Memetic fever

I can have MeMe fever, LOL? ROFL, look at Claire being all worried about Burus for nothing.

New York was a half-alive ruin; electronic billboards smashed and window displays boarded over, tipped up and trashed. DataVision on 38th looked like a storm had hit it. An empty plastic bag fluttered in the breeze, snagged on a shard of broken glass in one of the windows. A desultory flag for the new age.

People hurried to and fro as if nothing was wrong. There was a resiliency to the city, a stubborn tight-jawed, hard-eyed sort of stubbornness to the commuters, a gritty determination that had last been overtly visible sometime around the Great Depression and had flowed like a powerful undertow just beneath the surface ever since. Claire watched from beneath her lashes, her eyes hooded, her head downcast. In many ways the scene looked identical to Before.

But there were clues there for the careful observer, beyond the broken billboards and the smashed Best Buy storefront on Fifth Avenue. Little things were missing.

Keeping her head down, matching the others’ steely commitment to avoiding eye contact and - insofar as it was possible - general human contact, Claire kept walking. The only discernible difference from Before was that the lack of eye contact was undeniably a deliberate choice, not due to the irresistible draw of a brightly lit screen held in sweaty hands.

Times Square was desolate, walled by broken glass and shattered dreams. Where lights once glowed there was only darkness and cracked screens - nothing remained of its dreamy Before splendour, there was only the reality of Now.

Claire’s offices were intentionally inconspicuous, fresh paint mostly hiding where letters had been removed from above the door and painted over a nice shade of beige. Some colour with a name like ‘indistinct eggshell’ or ‘dull monotony’. If you squinted, and knew what you were looking for, you could still make out the vague shape of some of the letters.

Walking under the ghostly ‘VIAC’, Claire closed the door quickly behind her, doing her best not to dislodge the cardboard taped hastily over the glass. Should have been replaced months ago, but with the workforce what it was after the outbreak, well... it worked as well semi-permanently as it did as a stop-gap. And it had the added advantage of making the place look unused, so no-one bothered coming in to harass them. They hadn’t even written their name on the doors; the first sign that Colcaven Communications was based in the building was a - very discreet - sign on the third floor and the quiet hum of servers through the walls.

Claire plopped down at her desk and fired up her machine. The spartan loading screen was chewing through its opening processes, complete with scrolling text-updates - booting OS, defrag, image cleansing, virus scan - when Burus poked his head over the desk partition.

“Long weekend?”

“Far too short. Can’t believe it’s Monday already.”

“LOL. You still hungover from Friday, or...?”

Claire twitched, her hand tapping at her phone in her pocket, feeling it’s comforting weight. Burus always talked like that, even Before, but it was still unnerving. It made her uneasy, so she smiled reflexively and shrugged, hoping he’d go away.

“Nah, but wouldn’t be surprised if Ivan called in ‘sick’ today.”

Burus laughed, tossing his head back with the force of it, his blonde curls bouncing wildly around his head.

“And for the next week! ROFL! Wasn’t he drinking Sugar Bombers at one point? He’s defs subbed to the whole YOLO thing, ya know what I mean?”

Claire forced herself to relax and lean back into her chair, bring up the text-based client with a few clicks of her mouse. She remembered Ivan, on Friday, downing a row of sticky-looking blue shots that made her teeth ache to look at, and later on a series of glasses in all shades of the rainbow with little umbrellas and assorted crystallised fruits on the end of toothpicks. It had felt surreal, even after two years, that not one person had had their phones out to photograph the showy drinks for the ‘Gram or Facey or any other social media. They just knocked them back and moved on, living in the here and Now.

The morning was a chore - Ivan didn’t call in suck, but his sullen, heavy-headed presence was hardly preferable - and Claire had nothing to distract her from Burus’ quiet muttering as he worked. The news was far too depressing. An outbreak in Baltimore was being blamed on a Japanese family travelling to the US, despite the fact that Japan had cracked down on tech hard enough to scuttle its own economy for decades. And more cases in Cali, although that close to Silicon Valley it almost went without saying. An enormous H1MeMe1 hotspot, and still active even Now.

Work was no help. Everything was working perfectly, and it was a record low for support requests. Burus snaffled the latest one - something involving a toaster, what the hell were they doing? - and moments later a quiet OMG reached her ears. His laughter was a distressing mix of LOLs and genuine guffaws.

Claire fingered her phone and wondered if she should report Burus. He’d always talked like a text message written by an impatient person, all abbreviation and acronyms, but even he’d seemed to realise it was a bad idea to continue using his ‘unique’ patois after H1MeMe1 started spreading.

There was a brief moment following Burus’ addressing a phone call with a semi-constant stream of IMHOs, BTWs and putting the customer on hold with a BRB when she met Ivan’s bleary eyes across the room. He was wondering the same thing, she could tell. The way his gaze dipped away after a second and he hunched back over his desk spoke volumes, even if they might be mostly projected. Claire found herself boredom-Yahoo!-ing how far sound travelled to try and work out if Ivan could hear Burus’ words.
Results inconclusive.

Perhaps Burus was just feeling more relaxed. It was better than the alternative. Less headline worthy. No-one ever wrote news articles on tech start-up employees have a chill day at work, but Claire couldn’t shake the awful spectre of a different headline.

TEXT-COM COMPANY CAUGHT IN MeMe OUTBREAK

It wouldn’t matter that they had been the first to get on board with all-text comms and devices. In fact it would make it worse.

Her fingers drummed on her phone screen. The number for the MeMe hotline glowed accusatorially up at her. A false report could be as bad as a positive test result for Burus given the work they did; it was a liability to have someone even suspected of MeMe contraction working in the comms sector. People needed communication, connection, now more than ever. The ‘net had been quarantined and stripped back as far as possible, but true eradication was impossible and cutting it off laughable. The web was like oxygen in this day and age. No-one wanted to go back to phones and letters and faxes; the risk was worth it, so far as the population was concerned. You just needed to be careful. Pictures used to be worth a thousand words, now they were several thousands in fines and possible jail-time.

A notification buzzed on her phone, a violent and unfamiliar shade of scarlet.

BURUS

Message from Burus. Jpeg attached.

Claire flinched, nearly dropping her phone. It shouldn’t even be possible to send images on their system, not without serious jail-breaking at the administrator level, and there was only one reason anyone would stoop to that level. She pressed ‘CALL’, and listened to the dial-tone.

Across from her, Burus watched his screen, glassy eyes reflecting the images scrolling behind the glass.
“LOL” he whispered, clicking. Claire’s phone buzzed again - new message.