Welcome To Hellville - Part 2 (1/2) By Rich Mills 8th October 2040

Next Page, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

The filter system in Panal (The aging-should-know-better-arty-farty-toss cafe bar that should have been closed down 30 years ago.) must have been faulty. I'm still feeling really crap this morning, two days on now. Either that or I'm coming down with a wet season cold. Which is a major pain in the arse if that is the case, which I feel it maybe, as I can never shake it off once I've got one. Wet season colds and flu just hang-on in there all season, taking months to fight off. When you're living in such a constantly damp environment the bugs run rampage.

Long gone is any form of remedy, or simple way of dealing with such illness, unless you are super-rich. Only the Super-rich are wealthy enough to have filter systems in their homes, offices and shopping-multiplexes, designed to avoid getting the super-super-bugs that now multiply and mutate at a massive rate all around us.

There are no remedies anymore, even for those who can afford to buy into the extortionate health care schemes there are available to those who can cough the credits it costs. Even if you drank a bottle of bleach, and had a bath in sulphuric acid, the super-super-bugs would just give themselves a shake and then get on with systematically destroying your immune system.

One good thing though, at least my immune system is strong enough to survive as I've been hit by these bloody things so many times. I have what they call a muto-immune system. Quite common for children these days to be born with immune systems that too can mutate to cope with the hyper-viral-environment they are being born into, but unusual for someone in their to have developed one as I did during my childhood.

Although it isn't all so rosy having such a muto-immune system, as there is a danger of it turning into something that will literally eat me from the inside one day. Creating its own super-super-bug that will break free of my body and become another one of the countless killer bugs that fill the unpurified air around us. This danger can be suppressed or at least lessened by drugs, but who can afford that these days? One good thing in all this doom and gloom that cheers me up though is, that the Super-rich have super-crap immune systems. Years of anti-bacterial sprays, and preventative vaccines have fucked them up.

They are weak physically, and simply unable to cope with illness without resorting to drugs or genetic reconstruction of their immune systems offered by the massively costly corporate health care schemes.

Now the global corporate genetics industries are still relatively in their infancy, even though they have been going on since before I was born. People are still a little scared of the prospect of having their genetic code played around with, without a full and complete knowledge of the potential consequences of such a procedure, not only to them but their future generations. After all, the only people who can afford to have this done are the Super-rich, and they don't want their precious genetic line damaged at any time in the future. Money is power and to them power is everything. When you play at being a god, there are no guarantees.

There have been incidents were someone who have had such a procedure has gone through a major retrogressive mutation process. Many of these stories only exist in urban myth, as the powers that be do their best to keep them out of the mass-market-corporate-media. Stories of people quite literally turning into rampaging monsters, people exploding or imploding, some turning completely inside-out without warning. Everyone has a gruesome tale to tell. Many probably have been made-up, many more are likely to be true. Whatever the reality of these nightmarish myths, the truth is that genetic reconstruction of any form is a very risky business.

Now the one group of people I've forgotten to mention in this big bug water logged world of ours is those who don't have the money to fuck-up their immune system, or are born with a muto-immune system, or developed one like myself. Those are the people of the Viral-under-class, who are better known to us and themselves as the Wombles. (This relates to a late 20th Century kids TV show about underground dwelling creatures who cleaned-up a polluted world. Also a activist movement that developed in the early years of the 21st Century, who too wished to clean-up a polluted world.)

Continued Welcome To Hellville - Part 2 By Rich Mills.. Next Page

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