CHICKENHAWK VIRUS: Science Fiction Mystery

“So far I just can’t find what these deaths have in common,” said DCI Smith to Dr. Jones, CSI.  “I understand that they’ve all died of fulminating infection of their prostate glands, but what caused it?”  

“Yeah.  Bothers me, too.  I’ve got some biopsies fermenting in petri dishes.  When I’ve got critical mass on them, I’ll do some comparison tests.  I’ve got a gut feeling it’s some kind of mutation or epigenetic addition to the genomes of these guys.  That is, a flu sort of thing.”

“I thought flu was a stomach and lung bug.  How come it just hits the prostate?”

“Well, it’s a viral fragment.  They have to find a cell that they can hook onto.”

“Gives new meaning to ‘hook-up culture,’ eh?”

The scientist looked thoughtful.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a sexual dimension.  Urological, maybe, but not so likely.  We need to look for behavior patterns.”

The first useful clue came in from the son of an English teacher, a gay man who had adopted the boy from a shadowed past.  Now a succeeding teenager, the boy had been in very bad shape when the teacher found him and fought the system to adopt him.  Even now the boy had nightmares if he were under pressure.  One morning the boy, pushing his Cheerios around in milk, mused,  “Funny how all the chicken hawks are dying.”  

“What?”  His father lowered the newspaper he’d been holding up to read.

“Oh, you know what a chicken hawk is — a guy who likes little boys.  I’ve been reading the back of your newspaper.  The obituaries are listing guys we kids all know are chicken hawks.”

“Where.  Show me which guys.”  He took out his ever-present highlighter and marked the deaths the boy indicated.  At first he argued.  “This guy is married!”

“Come on, Dad.  You think that makes a difference?  Lots of these pervs have families, even kids of their own.  You sorta wonder what happens to them.”

Shaken, the dad did a quick count: five.

“Actually, Dad,” in the tone teens so love when they’re the one who knew better, “There’s one perv that’s not there, but she’s a woman.  I ‘spose she’s more of a cougar.  She likes boys who are a little older, like my age.”  Then, seeing his father’s face, he hurried to reassure him.  “Not ME!  I know about women like that.  I run.”

“Does every teenaged kid in this little town know about these people?”

“Some of the girls don’t want to know about it.  A few of them tell their parents everything anyway, so we ignore them.”

“Why don’t you tell the authorities?”  This naiveté made the boy laugh so hard milk came out his nose.  “Sorry, I shouldn’t be stupid while you’re still eating.”  When he went down to the police station he found out just how stupid he was.  The cops brushed him off.  They knew he was gay.  Some of them had not been updated since 1940.  “But it looks like murder!” he protested.  

“You been readin’ too many murder mysteries.  Don’t read so much.  Get exercise.” 

But Miss White, the super-liberal public defender, overheard this exchange.  She had learned to take paranoia seriously.  She asked the English teacher, who was a friend of hers, for his marked up obituaries and made copies to take to Dr. Jones, CSI.  At Bertha’s Beatific Bakery  Dr. Jones sat down for a meet with DSI Smith, who knew his men were often prey to stereotypes.  Jones had made a list of his own: all the fatal fulminating prostate cases from the past month.  There were three dozen.

Smith jammed a donut into his mouth, getting powdered sugar on his mustache.  “Yep.  We actually have complaints on some of these guys.  A few are on our sex offender rolls.  Served time.”

Jones nibbled a bagel and adjusted his specs to look at the list.   “Well, here’s the thing, Smith.  I think this is a designer virus.”  He rubbed the bald top of his head to help himself think.

“Huh?”

“Someone has made this virus to target people through this vulnerability presented by their perversity.”  They chewed in silence for a few minutes.

Finally Smith laughed.  “Why try to prevent it?  Let’s just let the scumbags be eliminated.”

“Look at that list.  There are major figures on it: county commissioners, religious leaders, sports figures.  If this virus gets out of control — we don’t know who else it could infect — it’s destabilizing.  People will get paranoid and see all kinds of dangers and targets.  We’ll have vigilante problems.  These victims are DYING.  Without any kind of trial.”

“People die all the time.”  DCI Smith dusted his face with his paper napkin.  Then he sighed.  “Okay.  I get callous.  What did your tests show?”  He sort of blanked out on the details of a two-stage infection that required a non-symptomatic carrier who could transmit the “bug” to another individual where it was somehow activated.  

