Liam Connors

The following is one of the first short stories I’ve ever written. Though it bears a strange resemblance to 2020, it was actually written in 2017. I had all but stashed it away until March 2020, when I found myself thinking about it very often. This is a simple reminder that the story is purely a work of fiction that I wrote in college because I felt like I had thought up an interesting concept, and I’m only sharing it because I found it eerily familiar. It does not, in any way, portray my beliefs about Covid, mask mandates, or vaccines. Enjoy!

It seems that every few years there comes a new crisis of the century. I often wonder what will reign supreme. What will be the real crisis of the century? The one that the technologically advanced historians in the next world will be able to identify as a turning point for civilization. For a while, I thought it’d be Yulon.

If you’ve never come into contact with the Yulon Virus, consider yourself quite lucky. If you’ve never known anyone who has suffered from the Yulon Virus, consider yourself quite lucky. If you’ve never heard of the Yulon Virus, consider yourself quite lucky.

But, for a while, none of us were quite so lucky.

We never really understood the virus that well. We knew the speed it traveled — it took out 47 people within one week. By the end of the month the number was 452. We knew it was airborne, which made the transmission easier than that of influenza, or even the common cold. But we didn’t know where it came from, why it came, or how to stop it. Well, not yet, at least.

But what we knew best — what had become embedded within us all — was the symptoms. If the speed did not frighten you, if the number of casualties did not frighten you, if the newspapers labeling this the biggest crisis of the 21st century did not frighten you, then the symptoms would.

Once contracted, the first few hours were virtually undetectable. A slight fever would occur, and sometimes there would be a discoloration of the skin, but nothing to suggest immediate medical attention. Throughout the next few days, however, the virus would spread quickly through your body and immediately get to work on your lungs. The white blood cells in the lungs would expand like a balloon being pumped with helium, causing the inverse effect on the red blood cells. As the whites grew, the red blood cells shrunk, which would cause your actual lungs to shrink at a rapid pace, causing you to lose more and more oxygen each hour. They say death by suffocation is the worst way to die, but I say that death by prolonged suffocation is something completely different.

Imagine a deep, satisfying breath. The kind of breath you take before meditation, you know, one of those deep ‘in through your nose, hold — hold — hold, now out through your mouth’ breaths. Then, just one hour later, each breath would feel as if it were coming through a snorkel. Three hours later your breaths felt like they were coming through a straw. And then a coffee stirrer. All the while, less and less oxygen is reaching your brain, and the hallucinations begin. Not even the good kind. Soon enough, you’re wishing that this virus would just kill you already, but you still have hours and hours until the oxygen level in your body drops to a fatal level.

And then, ultimately, you die. As quick as that. As slow as that.

There were images spread across our screens of people cutting open holes in their throat to try to receive more oxygen, but that would never work, and most of them just bled out. Many patients ended up taking matters into their own hands after receiving the news of their infection, assuming immediate death to be much better than the suffering they would endure. So, suicide rates soared. They don’t even include suicides in the fatality levels of the disease, but if they did it’d be safe to assume the number of deaths caused by Yulon would be nearly double what we know.

The entire country was thrust into a panic, but as many pointed out, weren’t we always? If it weren’t disease it was war. And if it wasn’t war it was economic collapse. Even now, as we struggled with Yulon, we were struggling externally with some conflict we’d gotten ourselves into with a middle-eastern coalition.

Nonetheless, as fatality levels rose, there was little you could do besides panic.

Horrifying as it was, though, we were comforted by the idea that we’d become advanced enough that a cure would be inevitable.

Scientists dreamed of this day. Some young boys might’ve dreamed of getting up to bat in the World Series, the game resting on their shoulders, and hitting the game winning home run — scientists dreamed of this. Developing the vaccine that could save the lives of everyone in the country was the ultimate goal. It was the golden ticket. The key to immortality. The walk-off home run of the science world.

Thus, it came with plenty of relief, but little surprise, that within two months of Patient 001 a vaccine had been created. Some thought even that was too slow. All of the most brilliant minds in the country focused on one mutual goal, and it took them two whole months? Sooner, they argued, it should have come sooner.

The rest of us understood. We were just laymen, we couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of solving a problem like this, we simply took it as it came. And, at this point, we didn’t care. The prayers of the nation were answered. We were free of Yulon.

