I hate you. Yes, you personally. And that guy, that woman, that couple, all of you. Don’t think that this is one of the misanthropic „I hate humanity, but individual people can be ok“ things. No, I hate all of you, individually and collectively. In fact, the closer you come to me, the more personal you make it, the more I hate you.

I pretend to have friends, when it is useful. I became quite good at it. Most of you are insanely easy to trick, because you all want to be acknowledged, accepted, admired. Me not. I’m a sociopath. That’s not a hollow phrase. I qualify for almost all of the 6 criteria of antisocial personality disorder according to the ICD-10 definition. I don’t care about other peoples feelings. I respect social norms if it serves my purpose, not out of any sense of obligation. I don’t maintain any relationships, though I can charm others quickly to use them for my needs. I have never felt guilt for anything I’ve done. And of course whenever I clash with persons or society at large, it is never my fault. Never. One thing doesn’t fit: I do have a healthy tolerance to frustration, and I can control myself very well. I need that to complete my revenge, my punishment, my crusade against you, and you, and you all.

You see, despite being a loner until halfway through school, I never felt that I was missing something. Human contact or warmth or such things. Later on I read about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Aside from the first, trivially obvious levels, I found it questionable at best, and more likely ideologically and culturally imprinted nonsense. I hear that further research has since come to the same conclusion as my 16 year old self.

I am smarter than you. That is a fact. My IQ was measured at 183 the last time I cared about it, and since IQ tests are fundamentally flawed, a part of that is because I trained for it. Much of what makes me smarter than you is not measured in IQ tests. But the analytical thinking it does measure helped me study with best marks, and get a scholarship at Harvard, the most respected university for molecular biology. I studied hard and while my utter disinterest in some subjects that have no place on a proper curriculum made me fail a perfect diploma, I finished in the top of my class, together with my future wife, whom I had strategically befriended halfway through the whole charade.

I went on to get my PhD while she went straight into a pharmaceutical lab. Well paid, too. But I had higher ambitions.

Biology was interesting to me for two reasons. One, it was an emotionless field of immediate consequences. And it gave me the opportunity to work on something that I really wanted. We married on her fathers money. While she had a scholarship herself, other than me she could have gone to Harvard without it. But I did not marry for the money. Firstly she was not that rich and secondly there was something else I wanted from her. Nothing in my life after 14 or 15 happened by coincidence.

Getting my PhD was painless. My wife’s money helped, as did another scholarship, and I already had a reputation that got me through some doors closed to the less gifted. It was much work, and long hours, but my research was both important and interesting. Had a bit of trouble keeping up the good marriage near the end, but keeping sight of my goals helped.

You see, I needed to pass any background checks with flying colours. My circle of seeming friends was not too large, as I tried to minimise the maintenance work necessary to keep them, and my father, my mother having died from some surprise cancer when I was small, while not being detrimental to my career, was also not a big plus. So I kept a few people at arm’s length.

My wife and her family, on the other hand, gave me the credibility I needed for top secret clearances. They were solid people, well connected, reasonably wealthy, healthy family. With her at my back, I was indeed approached by the Army research division shortly after starting my career. That I already had become an expert in biological warfare, just called by its civilian name, contagious diseases, was the main reason, of course.

Officially, my job description was research into protecting the American people from biological weapons developed by our enemies. Anyone with half a brain understood, of course, that in reality the department I worked for was developing just such weapons. Sure, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention made that illegal, but the loopholes were placed intentionally and all they did was force me to not speak openly about my work, which suited me well. Things became a little more hot with the Bioweapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, making the work done in my lab a crime, but the military command assured the scientists of full backing.

At that time, I should mention, I had already stopped doing active research. Ten years gave me plenty of pathogens to play with, but the security protocols were flawless and I saw no chance to further my plans. Unless, and that is what I did, I came out of the laboratory and was put in charge of it. So I trained management skills, became first an informal, than official team leader, and after a few years of paving the way, the lead scientist who spent most of his time managing the lab efforts. It was another five years, and an almost incident at an Israeli lab, until the military fools realised that they needed an expert in charge of security, not a soldier. So in 1986, roles and protocols were updated and I became responsible for the security of the lab. Nothing would enter or leave it without my approval.

I prepared the extraction for three years. My wife had done great in her career, and her weekends were busy with the social life that I had largely burdened her with. Keeping up our circle of friends was necessary for my regular background checks, but she was better at it and, other than me, actually cared for some of them. I had carefully removed myself from some of these commitments and found myself a mistress. One that was easy to please and manipulate, as my interest was not so much in the sex, but the fact that I could use her to buy a holiday hut in the nearby mountains, from my money but on her name, so that it was not linked to me. Once she was out of the picture, any good friends whom she had of course told about her affair would at best have the fake name that I had used with her.

