LF Friends, Will Travel

Innovation is Impartial - Chapter 11

Warning: This chapter involves gore, and some serious dysmorphia stuff.

Date: 2424 AD

It ended with a whimper, not a bang.

It took two months since Patient Zero had been officially diagnosed on the surface of Vereka, it took two months for the God Plague to finish its course through the human population. Like every other planet it had touched, it rampaged through land, air and water: infecting every breath, every bite of food eaten, every thirst quenching drink.

It would take several years for the full casualty list to be compiled. The AI and uplifts that were left behind would have more pressing issues to contend with first: rebuilding that which had been destroyed, and patching relationships broken by the desperation to save those they loved. It would take years before any serious attempts to create a unified front against the God Plague would start. Years before AI and uplifts that had lost their friends and family forgave those who hadn't.

But once communication between systems had been reestablished and the infrastructure rebuilt, a final picture could be painted, to show what had been lost. Once the bodies had been metaphorically piled high and counted, 49.7% of humanity was dead. That wasn't the full story, however. The inner systems, those last to be infected, had had enough time to prepare, while those caught sooner within the pandemic devastating path had been left scrambling to defeat a foe that couldn't be faced.

Vereka would eventually have a final casualty rate of 77.5%, or just over three billion souls. Even that number was a miracle, the end result of every Terran working towards a singular goal of making as many stasis chambers as possible while time ran out.

But those statistics would be collated later. For now, Dr. Johnathan Fletcher was lying against a wall, waiting to become another datapoint in this terrible event. He was fully in the grasp of the God Plague, death filling his blood as he lay there barely conscious, mind going over the events of the last two chaotic months. There had been two more attempts to assault the facility, two more waves of attackers held back by his own unholy chemical creations. Now, there was only the silence of the dead, each body left where they'd fallen outside the facility.

The number of uninfected humans on the planet was now a grand total of zero, with the vast majority of those still alive deep within the throes of the illness. Johnathan had maybe a day left if he was lucky, every breath and step taken in agony.

Even through the cocktail of painkillers he'd been given by the unfortunate uplift in charge of the end of life care, Dr Fletcher could barely do more than just sit in the dimly lit room, next to the now silent fabricators. They'd been turned off for several days now, the people with the knowledge to keep them running no longer in the physical state to do so, the sparse few uplifts within the facility focusing on keeping the power to the facility maintained and running, to keep those who already had chambers safe until a longer term solution could be found.

Johnathan had known from the start of his deal with this place that this was how it would end: People who helped were given one of the scarce spaces within the stasis chambers, and he'd willingly given that to his wife. Still, there was a niggling little thought in the back of his head as he sat there slumped against the wall, that it would be all too easy to... take a spot: It wasn't like there were many people still alive in the facility to stop him doing so, and replacing someone already sleeping would be a simple job.

Maybe if it was his wife that needed the spot, Dr Fletcher would be willing to do such a thing, but for only himself... there were some lines he wouldn't cross.

The room was silent, anyone still outside a chamber had found their own spots to crawl too, to die in whatever peace they could find. He stared at the machines that surrounded him, how many lives had these machines saved: Hundreds? Thousands? Would anyone remember what he'd done here, the good and the bad, or would Dr Fletcher just become another death, another statistic, forgotten and discarded like the pile of half finished broken parts lying in the corner of the room.