Project Dyszombie
File 1: A History of the Dyszombie v 0.1
This is my introduction to the portfolio known as Project: Dyszombie. -ed
Every society has a foundation.
For some the foundation lies in the mists of time, way back before anyone can remember. These societies often rely on myth to explain their foundation. Other societies however have more recent and memorable foundations. Sometimes people who were alive then reported on the founding moments of the society.
I guess this is sort of like that: a report on the foundation of a new society, in the midst of the ashes and skeletons of the old. But unlike most societies, in this society there never was any specific meeting of some people who declared “We are *a* people.” This society, which more or less came into being by default, like some unforeseen hand flipped a switch, is more defined by what it replaced. Hopefully someone with a measure of intellectual curiosity will come along and find this account someday. But it is highly doubtful that anyone will scratch their heads one day and ask “I wonder where we came from.” Not the way things are going.
That doesn’t really matter, to be completely honest. I write because I can. Because I am one of the few left in this world that do. And as long as I am holed up in this library, which was stocked with enough canned and preserved food to feed a small city for weeks, thanks to Cold War paranoia and bureaucratic oversight, I will be able to finish my history at least. Its more likely that someone will find me here and do me in though, long before there is ever any danger of me starving to death.
When I think back to how this whole thing started, I can easily point to a single moment in history. I was just a kid, about 15 then, but I knew that what was happening would change things for ever. I knew because that night, we watched a member of the New Ethics Party, a Dr. Edward Owens, be elected President of the United States, and then, after we turned off the TV, my father left the house and drove the family car off a cliff outside of the city I grew up in. We were of course devastated: it seems, however that my mother was not in the least bit surprised.
It is appropriate, perhaps to step back a little: The previous year, 2011, saw a huge break through in medical technology. According to the literature I discovered here in my exhaustive search of the archives, in June of that year, two doctors at a medium sized university in southern Illinois discovered a drug. The project was being funded by the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, and the rest of the alphabet soup there in Washington, and was supposedly top secret. But the news of the discovery leaked. After that, the scientists did what was academically appropriate and published their results. Naturally, they became infamous overnight.
It would appear that these scientists were working on a drug meant to rehabilitate criminals and make soldiers more robotic and less feeling. That’s your typical conspiracy theory nutjob stuff, the sort of thing a government which is able to print its own money and is paranoid about any form of social unrest does with its time and resources. But unlike your standard run of the mill conspiracy theories about alien cover-ups, reptilian invaders from another planet, Masonic plots to control the world, or sightings of Elvis (does anyone even remember Elvis anymore? If he were still alive today he’d be getting up around eighty years old, so it was kind of silly how people used to still be preoccupied with him… I digress.) this secret government program was real. After publication the only secret was who authorized the funding in the first place.
The effects of this miraculous drug were as follows: The control group, given a placebo in a double blind trial, committed socially deviant acts at the rate that one would expect in society, about 10%. Meanwhile among the treatment group, socially deviant behavior dropped to a remarkable .0001%! This finding was quickly replicated in California, and the findings were made public.
What this means is that in the control group, one out of ten people exhibited some social deviant tendencies like stealing or lying or deliberately “hurting” someone during an exhaustive battery of tests after the administration of the shot. This more or less confirmed the existing belief that one in ten people are deviant to some degree (also ironically confirming the belief that people are basically good, but can made wicked with the right incentive).
But for those given the drug rather than the placebo, that rate dropped to 1 in one million! And the only reason it was placed at that level was that a computer calculated the probability of random correlation between drug administration and elimination of deviant behavior at that amount in a theoretically universal population. No deviant behaviors were witnessed among the treated group, and in fact the scientists began observing hostility toward any attempt to induce the subjects to commit deviant behavior, but more especially when the subject saw others engaging in socially deviant behavior.
