The scariest virus I’ve ever heard of is called the myoxma virus and it only kills rabbits, even though people who handle rabbits are often infected with no symptoms. For rabbits, the virus condemns them to a painful death with crusty, blinded eyes.
When Australia was overrun with rabbits in the 1950s, they released the myoxma virus and it killed off 99.8% of the rabbits. The surviving rabbits had no predators and they quickly repopulated Australia, so researchers experimented with engineering the myoxma virus so that it attacked rabbit fertility rather than killing them all immediately. Imagine a virus like that running through a human population.
What is terrifying is that there are research labs that have attempted to use myoxma virus to treat various human ailments – like cancer, but when the difference between a virus that can cure cancer and a virus that can wipe out 99.8% of humanity is just a tiny segment of DNA, one wonders if this research should be allowed at all.
This topic sparked my interest after I watched my son play a video game named Deceit.
This video game is filled with nefarious rabbit imagery and as I watched the players search for antidotes and blood transfusions and vaccines, it made me think of myoxmatosis.
I’m often confused by the sorts of entertainment that is fed to my kids. Is it designed to desensitize them to frightening concepts? The epic, orchestral music they like is equally baffling.
My son is listening to a song called Diving Bell by Starset and I feel like my fourth novel will be written for him. The song makes me think of a child interpreting what the online realm does to everyone.
The protagonist will be a man who is trying to shepherd a rebirth of civilization after a myoxma plague. His mother is Mrs. Randall and they lead this rebirth from a gothic castle ruin named Stargard. He uses a quadcopter to rebuild shipping networks and visit factories that can be re-opened with the groups of workers he has helped safeguard.
Mrs. Randall has communication access to an international network of the remnants of government intelligence agencies. They read the outputs of a story machine which was designed to help them predict the future, yet the stories it tells change dramatically depending on what it chooses to remember and forget. Mrs. Randall is troublesome because she remembers some things that others want forgotten.
If you could remember the future or too much of the past, wouldn’t that be a terrible curse! With a story machine that predicts the future, these problems are all too real.
The castle and surrounding town have a dark, Nazi past, but the people have been largely lobotomized and have a limited response to fearful stimuli. This makes them, paradoxically, nonthreatening when properly educated but extremely dangerous when they lack good leadership.
Songs are instrumental in maintaining group unity.
Prepare the diving bell, It’s time to take this low again, I sink into myself, low, No need for farewell, I know you always understand
………………
Wake me when the new day comes. Together we will light the dawn. The future is an empty gun. We ride on to them one by one.
……………………………….
Here we are turn away now. We are the warriors. We built this town.
Perhaps in this story, the world population drops to 6 billion with more minor, localized disasters and then, over the course of two decades, it jumps up to 12 billion, at which point, myoxma is unleashed, leaving only 100 million survivors, ten million of which are in Europe.
The isolated group at Stargard has to make its own vaccine by finding infected rabbits and infecting themselves with the less deadly form of the virus that they carry in their crusty eyes. Mrs. Randall sends everyone out on a rabbit hunt.
With the virus under control, Stargard’s thousand survivors move to an almost abandoned city of Hamburg and create an enclave of order, safety, and plenty. In a place built to support two million, only ten thousand remain. The last name, Stargard, becomes one of the most common surnames in Europe.
I’m getting ahead of myself! I still have to finish the third novel… but it is all slowly becoming clearer.
My novels tend to start with a soundtrack and then take shape from there.
………
The image in the heading is from Ivan Pili on Artmajeur.
If you would like to hear this post read aloud, please check out this video:
Kirsten Hacker 