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The Virus Hirsute is a very short story that considers a world in which biological viruses get made by the same friendly folks who make computer viruses …

THE VIRUS HIRSUTE

by Ranjit Singh Mathoda
created and copyright November 13, 1996

hirsute: (adj.) hairy

In ‘63 they started coming into my clinic gagging from Hirsute. It was the first in a series of nuisance viruses foisted upon a jaded populace by clever entrepreneurs.

The walkers were afflicted earliest. The walkers: credit lacking vagabonds disdaining private transport, speech thick with blunted rage and discomfort. They wandered into for-profit recovery clinics, in scummy trousers and low slung sneakers, unused to being confined by smooth plastic and vat-bred wood. They would come only when the thick hairs grew from nose and gums, but after a time they became used to the inconvenience, deadened to the itch and shielded from the pain by a hundred synthesized stimulants. They wouldn’t always come in because of Hirsute. No, usually they came in because of the thousand of germs and bugs that can grow in so much hair. If they collapsed, I didn’t see them, because ambulatory services would treat them out in the field.

The upper strata were beyond feeling anything but pity for the walkers, but their kids had no such compunctions. Half-ass jokes slid across the fibrous nerves of a hundred city sprawls, slithered into slang, and were repackaged and wrapped into downloaded personality aids. Here and there a kid would pause for a moment in mid conversation, then ask: how can you tell a walker from a dog? (a dog doesn’t have lice).

The jokes didn’t become really clever until a billion personally targeted marketing programs picked up on the cultural rage. They weren’t riotously funny until the gel augmented artists, working for the truly wealthy content corporations, started churning out material. Then it was the kind of joke that could make you laugh despite your sympathies, the kind that can’t be repeated here without paying Disney a royalty.

The news feeds attributed the original outbreak of Hirsute to everything from space aliens to the Second Coming. The more popular news nodes targeted the laboratories of a hundred major companies for information, resulting in a number of science scandals. As a result the endowment of a few major universities were slashed, but nothing was uncovered about Hirsute.

The jokes ended one day when it became clear that anyone could come down with Hirsute. Apparently it had been gengineered well enough to bypass boosted immune systems and modern ventilation. That level of work focused a lot of attention on graduate students and asset rich conglomerates, without success.

The large investment houses gave stocks like Comdec and Civa hotter than hot strong buy ratings. The skin care industry tanked downwards but major cosmetic lines were buoyed by the success of name brand shampoo. In late ‘63 a consortium of companies researched a cure named Etusrih and sold it at a nominal cost.

The public replaced the mass purchase of shampoo with the mass purchase of surgery, removing follicle cells in operations known as baldings. Old footage of sports figures were remade into nostalgic action dramas, downloaded at the viewer’s convenience as they sat through the painfully long five minute operation.

It wasn’t until early ‘64 that a small news node covering financial news uncovered the fascinating tale of three entrepreneurs in Mongolia who had made a widespread killing in their speculations on a number of worldwide securities markets, shortly after the Hirsute outbreak. The node editors let some of their amazement (that the story had not been uncovered earlier) shine through, given the stupidity of the three culprits and the money trail leading to a number of private viral research laboratories and gene engineering college students. They even took to criticizing entrepreneurial spirit, as a dangerous destabilizing force in society, and were backed up by the latest in noise theory economics, before the traditional economists rebelled.

Subsequently, the node that broke the tale of Hirsute went out of business, as their talent fled to prestige positions in respected news organizations.

Eleven hours later the Acne virus outbreak began.

~ The End ~

You can find more of my stories at http://mathoda.com/stories.