For example: There was a case of one individual who was later revealed to have been treated with the drug. This subject, who they called “Sam”, was placed in a situation where he would run across a ten dollar bill placed on the floor. “Sam” refused to pick it up. The scientists then introduced a “plant” into the scenario, who was instructed to pick the ten dollar bill up. When “Sam” witnessed this, he went over to the “plant” and verbally accosted him, rather violently, until the instructed “plant” put the bill back down. “Sam” then lectured the man about how important it was to let the owner of the bill return to collect the money, that it wasn’t the “plant’s” money, and that theft destroys society. When the “plant” attempted to explain why “Sam” was wrong, “Sam” escalated his aggression into the physical realm. He also fought those who were trying to hold him back from attacking the “plant”. When they let him go, he continued to lecture those around him about their duty to leave the money alone and their obligation to help him stop thieves. “Sam” later reported that he had no memory of this event, but that “… it seems like this was the right course of action” given that circumstance.
The backlash was instant and severe. These scientists were taking away freedom to choose to do wicked things. What moral value is there in an act, critics howled, if there is no way a person can choose to do otherwise? Further testing was publicly cancelled; the drug, which had been administered to at least 250 people initially was supposedly destroyed. Eventually, all people associated with the drug had to be hospitalized, and several of them died from organ failure.
Simultaneously and completely unrelated, a massive graft and corruption scandal was uncovered in the highest levels of the government, implicating a huge and unprecedented portion of both congressional Parties. Needless to say, people forgot all about the drug, as political heads began rolling. People may have been upset about the making of “better humanity through chemistry” but they were more fed up with government corruption, ineffectiveness, and unresponsiveness.
In 2012, in response to the scandal, a new Party arose. Referred to as the New Ethics Party, or NEP, the charismatic leader, Dr. Edward Owens, himself a clinical pharmaceutical developer, ran for President that year promising one thing: clean government. He had no ideology, he had no political record to be hit on, he could slam any possible challenger to his campaign as being associated with the Great Scandal. The two main parties were utterly impotent against this charge. It was as if they knew that they were rotten to the core, and didn’t have the spine anymore to stand up against this fact when someone else pointed it out. They did their charade, of course, but by this time, the front was so pathetically obvious to everyone in the country, that politicians from either of the major Parties soon learned that every time they went on television, or ran political commercials, they lost voters.
The election in 2012 was ultimately the least expensive national election since the mid 19th century, and according to the academics publishing in the American Journal of Political Science, it was less an election and more a “democratic revolution.” I remember that more people watched the reruns of sitcoms on the major networks than watched the presidential debates. My father, a political scientist (who had not published anything in the AJPS that year), called 2012 “boring”.
In the end, Owens won the Presidency, the NEP accomplished a plurality in both houses of Congress, and for the first time since Lincoln’s election in 1860, a minor Party had virtual control of the executive and legislative branches.
My father had opposed the NEP, for what reason I am not sure. But when Owens won that November night, it must have been too much for him. He went out, got into the car and proceeded to drive himself into an icy river. My mother never really explained what his death had meant, or gave us any reasons for it. I suppose she intended to tell us someday, but just never really got around to it.
Over the next years, the NEP governed the country. Clean government was their motto and they carried it out. The NEP in Congress enlisted Democrats or Republicans, depending on the content of the piece of legislation, to get their bills passed, and often they were able to put together supermajorities to keep institutional dissent at bay.
One thing that wasn’t widely known at the time was that Dr. Owens was a supporter of the research of the new ethical drug which had been shut down two years prior. He had been absolutely impressed by the findings on this new drug, and believed that it should be administered to people and perhaps even children, once its effects were completely known and understood, to produce a new quality of person in the United States. This new person would not tolerate crime or lawlessness, immorality or unethicality. Owens envisioned the possibility of finally achieving the ideals of those who saw the United States as a shining beacon for the rest of the world. It was not out of an ideological commitment to the past that Owens acted: he was certainly no conservative. Instead, he was driven by a sense of right and wrong that deliberately admitted no mitigating circumstances. He saw the drug as a shortcut to the sort of society he wanted himself to live in.
