theplaguecourier

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 27TH, 2042

i wasn’t actually born here. i grew up in a little town called galena, population seven, give or take. it was honestly pretty cozy and nice. my mom died when i was three, pancreatic cancer, never knew her well enough to really think about that fact but it is extremely sad. my dad was attentive and caring and loving and then suddenly i was 23 and he was dead and the world was on fire. galena probably doesn’t exist anymore, haven’t been home since my dad died, though. you would think everything around here would feel familiar. i mean, there might honestly be more people in the sub-dorms than there were in my graduating high school class. socializing was never something i was extremely familiar with, and i only had a few friends when i was younger. galena was warm, though. it was a friendly place to live, i knew people’s names, i fell in love there. that’s the difference between galena, illinois and the apocalypse. no matter how many people are still out there, they won’t be like the people i grew up with. civility is a little bit gone. did you know that saying “god bless you” when someone sneezes is a relic of the bubonic plague, when people genuinely believed a blessing from god would keep you from dying? it didn’t, obviously. people died, a lot of people who had even been Blessed By God, but it’s still kind of comforting to think about a time when people really thought civility would stop a plague. we could use some civility right now, even if everyone is still going to die.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 26TH, 2042

the sun shines every day. i haven’t seen clouds in so long i really don’t remember what they look like. it never seems to rain, at least not when i’m outside. the apocalypse always looks so bleak and scary in movies, and, yeah, buildings are crumbling and vines are growing and people are dying left and right, but it’s awfully sunny. if we weren’t in the situation we’re in right now, i think there would probably be children running around. every day would be a great day to visit millennium park. as it is, millennium park is a massive, shining monument to nothing. i think i used to know what the bean was supposed to be, but i don’t remember at this point. i passed by it today and had to block reflected, glaring sunlight out of my eyes. the sun used to be something beautiful and powerful, granting life and taking it away all at once. it used to matter. nobody can even see it now. i don’t make deliveries at night, but i imagine that’s what the moon is like, too. i stood in my room and shouted today. i half-hoped if i shouted for long enough, somebody, maybe one of the couriers, maybe even somebody living in a real house way outside, would hear me. i knew they wouldn’t, but i’m trying to remember hope. i messaged elle. i tried to have a real conversation, which didn’t work, because i don’t remember what a real conversation even entails. surprise, no word on doc wendell’s miracle cure. she says she still believes the doctor she talked to, says he probably told the truth but there’s some complication with the cure, it doesn’t work right, they tested it on animals and it killed the animals or something. just a few more days, she said, and they’ll have everything worked out, and they’ll have a team set up to deliver it, and then, in just a couple weeks, it’ll all be behind us. she said maybe, if it works out, we’ll get out of here, and we won’t have to wear those stupid suits, and we won’t be hiding behind tunnels and walls anymore. she said she couldn’t wait to hear my voice. i fell asleep crying today, which is a friendly reminder that i can still feel things.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 25TH, 2042

when i started this journal, i expected to update it daily. i don’t actually know why. doc wendell didn’t say it had to be updated every day. lord knows i don’t have something interesting to say every day. more often than not, i find myself absorbed by my own increasingly bleak thoughts when i sit down to write. i don’t want to think about myself anymore. i don’t want to think about anything anymore. but here i am. i’m writing today. i’ll write tomorrow, too. i wonder why.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 24TH, 2042

i’ve stopped watching doc wendell’s videos. if he says something important, the community chat will talk about it and i’ll find out from them. i’ve stopped watching movies and listening to music, too. i make deliveries and i eat meals and i write in this journal, and that’s my entire life now. i delivered a letter today. i didn’t open it. who actually cares about some dopey, optimistic, letter-writing idiot who thinks the world is bound to bounce back any day now? my mind has been wandering back to alan and tram, to the letter i delivered something like 100 years ago, but actually just last week. at the time they seemed like starry-eyed lovers against the world. both of them could be dead by now and i wouldn’t know it. nobody would know it. if alan died, tram wouldn’t find out for weeks, or months, or for the rest of his life, which might also be weeks or months. the man i saw a couple of days ago was alan, on his way to see his lover, overwhelmed by loneliness. i mean, it wasn’t, it probably wasn’t anyway, but it might as well have been. if i didn’t know her face, it could have been elle. it could have been anyone, it doesn’t matter who it was. i wonder why i keep wandering out into those empty streets. the sky is blue, the sun is beautiful, and everything is silent, decrepit, dead. maybe the whole stupid world is alan, maybe it died two years ago and nobody’s bothered to look outside long enough to find out. i kind of think everyone has been dead for two years, not just the people who died, but the people who can’t make phone calls anymore because something is wrong with whatever satellites make phone calls and nobody can justify going to space to fix them, and alan and tram and all the lovers who send letters back and forth with human pigeons, and the human pigeons like me who deliver the letters then come back to their coop and eat their birdseed and pass out and wake back up to deliver more letters. we’re all dead, and none of us have checked our pulse to find out. i actually did just check my pulse and i’m not dead, technically. small comfort, i think.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 23RD, 2042