Soon enough, vaccination clinics were set up all over the country. Each hospital was filled with patients looking for their Yulon Shot. It took hours to even be seen in an Emergency Room anymore.

Heart Attack? Wait in line, we’ve got vaccinations to give out first.

Stroke? Take a seat, we’ll be with you in a few hours.

Tumor? Good luck with that one.

High Schools were having assemblies about the importance of getting a Yulon Shot. Hundreds of kids packed into their stuffy auditorium, listening to some angry old woman talk to them about the necessity of the vaccine. Still, they thought, “anything to get out of class”.They were even having nurses come in each Wednesday for the first few weeks of school, and each teacher would lead their students to the gymnasium for their vaccination. No child left unvaccinated.

Don’t even think about attending a university without your vaccination. You couldn’t travel without it either. The first question in your job interview was usually “Are you all up to date on your Yulon shots?”

I got mine at an Urgent Care Center around the corner from my house. I sat in the waiting room for 45 minutes, counting the number of Scooby-Doo band-aids I saw walk by, covering up the spot of the needle puncture.

I read my newspaper as I waited. Yulon was over, what new fear would I develop next? Apparently the conflict with the middle-eastern coalition was getting worse. If they were to get their hands on certain weapons, the newspaper read, they would possess the capability to alter life in this country as we know it with only one push of a button. One bomb, millions of lives.

Yulon only killed a couple hundred, I thought to myself. I thought we were out of the woods, but we’re just moving on to something worse. Disease and war, the two crises of my life.

The doctor called me in. I got my shot, and as I left I felt content for the moment that at least I had made it through the Yulon Crisis.

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They never really tell you what’s inside of a vaccine. They could be putting cow shit in your body, but as long as you are safe, you don’t have to know. Then again, if they are putting cow shit in your body, do you really want to know?

But in case you were curious, there were some ingredients listed in the pamphlet they gave you in the waiting room. They were all real big science words — dephlomaxitocin, ephrocilin, vansidium, triterphaline. No one had any idea what they really were, but they all sounded good.

“Ahh, vansidium, I heard that really strengthens your blood cells,” I overheard a man say in the waiting room.

“It’s the ephrocilin that does it,” the woman next to him replied, “boosts your immune levels almost ten-fold!”

None of us knew. But, as long as we were safe, we didn’t need to know.

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Two months after the first Yulon case, we got a vaccine. Two years after the conflict with the middle-eastern coalition, we dropped a bomb. Something about that seemed poetic to me. What was that law we learned in school, every action has a reaction? I guess that applied. For each new horror, we found a cure.

A few years after all of this had passed, I finally opened up my in-home office. I had studied psychology, initially as a way to come to terms with my own anxieties and fears. Through the time period of Yulon and then the war, I developed crippling fears that paralyzed me for a good while. I wanted to know why, so I finished up my schooling. Of course, helping others was a large part of my decision, but it was fueled by my desire to diagnose myself. The self-diagnosis was simple, actually, I had begun catastrophizing everyday tasks as a response to the all-or-nothing mindset I became accustomed to from all of the stories of death around me. But, now I was certified and practiced, and it was time to shift my focus to other people.

I had twenty-four patients within my first six months; some saw me weekly, some only came for the consultation. Among the twenty-four was Dr. Steven Boland.

Dr. Boland was an interesting case. He came to me with some clear symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but whenever we talked about his past, I found nothing peculiar. Most people think PTSD patients are all ex-military or victims of abuse, and though many are, anyone can become traumatized. For example, Dr. Boland was a tenured biochemist, with no military background and no history of abuse or childhood trauma.

Thus, he became an anomaly, and a figure of obsession for me. We could easily start our therapy, if only I found the source of his trauma, but he didn’t like to speak. It seemed to me he had no intention of telling me his story, but he thought I could treat him just the same. Therapy does not work well if you are not willing to open yourself up, I kept telling him.

He complained of flashbacks, but he never said what he was flashing back to. He said he woke up every night in terror, but wouldn’t tell me what he saw in his dreams. He wasn’t making it up, that was evident. He really was troubled, but by what, I could not tell.

That is, until I received a phone call late one night. It was 2:34am, I woke up and answered my phone, wondering who it was.

