ERASER

ERASER

(tentative title)

(Draft: Rough)

UNEDITED PROOF

SLATED PUBLISH DATE: 19 NOVEMBER 2009

ERASER

By

Ryan J. Van Seters

It started in California; at least we think it did. It spread so fast that no one knew what to do about it, and finding out where it started wasn’t nearly as important as containing it. It’s strange when you think about it, who would have thought something so simple would be so critical.

The first report was about a firefighter, “Blank Blake” they called him. He went into a five alarm fire with all the training in the world, then he just forgot everything, his training, his job, the fact that he was in a burning building, everything.

The building started to collapse around him and he just stood there, water line in hand, and let it burn him. By the time his friends got to him over seventy percent of his body had been burned, and when he woke up in the hospital the next morning he didn’t remember anything; not his training, not his station crew, not his wife, not even his kids. Dr. Adams called it “Acute Amnesia” said it wasn’t uncommon in traumatic events, if he only looked past the obvious, who knows what might have happened.

A couple of days later the doctor, M.J. Adams, watched blankly while a patient went into cardiac arrest. By the time the nurses came in the patient was dead, and Dr. Adams was curled in the fettle position crying hysterically.

It didn’t take long from there. Eventually things became more violent; husbands killed wives, grandmother attacked their grandchildren, countless car accidents riddled the highways, planes fell from the sky. The president called for an immediate quarantine of California and sent a specialized team from the CDC out to investigate.

They quickly labeled it the “Eraser Virus.” That was about as far as they got. Every case was so different, some people lost five years of memories others lost fifteen. One thing was the same; all of them lost the ability to create new memories. They could remember one day, but as soon as they went asleep, that was it, it was gone!

The quarantine wasn’t enough, people were starving, raiding, mugging, burglarizing; it was pandemonium. The president had no choice, he sent in the National Guard. They separated the infected and locked them down, not even families were allowed to stay together. Office buildings quickly became makeshift prisons with each office acting as a dormitory with no food or bathrooms. It took less than a month for every company in California to become bankrupt. By that time, Eraser had spread.

A dozen cities in Europe, three times that in China, Africa, Australia, every continent was infected in less than a month. No one knew how Eraser was spreading, what made it communicable, or how to contain it. It wasn’t just other countries either, 263 of the 280 CDC employees were infected, and they had been wearing level four response suits, the kind that protected you from nuclear fallout. Almost the entire national guard dropped off the radar, all of them abandoning their radios and roving the streets aimlessly with gun in hand, as if they were the lost children of Armageddon.

It took less than three months for the world as we know it to fall apart. The internet went quiet, television screens showed nothing but static fuzz, radio stations disappeared, mail stopped coming, newspapers stopped being printed, and, most importantly, we were running out of food.

We didn’t know what to do, so we fended for ourselves while the world around us died. It didn’t take long for the violence to spread. Instincts took over, people were starving and those that weren’t locked in a room fought each other to the death for little more than table scraps. We all just assumed that this was how the world would end. That was before we found out Jonathan Adler wasn’t one of the erased.

Before Eraser hit Jonathan Adler owned the largest multimedia company in the U.S.; television, print, digital, you name it, he owned a piece of it. Everything I had ever read or heard about John was bad. Even his own publications ridiculed him as a megalomaniac, others called him a tyrannical power-monger. Who knew he would save us all, well, what’s left of us.

I don’t know how he did it. I remember walking outside one morning, scanning the street with my gun at my hip when I heard something. I walked towards it cautiously and as I got closer I heard the electronic hum of a speaker. It was the storm siren, we had them all over the city, and John was talking through them. I couldn’t believe it, I hadn’t heard another sane human voice in at least a month.

The message was simple. “I can beat Eraser. If you can hear this, go to the airport.” That was it, nothing dramatic. It took me three hours to find a car I could hotwire, and another four to get to the airport. There were so many cars in the street, it was like navigating a giant maze.

When I walked into building I heard his voice again. “Get to the Tarmac, use the emergency exits. Go to the tarmac, use the…” There were six other people standing outside when I arrived. All of them were staring up at the communication tower, that’s when I saw him.

He told us that he couldn’t come down and that no one could come up. We had to make sure that at least one person stayed uninfected. Then he gave us each a job and told us to return the next morning at sunrise. The first day we all had the same job.

John used the airports back-up generators to get the printers working and printed out hundreds of flyers. We were told to take as many as we could carry, find any emergency vehicle with working lights and P.A. system and drive through the city throwing flyers out the window and reading his instructions through the megaphone.

“We have food, we have water, we can protect you. Go to the Airport and wait in terminal two.”

By sunrise the next morning John said six people were in terminal two. He told all of them that they needed to rest, and that when they woke up the next morning they needed to tell anyone wearing a blue shirt and hat, “Don’t abandon all hope.”

It was clever really. If they were infected they didn’t remember what to say, and we moved them to terminal one where we feed them whatever we could find. If they did remember, they were recruited.

It took three years in all, three years before we could communicate with every major city in the U.S. That was Johns whole plan, for every hundred uninfected we got he sent one of us to another airport in another city to do exactly what he was doing. Eventually we got a pilot, that sped things up. Then we got into the FAA building, and just like that, overnight, we were connected again.

Fifteen years later and we had created a whole new world. Surprisingly, a great many had survived, there are still too many nomadic gangs to get an accurate count, but we had enough to live. The hardest part was containing the infected and keeping them productive at the same time, after all, we still needed to eat.

Everyone infected was quarantined, just like in the beginning. Then, John appointed governors, just like the pre-eraser days. Unfortunately, that was the last thing John did before he got infected. It’s a shame because his idea worked. Governors elected mayors, mayors elected councilmen, and so on. The job was hard but we were organized.

Every Eraser Citizen was awaked one by one, every morning. It was the responsibility of every township’s leader to make sure they were each debriefed and requisitioned for the day. Those that remembered their skills were treated like celebrities among the Erasers, especially scientists and engineers. The rest, those that didn’t have any memory of any trade were put to work doing menial tasks, we called them the day laborers; because that’s exactly what they were, good for one day.

We’ve come a long way, well, that is we’ve managed to keep ourselves from extinction. There is even some talk among the intellectuals about reintroducing money. I don’t think we’re there yet, and as long as I’m Leader 1 we’re doing things my way. We have to move fast, the virus is still spreading.

I haven’t told anyone yet, but I have a plan. I’ve figured out how to stop the virus. The only problem is that it will do only that, it will just stop it. No one will get their memories back, but at least we’ll have hope.

The solution was simple, right in front of us all along. All we have to do is …

This post was published or three hours Sept 16, 2009.

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©Ryan J. Van Seters 2009