In 2015, four years after its initial development, research on this drug was begun again. The research program was initially secret, but as it was expanded, it was difficult to keep leaks in the tight security from leaking. In the fall of my 21st year in 2019, all details were finally publicly disclosed. The result was that Owens committed suicide rather than take any responsibility, and the government collapsed as people realized that none, not even those committed to clean government, were immune from the drive to deceive the people. But by then… well, it didn’t really matter too much. The public disclosure was made when the effects of the program were right in front of you.
It happened like this: Labs were set up at research institutions in major population centers. It was important that they were set up there, because there had to be a willing and able body of subjects for the tests. By this, of course, I mean hardened criminals. You aren’t going to find a steady supply of killers, rapists, drug kingpins, or thieves in Spearfish, South Dakota. No, they had to have jails to empty into the programs. Convicts were given the opportunity to earn early parole upon completion of the program. At first, it was completely voluntary, and thousands of criminals signed up for it. Nearly 100 percent of them were lifers, without any possibility of parole, or those faced with future execution.
The convict was inoculated with a shot of what they believed was a vaccine against influenza. In fact, what it was was a chemical derivative of the original 2011 drug, called D-11 (or derivative of the 2011 formula). D-11 initially produced more moderate responses in people than the original drug in its pure form caused. There was not a lot of display of violent aggression, according to the initial reports like there was observed in “Sam”. But social deviance dropped once more to around .0001% of cases. The difference came when a “plant” was introduced. Unlike “Sam”, recipients of D-11 were oblivious to the “deviant” actions of others.
One shot of D-11 was seen to be effective. Violent criminals became docile and compliant. While still in the program and under supervision, they frequently became targets of derision and violence among the rest of the convict population who subjected them to all sorts of abuses, just because they wouldn’t fight back. It turns out that it was a mistake to reintroduce them into the prison population. A week after the first recipients of D-11 were re-introduced into the population, a number of them were brutally murdered. While it seems they lost the ability to commit deviant acts, those around them, who had not been inoculated, remembered old scores, and settled them quickly and efficiently. It took government officials, who realized that their test subjects were being killed by a standard, run of the mill human being quicker than they could be replaced, only a short time to move to separate those who received D-11 from the general prison population.
More tests and observations were made over the course of the next year. Two major discoveries were made with the inoculation of several thousand more convicts: 1) D-11 and the derivatives that followed it up, acted in a way like a virus, and in another way, like a cancer, in that it altered the DNA of humans, and selectively removed genetic propensities to committing anti-social behavior, but that once introduced into a subject, gradually replaced their natural genetic codes with code that replicated the D-11 schematic. It only took about a week for a person to be completely “D-11 rebuilt” as the jargon went. And 2) Because D-11 produced genetic damage, eventually people’s immune system kicked in, causing violent reactions at first, and problems with organ rejection and rapid cellular decomposition, as the body tried to cure itself of the disease. Within a year, 90 percent of those who had received the first batch of D-11 were dead, though to be fair, 20 percent of those original test subjects were killed by other people.
The government, realizing the promise and hazards of this drug, remained committed to the promise, and sought to mitigate the hazards. New derivatives were developed which attempted to suppress the immune system, and then which were meant to replace the immune system with a D-11 compliant system. The first batch of this second type of derivatives, called D-11a was undermined by the common cold, as it turns out. With suppressed immune systems, the people became stable, but obviously, if they got sick from something else, there was no way their body could fight off the germs. They died of a full-blown case of the cold. In the first year after D-11a was introduced, 3400 criminals died as a result of their exposure to these tests; luckily they had all signed releases. The few that were alive were hospitalized in a segregated hospital unit and died later.
Later derivatives were more stable. The new D-11 derivative now first assaulted the immune system, shutting it down while D-11 conversion was taking place, and then it reprogrammed the immune system itself to be D-11 compliant. By the time Dr. Owens was re-elected in 2016, D-11’s derivative was stable, and people were surviving without complications. The derivative was called, appropriately “D-16”, or Derivative 2016. Tests continued using D-16 on people. Eventually, D-16 was administered to all prisoners in the US and state correctional systems. Prisons became places where people cooperated with one another, spent their time working together, and their free time engaging in cooperative sports, or painting, or learning.
