Outbreak

BDAnon’s drops were clearly coming to an end. His mission in Iran was now complete, the region seemed to be pulling back from an all-out nuclear conflict and he was moving on after his wife had been killed in an assault against an Iranian reactor. As well as trying to digest the horror of his personal news, I was also feeling somewhat foolish at setting up the automatic archiver given that nothing more would be coming in. Ah well, sometimes that’s the way it goes.

The next day, a LARPer jumped on 4chan and pretended to be him by using the same image.

“I've got about an hour if you guys have any questions. At the moment, things are quiet here but that won't last. Pieces are being put in to position for the final play. Shits about to get real.”

The style wasn’t quite right but most importantly, the punctuation was incorrect. BDA used backticks (the ` character) as apostrophes exclusively, a quirk of whatever keyboard or gateway service he was using to post to 4chan. The man himself appeared the next day to correct things.

“Yesterday I indicated that I would not be posting here going forward and that is the case. It seems someone is here selling an off brand cola instead of the real thing. My last post indicated why I would not be posting and what I am up to. If someone has the time you might locate that post and share it here. The real action now is not in Iraq but somewhere else. Their nuclear weapons program has been destroyed and they are staring into the darkness and it is staring back. My Russian friend was able to secure travel papers for me and I am on the way to pay a visit you may read about soon. Anyway as I mentioned before pray for our country. And as I indicated before my nickname in my craft is Heisenberg and certain people will understand that well soon enough.”

Anons were skeptical of course with one complaining that he could be literally anyone.

“Well the only reason I posted is someone else posted today using this header and it was important to me and others that this be cleared up. Now do your homework or well shut the fuck up and hide under the table. I have work to do.”

Godspeed you wonderful bastard and thanks for all the insight into the real world behind the curtain. A group of people who had been following along on Twitter were contemplating organizing a memorial service for BDA’s wife at the Etowah river but I didn’t even know her name. I took a flyer and emailed the Mossad to ask for the name of the female operator killed in the assaults on the reactors but received no reply. Then someone reminded me that he had told us her name back in November: Annie. But there wasn’t much else to do other than make tentative plans and look around for the next Big Thing on the chans.

That wasn’t particularly hard to find: /pol/ had been getting extremely worried about some sort of virus outbreak in Wuhan. The word on the streets was that people were dropping dead, the local authorities were literally welding people into their apartments and there were hundreds of thousands of casualties already. Some anons had been posting a link back to a post two and a half months earlier on October 21, 2019, in which a self-professed Level 4 infectious disease specialist outlined his concerns for an incoming pandemic.

“The issue is that in modern, densely populated cities, a sufficiently advanced pathogen would be capable of infecting the vast majority of inhabitants in weeks, before any health measures could have an effect. The population density is enough that current quarantining techniques used in cases like smallpox would be completely ineffective. Antivirals have historically proven ineffective and hard to disseminate while our current vaccine stocks might not work at all.

Currently computer simulations indicate that a dangerous enough pathogen could effectively destroy a city like Los Angeles in a few months. ‘Destroyed’ in the sense that emergency services are shut down, medical services are shut down, all economic output ceases and over 30-60% of the population is wiped out.

In short, a small nation-state or even well-funded terrorist organization could easily reduce the US to the state of a third world nation with. Yet no one except my colleagues seems to give a fuck.”

Further down the thread, he said he had already picked up a latent virus which was asymptomatic, looked like a coronavirus but defied classification. Another anon from Canada confirmed this.

“Whatever it is the genome is massive and vaguely trips our automated coronavirus threshold. Similar to coronavirus in the fact some of the PCR results got flagged for coronavirus but not SARS. This was last week but when we worked it out it was generally around 35kb¹ which is MASSIVE for an RNA virus.

This is just a rotation for me so I'm likely not the best person to ask beyond letting you know its in Eastern Canada."

Interestingly enough, BDAnon had spoken just before the Suleimani operation about a virus outbreak in China some time ago.

“The experimentation thing is bad because they fucked up a while back and released a virus in one of their facilities in Central China that killed over 5000 people. Really bad shit. They stopped it but close. Real close.”

Was this the source of the current outbreak? It was impossible to say. The infectious disease specialist’s post seemed to place the source sometime before October 21, 2019, since the infection had already spread as far afield as Canada. There was complete silence from the mainstream media and it was hard to follow the confusing mess of posts on /pol/, although at least some of them had the ring of truth. It was an incredibly scary time, mainly because all sorts of characters who claimed they were high level insiders were popping up on the chans and describing what it was based on the secret meetings at the UN and the British cabinet they had supposedly just come from:

• probably an escaped bioweapon from a lab

• carefully designed to look like a flu but with a lethal payload that no-one could figure out yet although deaths seemed to be from lung infections

• highly infectious but asymptomatic to allow it to spread invisibly via air

• mutated rapidly so as to outrun possible treatments

It really did look like an apocalyptic scenario. The Big One so to speak. Then on the 22nd of January, BDAnon returned to 4chan with an explanation that didn’t reassure anyone.

“This virus is a weaponized bio-chemical warfare agent that originated in a weapons lab close to the City of Wuhan. A previous weaponized virus escaped the facility a while back an over 1000 people were killed. This virus is one of the most deadly killers ever developed. How it escaped is not known. What is known is the virus was engineered to combine with other viruses to prevent it from being treated. If this weapon gets into the homeless population of Los Angeles and San Francisco the results will be catastrophic. It may already not treatable. The West Coast is probably already fucked.”

“Sad to say I am quite serious and the information is real,” he replied to some anon’s joke about San Francisco. “Act accordingly. The real danger is this virus is manufactured to combine with other killers and create viruses that cannot be cured. The Biolab in China has been burned to the ground and the entire staff has been quarantined with over 90% of the staff infected. Their families have also been quarantined.”

He advised that death counts would be in the millions, the Chinese were panicking behind the scenes because they were aware that it had been designed to be untreatable and that he himself was hunkered down in a small community far away from major population centers. On the one hand, this was all extremely frightening, but on the other at least he was telling us the truth, at least to the best of his ability given that some of the information would probably change as he learned more.

I warned my immediate family that we were in for a catastrophic world event and needed to prepare.

1. Kilobytes, the same measure as the size of computer data and programs.