Unlife

Excerpt from the lecture of Dr. Graham Stramm, from the 2010 International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Georgia.

It's pure egotism on the part of humanity that makes us think we're the dominant species of the planet. Even at a glance it is a ridiculous assumption. Seventy percent of the planet is covered in water, reducing us to living on thirty percent. Less, actually, once you account for places too cold, too hot, or too dry to support us.

Even in the parts of the world where we thrive, other species outnumber us. Rats and roaches, spiders and flies. And that's only the competition within our own kingdom. The true kings of our world, the gods of our ecosystem, are among the smallest. Viruses. Simple in design, they outnumber us by numbers so great as to be inexpressible in any meaningful way.

The real genius of these gods of our world, their true beauty, is, ironically, their lifespan; specifically, the brevity of their existence. Continually evolving, perpetually adapting, the only rule that ever seemed to limit their spread was that the faster they killed their host, the less time they had to spread.

It was this limitation which prevented deadly disease like Ebola from destroying countries, while allowing the mildly debilitating common cold to sweep across continents.
Until the Dapher Strain.

The Dapher Strain, or the 'Living Corpse' disease, as it is more commonly known, was identified in February of this year, and is, rather alarmingly, viewed primarily as a scientific curiosity by the medical community and the public at large.

It is the innocuous nature of the Dapher Strain during the life of the infected that has prevented the disease from receiving the attention and concern that it truly warrants. Difficult to detect, and almost without symptom, the infected spend the duration of their lifetime unaware of their conditions, and lead normal lives, all the while spreading their disease to others, blissfully ignorant of the contagion.

Only in death does the disease reveal itself. Through means we are still exploring, the Dapher Strain manages to 'trick' the cells it inhabits into behaving as though the hosts body was still alive. In most cases the effects are negligible, fatal wounds scarring over, bone marrow continuing to produce blood cells long after the heart has stopped beating. Only in the most severe cases have we seen the symptoms of 'living death', such as breathing corpses, and the infamous 'coffin shakers' of New Orleans.

While this all may seem merely interesting on the surface, even prospectively positive to the researchers from the Methuselah Foundation, I would reiterate, it is pure egotism that leads man to believe that he is the master of his environment. Diseases grow, they change, and they mutate. The question we should be asking ourselves is not how these diseases work, but what happens when they change.

What will happen when the Dapher Strain crosses paths with something more dangerous? What happens when the movements of the infected switch from pointless twitching to more meaningful motions?

What will happen, when the dead begin to walk?



The doctor waved his small life in front of my eyes, then leaned back, making a notation on the pad in front of him.

"Open your mouth." He ordered.

I complied, trying not to think about the look on the doctor's face.

When this ordeal had begun, the three doctors looking over us had made a point of treating us with respect. They answered our questions, any that they could, and did their best to hide any fear or frustration from us.

That had lasted almost a month. After nearly a year together, they'd stopped thinking of us as human beings, and they never looked us in the eye anymore.

I couldn't blame them.

The doctor scraped a sample out of my mouth, making sure to keep his hand as far away from my teeth as he could, then sealed the sample in a small glass container and wrote a notation on the side.

His nose still wrinkled in disgust, the doctor made another note in his journal.

I shut my mouth and began rolling up one of my sleeves.

The Doctor took a scraping of skin from my arm, then pulled out a needle and extracted some blood.

Once everything was labeled and sealed, he placed all of the samples in what appeared to be a refrigerator unit embedded in the wall. Back when they'd still been answering our questions, one of the doctor had explained the system to me. The unit opened into both this room, and the one next door, but never at the same time. Whenever one of the doors closed, the entire unit would be chemically sterilized.

Apparently, even after that, the scientists in the next room had to wear containment suits, not the full hazmat suits that the doctors who dealt with us wore, but whatever was a step down from that.

There'd been a time when the closing of that door had given me a sense of relief, knowing that the testing, and probing, and examinations were done, and the only thing left was the medication.

When I'd first gotten sick, the samples had hurt, a lot. The disease made me more sensitive. Sensitive to light, sensitive to touch, sensitive to smell. The headaches had been bad enough, putting me on my back for hours, moaning in agony. My visits with the doctor had been a thousand times worse.

It hadn't gotten any better with time. I'd just become more detached from the pain. I'd become more detached from everything.

"All right." The Doctor picked up the needle that had been sitting on the tray beside him since I'd come in. "We're increasing your dosage to five milliliters."

He didn't seem to be expecting a response, so I didn't give one.

The needle plunged into my arm and he injected the serum into me.

It hurt. But it always hurt, and I was tired of caring.

"This one's done." He called over his shoulder. Two large men, both wearing suits similar, but not identical to the doctor's, were standing next to the door. It was never stated, but everyone knew why they were there. If one of us lost it, if we went crazy, it would be their job to protect the doctor. Patients could be replaced. Guards could be replaced. Doctors, however, were a commodity.

The guards walked me back to the hall. Roger was already waiting for them. We saw the doctors every day, and always in the same order.

I walked past the bunks, to the back of the room, where the rest of the patients were standing around the table, eating. They looked like refugees from some third world nation, escaping from war and famine. A dozen bone thin bodies eating piles of meat as quickly as they could. Our disease, the plague that we carried, it consumed us, devoured our bodies, beginning with the fatty tissue. Only when we'd been reduced to skeletal figures did it attach the rest of our bodies, the skin, the organs, the muscles.

