Going Viral
A Short Story
“Cancer? A luxury.”
“Heart disease? A treat.”
“High blood pressure? An extravagance.”
Aditya knew a lot of people who had died during his young life, but he was not of a social class where any of them had passed away from causes like these. These were diseases associated with growing old. Folks like him, living on the mean streets of Mumbai, did not grow old. Viruses got them while they were still young. His mother had succumbed to Marburg before reaching thirty. His father perished from meningitis at a similar age. And his brother, sister, and best friend died as teenagers — courtesy of Ebola, SARS, and Dengue Fever, respectively.
Only people with money lived long enough to die from diseases. And money was not something Aditya had.
But an orphaned, homeless boy doesn’t make it even to the teen years without some impressive survival skills. Aditya had narrowly escaped the clenches of death on numerous occasions, thanks to two special talents that kept the reaper away.
First, he excelled at what others might label “pattern recognition.” He could distinguish the conditions on the mornings of days he ate from those on days he did not. He learned to watch which way pigeons flew and rats crawled to determine the best dumpsters to search through for food. He studied the sound of trucks on the move to determine which direction paid day laborers might be sought. And he learned the scents of the perfumes and deodorants most often worn by rich visitors. Tourists were the most reliable way for him to make money. Aditya would cleverly position himself in locations where he could turn his burgeoning street-performing talents into tips from visitors he entertained.
Second, in learning new ways to make money from his street performances, he developed an impressive level of tech savviness. He used his smart phone to make videos of his street performances and posted them on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where they could get clicks and ad revenue on the world wide web. He knew exactly how to tag videos to maximize the number of eyeballs each attracted.
A reasonably popular video might draw a couple thousand views, earning him enough rupees to treat himself to a nice meal every now and then. There was a video of him juggling soccer balls with a dog that nudged the ball upward with his nose every time Aditya was about to drop it; that one raked more than ten thousand views. Another one had him singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on a banjo made from a cigar box and some discarded power cords; it got more than twenty thousand hits.
But every now and then, there were videos that did even better than this. One such video was one he called The Bollywood Boogie. It featured a small dog he trained to dance on its hind legs. While the dog danced and Aditya played his cigar box banjo, thousands of tourists did a macarena style dance in the public marketplace. In a matter of weeks, that video went truly viral, picking up more than 120 million views!
Numbers like that can change a person’s life. And not just because of the equivalent of $750 thousand in ad revenue it raked in. The global phenomenon associated with The Bollywood Boogie earned him an interview on the India This Morning (ITM) television show, where he got to talk about his pattern recognition skills and his tech savviness. And where he innocently proclaimed that it was his dream in life to help the poor live long enough to die of the same things that killed the old.
His ITM interview happened to be seen by a bio-tech entrepreneur visiting India in search of tech talent with which to build his company.
“Wow!” the man thought to himself. “A boy with initiative? With tech chops? With pattern recognition skills? And with dreams about transforming health? All in one person!”
Aditya was the kind of talent the man needed.
So, the entrepreneur offered Aditya a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help build a company with him in India. After familiarizing Aditya with a few new software tools, the entrepreneur handed the boy a vast data set consisting of millions of images and scans made of human organs — hearts, livers, and brains, among others. The images had been taken over a period of two dozen years. They tracked changes in those organs and tissues before, during and after the patients had developed diseases like cancer, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
Just as he had done with his Youtube and TikTok videos, Aditya tagged each image with various attributes associated with them — among them, texture, shape, mass, and color intensity. And then, developing a pattern-recognition algorithm with software, he discovered the combination of tags most associated with hundreds of diseases and abnormalities.
Aditya’s algorithms were able to identify diseases years before traditional medical technologies would have, such that the owners of these organs might be treated for cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure sooner and more successfully.
Because the procedures and drugs prescribed to these patients were patented and controlled by the entrepreneur, the entrepreneur grew immensely wealthy. But because these treatments were priced at a premium, they stretched the financial resources of the country to the max. Surviving patients had no savings to draw on, and no affluent relatives to rescue them. Before long, the social safety net of the country began fraying and breaking.
With so many patients living into old age, and with no money to keep them clothed and sheltered, they soon found themselves homeless on the mean streets of Mumbai. There, they went onto die from viruses, like Marburg, Ebola, SARS, and Dengue Fever.
Aditya’s dream had come true. Well kind of. The old were now living long enough to die from the same things that killed the homeless.
His dream had gone viral.
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