The results were striking. Chemistry was in the process of creating new moral humanity. Often, inducement was no longer necessary, and when offered the opportunity to be released, prisoners opted to stay in prison. It was so strange. News media was at a loss to explain this phenomena, but it was coupled by the fact that most of the people involved in the early testing were in for life anyway. What confused the media was the stories about those who weren’t in for life: It seemed that they enjoyed prison more than the outside world as well. None ever confirmed any stories of medical tests being carried out on the prisoner population, because none of the prisoners were ever informed that they had become unwitting participants in the experiment.
By 2018, testing entered a new phase: dissemination to the general population. It was easy to keep a secret in a closed society like a prison system. Especially if the prisoners themselves didn’t know that they had been dosed (Most had received shots hidden within a routine series of vaccination upon indoc.) But getting people on the outside to take D-16 willingly was a different story. An idea of creation of an epidemic first struck scientists in the summer of 2018. If an epidemic could be created, people would flock to doctors to get a series of vaccinations that the government said were necessary.
This of course involved an elaborate hoax. First the State Department would have to announce that people were sick and dying from a new strain of flu in Central America, and this strain looked and acted like the regular flu, but the symptoms were more severe than usual. The media would pick this up, and chronicle the case of everyone who died from a particularly strong case of the flu, inflating the real numbers and severity 10 fold along the way, naturally as they do. Then selectively timed announcements from other government health agencies would illustrate the need to get inoculated against this new strain of flu, complete with the strange and effective marriage of dire warnings and assurances that there is no need to panic. Then add news stories of shortages of vaccines, reported over media photos of long lines at selected clinics, and you had yourself a good old fashioned panic.
It’s the same tactic that the government used in 2009 with the whole swine flu thing. And the people who were upset about that back then (I remember that my parents were) still hadn’t learned anything by the time they reacted the same predictable way nine years later. And yet humanity is so predictable, isn’t it. A journalist doesn’t have to lie when they report that people are afraid of the new flu: people are actually genuinely scared when faced with something that is unknown in every respect except that it has killed people. The only lie in this invented epidemic was the one person lying one time, about reports of a new flu virus striking a different country (and even that wasn’t a lie: every year there is a new strain of flu striking a different country. The lie came in the added import that was given to this mundane fact by the government official.)
That’s really all it took. Soon you had journalists flocking to other countries taking photos of sick and dying people, who always over-complain of the symptoms they personally feel. A flu is hard on people, but most people don’t really have anything similar to compare it to, so they can’t and won’t say, “well, this is run of the mill flu.” If they get the flu, it is always a lot more severe than the common cold which people usually mistake for the flu, and they’ll tell you “This is the sickest I have ever felt in my whole life” (whether they mean it or not). Seeing people die of the flu, even if it was only one, would be enough for people in this country to worry about it. Couple that with a year of famine and miserable weather which marked 2018, and you have the makings of a full scale epidemic in the US. That’s really all it takes to get people to panic here. Nobody even has to lie, really.
The reason, of course is because we really are that predictable, and the people who study us every single day, know that fact. Not only do we panic when we are told to, but we also screw things up by trying to improve them. While this panic was being created in the media, scientists were trying to perfect D-16 to make it available for people who may not look, physiologically, like prisoners. Prisoners were generally healthy and strong, well fed, well exercised individuals. It is safe to say that they had a different constitution than the average lazy American of the year 2018. Thanks to our technology, we didn’t really have to leave our house anymore. We did more so out of habit than out of need. Combined with our horrible medical establishment in the US, people were sicker from preventable disease, more regularly, than they had since the advent of modern medicine a hundred years before. All advances we had made were wiped out by the profit motive and the bottom line. And yet because people were so fed up in general with the way things were going, nobody cared anymore about whether society dealt with these issues. They just preferred to let it crumble, because they witnessed first hand the ineptitude and inefficiency of government-run health care which was neither adequately implemented or adequately funded, at least in our country.
