Chapter 2: Daniel
Imported from SF2 with no description.
Chapter 2: Daniel
Perspective: Daniel
“Do the words ‘freedom of religion’ mean anything to you??” I shouted. “It’s in the first amendment of the Constitution—our Constitution!”
“Daniel Jacob Hansen, you will NOT talk to your mother that way!”
'Shit,' I thought, 'here comes the “I’m older than you, so I know better.” Walked right into that one.'
“You are 17, young man, and you will respect your elders!” my mother screamed. “Go to your room!”
I gave one long look of smug defiance, watching her face redden even more.
“Now!” she yelled.
I stormed up the creaking wooden stairs, pretending to be enraged at my exile, but the truth was my room was the only place I felt safe anymore. As soon as I slammed the door, the relief rushed through me and I sighed.
I frowned, however, as I looked around and realized how much emptier my room seemed all of a sudden. Not that it was a sudden change, like something was missing that had been there this morning, rather it was a sudden realization. I recalled my old D&D books—a gift from Luke, my best friend in middle school—which she had gotten rid of when I was 10 because they “had the devil in them.” Then, when I refused to talk to her as a result, she had taken away my phone for a week. Later, I’d been foolish enough to actually pick up a Harry Potter book, just to see what all the fuss was about, but she had found that too. I was pretty sure she had burned it. I still had the Pokémon games; three game cartridges for the Nintendo DS that I had treasured since childhood when my friend Jasmine had let me borrow and later keep them. I hid them in the spare compartment in my room, a small storage space in my floor, which we used to use for storing god-knows-what. I’d thought about taking them out and playing through them again, but the last time she had caught me there were five game cartridges instead of three. Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Black were gone forever. I couldn’t lose the others.
There was also the fact that my mother didn’t know that downloading games was a thing now, and my Steam library was chock full of material that would have made her want to burn the house down and power wash the ruins with holy water for good measure. The cover art for Doom alone would have given her a stroke. It was a miracle (poor choice of words, perhaps) that I’d even kept this much. There was a day in my childhood when even dinosaurs were banished from my bedroom, and I was told that anything which implied the earth was more than a few thousand years old was heresy. Of course, nowadays she would have said that the dinosaurs were real enough, only that they had gone extinct not because a massive fucking rock from space obliterated them, but because they were gay.
My bedroom was nearly empty now. She thought she was protecting me, but really she was just stripping away any chance I had of becoming myself.
There was nothing she didn’t regard with the slightest suspicion or outright hate. It was as if she was afraid of the whole world, so she built a fantasy for herself, and when things didn’t line up with that fantasy or came close to shattering it, she went nuts.
Things would be better when I graduated. I could get a job and move out, not have her peering over my shoulder all the time. At least that’s what I told myself. That day hadn’t come yet.
——
I was going through my collection of games, playing one or the other for a few minutes before getting bored and playing another, but eventually I got bored of that and went to Reddit. The social media site was basically the only way I had any clue what was going on in the world anymore, as I had shut myself off from any other news source, not just out of an antisocial apathy toward the rest of the world, but because the rest of the world was a shitshow at this point. Between the memes and political jokes, I absorbed what I could of recent events. Besides the chaos and panic amidst the general public, a number of factions had been founded out of the political goals and beliefs of one party or another.
There was the Anti-Furry Army, a radical militia of conservative Americans who perpetuated violence and oppression against the furry community and the newly transformed anthros. Then there was the so-called Furry Strike Force, the socio-political polar opposite to the AFA, a left-wing militant vigilante group who persecuted anti-furry radicals on their own terms, believing the normal justice system was inherently corrupt and flawed. The latter group was regarded with conflicting views, considered a domestic terrorist cell to some and a heroic army of the people to others.
The AFA had a subreddit once, but it was very quickly taken down for promotion of hate speech. The FSF had one too, but most of the posts there were deleted shortly after being posted and I was pretty sure joining the sub would have put me on some kind of government watch list. There was one sub in particular I always paid attention to…
r/inhumans was a small subreddit devoted to the fraction of the furry fandom which had remained untouched by the virus—the name being a not-actually-very-clever mashup of the words “involuntary human.” Like incel, but with a less hostile connotation. These were the closet furries who despite the life-changing, society-shifting, human-history-altering virus, had remained in the closet. People like me.
