follow me, it was buried beneath a pile of fake stuff they had to sift through first.


    Meanwhile, I was on my way to my mail-order-business. Delivery time.


    Back in the days, morons with six-digit salaries and military ranks had given thoughts to the potential delivery systems for biological weapons. Bombs, grenades, infected corpses thrown out of low-flying planes, the works.


    During my years in the research lab, it became quite clear to me that they had been too stuck in the framework of conventional warfare. Biological weapons only make sense in one capacity: As a first strike weapon. And for that, your best delivery system is UPS and DHL.


    I had set up a fake startup company and lured in some collaborators with science talk and science papers that were good enough to fool anyone not a leading expert in the field. Easy to do when you are one of the best in a related field.


    You see, in the time of hyper-capitalism, precarious freelancing and ADD-media, there was a trend to optimise the self towards efficiency in daily routines. Save five minutes in the shower to help the environment and get more time for work. Ride the bike to work to protect the rain forest and merge commute and workout into one so you don¡¯t waste gym time in the evening. And then there are ready-to-eat meals. Since the invention of the microwave oven, a constant presence in the life of sub- and urban singles and families. But after an initial hype the pre-processed food got a bad reputation, not always deserved. Plus you still need to heat it and eat it and that¡¯s just too much work in a busy day.


    So the movement to reduce food to a purely mechanical intake of calories and essential chemical compounds appeared. Of course with a sticker of a ?healthy living¡° attitude that was necessary to sell anything in that time. If you mix these berries and those fruits and that grain and all grind it up into a fine powder, you can dehydrate it for easy transport and preservation, and then mix it with water, giving you a porridge-like substance that contains everything an adult needs for an entire day.


    A lot of those products appeared, and many of them were crowdfunded, made by startup companies that went out of business quickly after people discovered that actually taste and texture does matter when it comes to food, especially if you want to eat it every day.


    Idiots, the lot of them, but useful idiots. I made up my own recipe, my own startup company. Took in a few collaborators to play the CEO and marketing roles while I pretended to be the distant genius inventor who had money but no social skills and needed a team to get his invention into the market. My approach was competitive pricing, especially for early supporters, and promises on the edge of believability. I think half of our crowdfunders were merely curious if we could deliver what we promised and for 20 bucks they were ready to laugh about themselves if it turned out hogwash.


    This way, by the time I had multiplied my bio-weapon samples, I also had thousands of people all around the world who would willingly put something I sent them by mail into their bodies. You see, A-279 is a slow-acting agent. It was designed for spot injections into the enemy country, and would spread among the population for around two to three weeks before symptoms appeared in its victims. They would linger for another few weeks, bloating up, in constant agony. The last-stage symptoms were both ugly and even more painful. As a weapon, A-279 was designed to destroy the morale of the enemy as much as their bodies.


    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.By my estimates, my twelve thousand volunteers would have multiplied by a factor of at least one hundred by the time first symptoms appeared. The biological weapons department would put one and one together quickly, but it would be a day or two before bureaucracy had been bypassed and the report heard at the highest levels, and another day or two until other world leaders were informed through backchannels and a week at least until someone finally admitted the truth openly so concentrated efforts to fight the disease could be started. In that week, another multiplication by ten would have happened, bringing the weapon beyond the threshold where it could still be stopped. With millions all around the world infected, most of whom not yet showing symptoms, no standard test procedure in existence, no vaccination or cure, it would be a race against time. They might even realise too late that I took the entire group of pathogens, not just one. As I said before, the A-279 variants are similar to each other, but different enough that even if someone were to come up with a new cure in such a short time, or removed the errors I introduced into the formula for the old one, it would be effective only in a fraction of patients. More days would be lost understanding that not the cure was ineffective, but the disease more complex than assumed.


    The first public news confirmed my assumption. A mystery disease had appeared in Asia. Funny that, only a few of my crowdfunding fools had been in Asia. Maybe they were the most eager, or the most weak. A day later, similar outbreaks had been reported in America and Europe. Two days later, the connection was made. Luck had been on my side, with the strain first discovered in Asia being sufficiently different from the first patients in the west to be initially mistaken for a different disease.


    I had added the multiplied pathogens to the prepared food powder - largely bought in bulk from another company in this business - done the final processing and sent the stuff out. We had bypassed all the food regulation agencies and such, stalled the inspectors who had of course come ringing. My collaborators were worried that we would get into trouble, I assured them and the inspectors that of course an inspection would be done before anything was sent out. Two loyal helpers supported me in a two day-and-night marathon to package, label and mail everything. In true startup fashion, we would move first and face consequences later, thumb our noses at the evil government authorities suppressing independent entrepreneurs or some such nonsense.