“I just have to figure out what activates it,” said Jones, finishing his bagel and the last of his coffee.  “So I’ll get at that problem.  Maybe it has something to do with being an adult male.”  He waved at the beaming Bertha as he left.

Then a teenaged boy came down with the fulminating prostate and no effort could quite save him.  This was the case that gave Jones the clues he needed to understand what it was that kicked up the virus into being a killer: it was testosterone at adult levels.  An old man came in with the affliction, but didn’t quite die.  He wasn’t molesting boys because of his hormonally driven desire — it was just a lifelong habit.  He didn’t quite have enough sex hormone to fulminate.

People began to realize how much more happy and confident the towns pre-adolescent boys were.  They went about their various projects whistling, though there was no obvious difference otherwise.  No one had suspected what had been previously going on — the constant anxiety they had thought was normal, maybe part of growth.  The English teacher and the super-liberal Public Defender took some croissant sandwiches from Bertha’s Beatific Bakery out for a shared Saturday brunch on a park bench in the town square.  “Have you noticed how much happier the boys are?” he asked the lawyer.

“I have.  And these are great sandwiches.  You know, they say Bertha started out as a research chemist and that’s why her baking is so good — it’s scientific!”

“Hmmmm,” said the English teacher and passed the info on to DCI Smith, who did a little investigating.  Jones confirmed it.  Together they went to confront Bertha and to force open the secret room in back of the bakery.  “I did it,” she beamed.  “The world is now a better place.  I infected the boys of this town with virally infused pizza and it has protected them ever since.  But not their predators.  Think of it as a kind of vaccination.”

Smith and Jones were debating whether to charge Bertha until they opened the secret room.  It turned out to be a fully equipped lab.  On the counter was a list of proposals for new viruses Bertha intended to design.  One was targeted at stupid people.  “Wait a minute,” squawked Smith.  “Some of my relatives are pretty stupid, but I’m fond of them.  I wouldn’t want them harmed.”   Jones pointed out that stupidity was sometimes in the eye of the beholder, socially defined.  Smith was not reassured.

In the end Bertha was accused and tried.  Public Defender White lost the case.  When the English teacher asked her how she felt about that, she couldn’t find anything coherent to say.  After a long, thoughtful pause she said,  "You know, I've eaten a whole lot of Bertha's pizza."

The English teacher grinned.  "Well, at least you won't get a fulminating prostate!"

OUT ON THE EDGE

Pressure and criticism is building against video games, saying they are violent, sexual and unsocial.  I take this to be a deflection of what ought to be aimed at the reality of things like “extreme fighting,” a big deal in Great Falls where many people don’t only admire it, but will pay major bucks to watch two people (not necessarily male) pound each other.  That’s not what I want to talk about here.  Instead I’m reacting to a video by Glen Schofield, a creator of hugely successful video games, explaining in TED style how he and his team create the games.  Much of it is about the art work of strange environments, like space, war, or foreign places.  So this talk is the “meta” level of human experience and the principles that inform arts of all kinds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6PX2n5Pj2pI#!

At the same time I just finished the May, 2013, issue of “Analog: Science Fiction and Fact.”  The juxtaposition triggered the thought that what used to be sci fi, is now often translated into vid games, a mix of reality and virtual construction, and that before there was sci fi there were “religious” stories.  We reach for what is beyond human.

Part of this is the work of understanding survival in the obvious three step process:  1) intake of sensations, 2) filtering and structuring, and 3) producing decisions about what to do.  But there is always more beyond what we know, that bushwhacks us or lifts us up with sudden grace.  Three words are markers for me:  the uncanny (that is, what is unaccountable but not necessarily threatening and possibly explained eventually); the horrible (a danger that can’t be processed); and the sublime (felt access to deep meaning of a transcendent sort).  These stories carry the abiding interest of anthropological inquiry into exotic groups like soldiers of fortune, astronauts, bedouin, gypsies, sex workers, CEO’s or -- okay, extreme fighters.  

Anthros talk about the “emic” versus the “etic” , but since those words unfortunately summon up in my own mind emus if not emetics, I prefer the theological idea of a circle inside of which the person is a believer, belongs to the culture, sees the world through those eyes, versus outside the circle where the practices, resources, and goals of those inside are understood as information, structures, and so on -- but objectively only one possibly arbitrary way of being.  Stories can be told from inside the circle, outside the circle or even a mixture of both.  Video games, mostly from inside the circle, intend to give us a compelling visual and auditory experience of being there, even if the “there” is impossible, and presses us into a mind set that presumably can let us “survive” there.  I suspect that strategy is as important as violence.  (I’m not a gamer.)

