• ~ VIRUS ~
    By Gavin J. Annette

    When you get too creative and bring up an amazing idea, it’s almost too hard for others to resist the temptation to use it as their own. But sometimes, even a great idea has its flaws and shouldn’t be made reality at all.

    Or it could lead to horrible, deadly consequences.

    ***

    You see, there was this role-playing website that a lot of my friends and I were very addicted to, where we came up with post-apocalyptic stories in which the main characters traverse a great wasteland after a terrible cataclysm. Yeah, I know it’s a rather cliché storyline, but in all honesty, there’s a lot more depth to it than that. However, how much depth is not the case of this story.

    What matters is the Virus.

    When the site was first launched, I was one of its first members. I had found it while browsing Google, and my sixteen-year-old mind screamed, “Oh, yes!” After reading a short introduction from the administrator (username ~xxSteamboyThomasxx~), and after creating my username (Crimson_Thunder316), I really started getting involved. There was a bulletin suggesting that new members come up with the reason for the whole board: why were the characters in this wasteland in the first place? This hadn’t been established yet.

    This was my first mistake: I came up with the idea of the Virus.

    I had researched a few Biology websites, and learned a bit about viruses: what they looked like, formulae, stuff like that. Using what little chemical formulas I found, (and a bit of inspiration from certain video games), I came up with a viral RNA code – completely random, mind you, I hadn’t planned on having a virus that anyone could relate to another one (for “originality’s” sake) – and posted it, with a short summary of symptoms and motive of infection, on the board.

    …First signs of infection appear within hours of initial contraction: carriers develop sickly welts on the entirety of their bodies, followed by distortion of limbs and mental disturbia. Within minutes, the infected become incapable of coherent thought and fall completely into mental psychosis, attacking any other living being within sight. Infection is carried out through fluid transmission or by wounds inflicted by infected. It is one-hundred percent communicable and one-hundred percent “fatal”...
    It was an instant success.

    ~xxSteamboyThomasxx~ personally thanked me and added a Background post to the forum, so that everyone knew of the Virus and what it meant for the characters.

    My second mistake: I let him.

    I created my character and started a story, and everyone and their mother wanted to join in. It was as though I was the popular kid on the playground (something which I would never have been considered in reality), and I couldn’t help but feel a little egotistical; I mean, I did give this sight the motivation it needed.

    And everyone was fascinated with the idea of the Virus. My Virus.

    It was great fun.

    Until the news reports started.

    It was the morning of September 16, a week after the Virus had made its debut on the site, when the first of the reports reached my ears from the living room.

    “Two young people were taken into custody late last night, after attempting to brutally bludgeon a man in downtown Seattle with their bare fists. Both assailants showed signs of struggle upon being apprehended, and attacked the police officers responsible for detaining them. Two of the four officers were wounded when the attackers bit them, and authorities stated that the assailants may have been using illegal substances, which produced unforeseen physical and mental side-effects…”

    This report barely fazed me, because there were fights in Seattle all the time, right? Nothing to worry about. Substance abuse? Also reasonable.

    But then more of the same reports started coming. And they became more...interesting. Assailants with strange deformities. Brutal attacks. Biting…

    And then the real reports started.

    People dying all over the western seaboard.

    Murders.

    Rumors of a virus.

    Cities quarantined from Portland to San Francisco.

    “No…” I whispered after it was stated on the news – by the President, for God’s sake – that Seattle was to be placed under quarantined, as the source of the virus was said to have been a leak at the University of Washington’s bio-chemistry labs.

    Two weeks after initial infection, a young man - not much older than me - came on the news claiming to be ~xxSteamboyThomasxx~ (real name Thomas Gunnerson). He proceeded to explain that the outbreak of this virus was his doing; that he had been experimenting with a theoretical RNA code in the labs when it was created and accidentally unleashed.
    I was certain of three things, then.

    One, this Thomas Gunnerson was not the Virus’s creator because I was its creator.

    Second, this was indeed the same Virus that I had “created”.

    And three: the code I had made up had not been random at all; on the contrary, according to officials who came on after Gunnerson had left the stand, it had been a mixture of rabies and the Ebola virus, and I had not noticed this.

    Gunnerson ended with the statement that he had received the idea for the Virus from a website he frequented. Upon further question, he informed the public that the originator of the idea for the virus was username Crimson_Thunder316.

    I suppose, at hearing this, I was glad of one thing:

    After over half of the US was infected with a deadly virus, credit was given when credit was due. Unfortunately, the people of the US weren’t jumping for joy at my successful discovery of a new form of biological warfare.

    They were killing each other instead.