Cholera

People talked of the days of cholera, of Xochitlán's baptism in a great flood of diarrhea and vomit.  In those days there were wives and husbands, children, mothers and fathers just gone.  The water was unclean and there is no deliverance from water. 

They said one-in-four perished.  I didn't believe in the 1990s a medieval epidemic wiped out a town like this with no peep heard elsewhere.  The government underreports outbreaks and it was an unbearable tragedy here whether one in four or one in forty.  Xochitlán's torment was in the still dirt streets, the ramshackle homes at the periphery, the dust-blown open market and in the church of broken walls that stood as the headpiece of the town square called the zócalo.

It was three years after the epidemic.  Sweat soaked our shirts as we raced again in the sun past men with straw hats plowing and harrowing new milpas and breaking up dark soil beneath the pale dust.  We slowed to saunter at a reverent pace as we walked those streets near the graveyards where from time to time other men with straw hats, muscled from years of labor, would stand quietly with calloused hands and infected nails clutching their deep-lined faces or kneel at wooden crosses and weep.

Future Headlines

Student Discovers O(log log N) Prime Factorization Algorithm | MIT Student Found Dead | Intel Delivers 128 Core Processor | Protein Folding Fully Modeled | Human Brain Functionally Described | Half of World's Population Found on the Net | Wireless Cortical Device | Computational Model of White Blood Cell Complete | Games Jack In | Immortal! Gene Therapy Makes Wealthy, Healthy Immortal | Computational Model of Human Body Complete | New US Childbirth Policy Follows EU

Just so you know, the below stories are fictional..

Student Discovers O(log log N) Prime Factorization Algorithm

COMPUTER SCIENCE NEWS (March 19, 2009) - Brad Halloway, an MIT graduate student, claims to have discovered a prime factorization algorithm that has a guaranteed complexity of O(log log N) where N is the number to be factored (or O(log N) where N is the number of digits in the number to be factored). Researchers are eager to see the algorithm, which Halloway will present in person in November. A number of researchers have provided him with several million-digit numbers, all of which are products of two very large prime numbers. Halloway claims that he was able to factor each of the numbers in about one week. The researchers verified that the factorizations were correct. "If this is true, there will be earth-shattering consequences for computer security .. (more)

MIT Student Found Dead

NBC (March 22, 2009) - An MIT student, Brad Halloway, was found dead in his apartment today, victim of an apparent robbery. The perpetrators carried off a computer and a video game console. This is the latest in a recent string of so-called "Video-Game Burglaries" around the campus. "This is the first where someone has died - he must have surprised the perpetrator," said Capt. .. (more)

Intel Delivers 128 Core Processor

PRESS RELEASE (November 6, 2013) - Today Intel Corporation ships the first of its 3.2GHz 128-core processors manufactured with a new 16 nanometer process pioneered .. (more)

Protein Folding Fully Modeled

SLASHDOT (December 6, 2014) - Thanks in part to the Folding @ Home project, researchers announced today that the long-outstanding problem of modeling the way proteins fold has been solved. .. (more)

Human Brain Functionally Described

SLASHDOT (April 19, 2015) -Scientists today unveiled a functional model of a human brain running on one of the world's most powerful supercomputers .. (more)

Half of World's Population Found on the Net

CNN (January 1, 2016) - It is now possible to find more than fifty-percent of the world's population on the internet. .. (more)

Wireless Cortical Device Demonstrated

MSN (August 12, 2017) - The Cortico device announced this week provides a complete-sensory brain interface to its recipient. Cortical Labs also introduced the surgical equipment necessary to implant the interface. Cortical states that the equipment is self-sufficient and requires no human surgeon to oversee the procedure. .. (more)

Computational Model of White Blood Cell Complete

JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY (July 12, 2019) - ".. this is a monumental day for computational pharmacology .." (more)

Games Jack In

TIME (June 23, 2020) - A new generation of games are set to hook directly into several leading cortical interfaces for an experience that's "far more reality than virtual," .. (more)

Immortal! Gene Therapy Makes Wealthy, Healthy Immortal

USA TODAY (May 23, 2026) Front Page - It is a move that critics compare to the rich trampling the poor in a rush to leave the Titanic. Yesterday, the FDA approved gene therapy for rendering those (very few) who can afford it - and are in good health - biologically immortal. The subject of intense controversy since deemed technically possible only seven years ago, it has only now .. (more)

Computational Model of Human Body Complete

JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY (October 3, 2029) - ".. we've obtained the Holy Grail of computational pharmacology .." (more)

New US Childbirth Policy Follows EU

USA TODAY (February 8, 2040) - Following in the footsteps of the EU, the United States today introduced a childbirth policy that requires government permission to bear a child .. (more)

.. and this list is subject to change without notice. ;)

Language Vector

"What cannot be spoken of cannot be defeated."


