Fake Blog

This is my brief narrative that is due today for the first part of project four. It's meant to read like somebody else's blog entry in the not too distant future (what's a score here and there, right?).

October 26th, 2022

Howdy Readers,

So today’s the day. After weeks of media hype we’ve finally reached the 20th anniversary of the strange plague that the pundits at the time dubbed “the people who grinned themselves to death”. For those of you who have been living under a rock lately (or who are just too young to remember) I’ll provide a quick recap:

On October 23rd 2012 two local hopitals here in San Jose reported one case each brought in through the E.R. of a strange sort of catatonia. The victims were largely nonresponsive, they would not speak, showed no signs of understanding when spoken to, and would only change position when physically moved, and most disturbingly, their faces were frozen in huge, happy grins. Doctors at each hospital were stumped, but not yet alarmed, as there was no reason to believe they were looking at anything than an isolated case of mental breakdown of some sort. The following day brought no new cases and nothing more was thought about it until the morning of the 25th when 14 more cases were brought into ERs around the city by frightened family members and the medical professionals began to realize that they were looking a new sort of epidemic. The number a victims rose steadily as the day progressed, maxing out emergency services capability to care for them. The CDC was called in to help contain the situation, although by this time reports were coming in of similar occurances in other places around the country. The true horror of the situation however didn’t hit until twenty years ago today, when San Jose awoke to discover that 40% of its population had become what would soon be known as “grinners”. The unaffected few could wander the streets passing crowds of people who had just stopped going about their business whereever they happened to be and were just standing there grinnning manically at nothing. They were completely nonresponsive, they could be posed like dolls, they were breathing, their hearts were pumping, but nothing else was happening. They would not eat or drink unless fed by I.V. in the overloaded hospitals and it wasn’t long before people began to die.

At the time no one knew what was going on--it was sudden and terrifiying and a complete mystery. It would be five weeks before doctors and scientists were able to discover the cause anf the cure, and when the knowledge was given to the public the riots began. The grinners had been infected with happy bugs--the cyborg product of a secret military project meant to be used to incapacitate enemy soldiers and populations for easier conquest. The tiny little bugs were partially mechanical--tiny nanorobots married to living insect tissue in the lab. The insects, controlled by HI-MEMS technolgy, outwardly appear no diffent than your average gadfly but when they bite they leave the host infected with microscopic cyborg parasites that make their way to the victims brain, attaching themselves to the the hypothalamus where they release their chemical load directly into the pleasure center of the brain, leaving the victim tractible and helpless. Learning that it was our own goverment that had, albiet accidentally, set this horror on its citizens was the last straw and the violence that followed was almost as devatating to the population as the infestation itself.

Nearly everyone lost people they loved in that month twenty years ago, and nobody who lived through the experience can ever look at a grinning face in quite the same way.

There are programs and memorials throughout the nation tonight, and I’m planning to attend the vigil being held at City Hall to remember the dead.

The End.

That's how it stands at the moment--I may well feel compelled to fuss with it some more as the project moves along as I've never been very good at leaving well enough alone....

--The Wombat