We’re super close to wrapping up a flash fiction collection for publication; and it seemed timely to bring you into the loop a bit on some of the key ideas tying them together. One of the biggest ones had nothing whatsoever to do with COVID19 or any global pandemic because I started writing the dang thing two years ago.
It’s a little creepy now, though.
I was just was thinking along the lines of global outbreaks and mutating diseases…and what fantastic but maybe plausible mechanisms might science fiction offer to do something about them. In the collection, you’ll see much of the world’s population hit very hard with a rogue prion that triggers wild mutations. The resulting cascades of diseases appear with thousands of faces over a hundred years; and humanity forges an incredible approach to face them down.
It’s called the Bioverse. Let’s head inside to see what it’s all about. Here’s a short piece of flash fiction. It’s called THE CHASE. I hope you like it.
You can tell yourself the Bioverse is just a visual representation, a rippling and illusory curtain of data. You can steady yourself against the deck’s cockpit and acknowledge that it’s not really sailing anywhere physical. Look around if you like – maybe you’ll catch glimpses of the walls or lighting or soundproofing panels.
More likely, you’ll black out or vomit into your lap. It’s a lot to take in.
The aggregate input of quintillions of nano-scale machines and sensors embedded in practically every human alive throughout the globe has been rendered in this artificial universe for specially trained CounterBiotics agents like you to sail its front lines. New viruses and exotic bacteria are evolving at rates never before seen, in seconds rather than days. Rogue proteins and phages stalk the world, triggering DNA mutations that launch into the wide world in a matter of hours. It’s a devastatingly dangerous time.
And it’s a very good thing you’re here to do something about it.
Those images are data. You’re rocketing through actual people out there, who might be at the grocery looking through apples or coughing their last breath in a hospital bed. You’ll never know who they are; that’s hidden from you. In fact, you’ll hop seamlessly from one person to another like crossing an undefended border. It’s the chase that matters. Only the chase.
Imagine a ski-slope shaped chart, a pareto. The highest bars on the left are the people with some nasty disease that we’ve set in our sights…something that steals away pregnant mothers and single dads and wide-eyed little kids who can’t understand what’s happening to them. Imagine these diseases, these plagues, as hungry prowling beasts drooling in the shadows. They’re scary, aren’t they?
But we’ve built this miracle place. And we’ve tasked you to chase these beasts from their highest concentrations down to the last gene somewhere that’s coded for it. And we’ve tasked you to be merciless and slay them all, right where they hide.
It’s the chase that matters, my friend. Only the chase.
(C) Brian Bennudriti
Grailrunner Publishing
Grailrunner Publishing 