My head isn't clear and I pass in and out of sleep. I'm infected.

Stay with me as I type this. I'll give you a little background. In the 1950's the last of the South Fore engaged in ritual necrophagia and the prion disease Kuru recently claimed the last victims among them.  The last that ate the thoughts of another.  Nearby, another Papua New Guinea tribe discovered a more pernicious and far more horrifying threat about forty years ago.  For years, their population shook and trembled for a reason unknown to them.  They pointed to a cave in which words approximated by the English phrase The Black Whisper of Death were inscribed. "The plague came from in there," they said.

8-43 0x12a_rr . ;09]]

Globalization efforts brought the whisper heard round the world.  Oh, look! On the overhead TV, that image..


A beloved American religious leader at a political celebration passes an attractive, conservatively dressed young woman. As the light of recognition flares in his eyes, he warmly greets her by name. She smiles mechanically. Suddenly horrified he whirls around to locate the camera capturing an unmistakable expression of humiliation.

It's on TV every other day.  She was a minor porn star.  It was not that he greeted her that condemned him.  He could have legitimately known her in a number of ways.  Even had he known her biblically it would have been taken in stride.  Who cares?  It turns out his televised shame indicted him more decisively than a living-room stash of indecent DVD s.  After all, it is shame and little else that condemns us.  The tabloids carried that image for months next to the articles decrying Death's Whisper.  It doesn't matter.  The young woman and the religioso are dead now, victims of their own fascination with their tabloid fame and more directly, victims of its adjacent coverage.

In this case it is knowledge that destroys. dsf6 -saf ;; This is not a disease borne by a bacterium, a virus, or a prion. See, this whisper is a disease carried by the most insidious of vectors - language itself. To simply understand what it is is to be irreversibly afflicted. What cannot be spoken of cannot be defeated. I am condemned already and by writing I damn my readers. But there will be no readers..

Some said it was the Creator, dropping in a kill switch to flip at the turn of a phrase.  It's adaptive. They named the disease in the native tongue and it killed them. Scientists described it in English and French and Spanish. It killed them. The blind read of it in Braille, the deaf signed in ASL. Experts from around the world spewed a rainbow of euphemisms. It killed millions. It is not bound to any particular lexical form - perhaps its representation in the brain creates the disease ex nihilo. I don't really know. We did not discover the mechanism that drives this epidemic.

It may be strange to think of language spreading disease, but it is not unique.  What is it that viral machines inject into living cells if not RNA/DNA coded assembly language pathogens?  I know that machines aren't affected because words are transparent to them. Still, machines played the pivotal role in the spread -&89sd(( of the disease as its immune and efficient carriers.

Can you imagine (no, you can't - because there is no you) seeing all those around you die for an unknown cause of death?  As death certificate handlers really understood the meaning of unknown cause of death they came down with the disease in droves.  Suddenly, the certificates began listing things like Onychocryptosis and Internecivus raptus.  Those who witness the deaths but don't know the cause are inexorably driven to discover it.  (Most of) those who know, and are infected, try desperately to not reveal it to anyone and have always failed.  Now though, strangely, I'm compelled to type this even if I have to type with the keyboard upside down to keep the blood from my hands from running into it.  I can no longer hope for any resolution but the obvious.

And I wait for that resolution even as the asymptomatic machines auto-hyperlink this document. No future, fatal question will go unanswered action diminishes c0ntracts freedom entered invalid through fear judged excuses penalty attached contrary vectpr for reflex arc st1mulus unexpexedly 0kers afwe ~pwnd xasl gatattaccaagggtc link <> link 032 . . .

(story copyright (c) 2007 Paul D. Senzee)