THE MAKING OF MADNESS

  The end-of-the-world had already tipped into inevitability, but its catastrophic unfolding had yet to fully sink its teeth into this corner of the globe – the location of its origin – the inner-mountain west. A week before the guts of society were spilled on the pavement, a man in a black suit sat alone in the glinting bar of a five-star hotel on the outskirts of Calderna. His suit was Hedi Slimane, severe, immaculate, predatory. The lapels knifed downward like intent. The cut hugged him like a second skin, all clean lines and hidden violence. It didn’t shine. It devoured light. A $5,000 bottle of Balvenie ’66 Speyside whiskey radiated beside him. So did the .45 Magnum laid flat and deliberate on the bar’s edge.

  A woman in a red dress slid onto the stool next to him. She had a litany of her own problems, but he was a problem she was willing to take a shot at.

  He glanced at her with barely recognition; she could have been twenty-one, fifty-one, or one-hundred-and-one. It didn’t matter anymore. He poured himself a glass, knocked it back, and then turned to her as if she were nothing more than a mirage.

  "Twenty years ago, my lab made a breakthrough," he said, his voice smooth and detached. "We induced stemness - reprogrammed cells into pluripotency with just four viral vectors. Poof. Immortality for those cells and for molecular biology."

  She ran a finger along his thigh, playing her part. "I’m listening if you’re buying."

  He poured her a glass and refilled his, spilling whiskey onto the polished bar. Caught for a moment, he ran a finger through the liquid, drawn by the strange surface tension of its 110-proof essence. Then he went on with his end-of-the-road confessional.

  "We discovered a Siberian virus two years ago. Fifty thousand years frozen in the ice. Its integration potential was… incredible." He exhaled. "We emptied it out. Modified its payload with something new; behavioral attenuation, a leash, total human control with an Ro of 10; it was airborne and it would spread like wildfire. It would create the sheeple governments longed for.”

  He shot back the dregs of his whiskey and went on. “The second system was based on the adeno-associated virus, the workhorse of gene therapy, with SV40-driven genes to amplify psychopathy transmitted by IV injection. We created super-soldiers.”

  She frowned, tilting her head. "What the hell are you talking about?"

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  "The super-solider system worked at first. The use of Cre-Lox recombination let us toggle the genes on and off,” he said, with a flourish of his hands like he was a conductor. “We were geniuses, with our aptamer-mediated diphtheria toxin kill switches which allowed us to control psychopathic monsters. Or so we thought."

  She stared at him as he let out a dry laugh. "Everything was perfect in primate testing, but in the human trials, the virus started playing with the locks. Cre-Lox is a bullshit system in the chaos of a human cell. We didn’t have a good read on the fucking Siberian virus genes, and both viral systems recombined where they shouldn’t have.”

  He winced at the space around him as if the very air he was breathing knew what he’d done. “SV40 got dropped into places it didn’t belong, and the IV-injection transmission for the psychosis system, well it jumped to the Siberian Virus with its Ro of 10. That was… six months ago. Do you know what happens if you switch off empathy and switch on violence with a virus that spreads like the flu?"

  His eyes were wild, like he had a secret tumbling around in his head, and the woman in red got the feeling she didn’t want to know the secret.

  "You create a fucking monster," he said, his voice flat. "And with MAOA-knockout and SV40 driving overexpression of DAT1 and CDH13 - you pray you never meet one." He swirled the whiskey in his glass. "Everyone in the lab got infected. The kill switches? Useless. The virus rewrote its own code.”

  He laughed at nothing – almost a cackle, then he turned to her as if death had shrouded his eyes. “Do you know what it's like watching a fifteen-year-old female test subject from a Libyan slave market stomp the life out of a grown man? Laughing while she does it?"

  The woman stiffened. "What the fuck," she whispered. "Have you lost your fucking mind?"

  He wasn’t answering questions any longer. There was only one final judgement, and he knew it. "The recombined virus carries a ticket to complete tiered predatory psychopathy." He took a slow breath. "Governments are already bombing their own cities." He tapped the side of his glass. "You don’t hear about it because those places are cut off. No internet. No signals. Just fire and silence. Why the fuck do you think the cell networks are already dark around here?"

  “Seriously, what the fuck,” she scowled, tapping her glass nervously on the bar.

  The man just stared at her with glassy eyes, like he was looking through her. “Imagine a few Hannibal Lectors and Ted Bundys in a room and they are arguing about whether to take an axe handle to you or a filet knife; and at the back of the room there are mad feral berserkers that just want to run through you until you bleed out. That’ll be this city in a week.”

  She blinked. The weight of his words was lost on her at this point. It didn’t matter. She shot back her own glass, and then she took her own shot anyway.

  "Are you gonna take me upstairs and fuck me, or?"

  His hollow eyes met hers and he laughed like a man without a soul.

  "We’re all fucked," he said simply, pushing the whiskey bottle toward her.

  Their gazes held - hers confused, searching, his utterly vacant.

  Then, without drama or pause, he put the Magnum in his mouth and painted the ceiling with his brains.