By 2018, people who could afford quality health care occasionally sought it, while people who couldn’t didn’t. Through misuse or non-use America’s medical establishment crumbled and was a shadow of its former self. But this didn’t trouble American consumers a bit, because apathy had taken over.
So those working on the D-16 project needed to find a way to make the drug not kill all those people who were suffering from other things while the immune system was being reprogrammed. In September of 2018, they hit on a new derivative, which was initially tested on ten sick patients that showed some promise. Not only did the new derivative appear to not affect the condition of those who were already sick, but the conversion process actually was sped up, and replaced the immune system quicker. Because the immune system had been reprogrammed, it actually began attacking cancer and HIV in three of the test subjects where the natural immune system had not functioned that way. It was a break through: using this derivative, which was named “DZ” because this was to be the final, or “Z” derivative of the original 2011 tests, cancer and HIV had not only become curable, but actually cured.
DZ was initially scheduled for limited release to the population along with the flu vaccine that year. 100,000 doses were spread across the face of the globe. The goal was to monitor its administration and effects, and plan for a wider release the following year. The flu season came and went, and all 100000 doses were reportedly administered. It was then, in January of 2019 that things started falling apart. First, symptoms reminiscent of the test subject named “Sam” were observed in the original ten recipients of DZ. In the month of January, all 10 were arrested for displays of violence in public. Three of them actually killed people who they knew before (and who, it was subsequently revealed had been emotional or physically abusive toward them.) Seven others were arrested for attacking police officers who had arrived on the scene in response to public disturbance reports. All ten of them, found to be in excellent health, were then administered the D-16 which had been routinely administered to all incoming prisoners for years now. None of them disclosed their previous exposure to DZ, obviously, because none of them knew about it.
The drug interaction apparently was too much for the ten people. Within a week, there were reports, for the first time in two years of violence within prisons. Reports later confirmed that the interaction between D-16 and DZ, never before studied in the laboratory, had caused DZ to become airborne. In a move to limit exposure, the prisons were emptied, forcefully. Where the DZ had become airborne, prisoners reacted violently against the officials they had previously cooperated with. Some prison officials were killed in the riots, which were chalked up in the news as just prison riots. Eventually, the prisons were cleared and shut down, putting these people on the streets. The final report revealed that roughly 2.7 million Americans received early and forcible parole. Of that number, the lion’s share were in the prisons first exposed to the mix of DZ and D-16.
The airborne version of DZ spread throughout the population like wildfire. The first foci of the DZ-spread were in major cities: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Miami, Houston, Seattle, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia were soon completely infected with this airborne derivative of DZ, which now assumed the characteristics of a rapidly mutating, but virulent virus, in a matter of weeks. But since the incubation period in those without previous D-16 exposure was three months, there weren’t any outward signs of infection right off, except in those who already had received the D-16 shot. Similarly, there weren’t yet signs in those who received just the DZ shots either for a few months. By the time the first outward signs began manifesting, and society became unhinged, the derivative, a new disease, if you would like to call it that, had spread, without symptoms to hundreds of millions around the country and was waiting to explode overseas.
In May of that year, right around the time I turned 21, there were reports of riots in major cities as well as minor cities across the globe. The fact was that the state, which relied on traditional methods of coercion for social control, was now fundamentally incapacitated. Any attempts to restrain these infected individuals led to violence, and frequently death for one or both participants in the exchange. And if not restrained, the interaction would cause the infected individual to become more enraged at anyone in the nearby area.
And yet… it was so strange. If you did something wrong around one of these people, and they began getting enraged, the solution was to admit the mistake, and do what you could to make things right or correct the wrong you had done, either deliberately or inadvertently. That was enough to calm them down, and then they would just go on their way. Course, by then there was also a very small chance that you weren’t going to end up just like one of them.
