Single Source of Truth

The reports started leaking out of China about a new kind of flu, maybe a bioweapon, genetically engineered by a Chinese military lab, maybe released into the wild by sheer incompetence on the part of a scientists or bureaucrats, maybe released deliberately by the CPC, or by one of its enemies, or by a disgruntled political rival, it was impossible to say.

Of course the internet was all jokes at first; jokes about racism, jokes about zombie plagues, wingnut conspiracy theories. Everyone shopped their avatar to be wearing a Hazmat suit, and drew the virus as a sexy anime waifu and argued about whether it would even be possible, even in principle, to engineer a plague that only infected people of one race specifically. The bioterrorism dream, the woke nightmare of nightmares. No one trusted the official numbers or reports that came out of China, and no one was quite sure what to believe.

There were viral videos of Chinese collapsing in the middle of the street, but they were dubious, because you could obviously see their reflexes kicking in and preventing them from falling in a natural way. Epidemiologists wrote medium articles and twitter threads, and media outlets urged everyone to remain calm, and governments enacted travel bans or didn’t, whatever was best for the GDP.

The incubation period of the virus was two weeks, and the death count was climbing, and there were rumors everywhere that the CPC was massively underreporting the lethality of the virus to save face. The truth turned out to be far worse, and also far stranger than anyone had anticipated.

As the virus spread, it became obvious that there would be no containment, as new confirmed infections were reported in Singapore, Korea, the US, and Canada, and then many other countries thereafter. At first some nations were able to control it, but it continued to spread and be reintroduced.

Men and women alike fell sick, with symptoms that started like a flu, but that could suddenly mature into acute pulmonary and kidney failure. What took us a while to notice, a shamefully long time, perhaps partly out of denial, was that the virus was never fatal in men, and that it killed every woman it infected. No biological males ever manifested the acute symptoms, only the early flu-like affliction.

As the months went on, misogyny stopped being funny. Everyone had lost a daughter, or a mother, or a sister, or a wife. What could we do against the sad monotonic march of this plague through our families and institutions? Too late, far too late, we implemented a kind of unintentional Sharia law. Women had to be quarantined, hidden away from public life, or go out in hazmat suits more conservative and more regressive than any burqa. There was no God but Allah and the virus was his prophet.

Pornography became very precious, in a way, as a record of something we had lost. And despite the vast warehouses of hard drives full of it, we all had a morbid awareness that there would be no more of it. For most men, it became the only sexual access they could possibly have to a woman, and yet there was always the lingering awareness, the sense of regret: the girl in this video is dead.

What few real women remained became objects of impossible, insatiable desire, even the old, even the ugly, even the morbidly obese. Beautiful women accepted houses, cars, and golden treasures in exchange for even a single hour of company. There were stories, of course, of paradaisical oases of women; billionaires’ underground bunkers, remote rural compounds with even sex ratios, untouched by the virus, far away in the mountains of Montana, or Alaska, in New Zealand or on some nameless polynesian island. But these things were fantasies, of course, impossible dreams.

There was no shame in sex dolls anymore, in large part because there were no longer any women to shame us. It was the fastest growing market sector in the aftermath of the virus, and competition drove innovation, as each new iteration became more realistic and lightweight, with synthetic female voices and increasingly exotic materials, meant to simulate the feeling of flesh. The pharma companies started selling over-the-counter pheromone sprays, to make your bed or your sex doll smell like a woman. It helped with the loneliness, they said, not that most of us would ever smell a real woman again.

Everywhere you looked, everywhere you walked, if you stared into the face of another man you could see the same emotion, the same tortured eyes. We couldn’t save them. We were supposed to protect them. Gun sales were way up, as were suicides, quiet personal affairs, and many of us found, if not solace, at least an escape in the adrenaline thrill of wanton violence. But despite that, there was no anarchy. We continued to enforce the laws, we continued to live in society, and we learned to settle for less. Surprisingly, there were no great wars. No one at any level could be bothered to enlist or fight for a cause. There was nothing to fight for; there were no girls to impress. 

Men turned increasingly to homosexuality and transexuality, and the cities all turned into prisons, or bathhouses, or something in between. For those who were not as straight as they thought, an effeminate boy, sprayed with synthetic female pheromones, layered in makeup and so on, could almost approximate those angelic creatures that were now only seen on screens. As one wag put it, “all films are snuff films.” And alas, our sudden dearth of women meant also a dearth of children. There were fewer and fewer youths each year, and there’s nothing less convincing than a post-wall femboy. Youth was plentiful for the moment, but soon it would be as scarce as femininity itself. 

