You don't say good morning to your love, or goodnight to your children. You don't answer the phone. All your emails are checked through a filter before you read them. You've abandoned books, films and games. You don't listen to the radio. You don't watch the news.
Not everyone is as careful, which you guess is why this thing is still about. On the tram to work you keep your headphones on, blasting lyricless music as loud as it'll go. Once, you saw a bunch of rich, young guys laughing together. Carefree. You suppose they can be, on the back of everyone else's silence. As long as one of them hasn't got it. But you couldn't know that, so you turn your eyes away.
At the office you keep your head down. All communication comes through a chatbox on your computer, designed, you assume, by one of the infected. It filters out the word. No one speaks. But the work continues. It must keep its original pace, you are told. How, exactly, they are less forthcoming about. For someone who works with words, now's a deadly time.
Despite the danger, you must write. If you type the word in a vacuum, will it be infectious? Nobody knows. Just as nobody knows what the word is. How can they? To know it is to be infected. So only the terminally ill know what it is, as if that's any consolation. Makes you wonder why there's no filter on your word processor. Surely the infected could make one? Unless they can't. Maybe the chatbox filter does nothing. Maybe they just need you to keep working. You don't know why. Nobody reads anymore.
As to what it does, that word. Simple. Once you know it, your next hundred words are your last.
Paddy Dobson
3rd October 2020