there’s a lot to think about from the time before Grey-4. i actually graduated college just a couple of months before the first cases hit chicago, the august before last. i think a lot about the last week of college, about how breaking up with donnie dreyfuss seemed like the most important thing in the world, about how i thought i was going to go out in the world and do all sorts of marine biology. less than a month later, i was watching my dad die from one side of a glass wall. the thing about the virus is that everyone knows loss because of it. there’s not a single person left on the planet who doesn’t know someone who died from Grey-4, and there’s not a single person whose job didn’t change because of it, and there’s not a single life that was not irrevocably changed by the outbreak. i’m led to wonder what the world would look like if doc wendell’s cure existed. would we go back to normal? could we, even? maintenance is a thing of the past. office buildings and bars are in ruins, there are scarcely enough people left to run more than the few factory farms that uphold the food centers... but more importantly, we all know what humanity looks like in its darkest hour now. we’ve all seen what happens when we’re driven apart, when loved ones die and systems shut down. how can we even face each other again? how can i go out and get a job in a new world where marine biology matters, knowing what i’ve done? knowing what i’m capable of, the kind of person i am? i’m not alone, either. Grey-4 is not the only thing that has killed husbands and wives and parents and cousins. every doctor left in the world has blood on their hands. how can anyone send their children for a wellness check-up with the person who killed their brother? how can the healthy people who closed their doors on the less fortunate healthy people face the world, knowing that they, too, were executioners? the world is not the same place it was two years ago, and it’s not just because everyone is sick. everyone is aware. we all know what lies on the opposite side of terror. it’s cruelty. nobody gets to be alive right now unless they know the secret virtue of cruelty. not me, not elle, not doc wendell, not the doctors or the farmers or the businessmen who hold onto every cent to spend on nothing while the world burns. we’re all the same now. every one of us is a killer, one way or another.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 22ND, 2042

i really can’t take it anymore. i made a delivery today, only one, from a food center, who would’ve guessed, and while i was walking through the monotonous empty city i did something i sincerely believed i’d never have to do. a man saw me. that doesn’t happen outside, people who aren’t couriers don’t go outside, but today a man saw me, and i kind of can’t even call him a man, he was something in between a man and a corpse. his breaths were heavy and raspy, they sounded like the way a steel wool blanket might feel on your skin, and he asked me for help. he told me he needed food, he needed food so desperately, he saw i had food, please, just a little bit, he didn’t want to die out here on the street. he looked the way my dad looked. i knew he was going to die on the street, with or without my help. there’s something in the training courses about what we’re supposed to do if we see someone like this outside. so i gritted my teeth, and i did what i learned from the training courses, and now i’m sitting back home writing about it and trying not to throw up or cry. there’s no cure for this.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 21ST, 2042

i’ve been thinking about what elle said all day. i delivered a package of dry fruit from a dad to his son - the dad actually asked me my name, asked me how i was, thanked me - and for the duration of the trip, all i could think of was hope. am i hopeless? the first thought that crossed my mind when elle told me there was a cure was that she was too naive. i couldn’t even let myself believe for one second that maybe it was true. there still hasn’t been any news on doc wendell’s mission, by the way. in his video last night, he didn’t seem particularly excited or unfocused, though i don’t know what an “excited” doc wendell would look like. if elle is right - and i still can’t really make myself believe she is - they won’t ask any of us to help. the 187 block of cure deliveries will be handled by the real good guys, the strong and smart folks upstairs in the regular dorms, the ones who don’t show up in our community chat, who have never seen us in their lives, who still made commissions during the 207 outbreak. doc wendell’s hand-selected team of cure delivery experts is not going to be headed up by a bunch of poor people in basements who live on Lemon Drink. i guess that’s a hopeless thought. i think elle is right about me, which i hate admitting, mostly because i hate thinking that i can’t hope but also a little bit because i hate giving her so much free reign over my thoughts. just thinking about her, thinking about the fact that she thinks i’m hopeless and is still reaching out and trying so hard to be a part of my life again, like a lifeboat bumping up against a bloated, floating corpse, somehow it makes me love her all over again. i can’t keep letting that happen. that thought sends me down a whole separate line of terrible, broken reasoning. i can’t let myself fall in love, because love from down here is some twisted form of hope, hope that someday you will be able to stand outside next to the one you love, and if i let myself hope, then i’ll let myself fall in love, and if i let myself fall in love, then i’ll be letting myself hope, so i can’t love because i don’t want to hope and i can’t hope because i don’t want to love, and honestly now that i’m writing it out i can’t even find a logical line to follow in that terrible mess, but the fact is that when i think about elle, and how she still has some kind of hope for me even though she can’t see any hope in me, i fall in love with her and that fully and truly terrifies me. like i said, it kind of makes me lose my mind. i am earnestly and honestly scared that if i love elle, she will love me back, and i will let myself be happy down here, and that will be the moment i let my guard down, and that will be the moment somebody dies, or loses their job and then dies, or loses their job and doesn’t die but doesn’t have anywhere else to return to, and is forced to spend the rest of their life wandering a plague-ridden world, like an endless commission with no cores on the other side. maybe that’s my problem. if i let myself hope, i set myself up to be crushed. if i stay cautiously miserable, nothing can disappoint me. if i keep not loving elle, then when i lose my job and i am forced to wander the world alone, i won’t lose a single thing. so i’m hopeless.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 20TH, 2042

