“It’s up here, about four hundred yards out.” Says 6. I give him the thumbs up as we turn up a muddy track, the tyres cracking the frozen mud beneath. Ahead of us are the first finished houses in a new suburb that had been partly built, the buildings a mix of yellow brick and concrete painted grey. Great care had been put into the design of the architecture as they each represented the perfect mathematical equation for what the most economic, eco-friendly building could be through being designed by a computer. Rather than stirring up any kind of interest or emotion, all that the new builds inspired was ennui.
“This is as far as I go.” Says 6.
“Thank you.” I say, getting out of the jeep. It’s cold outside. I begin to walk up the unfinished road.
The streets are empty, although I can hear noises coming from inside the houses. There is a strange atmosphere in the air, the same quietness as if out in new snow. I walk up the drive of one of the houses and let myself through the front door. The walls were decorated bizarrely, striped wallpaper patterns beneath pictures nailed to the wall at varying heights. I sat in a perspex globe suspended from the ceiling by a black chain when a horn sounded behind me. I jumped, spinning round to see a man dash out of a doorway. As he continued to run he seemed to step into his clothes and disappeared in a wriggle of elbows and knees twitching beneath a shirt and trousers. It was quiet again. I stood back up and went to the room he’d just emerged from and switched on the light. An enormous teenager was crouching on the floor. When he saw me he began to hop on all fours around the room, breathing heavily.
“Who are you?” I shout, clutching at the door frame in uncertainty. My gaze drifts down from his oiled forehead and into the blistering, violent red eyes of madness. Rabid like, he hopped around the room for a while until he finally stopped by the wall opposite me. He slowly began to stand, the breathing getting louder. He was trembling. I closed the door quietly and looked around for something to block him in. Even through the door now I could hear his breathing. Is he talking? I pull across a bureau and set it to rest before leaving the room.
In the next room I meet a middle-aged man dressed in a lab coat over his corduroys. He looks up from his clipboard as I enter.
“Hello. I’m here to talk about your discovery Dr. Douglas.” I said.
“Oh hello, it’s nice to meet you. Did you find us okay?” He said, we shake hands.
“Of course. This place isn’t on any map but your directions were excellent. And how could I miss the opportunity to talk about such a fascinating discovery? Potentially one that could alter the context of civilization.” I say, taking out my tape recorder to record such a dramatic statement.
“Well, you tell me, haha.” He says. “Please, follow me to the control centre.”
The control centre was the entire second floor of the house knocked through to reveal a state of the art laboratory mixed with a state of the art security system, all decorated with state of the art meme paintings. HD monitors were fastened to poseable telescopic arms that descended from the ceiling. In the centre of the room was an enormous white table. Dr. Douglas went over to it and smudged his finger, unlocking the huge touch screen computer.
“What I have to show you may alter the future of human history…forever.” He says. He looked back down at the screen and opened up a menu bar and selected a folder, then a subfolder, then a file.
“Say hello to Toxoplasma gondii, a sporozoite that is capable of infecting more or less all warm-blooded mammals, although only breeding inside a feline. Immediately it appears to cause flu-like symptoms, although my research shows that there may be a slightly more insidious side to this microscopic creature.” Says Dr. Douglas. On the table there is a magnified video of the parasites making their way through space.
“Damn.” I say, slowly standing up after leaning against a desk.
“Damn is putting it lightly. Gondii has a 50% infection rate against feline to sapien interaction. We’ve found the average person has a twenty to one chance of carrying the disease.” Says a woman who’d just walked in.
“And you are?” I say, raising one of my eyebrows.
“Her name is Dr. Douglas. This is my daughter, Dr. Amanda Douglas.”
“A pleasure to meet you…doctor.” I say, raising my other eyebrow.
“As I was saying, Gondii is so prevalent in our society we ran studies on the actual effects of this parasite in humans beyond the immediate symptoms.”
“And?”
“And we’ve found that the parasite can affect human behaviour. It increases dopamine levels, shrinks grey matter and engorges the mendula oblongata.” She says sternly.
“In English?”
“Basically it alters the parts of the brain that effect behaviour. Fear, rationality, reasoning…it can even go on to alter sexuality. People with the infection are more likely to drink, more likely to swear…even more likely to have sex with each other.”
