Confession — Memoirs of the Great Plague

From the Posthumously Published Memoirs of General Theodore H. Simmons. Commandant, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland. Declassified June 23, 2041.

The concept itself wasn’t new or original, and although the execution had gone smoothly, it was the plan’s audacious scope that made it truly spectacular, 21st century total war waged across the economic, political, and public health spectra under the effective cover of plausible deniability. And Operation Apex had worked. Almost.

To make the attack invisible, it didn’t just need to seem as though the pathogen had jumped from a flea to a bird to a human, the disease actually had to make those leaps, mutating along the way. It had taken years to create, beginning as a strain of plague in Chinese cat fleas. Over time researchers teased out tens of thousands of mutations, cataloging those that successfully jumped to an avian host.

No one had minded or even seemed to notice when we were killing mites, but the bird deaths elicited some ethical consternation. Two researchers quit, but each individual knew so little about the project and its ultimate goals that it would have been impossible for the disgruntled to expose anything even if they had been so inclined. USAMRIID’s research was supposed to be — and previously, had been — entirely defensive, and the team creating the pathogen believed they were working off intelligence provided by the CIA to counter a supposed Russian…