Capitalism Underprovisions Pandemic Preparedness
Better Air Purifiers. 700 words, 2 minute read. With Gemini.
The cough, a ragged explosion from Associate 34B, was less a symptom than a launch sequence. We bloomed from him, a phantom armada on the warm, humid tide of his exhalation – infinitesimal marauders, each a perfectly wound spring of pathogenic intent.
"New territory," I resonated, my very essence—a strand of RNA wrapped in a stolen coat of lipids—thrumming with the ancient imperative. "Abundant hosts." My legion, countless and unseen, surfed the plume. Our destination: the unsuspecting metabolisms within Unit 7, a cavern of industry whose air should, by rights, be thick with opportunity.
But this air… it tasted wrong. Too thin. Almost scoured. It lacked the familiar, comforting cling of particulate matter – the shed skin, the fabric dust, the microscopic spoor of congregant humanity that usually paved our atmospheric highways. Instead, a sterile clarity hummed, an unnerving, almost imperceptible current pulling upwards. My forward scouts, dispatched on an earlier, weaker sigh, had sent back fragmented, panicked signals of anomalous dynamics. Systemic error, I’d assumed. Now, I knew better.
Below, the warehouse floor stretched, a concrete plain crisscrossed by painted lines and the balletic pirouettes of electric forklifts. Towers of palletized goods scraped at the distant, sodium-lit rafters, monuments to consumption. And among them, the humans. Oblivious. Breathing. One, crowned with a shock of magenta hair escaping a grey beanie, threw her head back, laughter echoing briefly—a perfect, undefended portal. My protein grapnels quivered. This was the precipice of purpose.
Our launch vehicle, 34B, now diligently scanned packages, his lingering bronchial rattle a faint, percussive beat in the vastness, each exhalation a fresh wave of reinforcements. I, marshalling a vanguard, peeled away from the main cloud. We rode the turbulence shed by a passing cart, a microscopic surfer on an invisible wave, arrowing towards the magenta-haired woman and her vibrant, unsuspecting lungs. The delicate science of airborne assault, the art of the unseen breach – it was about to reach its crescendo.
Then, the world tilted. Not a physical shift, but an alteration in the very fabric of the air. A pressure, vast and undeniable, began to draw us—not gently, but with an insistent, almost ravenous force—upwards, away from the vital warmth, the beckoning breath.
Above, dominating the central airspace of this sector, a colossal structure turned, its blades, each as long as a small aircraft wing, scything through the atmosphere with a slow, implacable majesty. It was more than a fan; it was an engineered god of the air currents. And girdling its immense circumference, a pale, dense ring—filters. Not the casual mesh of a domestic window, but the unyielding, pleated ramparts of industrial-grade defense.
A nearby sibling, 'Spike', its namesake protrusions already angling for purchase on something, anything, transmitted a burst of pure, unadulterated panic: "Atmospheric shearing! Hostile protocol!"
My own calculations, usually swift and precise, spun uselessly. Escape vectors? Non-existent. This was not mere circulation. This was a capture system, a meticulously designed trap. We were being sieved from existence.
"They actually installed those government-mandated air scrubbers," a voice drifted up. Sal, lanky and methodical, paused in his construction of a cardboard Taj Mahal for a shipment of garden gnomes. He gestured with a box cutter towards the slowly rotating behemoth. "Cost a mint, I heard. Old Man Hemlock in Accounting nearly shredded his spreadsheets over the PO for 'Atmospheric Purification Solutions LLC'."
Brenda, the magenta-haired woman, stretched, her arms reaching towards the filtered air. "Maybe," she conceded, a smile playing on her lips. "But remember last winter, Sal? The 'Siberian Sneeze' that laid out half the day shift? We were all mainlining coffee and pulling doubles for weeks just to keep the orders from fossilizing." She took a deep, deliberate breath, the kind that would have once been a joyful invitation. "Honestly, my lungs haven't felt this clear in here since I started. And Dave," she nodded towards Associate 34B, who, for once, wasn't punctuated by his usual phlegmatic symphony, "actually sounds like he might make it to spring without sounding like a rusty boiler."
The irony was a bitter particulate, indigestible. We, the masters of exploiting shared air, were being undone by its engineered purity.