Libertarians are now the radical left. Feminism has become an impossibly abstract and decadent hypothetical, akin to the theological non-sequiturs of medieval monks: does the patriarchy oppress female bodies? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It’s legal to smoke indoors again, and it’s legal to drink in public, and it’s legal to run a casino in all fifty states.

And somehow, somehow, civilization keeps moving along. Most of us are so domesticated, such creatures of habit; yes there have been economic shocks, the total collapse of the publishing industry, the fashion industry, and the healthcare industry. Cosmetics have been more resilient than you would suppose. Instagram is gone and photography s a dead art. There’s nothing in the world worth taking a picture of, you know?

Our Manhattan project, or if you like, our Hail Mary, is to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to biotech research, to figure out how to use genetic science to splice human DNA into monkey eggs, to be gestated in artificial wombs. This needs to be done at scale, and the clock is ticking. Personally I don’t have much hope.

At least there are no more woke politics, because again, there are no more girls to impress. Insult was added to injury, maybe, when the virus that only kills women left all of the transwomen untouched, just like every other straight man, proof that nature or natures god is hopelessly regressive and transphobic.

There are no more women doctors, no more women senators or CEOs or board members, no more girls who code, no more “women in stem”, no more Title IX, no more sexual harassment seminars, no more #metoo hashtags, no more gender politics, no more female suffrage. 

So it’s kind of a wash, really. Garçon, Garçon! Pour me another brandy, and light me a cigarette.

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I wrote this short, tasteless story a bit after God-Shaped Hole, right at the beginning of the Chyna virus pandemic, the kung flu, the Wuhan virus, before anywhere in the world outside of Chyna was locked down, back when they were still telling us it was racist to wear a mask, because that implied that like, we hated Chinese people or something. It was all incredibly logical and coherent and it wasn’t until about six weeks later that they told us that akshually everyone had better wear a mask right now or else that would be racist. At the time I wrote this, we still knew very little, and even now, over a year later, it is still very hard, because this event has triggered a unification of the US government’s truth-generating organs and the supposedly “private” companies which control our digital communication platforms. I can only imagine that in the future, these tendencies will be even deeper and the knowledge warp around official narratives will be even more dire.

The titular “single source of truth” is an idea in software engineering where, in a distributed system, each specific piece of data should have a single authoritative provenance, in order to avoid situations where multiple instances of “the same” data diverge under Byzantine conditions. In our case, we find that women (especially of the childless variety) tend to be the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the ravenous leviathan, and in the scenario the story presents, they cease to function as a “source of truth.” Presumably, this would loosen the jaws of that leviathan, though at a world-ending cost. So although the story is intended as a joke, it is also a thought experiment about the interaction between sexual dimorphism and epistemology.

I hope that some day, someone, somewhere, will be able to write a correct and comprehensive history of this plague, but perhaps no one can ever know historical truths with full certainty, irrespective of what is written. This topic is tightly controlled by automation in every public online forum, and even speculating against the official truth can be dangerous. It is obvious that the danger of this disease is vastly outweighed by the possibility it presents to the state to exert technocratic control over its citizens. A tremendous evil is upon us, wherein a novel virus has been taken as carte blanche to implement a global medical dictatorship which will track and regulate the movements of every person in the developed world—where they can go, what they can buy, and what they can say.

In retrospect we may feel it was inevitable that the rise of smartphones and high-speed satellite internet would precipitate an arrangement of this kind. Who could resist the opportunity to take such a power, when presented with the opportunity? Do you really imagine you would be so noble? From the perspective of the macro-organism, there are many compelling arguments to do so, many of which are grounded in the noblest of motives. The world these people will create reminds us of one of the oldest and most famous science fiction dystopias ever published, in the book of Revelation:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
(Rev. 13:17)

Of course, men have been associating this or that government attempt to make citizens more legible with the prophecy of St. John of Patmos since the day it was published. His prophecy has come true many times, and will continue to do so, because the mark of the beast is not a specific policy, to use a modern, “liberal democratic” term, but rather it is a universal tendency of all governments in all places and times. As technology becomes more sophisticated, the marks become ever more elaborate. I don’t know if there is any escape from this future, but for the time being we are still able to laugh about it. I can easily imagine a future where the instruments of digital control have rendered humor impossible, and the only laughter that remains is the joyless mouth flatulence of the terrified conformist, who only laughs to signal submission to the commissars who watch him from the cloud.

~ZHP