It was as if these people were on auto pilot: committed warriors for some cause. It’s like the DZ made them the conscience of society. They reacted violently whenever they witnessed people being cruel to one another, or when they witnessed people stealing something of another, or when they heard someone tell a lie. For all intents and purposes they were otherwise exactly the same as they had been before. But a rage would come of these people when something happened which was a violation of some strange universal order. Can you believe it? It was as if these people were infected with a disease, a genetic disorder, that made them incapable of accepting the fact that it was occasionally alright, or even appropriate to bend morality a little, just to get along with one another. White lies were punished with the same ferocity as massive and widespread fraud. There was fundamentally no difference between the theft of a quarter and the theft of a car. If you did anything like this in the presence of one of the infected, and refused to make any sort of restitution for it, or worse yet, tried to escape, you became a target.
As the infection deepened and spread across the face of the planet, the government finally admitted its role in the affair: their report makes up the bulk of this history of the plague so far. The government couched its admission in terms of necessity, but everyone knew that this wasn’t the case. The real goal was social control: if they could create a society that would police itself, the police would not be necessary. If they could create a society that was physically incapable of doing wicked things to one another, if they could create a society of angels, well, there would be no more need for government. They tried. And they failed. And then they lied about it.
That was the final straw. About this same time, the three month incubation period ended, and DZ became active in approximately 6.5 billion people world wide The results were catastrophic. People settled old scores with one another, repaying one another for abuses they had suffered, or for lies that had been told. When one DZ saw another attacking someone, they felt obligated to step in and defend the victim. Consequently someone died, because there is apparently nothing more morally repugnant than attacking an unarmed person.
At first, many just tried to keep their heads down amidst all the chaos. Some, who realized their own cowardice, like our beloved president who had been responsible, ultimately for the spread of this disease, before he too contracted it, felt obligated to kill themselves. And they did, publicly, and usually contritely. Others felt obligated to try to help people who were being attacked, usually to no avail. It was literally a ticking social time-bomb that decimated the population of the planet within a month.
Something else very strange happened, however. Do you recall how in the initial studies conducted in Illinois, the computer models reported that one in a million people would still exhibit social deviance even if exposed to the drug? Well, it turns out that these models were not too far off the mark. Over time, we generally became aware that about 1/10th of one percent of the population were immune to DZ. I was among that number. There were perhaps 6.5 million of us world wide who didn’t get any rage anytime. Some of them were killed by the infected over old scores, but for the most part, many of them escaped the destruction and tried to live among the infected for as long as possible. I was also among that number as well.
I spent two years moving and foraging as best as I could in the remnants of the now wiped out civilization I had been born into. The human race had been cut by a fraction of 10, leaving roughly the population of three Americas spread out in various pockets around the planet. Almost all of them had DZ. The worst thing is that DZ did not stop mutating after the original bloodletting. These people became more zombie like with every passing day. I don’t mean to say that they were the kind of zombies you see in movies: They to my knowledge have never attacked anyone to eat them. I have never heard of any one of them, before the “Awakening” at least, exhibiting perma-rage either. Nor did they decompose, nor were they ever covered in blood.
They were more like a “dyszombie” or exactly opposite of a zombie: they were perfectly physically fit and conscious, moral to a fault (overactive morality was their defining trait) and completely deliberate in their movements. They would either have conversations with you or say nothing to you, but you better not try to deceive them, because then they would fall into a rage. It was best, I learned, just to try to avoid them as much as possible, unless you needed help doing something. In that event, it was best to limit conversations, answer direct questions directly, and when their assistance was no longer needed, offer to give them something you have. They invariably reject it, because they have no need for anything, but that is more or less a moral obligation, to recognize their assistance.
But… that said, it is almost as if the death and destruction that happened so quickly was too much for the human psyche to take. These dyszombies were more or less in DZ-enhanced shock at the toll their own actions had taken on the civilization. They continue to live, but the human spark has left them completely. DZ had some other interesting initial side effects too. Infected people were no longer hungry, nor did their body require food anymore. It regenerated itself on sun and air. That was totally strange to me. Their health, all things considered was perfect: they were strong and well composed and were not affected by any natural disease or ailment that tended to still floor non-infected people. Even two years after the outbreak, they were still fit, and as strong, if not stronger than those of us who required food to survive. For “zombies”, these infected surely didn’t fit the stereotype.