rumors are going around the community chat today. apparently, doc wendell and his crew of merry doctors are about to start enlisting couriers for some mystery project. nobody can really agree on what the lucky few are going to be doing. jeb is saying they need a repair crew for the three food centers in our block, people who are equipped to move around and learn new tasks on the fly. ali heard from someone that Operation Preparation is back on the table, that the government finally found a planet that can suit human life, and couriers are the only people they can guarantee aren’t carriers. tommy says he thinks they’re getting ready for downsizing, and the selection is to see who gets to move into some new facility while the rest of us lose our jobs. elle messaged me something privately. she said she made a delivery to a doctor the other day. doctors are about the only people who will stop and talk to you most of the time, probably because they spend every day of their lives “treating” Grey-4 patients, which really means putting them in a room with a thick, soundproofed glass wall, and determining the most humane way to kill them without touching them. it’s pretty terrible. the bright side, though, is that doctors know what Grey-4 looks like, and they know couriers don’t have it. apparently, the doctor she talked to had a story. i’m recounting this with a pretty healthy amount of separation from the source, so don’t take it as gospel. the truth, as elle told it, is that doc wendell thinks he’s found a cure. supposedly, he finally isolated the Grey-4 virus, and did some mixing of whatever chemicals he’s hiding in his lab, and found out that there’s actually a pretty cheap way to kill it completely that nobody’s ever tried before. i don’t know if i believe elle. it seems like a really convenient story, like maybe the kind of story a doctor would make up, like maybe the kind of doctor whose only contact with the outside world since the outbreak started has been as an executioner, the kind of doctor who’s looking for a low-stakes way to live out a fantasy world where the answer is right there in front of them, the kind of doctor who knows a courier like elle isn’t gonna tell anyone important. she’s not lying to me, i know that, but i also know she’s a very easy person to lie to. she told me that if there’s a cure, they’re going to need a way to distribute it. that’s where the couriers come in, she said, we’re going to be the ones who distribute the cure, we’re going to save the world from Grey-4 and maybe then all our friends and families and loved ones will somehow not have died in vain, somehow dying sick in your own bed, overheating and suffocating and starving all at once, will actually have been some brave sacrifice, and we will be the ones to make good on that sacrifice. i asked her why she didn’t say anything in the community chat. she told me she didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, in case it isn’t true. i asked her why she told me. here is, verbatim, the saddest message i’ve ever received:

ELLE(003): I don’t really think you have a lot of hopes left.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 19TH, 2042

