'Ill-Seekers'

Medicine’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

I remember a time when any pathogen, anywhere, could kill us. The threat of impending death always kept us on our toes. When would the next zoonotic strike? Who knew whether the next one would be another Swine Flu or another Black Plague? When would the Spanish Influenza jump the species boundary and kill us all again?

That was the reason why I joined the WHO straight out of college. I knew that if we could just halt the process of species-jumping, we would be safe. There would be no new influx of disease. Medicine was advanced enough that we could, in time, cure all the diseases left to us. Whatever we didn’t cure, nature would—after all, that’s what happened to herpes and the common cold.

It took some time, but eventually we hit upon a genetic nexus that controlled the ability of viruses to jump between species. So simple; so universal—it’s incredible we could have overlooked it so long. We turned CRISPR on it, and boom. No more novel viral infections.

Bacteria and fungi were a little harder, but we stopped those in time too. Fungi were easier, since only a few of them ever did us real harm. Bacteria, with their myriad ways of transferring genes, were the real humdinger. But they, too, fell as we broke open their genome and found the similar set of genes that controlled their spread and species-jumping.

And finally… after all those years, we did it. Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis; even diabetes all went the way of smallpox and measles. We’d cured them all. Every last one of them. Life expectancy went through the roof once we got rid of the worst killers. There were smaller gains to be had from killing the cold, but they were there nonetheless. At last, I thought; we could finally drink deep of that Fountain of Youth the old legends claimed existed.

But then came the Sick Parks—and they weren’t ‘sick’ the way hoverboards were in the early twentieth century. Disease kept us on our toes, I said before—but without them, people started getting bored. Disease was a novel experience, after all—“it gave you a high,” some said, “fighting for your life, knowing that you might lose it someday.”

Of course, only the craziest of vector junkies said that. I knew better, of course, but I was only one person. The rest of my buddies in WHO were gone, scattered to who knows where are the organization dissolved. I couldn’t stop all of them.

Most went in for the thrill of a runny nose, the rush of sneezing their brains out, the infantile satisfaction of being able to poo their pants without being socially shunned. There were different levels of infection available at these Sick Parks, ranging from the ‘pleb tier’, with rhinitis and mono and the like, all the way up to the ‘death angel tier’, full of C. diff and TB and MRSA. These so-called ‘ill-seekers’ could start themselves off on the pleb tier and keep climbing up the ladder until they said they’d had enough. And then, a robot doctor would whisk right in, inject them with a targeted mix of CRISPR and proteases (and antibiotics or antifungals as needed) and boom! In an hour’s time, the ill-goer was cured and—god forbid—ready to go again.

The only sense I saw in these places was the ‘forbidden tier’. Here, they kept all the known plague agents and bioweapons, like anthrax, Yersinia pestis, and the Spanish flu. I’d been told that only the oldest and most dissatisfied people went there—people who had tired of long life and wanted one last burst of death-defying adrenaline before they closed their eyes for good.

Imagine my surprise when my teenage great-granddaughter said she wanted to try the forbidden tier.

“You’re crazy, Sue,” I told her. There was no disguising the shock in my voice, nor the disgust. “Mankind’s worst killers are stored in there. You can’t go in.”

“Gramps, what are you talking about?” She rolled her eyes in that way she did when she didn’t believe me. “They can’t kill anyone anymore. I’ve already tried MRSA and TB—and you don’t see anything wrong with me, do you?”

No—nothing’s wrong besides your utter lack of self-preservation. But I didn’t tell her this; only folded my arms and glared.

“I’m not taking you, Sue. I worked with those bugs, back when the WHO still existed. They are nothing for us to expose ourselves to willingly. Do you know why ‘Ring Around the Rosie’ was created?”

“Because the medieval people couldn’t do anything but dance in circles with pockets full of posies, watching their loved ones die before their very eyes, hoping that they wouldn’t be next.” She parroted my words back at me exactly, with that tone of voice I’d long since learned had the same meaning as her rolled eye. “But this isn’t the 1600s, Gramps. They’ll cure me if I say it goes too far. I’ve survived MRSA and TB—I know I can survive this.”

“No you don’t, Sue. I forbid you from entering the forbidden tier. Do not discuss this with me again.”

Seven days later, while cleaning out her room, I found a note tucked underneath her diary. A chill ran down my spine; even before I opened it, I knew what it would contain. Fingers shaking, I opened it and read the dreaded words:

Went out with friends. At Sick Park. Be back soon. – Sue

The message was the same as she’d written previous times, when she exposed herself to rhinitis and bacterial meningitis. But the date… The date was wrong. In the past, she’d come back one or two days after the note was written. But by now, five days had passed.

I tried to tell myself there was a perfectly good reason for this. She was mad at me. She was spending the night with her friends. This was all a sick joke, wasn’t it? Tomorrow, she’d return, triumphantly telling me all about how she fought down the bloody cough and pranced about, defiant of all the old medical wisdoms that told her to stay in bed.

But as sure as the feel of paper in my hand. I knew. She’d gone to the forbidden tier. And she wasn’t coming back.

I sat heavily on the edge of her rose-colored bed and crumpled the note in my hands. And before I knew it, I began to cry.

They say the worst thing for a parent to do is outlive their child. Even worse to outlive your great-grandchild.