From: Wilson.M.Clements@dartmouth.edu (Will Clements)
Subject: Another Day of Work
Date: 17 Feb 1994 02:36:20 GMT

Disclaimer:  I realize that I have stretched the bounds of science with
this one, but read it through.  Bispecific antibodies are being worked
on.

Will
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
	Outside the medical laboratory, the wind whipped around the
barren, moonlike landscape.  Inside, the environment was sterile,
eerily clean, and no sound drifted down the stark hallways bathed in
a greenish blue light.  J.D. Crick was busy trying to isolate the
latest
antigen shift on the protein capsid of AIDS.  The year was 2081
around one hundred years after the emergence of AIDS as an
epidemic which wiped out thirty percent of the world's populations
before the drug companies were able to effectively block infection of
AIDS.  Nuclear war had resulted from the refusal to share for no cost
the polyclonal antibodies developed.  Now, AIDS was back and in a
form that wiped out not only the CD4+ T helper cells but the CD8+
Cytotoxic T lymphocytes.  The method of infection was the same;
small numbers of cells resulting in severe immunodeficiency.  The
glycoproteins on the capsid were on the verge of being isolated, and
new polyclonal antibodies could be used to block the new strain of
HIV.
	J.D removed the interface helmet that had allowed him to see
the virus projected in 3-D while the monoclonal antibodies developed
through infection of mice attacked the antigens on the surface of the
virus.  Nothing new had been found in this session and J.D. was tired
from wrestling with the interface.  He replaced the dust plugs in the
jacks at the base of his skull, and prepared the lab for the next day's

work.
	The insignia on his lab coat read J.D. Crick, Immunologist,
Smith, Kline, Beechem, Hitachi Lab.  The U.S. government had
founded this lab right after the wars over the polyclonal Abs had
died down in 2010.  The government was determined not to let small
splinter groups control the fate of humanity again.  Tension still
existed between the U.S., Great Britain, the EEC, and the third world
countries which HIV had decimated.  These countries had nuclear
armaments which had been preemptively destroyed in 2005. This
first strike resulted in minimal deaths and widespread destruction of
the global economy and ecology.
	The lab was in the southeastern corner of Tennessee in a city
known as Chattanooga.  The resulting climate change from the partial
nuclear winter had driven everyone south.  Winter in Chattanooga
was cold with temperatures averaging negative 15 Celsius.
	J.D. looked up as his computer beeped signaling incoming mail.
He put his helmet back on and faced the net.  He could see the red
beacon of an incoming high priority blitz making its way through the
lab's elaborate defense system of countermeasures.  It was like a
heat seeking missile twisting and turning as it countered all defenses
and finally came to rest at J.D.'s feet.  He (inside his mind) bent
over
to pick the letter up and it exploded in his mind.   The neurotoxins
spread through him and effectively lobotimized him twenty seconds
before shutting down the peripheral and central nervous systems.
This took a total of twenty-one seconds.  He died two minutes later.

			*****************
	"Shit, what a mess."
	"Holy shit, what a smell."
	"Jesus Christ, Goddamn where's her face?"

	Blackness, then a glimmer of light, blackness again....
Pain flared through Tim's head as he rose to his hands and knees.

	"Hey, one's moving."
	"Don't move fucker." Cold gunmetal blackness against his neck
freezing into his spine.
	
Tim wasn't about to move-nothing worked.  He was frozen on his
hands and knees.  He tried to speak but no sound.  He wondered
what had happened.  He had been eating dinner with his girlfriend
when hell had appeared on her face and slid outwards towards him.
He vaguely remembered her face sliding off her skull and into her
bowl of soup.  He retched and vomited onto the man's black shiny
shoes.  "Well at least I don't have to look at myself,"  he thought.
Blackness again when the cop smacked the base of his skull with his
gun.  Before Tim fainted he saw Helen's face staring up at him from
the floor but something was wrong--it was flat.

I know of machines that are more complex than people.  If this is
apostasy, hekk ikun.  To have humanism we must first be convinced of
our humanity.  As we move further into decadence this becomes more
difficult.
Thomas Pynchon