We came to call it the Outage. Three days in which all of Shepardsport was effectively cut off from the outside universe as a result of malware interfering with our Internet connection. We weren’t totally cut off — we could get dribbles, the occasional text message or e-mail that slipped through, and even if the pilots flying in from other settlements weren’t allowed to come up to the main part of the settlement, they did talk with enough people in Flight Operations that we heard some gossip, enough to know that something was happening, and it was big.
But nothing that could’ve prepared us for what we discovered once IT dragged that piece of malware out of their servers and we were suddenly reconnected with the full flow of the Internet. Not just the sudden and explosive increase in the numbers of cases of what had been dubbed the diablovirus for both its severity and the two protein structures that resembled a devil’s horns. Until I got the AP and Reuters feeds back, I would never have expected food riots in modern cities. But a quick visit to the relevant news outlets’ websites showed images of people swarming trucks, literally tearing the trailers apart and looting the food inside. Pictures of police and even military forces firing upon the rioters, trying to break up the crowds of desperate people by any means possible.
It wasn’t a crop failure, or a sudden mutation of the diablovirus to infect livestock. Instead it was a failure in the distribution system. The food existed — but it was stuck in the field and the barns, unable to get to the people who needed it. Thanks to the Just In Time system, there was almost no food stored in grocery stores’ warehouses. Once workers at various processing plants began to fall ill, the wheels started coming off on the supply chain, resulting in vegetables literally rotting in the fields, animals having to be euthanized and burned or buried because the farmers had no fodder for them.
But even more disturbing were the accounts of riots and destruction against anyone and everyone who could be made a scapegoat. Some were the Usual Targets: Jews in much of the West, Chinese in Indonesia. But others came as a surprise: the riot in New York City that poured onto Wall Street and tried to storm the Stock Exchange, apparently blaming international commerce for the rapid spread of the disease. Or the attack on a small town in California’s Marin County, the home of a parapsychological research institution originally founded by astronaut Ed Mitchell. Apparently someone had taken it into their head that psychics’ “bad vibrations” were causing the disease, or that their work was Satanic, or half a dozen different notions that were offered to police interrogators by the rioters after their arrest.
It was as if we’d gone to sleep in a troubled but sane world, then woke up to find the entire world had gone mad. We knew the diablovirus could have digestive and respiratory symptoms, but could it also have purely neurological symptoms?
—- Autumn Belfontaine, “Shepardsport Pirate Radio’s Coverage of the Diablovirus Outbreak” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater: Kennedy University Press, 2059.