Only the Paranoid Survive
Fiction
Three days before Ol’ Larry broke Doug’s door, Doug started his day with tossed eggs and coffee. Both eggs and coffee were still on the recommended list. Doug filled out his water jugs, tossed the purifying chemicals in them, and then passed it over the UV filter one more time. It took about twenty minutes for him to get his water for the day. He then walked into his workroom. His work had changed since the outbreak — he was a career technologist till two years into the outbreak. He had retired from a career since then for what he thought was God’s work.
Doug replaced a yellow sticky that was coming off. He made sure that there was no overlap with the other stickies and threads. He went back a few steps away from the wall to check how the map looked. He also wanted to check if there was any blurriness of vision as he looked at many colors. He could separate all hues. He let out a wry smile — he felt in control.
To an outsider, the wall didn’t make any sense — yellow and pink stickies with red and green bold letterings, connected with red and black and green threads. For Doug, it was his army to fight the outbreak. The wall contained the most curated information on the disease. It was a decision guide to detect where someone was on the infection curve based on observed symptoms. It told patients how much time they still had.
Doug had acquired a prophetic stature on Twitter over the last year and a half. Most of his tweets followed the template — “umpteenth days of infection.” The tweets were replies to patients or relatives who had tagged him and provided him the details he needed. Doug couldn’t help with medical supplies — the ever-increasing list of drugs, new antibody cocktails, or a bed in a hospital with doctors. He had tried doing that in the initial phases of the pandemic. His leads turned out to be conmen too many times and he stopped. He settled on telling patients exactly how much time did they have. He had convinced himself that it was the most humane thing to do.
The count of parameters had moved to twenty-eight on Wednesday when “periodicity of rambling noise from the stomach (over half an hour duration)” was added to his pinned tweet. Doug thought it too ‘folksy’ when he saw the initial flash. “Who knows what the Brazilians eat?”, he thought to himself as he read the reports. He scrounged for similar literature, talked to the doctors who were ready to speak to him after knowing who he was, updated his physical and chemical models, ran them for various strains, back-tested the results. He wanted to do all to discard the parameter. He tried and failed. The parameter added more than what it subtracted.
Doug sat back on his chair, tugging it back and forth, staring at the wall all the while. In mid-motion, he felt an itch on his left buttock in the meaty area. There were a few blips on one of the screens. A few new symptoms were reported across the world. Most of them seemed correlated to other symptoms that he was tracking. He would revisit them later. He also noted down that he would do a news scan and literature review for varying forms of buttock itches.
He decided to monitor his parameters again — twenty-eight of them, the first of his 3 daily checks. It took about 45 mins. Everything looked good. He had time.
He completed his checks on the new symptoms, made his lunch (heated pre-cooked mix of lemon and bitter-gourd for the eighth day in succession), took the vitamins, and laid down for a while listening to some classical music.
He had to switch the lights on to see around when he was up. He was going to make tea for himself but then decided to do a quick check of his parameters before that. He was distracted from it when he saw multiple flashes on one of the monitors. A particular symptom seemed to have been identified as the zero markers for the onset. At least 4 independent studies had reported it. Apparently, the results were dated by a month or two, but the researchers had decided not to publish it since it would have caused mass hysteria. People had settled in with the outbreak and its peaked plateaus — such hysteria would unsettle them. Only today, when Biology, the most respected of journals, decided to publish its results, all the others followed. Doug’s itching aggravated.
He began his research. The studies didn’t have any obvious issues — all of them were well-crafted RCTs, the researchers seemed to have interpreted statistics correctly, and all the researchers seemed to know well what they were talking about. He tried calling the numbers he could find. The first researcher he managed to find didn’t speak to him once he told his name. Irritated, and scratching his right buttock now, Doug kept trying numbers. After about fifteen minutes or so, he gave up. He looked at the wall thinking where the new symptom should be hypothetically put. He tried putting it as the zero markers in his head and thinking through the logic. It was getting too complex now — he was getting lost in the yellows and the reds while tracing the red and black threads.
Frustrated, he gave up. He needed to rest. He was getting tired. It was now about 7 pm — he remembered that he should start looking at the tweets for help. He decided against it as he felt he should first update the model. He put his mind back to examining the news and understanding the reports — the definition of the symptom varied across papers but only in minute ways. He decided he had to further read on the chemical implications and identify the possible parameters for his model. He also decided to lose his shorts as the itching seemed to be spreading across.
He labored on through the journals and the available literature, only in his underpants. He suddenly remembered that he had not checked his parameters when he heard a rumble through his stomach. He sat up and set the timer at 0. By minute 14, he had counted about 37 rumbles. To distract himself, he started checking for his near and far vision. The wall was far and appeared a sea of reds, blacks, greens, and yellows. Did he also see blues for an instant? He couldn’t tell. He looked down closely at his thighs — they seemed brown with patches of red. Was it the itch? Separately, he had counted 9 more rumbles in parallel.
Doug felt his body exhausted and throat dry. He set his head down on the desk, only in his underpants and leaving the count of rumbles at 44 in 16 minutes. He closed his eyes as more news and tweets kept blinking across the 4 terminals in front of him. The tweets had a common hashtag “#ParanoiaTheZeroMarker.”