A dimension not often acknowledged outside the world of video gamers, but touched on by Scholefield is that of aesthetics: the poetic ability to summon up metaphors and images that are visionary beyond anything we normally experience.  Words and images have a special ability to sweep us into mental and emotional states.  They take us into the “feeling” concepts that are under our consciousness. 

We normally think of altered consciousness in terms of drugs.  Some remark on contemporary alcoholism among American Indians as the result of never having developed the use of toxins to affect their thoughts and release emotions.  But in fact American Indians commonly used environmental pressure on physical homeostasis (cold, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, wounds) to distort their mental processing -- sometimes on purpose and sometimes as a necessity.  Whether the result is desperation, rage, exaltation (maybe a combination), or a great peacefulness in the aftermath, is open to investigation.  The dynamics of emotion in extreme circumstances, especially those of bonding or shock, may be more consciously investigated in video games and movies than in the processing of real-world war acts.  If they were, we might understand PTSD better.  Could a video game help heal PTSD?

Schofield speaks of ransacking every source of ideas he can find, including comics and documentaries.  He mentions “The Devil Came on Horseback” and how the author of that book, Brian Steidle, a “peace keeper” in the Sudan, noted that dust storms can shut down the most powerful modern army machines, an idea he used as a “timer” -- a deadline pressing the action.   He does not include the most extreme horror: little girls from a school who were shackled in a huddle and set on fire -- alive.  Ashes and bones are all that remain -- plus whatever imagination shows us.  I don’t recommend the video but it’s on YouTube.  It IS extreme.

Schofield does show the orderly ossuwaries of skulls in the catacombs under Paris and tells us he used the image as a break in action.  And he mentions the French preoccupation with what is called the “New French Extremity” school of cinema.  These include “torture porn” and other atrocities that can be visited on the human body.  He does not mention the school of “enviro porn” showing the destruction of the “flesh” of the planet.  I’m not sure he’s aware of it.

We seem to be in a time when we search for extremes, boundaries, edges -- maybe because so many of them have been pushed back.  Maybe the most obvious example is our space probes, now outside the solar system.  In the opposite direction, there is a strange unease in finding the Higgs Boson -- on the one hand wanting it to truly be the end of all searching but on the other the nagging itch that there might be more, even rather hoping there is.  We also seek edges in our social arrangements.

Here is the creative advice of Schofield as he lists them on his video:

Keep an open mind.  Dismiss ego.  Consider all possibilities.

Assess priorities.  Establish an order.  List them.

Research while staying aware for the “golden nugget”.  Go deeper.  Then go wide, to related fields.  The obscure, the forbidden.  Have experiences.  Travel.  Don’t neglect details.  Take a zillion photos or sound tapes.  Notice the small human gestures and framings.  Shapes of spaces.

Use other people’s experiences, consultants, historians, scientists, leaders, the news, teaching tapes, field records.   Quote other films, esp. well-known ones.  Know “The Public Psyche.”

Pin-up boards, like the ones on cop shows and on the walls over the work counters of clothes designers.  Create reference booklets of photos and art images.  (For writers, save quotes, but be sure to include sources.) 

These warnings:

Inspiration may not take a direct path, but may turn out to be a labyrinth of multiple sources.

Sometimes the most crucial element comes by accident while researching something else.

The whole thing is likely to be messy -- you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how you will get there, and what you will end up with.

In the end there will be a “rule set” derived from free association and then “what if” questions.  These are the “paradigms,” the grammar of the story.  They might be trivial and conventional, or they might be transcendent and surprising. 

The following little schema is mine, derived from neurological research:

The black box :  What goes in (sensory)

What happens inside the mind (paradigms, expectations, deep beliefs, imagining)

What gets done about it and whether it leads to survival.

THEN, how to communicate all this material that may seem unpredictable, unprocessable, undoable, uncommunicable.  This is the ground of science fiction as well as video games.  What I miss in the latter is the “soft sciences” of psych and philosophy.  Maybe some of the energy of video games can be reverse-engineered into new sci-fi.  Or maybe fantasy is where the psych and philosophy have gone -- are those in video games, too?  A three minute search finds “The Longest Journey” on YouTube.  Female art student protagonist.  Multiple languages.  Many bits plus long records of other people’s games.