Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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T-minus 26 days to DEADLINE.

Allentown, Pennsylvania. June 11th, 2014.

Hazel Allen was well and truly baked. Not just a little buzzed, oh, no; she was baked like a cake. The fact that this rhymed delighted her, and she started to giggle, listing slowly over to one side until her head landed against her boyfriend's shoulder with a soft "bonk."

Brandon Majors, self-proclaimed savior of mankind, ignored his pharmaceutically-impaired girlfriend. He was too busy explaining to a rapt (and only slightly less stoned) audience exactly how it was that they, the Mayday Army, were going to bring down The Man, humble him before the masses, and rise up as the guiding light of a new generation of enlightened, compassionate, totally bitchin' human beings.

Had anyone bothered to ask Brandon what he thought of the idea that one day, the meek would inherit the Earth, he would have been totally unable to see the irony.

"Greed is the real disease killing this country," he said, slamming his fist against his own leg to punctuate his statement. Nods and muttered statements of agreement rose up from the others in the room (although not from Hazel, who was busy trying to braid her fingers together). "Man, we've got so much science and so many natural resources, you think anybody should be hungry? You think anybody should be homeless? You think anybody should be eating animals? We should be eating genetically engineered magic fruit that tastes like anything you want, because we're supposed to be the dominant species."

"Like Willy Wonka and the snotberries?" asked one of the men, sounding perplexed. He was a bio-chem graduate student; he'd come to the meeting because he'd heard there would be good weed. No one had mentioned anything about a political tirade from a man who thought metaphors were like cocktails: better when mixed thoroughly.

"Snozberries," said Hazel, dreamily.

Brandon barely noticed. "And now they're saying that there's a cure for the common cold. Only you know who's going to get it? Not me. Not you. Not our parents. Not the kids. Only the people who can afford it. Paris Hilton's never going to have the sniffles again, but you and me and everybody we care about, we're just screwed. Just like everybody who hasn't been working for The Man since this current corrupt society came to power. It's time to change that! It's time to take the future out of the hands of The Man and put it back where it belongs—in the hands of the people!"

General cheering greeted this proclamation. Hazel, remembering her cue even through the haze of pot smoke and drowsiness, sat up and asked, "But how are we going to do that?"

"We're going to break in to that government-funded money-machine of a lab, and we're going to give the people of the world what's rightly theirs." Brandon smiled serenely, pushing Hazel gently away from him as he stood. "We're going to drive to Virginia, and we're going to snatch that cure right out from under the establishment's nose. And then we're going to give it to the world, the way it should have been handled in the first place! Who's with me?"

Any misgivings that might have been present in the room were overcome by the lingering marijuana smoke, and the feeling of revolution. They were going to change the world! They were going to save mankind!

They were going to Virginia.

***

A statement was issued today by a group calling themselves "The Mayday Army," taking credit for the break-in at the lab of Dr. Alexander Kellis. Dr. Kellis, a virologist working with genetically-tailored diseases, recently revealed that he was working on a cure for the common cold...

When will you Rise?
Tags: deadline, don't be dumb, mira grant, pandemic time
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  • 44 comments
I'm guessing it was at least partly because the twits snaffled the Kellis virus before Dr Kellis was done testing and refining it. It's entirely possible it was going to do what it did anyway, in which case Dr Kellis might have at least partly deserved the venom his name has been spoken with in-world for years, but I prefer to believe that he would have realised it mutated a bit too readily in the lab and tweaked something important to prevent that if only he'd been given the chance. :(

...Because Seanan has written him as a nice guy, and I like him. :P :)
At one particular signing Q&A, the A went along the lines of (paraphrasing broadly) "But it wasn't ready for release yet, because there were some concerning side effects that would have to be taken care of before one could even THINK about human trials..."