Post by SHEILA on May 16, 2009 23:14:02 GMT 9.5
SO INSANE THAT WE MADE AN ALL-ERAS, CANON-SQUASHING,
DISEASED HP BOARD. WE'D LOVE TO HAVE YOU, FOR SERIOUS.
HERE'S THE LINK IN CASE YOU'RE TEMPTED TO HAVE A LOOK.[/font][/b]
Escherichia Mortia. Say it. Drag it out; syllables, vowels, diphthongs. Give it its worth, and make sure your tongue knows just how important it is. Enunciation, if you please. You can't afford to slack on this one. Now from the top, and kindly try, for pity's sake. Ready? Escherichia Mortia. It kills, in case you were wondering. Were you? Well, congratulations. Most people don't have the time for curiosity, you know. If you’re out and about, it’s with oxygen-masks and gloves. The doors are shut, row after row of them. It's a disease, this Escherichia Mortia, and you never know who's carrying it. There's no green light to say yes, and there's certainly no red light to say no. The symptoms are minimal. The first one is called yellowing skin. The second is weakening of the lungs -- try coughing up blood, and then keep on coughing. Got it. Now they’re closing altogether, so what you do breathe in tends not to reach them. Then you have your lesions -- that’s symptom three, if you weren’t paying attention. Four is your eyes drying up, and then it’s a loss of vision -- you’re not really sure, because you’re drifting in and out of delirious fantasies. The ceiling has turned upside down. There are ants under your skin. And now for the clincher, the universal topper: death. Symptom five. Passing away. So many euphemisms, and none of them make it any softer. It’s 2021, the age of technology, or so you’re told. The age of reason, and justice, and shiny kitchen appliances. But we’re leaving something out here: fear. Stark fear. You’re as helpless as Europe was against the Black Death, and the fact that the world is no longer officially flat doesn’t offer any defence. Back to basics. People don’t know what to do. They’re not used to this dreadful not-knowing, not-seeing. We’re modern, and we have the answers. The advertisements say that. They’re right. They were paid for, and why would you pay for something that isn’t right? So they’re right. Something must be wrong, then. And as more and more fall to this disease, commonly called ‘the clamp’ because of the way that it closes your lungs, the question gets louder. Bigger. Who’s wrong? Who’s responsible. And it may be 2021, and everyone may know everything, but times haven’t changed that much. You know exactly who’s wrong. The government. The outrage stops. Whatever they’re doing to prevent the pandemic isn’t enough, and what they’re not doing features on the front of every newspaper. ‘How They Should Approach This.’ ‘Solutions to the Pandemic.’ Problem is, they don’t work. Healers aren’t used to this bizarre strain of the infection, and while muggle cures work for the people who invented them, wizards aren’t so easily saved. And then your neighbour’s infected, and then your brother is. How long before it’s you? That’s what they’re all asking, and it’s another thing to add to the list of things that you just don’t know. The fear. Can you feel it building? Yes? Well, check your skin while you’re at it. Yellowing, even a bit, and you’re out. You only have one life, and you’ve just used it up.
Now, how to save everyone else’s?
“Can’t we just go back to before this virus started?” Some junior intern said it, probably for a bit of comic relief, but the Minister was quick to take it and pass it off as his own sweeping plan. The infected people were goners. Horrible for them, but that was a fact. The only thing on the agenda was saving the people who’d avoided it so far. There was nowhere they could go where the virus wouldn’t follow; no air was clear of it, this Escherichia Mortia, as the scientists had started calling it. And the hours passed, and the days passed. More succumbed. Going back to before it started became not only an idea, but a necessity. The champions of logic and common sense raised objections, of course. Time wasn’t meant to be tampered with. The world was bordering on overpopulation already, and there was no way that the Britain of a few years ago could support that extra load of survivors from the following decade. And what about the past and future editions of a person? Were they meant to treat this as a two for the price of one personal identity deal? ‘Oh, hi, self-of-2013. Say, that’s quite the hideous tie. So glad I’ve gotten over it.‘ And then there was the simple one: all the time-turners were gone, anyway. They drew in their breath, and they shouted at the top of their lungs. They made charts and graphs, built models of London in the 2010’s. Alliteration, imagery, oratory. Shiny shoes. They had it all, but the Ministry had more than that. Fear. It hadn’t stopped growing for the lack of people to prey on. Instead, it just ravaged the ones who were left, picked at their flesh and reasoning. The pandemic. They had to get away from it. The Ministry found ways around the nit-picking, as they always could. Rearrange things a tad, and it made perfect sense. They’d go back to a time before any of them, or even any of their grandparents, had even been born; to a time when the world population was still recovering from World War Two. Welcome to the fifties, kid. They passed out pamphlets that made it sound like a great adventure. Leaflets detailed anachronistic things that you couldn’t say or wear, laws that didn’t exist yet. They got ready, and that made it seam safe. They knew the fifties. The fifties had happened. 2022, and 2023, and the rolling slot machine of years to come -- they were the uncertainty. Escape it. Just escape it. The Minister’s speeches all preached running away, and running backwards. Then they produced the time-turners, one for every household. They were shipped out like gas masks. Use If Uninfected. And then they went, the pure ones, the safe ones. They were told to pick random years within the decade to prevent a complete overload at one point in time, but they would all leave together, and with a positive tidal wave carrying them off. They had nothing to stay for, and everything to go for. So they went.
If only it had stopped at that.
Basically, an overload ensued. Think of millions of people trying to access one website at the same time. Transfer that to something as fluid as the fabric of time, and it quickly starts to tear. The result wasn’t the nice little scattering that the Minister had drawn out. One person -- who, funnily enough, hasn’t come forward -- made too few turns and wound up in 1980. Worse still, everyone else seemed to follow them to there. There are plenty of theories on how the hell this happened, and some of them are halfway plausible, but care to explain why this bastardising of time also dragged along people from 1953 and 2004? Didn’t think so. “These things happen,” said the Minister when he realised the damage. This inspired response didn’t fix things, though. And then people looked down at the time-turners in their hands and realised that they were still spinning. The wheel was continuing; throw spanners into it all you want, they’ll just deflect. “But,” tried the Minister, “but the clamp is gone.” A rather dangerous call to make, and he paid for it dearly. In the next few days, a person’s skin started to yellow. “Jaundice,” the Marauder Era Healers said, and they didn’t correct them. Of course they wanted it to be jaundice. Didn’t everyone? So no-one spoke up, even when they started coughing. Even when they looked down at their tissue and saw blood. Even when breathing became gulping, and gulping became suffocating. Those lesions had to be something else. A week later, and they were gone. Double the fear. Triple the fear. Does anyone else have the virus? How is it spread? But mostly: what if Voldemort gets his hands on it? For reasons unknown, the Voldemort and Dumbledore of 1980 weren’t included in the time-turner exodus, but the younger Tom Riddle is just as dangerous and much more power-hungry. Wield it right, and he’ll have control of the bug itself. And who’s stopping him? The remnants of the Order and the few they’ve managed to recruit -- quite the resistance. Most people are too busy worrying about day-to-day matters. Finding homes. Hiding from their past selves -- as the disparagers from 2021 pointed out, an encounter wouldn’t be a savoury experience. And let’s not get ahead of ourselves and assume that it’ll always be 1980. Those time-turners keep moving, and maybe we’ll move with them. Don’t blink. You won’t want to miss a thing, and it’s not as if you can afford to.
