Flights of Fancy

The Good Virus, a Christmas Tale

Bodie Tate did not hate people, nor did he despise society, civilization, or the world in general. He did, however, harbor a profound disappointment and annoyance brought on by those aforementioned entities.

He had a fairly good life, comfortable with a moderate amount of contentment. Like any human who has spent a good portion of their adulthood working and interacting with other humans, he was both pleasantly surprised and deeply wounded by his fellow earthlings.

He felt that mankind's morals didn't live up to its religious texts, its love didn't reach the zenith of chivalrous love embodied in the Arthurian texts, and its bravery rarely reached comic book levels. He often noted that movie characters were always far better than real people and most good acts were motivated by some form of guilt. Bodie knew he sounded bitter, but he wasn't, he simply recognized and accepted man's limitations and thought that he could live with that.

His final and utter disillusionment with humanity transpired with amazing rapidity. In the course of one week, he went from moderately content to utterly despondent and his feelings for mankind spiraled from tolerance to a profound wish for Armageddon.

This seismic shift was the result of a number of unfortunate events which had occurred that week in Philadelphia and forever dispelled the notion of Karma from his philosophy. Bodie had never done anything remotely evil or even ill-tempered and could by no one's account deserve what happened.

His week started poorly. Bodie's fiancé left him for a drummer; his house was broken into and trashed; he was mugged by three sadistic barely post pubescent teens in front of the Philadelphia Cathedral Basilica with bystanders looking on, and a homeless man pissed on his leg. That wasn't the half of it. He was fired from his job as a pharmaceutical salesman for excessive honesty, his car was stolen, and his accountant informed him, quite apologetically, that he had stolen the majority of Bodie's savings and moved to Costa Rica. As an exclamation point to his apocalyptic week, his cat died.

After about a month in isolation basking in self-pity and trying to convince himself that mankind was basically good, he received the phone call that would profoundly change his life and offer an excuse to escape the increasingly depressing confines of the city.

Prior to his employment as a sales rep, Bodie had studied to become an epidemiologist, focused on the treatment and prevention of diseases. He was forced to withdraw from the university when his father died and he became the only means of support for his chronically ill mother. When she passed away, he was well entrenched in his job and talked himself out of returning to college to complete his degree.

During his time at the university, he worked as a trusted assistant to an eccentric yet brilliant professor of epidemiology named Doctor Johnathan Sutter. It was Doctor Sutter who called him and drew him out of his self-exile.

Sutter had left the university to pursue independent research at his laboratory in Lenfer, Louisiana. He begged Bodie to join him in his research, telling him he was on the verge of a major breakthrough and needed someone he could trust. With literally nothing left to lose, Bodie agreed.