In late April, the lab was running another security exercise. The scenario was a rogue scientist, who had been paid a million dollars by some made-up islamic terror group, would try to smuggle a mix of recent viral research results out of the lab. During the drafting phase, I had shifted the emphasis of the scenario. We had trained similar responses for years, locking down the lab, searching every corner of it, shutting down the perimeter, protocols to establish fast what was missing, alarm chains, and so on. This time, thanks to my input, we would go one step further and assume that the culprit would manage to leave the base with an active biological weapon. In order to stay low profile, his „home“ was a training building at another military base, and the purpose of that part of the drill was to subdue him without releasing the bio-weapon into the atmosphere.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

And while everyone was focussed on bringing down our fake terrorist with a fake product six miles away, the real one quietly took three canisters of active pathogens and drove into the mountains. What I had taken was a research sample, nothing more. I needed to grow more of it, multiply the pathogens. And I did. Over the years, I had slowly collected all the parts needed for my own lab and had stored them at a storage facility halfway en route, container rented under another fake name. Identity checks these days are pathetic at anything that is not a military institution. On my way, I picked up the various parts and pieces of equipment and set them up in the holiday house. My mistress was away on one of her business trips, and I had filled the car with food for two weeks at a supermarket intentionally the other way from the base, then made sure I didn’t stop anywhere until I reached the hut.

They would be searching for me soon. That is why I had booked a flight to Russia going from Toronto the day after tomorrow. They would, of course, go through my e-mails and my credit card data and find it. The story would fit the current political narrative of Russia as the re-awakened old enemy, who had somehow bought me out. The trip was made to look like an amateurs attempt at secrecy. The first flight going to Amsterdam and the connecting flight booked with my second credit card through a different travel agency using a throwaway e-mail address.

So they would wait for me at the airport and, depending how fast they found it all, search along the scenic route to Canada. There was a good chance that they would mount not a full-scale national search, because our research was, strictly speaking, the preparation for war crimes and conflicted with multiple international treaties. So they had to keep things somewhat hush-hush, which worked to my advantage. But even so, I had two, at most four days before I had to move places or the chance of discovery would become too high.

There is a reason bio-terrorism is not a thing: It is actually far from simple. Explosives are so much easier, so much wider understood and so much easier to get or mix. Biology is hard and far less predictable. And biological weapons are entirely in their own league. Which is why I opted for something reasonably simple, straightforward and reliable.

A-279 is a group of pathogens, three of which we had active samples for. They are genetically related but different enough from each other that most cures against one of them are ineffective against the other variants. I had made sure to contaminate and thus spoil the reserves of cures we had, and managed to introduce errors into the documentation so at least the first few batches made after the outbreak would have reduced efficiency and with any luck some nasty side effects.

A-279 multiplies rapidly under the correct conditions, and can spread both through the air and through water. It is a wonderful biological weapon, with the usual problem of containing an outbreak that is the primary reason that they were never used in actual warfare. Most bio-weapons developed during the Cold War were invented as doomsday weapons. If you are going to die anyway, at least take the other guy and the rest of the planet down with you. A doomsday weapon is what I wanted.

For the first time in decades, I felt truly happy, mixing the samples I had taken into the growing vats where they would find heavenly conditions for multiplying. Finally, I felt something that for lack of a better word I would call love. It is the opposite of hate, is it not? There, in front of me, was the end of humanity as we know it, and since I’ve always had hated the lot of you, the antidote to the human disease was naturally an object of my deepest affection.

So I gave it all my attention and prepared it with the utmost caution. Not just because a small mistake would turn me into a dead wannabe-terrorist, but because I genuinely cared.

Of course I was under no illusion to wipe out humanity. Even in the most optimistic simulations conducted by the military, pockets of human life would survive a world-wide pandemic. There were still isolated tribes that would not have contact with the dead outside world until the pathogens had succumbed due to a lack of hosts. There were too many inhabited islands that could easily be closed off and had a reasonable chance at basic survival even when isolated. You see, the basic problem with islands is not that pathogens could come through the air or water even when the ports and airports are closed. If you are distant enough from the nearest land, that chance is manageable and if you isolate the few random infections it might cause quickly enough, you can weather the pandemic. But most islands, especially the smaller ones, are not self-sufficient. They cannot feed even a fraction of their population without imports.

But one way or the other, humans would survive. But human civilisation would not. It would start again almost from scratch. The world is so connected, supply lines are so fragile and interdependencies so large, that national and international communication networks will be down within one day, two at most, of a pandemic on the scale that I was preparing. Power would fail quickly once the majority of workers were deceased. Transport networks would be next, with air travel failing first, then trains and cars and finally ships. Petrol has half a year of shelf life these days, and most petrol stations have stored only a few days of sales. Once the logistics chain is interrupted, and people start to hoard, it will all collapse quickly. Without supply chains, cities become death traps. What will you eat when the supermarket is plundered? There’s no fruits or harvest and very little animals to slaughter. Your dog will feed your family for a day and then what? To get to the countryside you need the transport network. Not to mention that within the densely populated areas, the pathogens would spread the quickest.

I estimated a week between the outbreak and the total collapse of civilisation. There are so many movies about these topics, but they all ignore the psychological factor. In wars, humans managed hardships because there was a common enemy against which you could unite. In a pandemic, every other human is potentially infected and thus your enemy. You have no friends. People will understand this very, very quickly. Or rather: Those who don’t understand it will die.

Humanity’s light will go out in agony, in fear and in distrust.

I couldn’t wait to see it happen.