Congratulations on Unleashing a Fierce Plague!

You’re a graduate student at UCSC, working hard and trying to get your Ph.D. It’s not an easy life, but it’s the one you chose. You spend most of your time analyzing the reproductive traits of various benign bacteriophage, taking them through generation after tiny generation each week, trying to discern how and why they transfer their genetic data and how you can effectively manipulate it.

You’re also really clumsy. So this Saturday, while trying to move a new petrie dish from one counter to another, you’re going to drop it. It’ll shatter into a million little pieces and those super reproductive bacteria that you’ve been engineering all willy nilly will start to consume air and spread like whoa.

See you’ve been getting government funding for your projects under a set of provisions that were established to assist in the researching of certain “super-plagues.” The idea was that developing plagues that might one day come about and then developing reasonable antidotes to said plagues was the best possible way to approach the subject, so to give our boys and girls a leg up on the competition we should sponsor the craziest mad scientists we have and give them cash so they can work on new and creative ways to wipe out half of the Earth’s population will man-made illness.

You’ll be the first one to die, which kinda sucks. Usually in movies with this plot you’d survive long enough to make a cure or become some sort of important figure who feels bad and looks thoughtfully out of un-shattered windows. But in this case you’ll just start choking as your flesh is consumed and your organs begin to liquefy.

Next your Mexican janitor will carry the plague outside when he flees, having discovered your body. He’ll die on the pavement, where he’ll infect paramedics, who will infect easily influenced young co-eds, who will infect campus security, who will infect police, and so on until almost the entire world is wiped out by your little plague.

All because you insist on wearing latex gloves and refuse to drink coffee.

Congratulation on Unleashing a Fierce Plague!