There used to be new posts almost every day, usually about someone who had been caught shipping out samples of the virus to those who wanted to be infected (which was of course illegal, given the virus’s lethality). From time to time, there were even posts linking to places where you could supposedly obtain a sample of the virus yourself, but these posts were usually deleted and almost all of them had been scams. The ones who had been dumb enough to fall for these schemes had certainly ended up with viruses, but instead of the one they wanted which would have given them wings or claws, they got herpes or a deleted hard drive.
These days, activity on the sub was next to nothing. Posts came once or twice a week now and always consisted of one of three things:
Someone making a self-deprecating meme about how they hadn’t caught the virus yet and how pathetic their life was.
The usual spam.
The rarest kind of post: Someone half-heartedly telling the remaining members of the sub to keep their hopes up, insisting they’d get their chance to become who they wanted to be.
As a moderator, I had to comb through the daily posts and delete anything too suspicious or uncivil. It wasn’t hard, given that the sub was basically dead, with only a few thousand remaining members and only one or two online at any given time. This time, though, there was a different kind of post.
“How do you keep from self infecting?” the title asked. My heart skipped a beat reading this. Voluntary infection was more than just illegal, it came with a 10% chance of a slow and painful death. Even considering it was a cry for help.
The body of the post was a brief paragraph of text and I leaned back in bed as I began to read:
“I’m aware of the risks. Believe me, I am. I know people have died. But I can’t stop thinking about it. I had to unsub from r/furryirl because it’s blown up with anthros who made it through their transformation safely and every new post on the sub was like a punch to the gut. Does anyone know someone who has found a way to be safely infected? I’m dying here.”
The post already had several hundred upvotes, and a surprisingly civil ethical debate had started in the comments. One user, u/silvan337, replied to the original post with a very well-worded argument that the OP should have every right to voluntarily infect themselves so long as they accepted the risks and self-isolated sufficiently once they were infected. Another replied that they could never be completely certain that no one else would be exposed, as was evident by the deadly toll the virus had taken on the world, even with the global efforts to quarantine outbreaks.
I sat back and wondered how I would, well, moderate this whole thing, considering that was my job, and I found myself thinking back to when I was in the same place, when I had almost self-infected. In the end, what I was really worried about was my mother. Despite our constant fighting and the palpable tension at the dinner table, I wouldn’t have wanted to infect her with the virus once I had it, knowing it might kill her. I was more than willing to take the chance on the virus myself if it meant achieving more than I’d ever dreamed, but not if there was a chance it could hurt her.
I had been so close, too. Consumed with rage after one of our fights, I had gone and contacted one of the shadier members of the Inhuman subreddit, proposing a meeting place: The alley behind Vitali’s, the Italian restaurant on 4th Street. The location itself was closed to the public due to the virus, open only to employees carrying out online delivery orders, but I would enter and ask to use their bathroom; insist it was an emergency if denied. Then I would wait 20 nerve-wracking minutes for the contact to show up, disguised as a recently hired employee, who would enter the back alley, where I would join him and obtain a sample of the virus, to be used with discretion.
The whole thing was very cloak and dagger, especially considering whoever I was supposed to meet with had found a way to delete our online conversation entirely, leaving no trace it had ever even happened. I’d gotten halfway to the location before I changed my mind.
Scrolling back up to the post itself, I tapped the comment box and wrote out the best reply I could:
“I was in your position once. Almost went all the way, too. I couldn’t go through with it in the end because even though I had accepted the risks, I knew there were people around me who couldn’t, people with too much to lose, even if I had nothing. Don’t get me wrong; I still want a transformation of my own, I want it so bad it hurts, but now of all times we have to be selfless, not selfish. If you’re thinking about getting infected, consider the ones around you. Not just your family, but your neighbors and their families. Consider us. We have to remember to stay humble, stay safe. We may be ‘inhuman,’ but we cannot afford to lose our humanity.”