The Story Of My Life And Their Death

For a race of intelligent beings, humanity is not all that smart. We were never too logical, nor too practical and while we were busy unraveling the world, we forgot to unravel ourselves. So when science caught up with us and then forged ahead we were caught unawares and unable to handle it. Only if we had invested even half the amount of effort on people that we had invested on creating technology, the world would still exist.

Wait. I am wrong. The world exists. It's the people who don't exist anymore. When I was young, the folks were obsessed with saving the world. They had movements and laws to prevent global warming and to clean up the air. They should have told the truth. It was themselves they were trying to save and not the world. The world would have shrugged a bit and gone back to a pretty fine existence for all the polluting we could do.

They were worried about bombs too. Never a week went by when some global leader or such-thing wouldn't stand up and tell everybody else that it was evil to have those bombs and then go right back to creating some more of his own. They had really big bombs. Big, nuclear bombs. Everybody thought we were going to die of them. That some fine morning a slightly crazy idiot elected by even crazier idiots would drop one somewhere and we would all go up in flames. They were wrong. When were they ever right?

Bombs couldn't do in the world. All they could do was destroy some buildings and kill some people and that too not for long. In a hundred years any place that was bombed would be teeming with life and civilization right again. Those dopes were too easily swayed awesomeness. The bigger it is, the louder it is, the more dangerous it ought to be. The thing that took down our world struck silently.

It wasn't due to a war, or terrorism, or sabotage or even one tiny shred of malice. It was just one small act of negligence. One slightly overlooked rule in an eagerness to please the superiors. It was common-cold that killed the human species.

I still cannot figure out why those guys thought we needed a vaccine for common-cold, and I can't figure out why they thought it was important enough to disregard the safety procedures established for vaccine development. People weren't dying for the want of a common-cold vaccine. Were they? Maybe that was the reason. They didn't think they needed to follow safety procedures for common-cold. After all, people weren't dying.

The most common trick to develop a vaccine for a viral disease is to use the dead, weakened or mutated forms of the virus that causes the disease. That way the immune system of the human body becomes familiar with the virus and develops anti-bodies to fight it. So when the real virus arrives, the body is prepared.

They had built a mutation that they thought was safe for a vaccine. Then they tried it on people and it worked. It worked so well that the executives were thrilled even more than the scientists, and they greased palms more vigorously than usual to bring the vaccine to the market.

Usually a drug or vaccine takes years to reach the market from clinical trials. But in that particular case it was done within a year. Fast work for the common good of the people and the politicians.