As a matter of fact they were fine in every respect except one. They simply could not control their moral outrage, and needed to deaden themselves to keep themselves from going into a fit of violence that they had no control over. The DZ was responsible for a more or less universal psychosis tied directly to moral outrage.
Over the two years since civilization fell completely apart, a few of these infected people began trying to organize themselves to accomplish some little task, like cleaning up a neighborhood and burning all the dead and rotting bodies, or evacuating buildings which were no longer inhabited, or inhabitable. For the most part, however, during that initial period, they mostly kept to themselves. I suppose the difference between those who worked and those who didn’t is one group probably felt a moral obligation to work, while the other group didn’t. None of the zombies who worked complained about it, however. They simply carried out their tasks drudging, thanklessly, for nobody’s benefit but the satisfaction of their own ethical obligations. Initially, they would work with those of us who weren’t infected, and even help us find food (as long as we paid for it: while they were hanging around us, we had no problem acquiring as much food as we could possibly want or had money for), but after the “Awakening” that was no longer an option.
It took just a short time for small groups of the uninfected to return and try to reclaim the earth for themselves, to re-establish non-infected humanity as the master of the planet. At first, these individuals were essentially warlords: survivalists who had attracted a cult like following among those who weren’t infected. They generally fought against one another in this environment, but before long, they realized that if they wanted to set themselves up as the future kings of a newly reborn human race, they needed to take back the sites of human habitation before the plague decimated our planet.
The war-lords themselves, as well as a significant number of independent entrepreneurs descended on the cities at various points across the globe, in force and began slaughtering the infected. There was no real cause for it: if everyone acted correctly, there was no threat from the infected. But these warlords didn’t see it like that: instead, the “zees” as they were called, stood between these survivors and power. In the first few attacks between the organized uninfected and the dyszombies, another hundred thousand or so people were killed, nearly all of them DZ-infected folks.
But DZ was not done with the human race yet. It was a little insidious piece of code, probably inadvertently programmed into the DZ, which brought about what I call “The Awakening.” The mutation had a self defense mechanism, and it knew when carriers were threatened. The prison riots were an example. All of them occurred as the prisons were being forcibly emptied. There was no coordination, there were no committees for resistance. The people with the mutated form of DZ just knew that the order they wanted was being threatened by prison guards. So it was like a little switch in their DNA that flipped on and made them resist. Similarly, when society was falling apart, and the traditional institutional responses to civil disorder were being employed, this little switch told these people to turn on the system which was threatening them, or on the people which were attempting to fight back.
Because, and I believe this, programmed into every human’s DNA is a social characteristic. We love to be around other human beings. The mutated DZ exploited that characteristic of humans to develop what some could call a “collective consciousness.” Call it widespread, universal empathy, if you like. But at once, all dyszombies felt the threat of a force that meant to do them harm, and what I call the “Awakening” occurred. They woke up from their zombie like state and became a unified, driven, single-minded force that far outnumbered the uninfected. And unlike the zombies you see in movies, these dyszombies knew how to use tools.
The “Awakening” occurred in the summer of 2021, two years after the plague had indirectly wiped out most of the population. It assumed the following form: Uninfected launch several coordinated campaigns to reclaim the cities. DZ switch turns on. Dyszombies begin to attack anything that is not part of the collective, that is, uninfected, like the ones attacking them, or like me, who learned quickly how to manage my life among these people. They can tell whether one is infected or not, because they feel aversion to people who aren’t infected- they see us as monsters and feel an irresistible urge to exterminate the unperfected form of human. And of course rage sets in. If you resist, you only make them more mad. If you don’t resist, they will destroy you anyway, because you aren’t fighting back. And this time, there is no way to make it right: we used to be able to apologize and try to seek amends. After the Awakening, however, that was no longer an option.