i woke up this morning feeling tired and honestly a little bit dead. i had breakfast for the first time in a long time - i bet you can’t guess what i ate - and immediately went back to bed. i slept for two-ish hours and i only woke up because my message device was going crazy. elle sent me a sync request, and i knew without opening it that she was asking me to watch the matrix. last month we decided to start syncing movies sometimes. we would trade off - on tuesdays, she got to pick a sci-fi movie, and on thursdays, i got to pick a romance or a comedy or a romantic comedy because i liked watching movies that made me smile because i was quickly losing the incentive to smile. after a little bit, though, the system fell apart. it became a sort of inside joke that every tuesday elle would pick the matrix and every thursday i would pick zoolander. she was more into it than i was, so even after i stopped paying attention to the schedule, she kept sending me sync requests to watch the matrix. i started ignoring her. i feel terrible about it, but i’ve kind of started ignoring everyone. today is a wednesday, for what it’s worth, but that doesn’t really matter because the schedule has long since stopped existing. i picked up my message device and, without answering the sync request, asked elle why she wasn’t at work. turns out she’s actually been doing great and has like ten thousand cores put away and she just wanted a day off. the unspoken end of that message was “a day off to watch the matrix with you, like how we used to.” i went back to sleep. yes, i also hate myself. let me explain a little bit. when i showed up at the block, elle had already been here for a month. she was the one who had worked here the longest, and she offered to help me get some commissions. it didn’t work, because getting commissions isn’t really a skill-based game, but i appreciated the gesture and me and elle started talking sort of all the time. i was, maybe, a little bit in love with her, but the kind of love that people who only know each other by their faces and their words can feel, which maybe isn’t so different from the kind of love that people who know each other by their voices get to feel. after a while, though, i couldn’t take it. i kept thinking about the times i had been in love before, with boys in high school who read foucault and girls in college who were really into role-playing games, and at some point i realized that i couldn’t stand to be in love with someone who could never read me philosophy books or teach me role-playing games, and i realized that no matter how many times i messaged elle about the matrix, it would not be the same as knowing her, at least not the way i needed to know her. some people can be in love without hearing their lover’s voice. i wish i was one of those people. what i realized was that if i kept messaging elle i would keep falling in love with her and if i never heard her voice or hugged her or actually met her outside of strong plastic tunnels, i would only lose my mind faster than i already have been. and i realized that about all the couriers i was making friends with. that’s why i stopped talking to the other couriers. that’s why i stopped answering elle’s sync requests, and that’s why i stopped bothering to ask customers questions. relationships don’t get to grow in sub-dorms, where everyone hides in their own little cell and sends their own little messages to strangers who live next door and acts like they’re getting close.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 18TH, 2042

i made a personal delivery again today. personal deliveries pay a whole lot more than corporate deliveries. places like food centers don’t have to pay as much in commissions, but normal people like you or me (probably more like you, i don’t spend a whole lot on deliveries given that i don’t know anyone who doesn’t live in the same building as me) pay usually around forty to sixty cores. they’re rarer, though. most people don’t bother delivering anything unless there’s a birthday or anniversary or some other reason they would want their friends to have things. this time it was a girl, probably in her 20s but, like most people, she didn’t stop to talk when she gave me the package. couriers are generally considered not-so-safe, which is silly because every time there’s a Grey-4 outbreak in a courier block it’s all the news talks about for a month and nobody could possibly place an order without knowing there was an outbreak. actually, a couple fun facts: there was an outbreak in block 203 a couple months ago, which is far enough away from block 187 that there would be no reasonable concern for any of us couriers, but close enough that every single person assumed we were all carriers and we would absolutely most definitely kill them if we touched their cardboard boxes full of eggplants and soda and knit sweaters and whatever else it is that people send around in boxes. we didn’t make a lot of money for a while, which was technically fine - we don’t pay rent in the subdorms, and there are free emergency meals available, which are somehow worse than the plain old Protein Food we can get for fifteen cores a block - but it was a little scary to watch the savings i had put away every time i earned more than i paid for dinner slip out of my account. it was also boring. the subdorms have televisions where you can pay a few cores to watch old movies from when people still made movies, or new cartoons because people do still make cartoons, sometimes, but they’re not really “good,” or, if you’re like most couriers, you can drop a couple more cores and watch porn. porn is another one of those things they mostly stopped making at least a year ago, but i think it would still take more time than most people have in their lives to watch all of it, so couriers stay occupied when they aren’t out making deliveries. personally, i spent most days messaging other couriers. a lot of the times i would message the ones who were out on deliveries just to see how the world looked out there, or i would message elle, but mostly it was the couriers on deliveries. they were mostly doing super-cheap jobs, sometimes as low as ten cores each, and about half the time people wouldn’t even answer their doors to accept the packages, even though couriers go out in unnecessarily large protective suits that have a brand name that i can’t remember. i promised a “couple” fun facts, so here’s the second one: there is not a single recorded example of a courier transmitting Grey-4 to a customer. anyways, i took the package from the girl who was probably in her 20s, and i brought it to a woman who was probably in her 40s, a mom or a tutor or something probably. i didn’t even bother to check what was inside. i hope she was happy with the service. i made 50 cores and i skipped dinner. i’ll be hungry tomorrow, but guess what, i’ll also be 50 cores richer tomorrow. not that it matters. unless you make enough to leave (which nobody ever does), cores aren’t good for anything except bad food and porn.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 17TH, 2042