“Whoa whoa whoa, now you got my attention.” I say, holding my fingers up to my head and pretending as if my mind was exploding.
“For instance, once Gondii has infected a man it lays its eggs in his semen, which can they go on to infect a foetus before travelling up the mothers spinal column. It also has the added effect of increasing the sex drive of people with the parasite, who then go on to spread it further and further through…intercourse.” Says Dr. Douglas.
“Does that word make you…uncomfortable?” I say, smirking slightly as I create a steeple shape with my hands.
“I’m not sure if you’re taking this seriously.”
“Seriously? Seriously. You know, let me tell you about serious. I once knew a guy who’d worked all his life selling apples out of a cart, he had his own orchard that had been passed down through the generations but this guy had no kids. One day his horse dies and he has to start dragging the cart from his orchard all the way into town by himself, it’s not long before he takes a slip and breaks his ankle. A local kid comes up and finds him, puts him in the back of the cart and then drags both the old man and the apples all the way in to town to the local doctor. And you know what happened when he got there? The old man had died with a smile on his face and an apple core in his hand.” I said. Everyone was quiet for a moment.
“What happened to that kid?”
“His name was Steve Jobs, maybe you heard of him?”
“Even if Steve Jobs were here, he wouldn’t be able to do anything. Gondii makes people take more risks, become more narcissistic and more sexually active.”
“Sounds like the right ingredients for an Instagram superstar.”
“Not only is it transferable through bodily fluids, it is zoonotic. You can get it from eating rare steak for example. It’s potential for infection is enormous.”
“So what? Sounds like this Gondii is a good deal.”
“Cats.”
“Excuse me?”
“The parasite only breeds in cats. Mice that have Toxoplasmosis show almost no fear of cats. People who carriers on the other hand tend to have pet cats. I’ve been tracking the number of times cats are mentioned on the internet and the numbers are increasing at an exponential rate. Our society is becoming almost wholly obsessed with this animal.” Said Dr. Douglas.
“The cats themselves are benign. It’s the parasite that is the driving force behind this. Like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus that infects ants that alters their behaviour, Toxoplasma Gondii offers just as much a threat to humans. Our entire planet could become slaves to cats before the century is up.”
“So what you’re saying is we should destroy all cats?”
“It is difficult to think of how to deal with the disease. On the one hand it offers relatively little danger and in fact can make the host happier to some extent. On the other hand, the parasite could change over time…evolve to alter human behaviour further. The rabies virus makes the host attack others orally when it wants to propagate, what if a mutation of this virus makes people engage in…intercourse?”
“Does that word make you uncomfortable doctor?”
“Nevermind that. This little enclave is our test centre. We can run simulations, modify the parasites DNA and test its possibilities. We’ve already discovered that this parasite can cause schizophrenia in babies. You ever seen a schizophrenic baby?”
“So everyone living here is infected with brain parasites? Whose idea was this?”
“Mine.”
“Doctor…do you have Toxoplasma Gondii?” I ask.
“Of course. I accidentally caught it off my cats.” Says Dr. Douglas. He walks over to a cupboard and opens it up. Inside it is stuffed with cats. Hundreds of cats squashed together, mewling and hissing, a wall of fur and claws. The surface tension breaks and the room is suddenly filled with cats running across every surface. I start to run. Out in the next room the teenager has started hopping again, although he is set upon by cats. I knock over a table on my way out of the door and back onto the street. And I am greeted by a sea of cats eyes.
Hundreds of cats. Perhaps thousands. Some are sleeping, some clean themselves, others join flowing roads of cats that move this way and that. A few have already noticed me and are already rubbing themselves around my legs.
“Remove yourself!” I shout, beginning to run around the house. There is a couple copulating in the back garden, the low winter sun illuminating a pair of hairy buttocks rising and falling in the air as steam comes off the sweating bodies. I pull myself up over a garden fence and into the next one. A few people are gathered around a dead cat, they look up from their meal at me at the same time. All of them are wearing white contact lenses.
“Can I get a doggy bag?!” I wisecrack as I leap in with a karate kick, delivering the blow in slow motion to the forehead of an old man. Not breaking stride I continue to run, jumping, rolling, moving. Behind me thousands of cats are chasing over each other to get me, the microscopic worms in their brains wanting to enter mine. I run.
