[Terminus] Presence of Unknown Pathogen Confirmed

Presence of Unknown Pathogen Confirmed

By Casos Tigia, Tayseri Times

Samhaus, MEGALOS BREACH- Earlier today the Robath Freehold’s Ministry of Health released reports confirming suspicions that the steadily growing epidemic of Yisis Influenza on the capital world is, in fact, not an aggressive strain of the relatively common dextro-specific ailment as previously thought, but an entirely new virus altogether.

“This is no reason to panic or riot in the streets,” stated Division for Disease Research and Control Director Mokar in a press conference today. He further reiterated that current symptoms indicate little difference between this new pathogen and Yisis.

“Fever, aches, congestion, coughing, and fatigue, this is largely a disease that’s a danger to the very young and very old, if any at all,” Mokar said. “We strongly encourage all citizens to stay up to date on their vaccinations and, if infected, to stay home and refrain from exertion.”

Despite reassurances from on high, concerns remain, particularly among the turian military forces of the Freehold. Founded some five hundred years ago after the destruction of the Greystorm Fleet in the Battle of Keening Edge, the Freehold is a batarian-dominated nation with turians and asari forming significant minorities. Both races have largely congregated to a handful of cities and districts, and both maintain separate military forces under the jurisdiction of the Robath Department of Defense, with the turian dwarfing both the state’s standing armies and asari bands.

Updates will be forthcoming as the situation develops.

Up next, panicking and rioting in the streets.

Surprised we're not hearing anything about a quarantine being imposed.

Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

Huh. Sounds like the blinks are gettin' jealous of the cuttlebones.

...times like these I wish I'd enne-liz-ted with one of the big outfits, someone with the force multipliers to pull this off.

Doesn't appear to be anything particularly virulent really. No point in imposing mass quarantine over what's basically the flu I would imagine.

Which really kinda irks me, considering the word "epidemic" is right there in the first sentence. Damn news outlets and their sensationalism.

In all fairness a more honest article titled "BREAKING NEWS: COMMON HARMLESS VIRUS ACTUALLY ANOTHER HARMLESS VIRUS" would hardly sell well.

Well, it's not like I'm saying that either. I'm talking about the report itself - it's easy to make a useful, informative article about a new disease turning out to be actually new without breaking out the OH GOD IT'S AN EPIDEMIC HIDE YO KIDS HIDE YO BONDMATE language.

I personally like to think that it's a conditioned response ingrained in reporters over the course of years of being told to make Aish Ashland's latest overdose newsworthy.

It's news because the disease is dextro and turians are a minority out there. That's what I think. I mean, they're probably frightened that people are going to get paranoid and say the government is trying to weaken or destroy the turian class with a disease that doesn't affect batarians (or asari, I guess, but aren't they the smaller minority? Less powerful out there, anyway). I think what they're really saying is "how long before some turian politician is whipping up the turian population with claims that the government is selectively killing them off?"

I mean, the article makes it clear that turians are the strongest military force out there even if they're a minority in terms of numbers ('cause this is turians, you know?)

By all appearances, the vaccine that is given for this pathogen is not rare so something as you have described is unlikely to occur.

Well, yeah, for Yisis Flu, sure, but I thought the whole point of this article was that it's a new bug.

It's not like dextros are dying left and right? Turians sneezing... doesn't sound too wild right now.
C-sec should take some precautions for travellers from there though.

Actually, is it heard of that a dextro desease can be transmitted by levos?

Man, there's a lot of this disease shit in the air these days. I'm not trying to sound like, you know, a crazy person, but a smart man can connect the lines.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was connected to The Big Corporations in some way. Wink, wink.

I'm not sure how a company can profit off of this. I mean, if there was a vaccine for something like this ready almost immediately, then that'd be very suspicious, because it'd require prior knowledge of the virus. Governments will be all over them before they could make a profit.

That's not how it works genius. If a company were to manufacture an epidemic for profit it works as follows.

1) Spread new disease.
2) Deploy fake vaccine.
3) 'Panic' as fake vaccine predictably fails.
4) Let the bodies pile up.
5) Deploy real vaccine whilst making sure to emphasize how hard they worked to bring this out in a timely manner. Bonus points if they produce the corpse of one of their researchers who was 'accidentally' infected during the frantic rush. Heroic sacrifice and all that.
6) Profit and great PR.

Voila.

I'm sorry I can't hear you over the sound of the flaming moxies I'm punting into a racially diverse orphange for the blind and speech impaired.


So:

1. Sink the time and resources into designing or dredging up a disease that nobody has heard of before or sufficiently altering an existing one so far as to make it unrecognizable.
2. Take hit to popularity and investor confidence as vaccine fails.
3. Take additional hit to popularity and investor confidence as you display complete ineptitude in a crisis, to be tacked on to a perceived failure to properly test or implement the vaccine.
4. Take yet another hit to popularity and investor confidence as you do nothing while hundreds, if not thousands die.
5. Finally do what you said you were going to do originally, at the expense of your own personnel (which speaks to exceptionally poor containment protocols in the eyes of the public), while spouting propaganda about your "struggle" to a galaxy that just watched you categorically fail to do anything useful for an extended period of time.
6. You maybe break even and all it took were small mountains of dead, your own staff, and a fortune in lost revenue and reputation.

Genius.


I'm going to let you all in on a deep, dark secret right now: corporations generally don't make the vast majority of their money off of grand crises and dramatic advancements.

They make it off a bracket of regular goods and services provided to a stable, dependable customer base coupled with exploitation of loopholes in patent and tax laws as well as changing market conditions all while maintaining a steady investment in future enterprises (ie. R&D, partnerships, etc.).

Says the corporate executive whose security forces are under suspicion of attacking an unaffiliated target in the Halctis Frontier.

INITIALIZING

Welcome to Aurecatix, VI and automated information update system of the Tayseri Times, bringing you breaking news fresh from the feeds. This stream will keep you apprised of further developments as reported by Mr. Tigia.

Thank you for choosing the Tayseri Times for all your current events needs.



UPDATE

Preliminary research under the direction of the DDRC seems to indicate that the Influenza-like pathogen infecting the colony is nonnative to Samhaus or, indeed, Freehold space altogether. “It is superficially similar in structure, at least, to microfauna from the Deep-Abyss world of Tautheopolis,” said Dr. DDRC researcher Dr. Hatharek in a publicly televised conference. “Although we believe that what we’ve found is only the carrier of the disease, it’s much too large to be the virus itself.”

A full recording of the conference may be found [here].

Microfauna? Man, bacteria infected with a virus is the last thing I want to catch.