When the study began I'd held on to the hope that, even if a cure could not be found, they'd find some way to slow the disease.

So far, the closest thing we had to treatment was the meat. By consuming massive quantities of fatty tissue, we gave the disease something to eat besides our bodies. It hadn't taken our keepers long to figure out that raw meat worked even better. These days they didn't even cut our meals into portions, they just slaughtered the livestock and put it out for us to dig into. Like animals.

I found an open spot at the table, grabbed a leg, and pulled until it tore away from the body.

In my life, my real life, the one I had before the disease, I never would have been able to do something like that. Not just because it would have made me ill, but because I'd never have had the strength for it. Normal people, healthy people, their bodies have controls built in, things that keep them from hurting themselves. We didn't. The illness turned off the controls. Technically we weren't any stronger than before we got sick, we just seemed to be.

I bit into the flesh in my hand, my broken teeth cutting into the raw flesh, which I very nearly inhaled in my desire to consume.

None of us talked anymore, and it wasn't just that we'd run out of things to say. Acknowledging each other would require us to look at each other, and looking would remind us of what we looked like. It was a mutual shame that kept us each in our place, eyes downcast, trying not to think.

The thing that made it all so much worse, so much more horrible, were the guards. And the doctors. Being left alone to our humiliation and self loathing would have been terrible enough, but we weren't. Everything we did was observed. Every disgusting act, every humiliating detail, every miserable waking moment was observed by someone healthy and normal, someone disgusted by us, someone pitying us or hating us.

Even without conversation, even without eye contact, I knew I wasn't alone in my hatred.

I gnawed the last strips of flesh off of my meal and reached forward for another piece. Glancing up, I caught a peak at one of our guards through his plexiglass face mask. His lips were curled in disgust.

I raised a chunk of raw, dripping meat to my lips and chewed.

***

The only time we weren't watched, the only time we were left alone, was at night. They lashed us to our beds, of course. Not that they didn't trust us, we were assured, it was the nature of the disease. If we died, if we passed away while we slept, that was when the second infection kicked in, exciting the neurons, artificially stimulating the primitive portion of our brain.

Even with the straps across our bodies, though, it was a relief, being left alone, not feeling those judging eyes on us. A guard still came by every hour, but he never stayed long.

I laid down in my bed, as docile as ever, waiting for one of the guards to strap me in. Like the doctors, they never looked us in the eye anymore. Actually, they never looked us in the face. Seeing them staring into the space halfway between us had caused me pain at first, then frustration, then resentment. These days, I mostly just felt rage.

Part of me wondered if that was the disease, the second one. Maybe it stimulated parts of my brain before I died. Rage, hunger, the primitive urges that dominated my thoughts.

I lay still as I was strapped into place, rubbing my broken, aching teeth together, trying to overwhelm my hunger with pain.

In a matter of minutes we were all strapped into place. One of the guards cleared away the bloody remains of our meal, while the other took Polaroids of each of us, noting the date and time on each picture, to be added to our files.

Then they were gone.

I stared at the ceiling, patiently, for the first hour. The guard for the night came in and walked through the room, glancing at each of us just long enough to be sure that we were still there, before he left.

I waited for ten more minutes, just to be sure he didn't double back through. They never did, nobody spent a minute more with us than they had to. But I waited anyway.

When I was sure that nobody was coming, I turned my attention to the strap on my right hand. The guards checked the straps to be sure they were secure, pulling, hard, every night. It had been tricky, worrying away at it. I had to be sure that nobody noticed when I went to my bed early, that I had gone for a reason. I had to be sure that to tear away the strands as I pulled them loose. It would have been unfortunate if all of my work disappeared because somebody saw the frays. And I had to be certain I did enough damage that I could escape, without doing so much that the strap broke early.

Lifting my hand slowly, steadily, I strained for over a minute before I heard the sound of fabric tearing. Another thirty seconds of pulling, and my hand was free.

All around me, I heard small motions, heads turning, bodies straining to see what was happening.

With one hand free, it was simple work to undo the rest of the straps.

As I stood, I smiled for what had to be the first time in months. It was a strange smile, one I'd never worn before. Behind the smile there was a rage, a cold, dark hatred.

Walking to the next table, I undid the straps holding down one of my fellow patients. She stood, staring at me for a long moment, her one good eye locked on mine. It was an odd moment of kinship. The very corners of her lips trembled upwards for a moment before sinking back down, and she turned away, walking to the next bed. I moved on as well.

We moved quietly, systematically, from bed to bed, freeing our kindred spirits, until only one remained. The last of us. I stood in front of him. My hands frozen over the first strap.

Slowly, as I stood motionless, staring at the figure of a man I vaguely remembered to be a bus driver named Ramirez, the others gathered. All of us, standing over one of our own, staring down.

It took me a moment to realize what had stayed my hand, to understand what was wrong. We all knew who the enemy was, who we hated. We all knew what would happen in half an hour, when the guard returned, but between now and then . . . we were hungry.

The man on the bed, our fellow patient, he was one of us, but what were we? We weren't human anymore, the doctors, the guards, they made that clear with every action, with every look.

We were animals.

Things.

And we were hungry.

We stood, all of us, around the bed, staring down. I understood, with a sudden flash of insight, that everybody was thinking the same thing.

But nobody wanted to be first.

What was going to happen next was inevitable, the only question was, who would lead.

I opened my mouth and leaned forward.