Measles

The Brooklyn summer was having one of its more oppressively muggy days. I could hear the loud chatter of high school students flooding the sidewalk nearby, presumably released from summer classes for the afternoon. Running my hands over the wrought-iron armrest of the bench I' sat on, I scanned the park for sign of the friend I was supposed to meet.

The high school that the kids had just evacuated was also mine, 15-odd years in the past. I was slowly broiling beneath the unforgiving afternoon sun instead of hiding in shade and air conditioning because I'd agreed to meet an old classmate of mine here, after having gotten an email from him out of the blue. We'd been close, back then, but as people do, we'd swiftly lost touch once we'd moved on to our respective colleges.

I'd ended up staying in New York, but the last I'd heard of him, he'd gotten hired by some big firm out west after a moderately good showing in graduate school. I had no idea doing what, other than some vague idea that is was technical. I, on the other hand, went for a liberal arts degree, and now found myself a middle manager at a software company, trying to herd more technologically minded people into acting out buzzwords like scrum and agile.

At the moment, however, what I was doing was sweating, and seriously considering giving up on the reunion with a friend who was now slightly more than a half-hour late.

"David! Sorry, sorry..."

And there he was, walk-jogging toward me, puffing for air, and looking like any sort of repeated physical motion wasn't part of his normal routine. I grinned.

"Hey Bill. Long time."

We bumped knuckles and he flopped down onto the other side of the bench, panting.

"If..." he puffed, "if I'd known it was gonna be this warm I wouldn't have suggested the park."

"I don't think it will kill either of us," I said, "and honestly it looks like both of us could use the sun."

He gave an amused little bark at that, his breath slowly returning to normal.

"All the same," he said, "let's go find a coffee shop or something to hide in."

Ten minutes later we were installed at a small table in the back of a trendy little cafe that hadn't existed when we were kids. A server put a couple of glasses of water in front of us and took our order for a couple of sandwiches.

"So," Bill said, "first I want to say thanks for agreeing to meet me after all these years, and second, we only have about an hour before I need to leave to go catch another flight."

"Oh, uh, wow," I said, "So..."

"So, I need to ask you to listen to me for a little bit. This visit isn't actually social. The first thing you should know is that I work for the government now."

"I'm pretty sure I paid my taxes last year" I joked.

"You did," he said, deadpan, "You also keep up with your doctor's appointments, and you've been employed by the same company and living in the same apartment for several years now."

I didn't reply, staring across the table at him with a frown on my face, more than a little creeped out by both the content and delivery of his words.

"Forgive me, I don't have time to mince words, and I need to make sure you understand some basic but critical information before I leave." He picked up his water and took a sip. Despite the supposed urgency, he didn't immediately say anything else, just sat there holding his glass and gazing at me.

Uncomfortable under his scrutiny, wanting a moment to thing, and for want of something to do with my hands, I picked up my own glass and took a long pull, the chill water welcome after the heat outside.

As he watched me drink, something seemed to uncoil inside him, and he slumped in his chair slightly. He suddenly seemed... very tired.

"What are your feelings about vaccines?" he asked.

"Um," I said, not quite sure how total this turn in an already weird conversation, "I'm pro?"

He gave a little lopsided grin. "Most people are, but as I'm sure you've seen in the media, there's always a contingent that will trust pseudoscience, instinct, or paranoia over science. As is their right, of course, except where it creates a public hazard. Thus all the recent hoopla about the uptick in measles cases."

"Okay, but..."

He held up his hand to interrupt me again. Just as he was about to begin speaking, the server returned with our orders. He paused to let her set the food in front of us, and then scooted his chair to an angle when she directed him to with her hands.

He resumed speaking. "Measles is actually a great example. Highly contagious, serious, and very treatable thanks to modern vaccines." He paused to shift his hips forward in the chair as the waitperson knelt in front of him. I heard his pants zipper unfastening, and a moment later the back of her head vanished from my sight below the table. A moment later it bobbed back up and then dropped again as she established a rhythm.

"Eventually the measles cases will drop off again, as public sentiment and the obvious rise in sickness and occasionally mortality drives home that the vaccine isn't a government mind control plot, but actual medicine doing actual good. A similar trend actually existed in Great Britain early in the century, and their numbers are back down now."

He let out a little hiss of breath and the woman's head dropped and stayed down for the better part of a minute, presumably because she was swallowing everything she could get out of him. She stood and smoothed her apron. As she turned to leave she had to do a little dodge around one of the customers, also female, who then knelt in front of Bill to take her turn. She was noisier, and he had to speak up a little to talk over the slurping sounds rising from his crotch.

"Measles is one thing, of course, actually fairly old science now. The thing is, viral evolution is always happening, and these days there are some human bad actors who are trying to lend it a hand. I work in a division of government partnered with what you would probably refer to as Big Pharma. The mandate is to stay ahead of the curve, as best we can. There's a very large amount of money involved. My current problem, everyone's current problem, really, is that a few months ago the curve got away from us."

A small line had formed, three to four women deep, varying as one finished with Bill, only to immediately be replaced by the next.

"The aforementioned bad actors managed to cook up something really, really bad, something that got away from them. I'm actually not cleared to tell you precisely what, but the good news is the government has a counter. A nearly perfect vaccine, a countervirus. The more bad news is that they haven't worked out a delivery system that they can cover 100% of the population with easily. It's one thing to fill the water supply with fluoride so our teeth stay healthy, it's another to make sure that as many people get exposed to a live, fragile virus as possible.

"And so we come to you and I. I mentioned government mind control earlier. You might pause to take in the fact that you, nor anyone else in this cafe, has seen fit to comment on anything out of the ordinary, like the women queueing up and servicing me, or that I've apparently had a dozen orgasms in the last twenty minutes and I'm still going.

"I..." I said, frowning.

"Biology is tricky and weird. We needed a delivery mechanism for the countervirus, and despite what you might think, I am not that delivery mechanism. I'm more like... the thing that makes the delivery mechanism. Each of the women you've seen swallow me today will, over the next 24 hours and for the next three or four weeks, begin to produce the countervirus. They will also feel a strong desire to exercise or otherwise get sweaty. Their sweat will aerosolize easily, and everyone who inhales it will be vaccinated against, well, that which I am not allowed to name. I also produce something from my sweat, but that's mostly the signal for the ladies, and to make everyone in the vicinity essentially ignore anything untoward happening around me.

I grunted as I came into the mouth of a young black woman wearing leggings and a sports bra. She had left his queue to kneel in front of me.

"And, as I'm sure you've guessed, you've got a new hobby now, thanks to a little something I put in your water earlier. The effects will last a little less than a year, and for the first couple of weeks you're going to experience... let's call it slightly compromised cognition. Sorry about that, I wasn't able to figure that issue out before it was too late to take any more time. I won't go too deep into why I picked you, other than the fact that you, I, and maybe two thousand other people in the continental US have the particular gene cocktail that makes this work."

He stood, zipping up his pants and gently guiding the women closest to him into the line that led to me now.

"Stay here, let what happens happen. Your assigned handler should be here in the next couple of hours, and they'll see you get home all right tonight, and they'll be around during the early days to take care of you. They'll send your resignation in tomorrow, and get direct deposit of your new government paycheck set up. I'll come back in a month or so after I've finished rounds, and we can really catch up. I'll take you out for drinks to apologize."

I stared dumbly after him as he picked his way around the women, out of the cafe, and into the Brooklyn summer.