    People had similar ideas before. The Anthrax attacks in 2001, for example. But they sent their packages to high-profile targets that have security in place. My targets were regular folks expecting some chemical substance and believing my lies that everything had been FDA approved and tested by independent laboratories and everything. Timing was crucial - the lies had to be in the public long enough to be believed facts, but not long enough to trigger an official investigation. I was trying to fly under the radar but be big enough for having enough targets. There was a fallback plan, but it was not needed.


    In the end, we had almost half a ton of product left over and started sending out small free samples to people who had merely indicated interest. I also made sure to infect my helpers, just for good measure. Everything went well on my side, and the impact and spread worked out just as planned, if not better. No, to be completely honest, I had underestimated A-279.


    After sending was mostly complete, I retreated to a mountain cabin that I had rented for a family of four under another false name for three weeks. They would be searching for a single man. A family booking was less suspicious.


    There, I enjoyed nature without people, hunted my own meat as I would have to do once civilisation had ended, and followed the news. I enjoyed every moment of it. Things unfolded mostly as I had thought they would. A-279 multiplied faster than its hosts died thanks to its long incubation period. The absence of a reliable test during the first weeks made quarantines difficult if not impossible. Fear and paranoia added to the uncertain situation. Entire countries shut down their airports and borders, only to find out later that the disease was already inside.


    It might seem at this point as the work of one man, but I have to extend my gratitude to maybe a hundred or so scientists and military personnel who over the years contributed their part to the research, development, improvement and continued storage of A-279. Humans can always be relied upon to be destructive, petty, irrational and irresponsible.

 Justice

    I don¡¯t care about you. Not your story or feelings, not your lies, not your wounds. My job is to get out the full truth of what you did and help the jury come to a just decision. I care about justice and the triumph of civilised humanity.


    Your actions caused the most destructive pandemic in human history. Everyone else involved in the development and deployment of this biological weapon has already been sentenced, though none of them survived the outbreak so far as we know.


    The heroic collaboration of Chinese, Russian and American scientists finally found a cure amidst the chaos of a broken world. The stories of how they worked under impossible conditions, generating electricity by hand to power the necessary machinery, sleeping next to deadly pathogens because leaving the laboratory was more dangerous and how many of them were lost in riots or to general panic. These stories will be told by generations to come. Yours will not. It has already been decided that your memory will be cleansed from history. Your name will be erased from all proceedings at the end of this trial. There will be no grave nor tombstone for you.


    Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!Your guilt is proven beyond doubt, by your own admission, by evidence and by witness testimony. The only decision left is the appropriate punishment. The death penalty has been called for, as has torture and mutilation until your body gives up. Under the post-pandemic provisional laws, both are permissible for your extreme crimes against humanity. We made that law specifically for you. Too few of us are left to allow valuable workforce to go to waste with death or prison sentences. But prison for life has been called for as well, under the most harsh conditions, to keep you but barely alive to suffer.


    As chief judge of this tribunal, I reject all of those proposals. We are at a historic point that will be in history books for all eternity. Humanity has survived, though barely. Civilisation has not ended as you wished, but prevailed. Civilisation means justice and it means restraint. We cannot afford ourselves to behave as animals.


    You will not have an opportunity for last words after the judgment has been issued. So anything else you wish to say, say it now, as it will be the last that the world will ever hear from you.

 Closure

    I laugh in your face. Truly, humans can always be counted upon to be idiots. You think that I did not anticipate someone might catch up to me, and some pocket of people might survive somewhere? You did not catch me in my mountain cabin, did you forget? I came here. You think it was because I desired the comforts of a city, a hot shower and regular meals. You think I believe to have erased all my traces and could enter incognito, undiscovered in the chaos and aftermath.


    Yes, there was that possibility. But of course I understood that I am the most wanted man alive. My IQ needs specialised tests to be measured, you forgot?


    We talked about A-279 these last weeks, and everyone here is tested for it and there are now cures available for all the strains in case someone infected appears from somewhere. For the last weeks, we have all breathed the same air in this same room. Judges, prosecutor, guards, visitors. Then you all went home back to your families or what is left of them, to your friends, to the bars and restaurants and brothels. All this time I¡¯ve been breathing out C-91, and you¡¯ve been breathing it in and spreading it around the city. I took only a small sample from the weapons lab, re-sealed the container it was stored in, quite sure it was never missed. But it multiplies readily inside the human body. It takes three months for it to show symptoms, but death is quick after that. Without the original samples and chemical formula, with most scientists dead and almost all laboratories destroyed, with the little resources you have left, and the panic that a second pandemic will cause, I have completed my mission.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.