The Virus

He woke in the night, dreaming of the old days, back before the virus, before The New World.

It had all begun with The Great Transformation. The Great Transformation had begun with little changes, little changes that were almost imperceptible at first: yellow and black signs that read: ‘keep out, not for public consumption, no longer allowed, due to the virus’...but soon, the little changes culminated into big changes, and suddenly, a new world had started to appear, a world that barely resembled the old one at all.

He remembered sitting in the park and seeing men and women walking past…silent monkeys, dressed in white plastic suits, spraying benches, bins and hand-rails, as though they were destroying something truly deadly, protecting the public from something that could kill you just by sitting on it; and then the decree: the prime-minister announcing on national television that all business was now effectively shut, and then, the police surrounding the neighbourhood, enforcing the new laws…

Memories of the old world, memories of the freedom that he once had… what it was like to breath the air and truly wonder what was going to happen next…memories of the women he had dated, back before ‘social distancing’, before Lockdown and Transition and The Great Transformation…

He looked up at the room, at the walls, the realisation hitting him: he would never marry, would never have children…how many others were in the same boat? The answer was everyone of course, everyone he had ever met or known…or was it?

He had to marvel at it all, the way that the Great Transformation had taken place, the changes that were put in place so effortlessly…and then, the realisation hit him again: he would never breed, would never have offspring…still, he had his data card and that was what mattered, wasn’t it?

On it, he could store his wildest fantasies, vignettes played out in real time; in holographic form… and, truly pretend as though he were experiencing them first hand… this, The New Pornography… as was officially part of The New Diet... funny, now that it was mandated, it had lost its allure…

Now-days, he would watch the movies while crying half the time, realising that he was watching all the things he would never actually have, all the things he had once dreamt of… every clip, a manifestation of his greatest desires, and he knew, too, that on a deep level he was actually laughing at himself…but Central Intelligence knew that, too…Central Intelligence knew everything...

But, what did it matter? His days were numbered anyway, as where everyone else’s, and it was clear that, whatever it was that was set aside, he would not be a partaker of it, whatever it was…no, he would live out his days in this, his room, with all the world’s modern conveniences at his disposal, and then die peacefully, having left society relatively undisturbed, as had been decreed…but by who?

He would walk the streets and wonder. Now, he looked around the room and wondered if it was possible that by being good enough, intelligent enough or whatever, that he could actually have had a chance to become one of them…He wondered whether or not there was a screening process whereby certain humans were selected and others were not… Indeed, it was possible… had he actually rubbed shoulders with some who had been taken up, selected by Central Intelligence itself? Had he himself come close to being one of them?

But of course, he had no way of proving any of his ideas. He looked around the room, his mind running wild. What were they doing with their time? And then it suddenly occurred to him, it was so obvious: they were space travelling! Of course, they were. He marvelled that he hadn’t figured it out earlier, but then again, he wasn’t chosen, so apparently, he wasn’t that bright…the planet was dying, of course it was…how many times had it been announced? But what wasn’t announced was that they were building new colonies elsewhere, new colonies of humans on new planets… but all the other planets in the earth’s solar system where uninhabitable, weren’t they? He refused to believe that they weren’t, after all, it was what he was taught all throughout school, and that information, he believed in… so, it must be the moon; that was it, they were colonising the moon…how long had this been going on, he wondered…twenty years? More? Were there generations of people already up there, now?

He thought about it, indeed, it was possible…the dregs of human kind, left to live out insignificant lives, to die of natural causes, in whichever way humanity saw fit… though, one rule must apply: they must not be allowed to breed…

And so, he had seen more and more devices put into place, more and more inventions and distractions, all designed to steal people’s minds away from this one truth; more and more simulations, more and more tinsel...and now, the latest one: holographic pornography, the king of all distractions…

He stood and walked to the glass window, looked out at the city below, furious that his life meant nothing, was nothing more than a liability for the chosen few. He looked out at the skyline, the glass building reflecting the last of the afternoon light, gold shards that might have been impressive, looked at the grey air. Yes, it all made sense, we had stuffed up this world and now must try and build another one: doomed to repeat this process infinitum, and so, one day, populate the universe…and he would die alone in this room.

He walked back over to the single bed and sat on it, kept looking out at the skyline. There must be a way to become one of them, to make his life mean something, to feel a women’s flesh again, to hear her laugh. He lay back down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling and thought about these things until a fitful sleep came.