“It’s Dr. Boland.” I heard him say.

“Steven, is everything alright?” I was worried.

“I was assigned to be a part of a task that I didn’t volunteer for, and that I never enjoyed,” he started, “but I was offered a lot of money by our government, so I did it.”

I could hear how unsettled he was by the shake in his voice. He just woke up from another of his nightmares, I assumed. But I didn’t realize that I was about to have a nightmare of my own.

“We were all called to this conference. Nearly one hundred of us were sitting in the university auditorium. I saw many of my colleagues, all highly-acclaimed biologists and pharmacologists and surgeons. All heads of their field. I had no idea why we were there. On the stage sat politicians and government officials I recognized, along with some I didn’t. And then Senator Lovitz took the stage to address us, and that made things more unclear than before.”

“They told us we were chosen to create a disease. Not a vaccine. Not a cure. A disease. The cure was already created, we were to use an inverse process to manufacture a disease that would create a necessity for the cure.”

I don’t understand, I told him. But as I said it, I hardly believed that I wasn’t at least beginning to understand. The shiver down my spine didn’t tell me different.

“Listen to this: Ephrocilin and dephlomaxitocin weren’t necessary to defeating Yulon. Vansidium was, but that’s it. Triterphaline is the base of most common cough medicines, mecitophen is just a mixture of a bunch of vitamins, dyalidine is just the mixture of….”

I get it, I said, go on.

“But ephrocilin and dephlomaxitocin, they mixed together to make Serfiltrium. And that was the key.

“You know what Serotonin is? What am I saying, you’re a psychologist, of course you do. So then you know that a lack of Serotonin is widely agreed to cause anxiety and depression disorders. The lower the Serotonin levels, the more likely you are to be anxious. The more likely you are to be depressed. The more likely you are to succumb to your fears. Well, think about the word Serfiltrium. Break it down. Serotonin. Filter. It drains the chemical from a person’s body. You get it?”

I do, I told him.

“So, the vaccine was already created, and of course it had Serfiltrium. We were just necessary to make the disease for the vaccine to cure. It was the inverse of everything I had ever learned, but it wasn’t hard. In fact, it’s easier to make a disease than it is to cure it. Ironic. Well anyway, within about a year’s time, we had developed the disease. And by the orders given to us, it was one scary enough to create a mass panic. I mean, who isn’t afraid of suffocating? We basically just took the shittiest way to die, and we put it on steroids.”

Why? I asked.

“‘If you want an omelette, you’ve gotta break a few eggs.’ That’s what they told us. Every day. We were just breaking eggs. A couple hundred people would die from this disease, but a couple million would be saved. Was it ethical? Ask Nietzsche.”

I had my notepad on my desk, and I grabbed it to scribble down everything I heard. On the bottom I wrote, “Let’s call it a scientist’s confession”.

“Now, even after we released the disease to the public, I still didn’t really get it. I figured it was some trick, but it was one far above my head, and far above my pay grade. It took two years for me to understand what we did. But once I got it, I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it before. I mean, with all the papers and the news stations. Everywhere you went you heard something about the war.”

The war? I asked. What does that have to do with it?

“For a smart guy, you’re a little slow on the pick up,” he said, “it was all about the war!”

I didn’t ask anything else. I just let him talk.

“People have been wary about war ever since Vietnam. If we went in and bombed those innocent people without popular consensus, we would have had a revolution. So, how do you fix the problem? You get popular consensus. You get the people to agree.

“You make a disease, and you make them beg for a cure. You give them the cure, but you sneak a little something in there. Something that lowers their inhibitions, makes them more vulnerable to your propaganda, more susceptible to fear. And right when they’re at their most fearful, you surround them with images of the ‘bad guys’. You talk about it on the tv’s and you write about it in the newspapers. It doesn’t even matter if they’re paying attention, they’re taking it in one way or another, and they’re getting scared. On the surface, you tell them it’s ok. You tell them you don’t want to bomb innocent people, but they riot. Overcome by fear, they don’t understand why their government would rather protect the bad guys than its own citizens. They beg you to take care of the situation. They force you to take care of the situation. And then, blast off, it’s done. You’re happy. The people are — well, the people are as close to happy as they could get.”