When I was sixteen and told my father that I wanted to be a Newsie?it wasn?t a surprise by that point, but it was the first time I had said it to his face?he pulled some strings and got me enrolled in a history of journalism course at the university. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Hunter S. Thompson, Cameron Crowe? I met the greats the way you should meet them, through their words and the things they did, when I was still young enough to fall in love without reservations or conditions. I never wanted to be Lois Lane, girl reporter, even though I dressed like her for Halloween one year. I wanted to be Edward R. Murrow, facing down corruption in the government. I wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson, ripping the skin off the world. I wanted the truth, and I wanted the news, and I?d be damned before I settled for anything less.
Shaun?s the same, even if his priorities are different. He?s willing to let a good story come before the facts, as long as the essential morals stay true. That?s why he?s so good at what he does, and why I double-check every report he writes before I release it.
One thing I did learn from those classes is that the world is not, in any way, what people expected thirty years ago. The zombies are here, and they?re not going away, but they?re not the story. They were, for one hot, horrible summer at the beginning of the century, but now they?re just another piece of the way things work. They did their part: They changed everything. Absolutely everything.
The world cheered when Dr. Alexander Kellis announced his cure for the common cold. I?ve never had a cold, thanks to Dr. Kellis, but I understand they were pretty annoying; people didn?t enjoy spending half their time sniffling, sneezing, and getting coughed on by total strangers. Dr. Kellis and his team rushed through testing at a pace that seems criminal in retrospect, but who am I to judge? I wasn?t there.
What?s really funny is that you can blame this whole thing on the news. One reporter heard a rumor that Dr. Kellis was intending to sell his cure to the highest bidder and would never allow it to be released to the man on the street. This was ridiculous if you understood that the cure was a modified rhinovirus, based on the exact virulence that enabled the common cold to spread so far and so fast. Once it got outside the lab, it was going to ?infect? the world, and no amount of money would prevent that.
Those are the facts, but this guy didn?t care about the facts. He cared about the scoop and being the first to report a great and imaginary injustice being perpetrated by the heartless medical community. If you ask me, the real injustice is that Dr. Alexander Kellis is viewed as responsible for the near-destruction of mankind and not Robert Stalnaker, investigative reporter for the New York Times. If you?re going to lay blame for what happened, that?s where it belongs. I?ve read his articles. They were pretty stirring stuff, condemning Dr. Kellis and the medical community for allowing this to happen. Mankind, he said, had a right to the cure.
Some people believed him a bit too much. They broke into the lab, stole the cure, and released it from a crop duster, if you can believe that. They flew that bastard as high as it would go, loaded balloons with samples of Dr. Kellis?s work, and fired them into the atmosphere. It was a beautiful act of bioterrorism, conducted with all the best ideals at heart. They acted on a flawed assumption taken from an incomplete truth, and they screwed us all.
To be fair, they might not have screwed things up as badly as they did if it hadn?t been for a team working out of Denver, Colorado, where they were running trials on a genetically engineered filovirus called ?Marburg EX19,? or, more commonly, ?Marburg Amberlee.? It was named for their first successful infection, Amanda Amberlee, age twelve and a half. She?d been dying of leukemia and considered unlikely to see her thirteenth birthday. The year Dr. Kellis discovered his cure, Amanda was eighteen, finishing her senior year of high school, and perfectly healthy. The folks in Denver took a killer, made a few changes to its instructions, and cured cancer.
Marburg Amberlee was a miracle, just like the Kellis cure, and together they were primed to change the course of the human race. Together, that?s what they did. No one gets cancer or colds anymore. The only issue is the walking dead.