shipment requests have been incredibly slow. mostly, food centers are sending meals out to subscribers and paying 20 cores per delivery, but you can’t really turn down commissions these days, so today i knocked out four food center shipments and earned enough to get a block of Protein Food and some Lemon Drink too, because i haven’t had Lemon Drink in a while. the first day i started working in the courier block, after months of unsuccessfully hunting for jobs that could be done online in the safety of a real house, they put me in the sub-dormitory, a little housing unit underneath the cafeteria that housed eighteen of us couriers, all with little separate tunnels leading up to the cafeteria so we don’t accidentally touch each other and die instantly. that’s only mostly a joke, i guess. anyway, along with my room key, they gave me meal vouchers for a month, because earning enough to eat as a courier in your first month is just about impossible. the vouchers came with a free Lemon Drink. back then i skipped the Lemon Drink every single day after the first voucher. it tasted like cleaning chemicals and sour water. i wish i had just held onto the vouchers. it’s been about two months since that day and i would give just about anything for 29 free Lemon Drinks. i guess it helps to not have anything else to drink except artificial water, which is like water if you have forgotten what water tastes like, which i guess i have now. Protein Food is about the blandest thing in the world, but it’s also about 85% of my diet. on a really, really lucky day, i’ll make enough cores from commission to buy something else, maybe a pizza or a burger, but they’re all basically just Protein Food with a few fancier and more expensive chemicals inside. so that’s what we eat in courier block 187. i mean, the really good couriers, like, the ones who don’t have to live in the sub-dorms and can live in just the regular dorms, some of them subscribe to food centers and eat Real Chicken And Real Pasta And Sometimes Even Grape Soda, but most of us eat Protein Food. the funny thing about being a courier is that you pretty much live with seventeen other people literally feet away from you, and you’ll never know what their voices sound like. when you join the block, you’re automatically entered into a community chat where everyone can talk to each other or you can just talk one on one with somebody if you want, and i guess that means we’re all friends now because they’re the only people i’ve talked to for more than a couple seconds for the last two months of my life, and i know them all by face - the tunnels that lead between our rooms and the cafeteria are made of a durable but transparent plastic - but if one of them called me and spoke to me, i’d never know who it was. i said that was funny earlier but actually now that i’m thinking about it it’s a little bit sad.

[theplaguecourier]

MARCH 16TH, 2042

doc wendell said the couriers should start keeping online journals, so that’s what i’m doing now. he said that maybe it would be less lonely if we could write something that people could see and read and respond to. i think it’ll be a real surprise if someone sees and reads and responds to this, especially since there’s about a million couriers who are probably in more interesting parts of the world and who are definitely getting the same exact advice from doc wendell and who are definitely writing about their way more interesting and cool big adventures, but i guess it’ll be nice to at least talk to someone who isn’t paying me to bring them bread or condoms or whatever. i predict that most entries will look something like, “i biked across a very large and very empty expanse to move a block of freeze-dried ice cream from some kind, rich grandmother’s house to her mean, rich grandson’s house.” still, it’s nice to talk. today i got to do something i don’t usually get to do. i got to move a letter. people don’t send all that many letters these days because you can just text all your dearly-beloveds and let them know that you still haven’t caught Grey-4, and you hope they haven’t either, and then it’ll quickly devolve into a series of i-love-you-i-love-you-mores, and there will be no need for some terrible nosey courier to look at all the words you want to say. i should clarify, couriers 100% are reading all the letters you write, so i don’t blame anyone who doesn’t send them. today’s was from a young man named tram, or maybe nicknamed tram because who the hell names their son tram, and it was written to another boy named alan, which is definitely not a nickname because who the hell would choose to be called alan. tram let alan know that he loves him very much, and that Grey-4 hasn’t hit him yet, and that his dad’s e-service went just fine but was very sad, and that he was hoping that someday all this plague stuff would die down and that he could touch and hug and kiss alan again and to be honest i felt supremely uncomfortable reading tram’s beautiful and heartfelt letter, but couriers don’t get to meet people, we just get to live their lives through the letters they send once a year to their best friends and boyfriends and quarantined lovers and quarantined parents, etc., etc. it’s nice to read a letter and know that someone out there is still in love. i earned sixty cores from that delivery. it was the only one i made all day. dinner was a block of Protein Food, a food that is full of protein and made of something. as per usual, i am lonely, and doc wendell’s nightly video conference for the couriers was nice, but it wasn’t as nice as thinking about alan and tram and the idea that someday they will get to be in love the way people are supposed to be in love again. goodbye and goodnight from the plague courier.