Final Flu Shanghai by Jadling

Chapter 1

Jim was on a work trip in Shanghai looking out his hotel room window. He couldn't help but notice two stunningly beautiful women in the pool below. They were maybe mid-20s, lithe, shapely, graceful, and so full of youthful joy and energy, chasing each other around on inflatables, splashing and laughing. He couldn't help fantasizing a little, imagining them joyriding him instead of those inflatable rafts.

His fantasy awakened something inside him. No, not that. Something that was actually not Jim, but was literally inside his body. Earlier that year, a mutated strain of the flu had built an intelligent network of modified nerve cells within his body and become a separate sentient being. For its own reasons, the virus needed more of Jim's DNA in the human population. A lot more. In Jim, and in a precious few other humans scattered around the world who shared his rare combination of genetic quirks, the virus was able to take on its full form, an extensive parallel nervous system of infected cells throughout his body and especially in the gray matter of his brain, where it could watch his thoughts, borrow his senses, and develop its own intelligence by mimicking patterns in his brain.

The virus had already spread to everyone on the planet in a limited form, but it remained mostly dormant, watching, learning. The one action it had taken was to eradicate all other infectious diseases from the human population, mystifying scientists and making headlines around the world. The virus didn't want anything else around that could ever evolve into a competitor. Everyone knew that all infectious diseases from the common cold to malaria to STDs were now a thing of the past, but nobody knew why. The only remaining exception was a single flu strain that briefly made headlines, becoming known as the final flu. It was never fatal, usually completely asymptomatic, and present in everyone. Unlike all past flu strains, it was not mutating at all and seemed to pose no danger, so medical science largely moved on from it as a curiosity not worthy of major research funding.

For months the virus had been studying human reproduction and sexual attraction, observing and experimenting in other reproducing bodies, learning to optimize the process so it could be as effective as possible whenever Jim got around to doing it again. Just one of his babies was on the way in his wife's womb, and it would be many months before she could begin to make another. Didn't he know there were other wombs? Didn't he know he had millions of sperm just going to waste every day? What the hell was he waiting for? It had been months! The virus was growing increasingly impatient with Jim's apparent total lack of interest in spreading his precious DNA.

Then it saw his attraction to the women in the pool. This was it. Finally, he wants to breed with someone, it thought. It sprang into action. The viral network in Jim's body could signal the network in another nearby host with tiny muscle twitches beneath their conscious perception. From farther away like this, the twitches would need to be a bit less subtle, but would still do the job.

As Jim watched the two women below, one of them seemed to feel his eyes on her and looked up directly at his window. He felt a quick series of muscle twitches all around his eyes as they made eye contact, and then he saw her gasp as her skin flushed and her eyes went wide. Her friend, following her gaze, looked up a moment later and saw him too. The twitches came again and she too immediately flushed, gasped, and stared wide-eyed at him. He stood there in shock, locked in their gaze. Their expressions weren't the anger or disgust he expected and probably deserved as a voyeur. Slowly it dawned on him. They were… aroused? Their hips ground subtly against the inflatable rafts they were straddling as they stared, panting, up at him, their eyes smoldering. Smoldering and grinding, right at him. They wanted him? It seemed ridiculous. It was ridiculous. Even more ridiculously, somehow he felt they were now connected to him and would try to find him. And then what? Nothing, of course, he told himself. He was happily married. And probably imagining things anyway, he told himself as he forced himself to step back from the window. Of course you're imagining things, Jim, you idiot, he told himself firmly, you're not that attractive. Also, nobody is.