Lots of the uninfected who were living among the DZ were killed or seriously wounded at the point of the “Awakening” which occurred, by my reckoning, on August 22, 2021. The rest of the uninfected, for the most part, saw the writing on the wall, and fled the cities and towns, looking for safety in numbers, usually under the control of the war-lords. I, on the other hand, found myself a nice library, barred up the door real sturdy, and discovered the cache of food in the basement. The “Awakening” happened a month and a half ago, and I have no idea what has gone on since then outside. I don’t know if there was a war or even a fight. I have had no news of the outside world, this long. But, I believe that as long as none of the DZ find me here, they won’t feel any desire to destroy me. Perhaps someday their DNA will switch off, like it did after the big bloodletting two years ago, but who knows. If, on the other hand the uninfected come and liberate this city, I don’t know what they’ll do either.
One way or another, I’m not moving from this spot, and will spend the next few days reading anything I wanted to read, studying, and writing. I hope to someday be able to see the sun again. If you find this history some day in the future, when everyone has forgotten how this society full of DZ was created, this is the true history as I experienced and researched it. I have also tried to keep my feelings out of the paper, but as you can tell, I’m lonely, scared, and safe, for the time being. As my mother used to say, “May God help us all.”
A brief timeline of events:
Summer 2011: Secret drug program publicized. Two scientists at Southern Illinois University reveal effects of drug that eliminates the ability to act immorally. Public Outrage follows and program is shut down.
Fall 2011: Massive government scandal revealed. More than 150 congressmen and senators forced to resign or are impeached. Scandal plagues congress for next year.
December 2011: New Ethical Party is founded. Dr. Edward Owens named Party’s first candidate for Presidency.
Spring and Summer 2012: Nobody pays any attention to Presidential Race. Any attempt made by two major Parties to gain voters is met with hostility and rejection.
November 2012: NEP easily elected President, gains plurality in both houses of Congress.
January 2015: Research on secret drug restarted.
February 2015: D-11 developed and tested on prisoners.
March 2015: Most participants in early trials having trouble back in prison, segregated from general population. Research and testing continues.
November 2015: In response to high mortality rate, D-11a developed and tested.
Winter 2015: Common cold seals fate of D-11a.
February 2016: Most prisoners who are first recipients die of complications due to D-11 and D-11a. Testing on D-16 begun.
November 2016: President Owens re-elected. D-16 is determined stable and safe.
December 2016: Mandatory Prison dosing program begins. Peace and tranquility settles over prison population. Prisoners begin to prefer to stay in prison rather than being released.
March 2018: Government begins work on new derivative for dissemination to general population.
May 2018: Reports begin dissemination about new flu in a foreign country. General panic follows.
Fall 2018: New Derivative “DZ” ready for human testing. 100,000 doses distributed worldwide. 10 people who receive shot in US exhibit violence, and are taken to prison where they are also dosed with D-16. Interaction causes mutation in derivative, turning it airborne. Prison population in all 10 locations are immediately infected, and begin demonstrating violence. Prison guards attempt to clear prisons and are attacked. Eventually prisons cleared, putting the disease outside of the prison walls.
Fall-Winter 2018: Hundreds of millions of people infected unwittingly with airborne DZ. Billions worldwide later infected when airborne sufferers from US unknowingly spread the DZ around the world. Mutated virus has complete global saturation by the time it begins coming out of incubation.Spring-
Summer 2019: 6.5 billion people infected by DZ. Hundreds of millions of people die through mass killings, and failed government responses to infections.
July 2019: President Owens commits suicide after official government report is released that implicates government for development and propagation of DZ. US government officially “fails”.
Fall 2019- Summer 2021: Situation stabilizes. Sufferers of DZ try to begin cleaning up. Meanwhile warlords begin organizing out of cities. By summer 2021, warlords decide that it is time to reclaim the world from infected. 100K DZ sufferers die in coordinated non-infected attacks.
August 22, 2021: The “Awakening” occurs in which DZ infected suddenly develop collective consciousness, and begin fighting back against attacks.
