(DRAFT)
Hi, my name is Robert and I’m a PMM. I’ve been a PMM for six years now. I know what you’re thinking. It’s a long time. Most people manage to re-integrate successfully after three. Why am I still a danger?
I’ve no idea what the answer is. Maybe I’m one of those cases who will finally actually try to do something. If I do, I know I’ll be the first to die. I hope, I genuinely hope, that the government will stop me before anyone dies.
As I said, I joined the Potential Mass Murderer Program six years ago. First step, as everyone knows, is admitting you’ve got a problem. Which is a joke. At that point, I’d had a vial of bio-toxin in my fridge for six months. It could wipe out everyone on the planet if no one did anything about it. My guess, it’d probably actually manage about ten thousand or so, it wasn’t a good one, just something I cooked up from Internet pages.
Now, anyone can do this, doesn’t mean that everyone does. But I was lonely, and I was walking around seeing all of these happy people and I just wanted to kill them. And I wanted it to hurt. I wanted them to claw their faces in agony, I wanted them to see their children dying in front of them, I wanted…
Sorry.
What I’m trying to say is, I wanted them to hurt as much as I was hurting. Doesn’t matter why, I was just made wrong. Anyway, as I say, I was unregistered for six months before I finally went down to my local centre. They were pretty nice, considering. I guess it’s just a job to them. They sent a man ’round every month. His name was Rob, too. Milk, no sugar. He’d take a sample of whatever toxins I’ve got, just in case I actually do the unthinkable and release it. And, of course, I had to start coming to these sessions, and the one-on-one stuff. They’re pretty definite about us doing that, aren’t they?
I don’t think much really changed for about six months, when everything went wrong. Someone at the office saw me going to the centre. I got fired a month later. Not for being a PMM, obviously. It’s never for that. They found an excuse.
Well, I was hardly going to find another job, was I? I went onto disability. Funny how you never get messed around when there’s a note on your file saying you could just snap and kill everyone in the office. All of a sudden I had a lot of time on my hands. I guess that’s when I started to get into the technical side of bio-toxins. Over the two years I improved virulence, added a water-borne vector, basically made the vial in the fridge mine.
Word got round, of course. After the third brick through the window I applied to move to London. No one bothers anyone here.
Anyway, I think it was about a month after I’d moved I met Rebecca. It was at a meeting at the old centre, the Thursday one followed by pool night. My god, she was gorgeous. Flaming red shoulder-length hair and… Anyway, she was new – you know the rules – she had to talk.
I think I was paying so much attention to her face it took me a while to hear what she was saying. She’d been through five relationships in the last two years, with a variety of deadbeats, cheaters and abusers. Finally, one day she just snapped and decided it was time to solve the problem once and for all. She came up with a toxin that targeted men. About a week later she told her best friend, who did what any sane person would do and phoned the centre.
So here she was, hating the world, feeling betrayed and gorgeous. I had to get to know her better. I stayed around for pool; normally I’d just go home but I made the effort. As it happens, I didn’t even have to make a move. Just as well, I’ve never been that good at that stuff. Sandra introduced us. She doesn’t come anymore. She got well about two years ago.
You know how it is, there’s only one thing to talk about. So I asked about her toxin. Turns out she knew nothing about the technology behind it. What she’d got was very primitive. Actually, I reckon it would probably have only had an eighty-twenty male-female split.
Now, I’ve got to confess something here. I might be giving you the impression I was just interested in her. That’s not quite true. The whole idea of a targeted toxin was a revelation to me. Yeah, I knew you could do it, but it had never occurred to me to want to kill one person more than another.
We must have talked for hours, and I agreed to help her refine her toxin. Six months later she moved in with me.
Looking back, my life started to change then. Little things. Martin, the guy who got assigned to me in London had been really nervous around me. One of the “in and outers”, you know the sort. Now he’d stay for coffee. I think we even watched a couple of games. I got a bit more involved in the social activities. I got introduced to Rebecca’s family; I think I quite liked them.
And every Thursday, the two of us would sit down and work on the technology. We started off by fixing the targeting; no more collateral female deaths. Then we concentrated on my areas for a while and upped the virulence.
Then one day, she told me that she didn’t want me to die if she released it. She was so nervous when she said it, as though she was saying something wrong. God, you have no idea how happy I was. Finally, I knew she loved me as completely as I loved her. I kissed her and told her everything would be all right.
So we started what we called the “Don’t Kill Rob” project. Those of you who were around at the time will remember how it became quite a joke around the centre. “Hi Rob! How’s the DKR?”
It’s actually very difficult to target a bio-toxin that well. Even if only certain parts of it got through, my being at ground zero would pretty effectively cash my chips. Genetic targeting was tricky because I was to be the exception, not the rule.
Well, we’d been living together for two years by then and had started talking about kids, and I thought it was about time I got a job. So I got a job with the rapid response unit. Yeah, I know, I’m a cliché. Poacher turned gamekeeper. But seriously, these guys were good. I thought my design skills were top-notch, but I was just a gifted amateur when I started out.
It was my boss who suggested the solution. It was simple; I just had to develop a specific immunity. I must have run home to tell her. It’d take about three months to build up my white cells.
You know, I sometimes think that I must be stupid. I couldn’t see what was going on right in front of me. Somehow she just didn’t seem excited. Then, about a month after I’d started on the anti-toxin regimen, she asked me if I could reduce the virulence. I didn’t understand. Why would you want to do that? She said she was feeling nervous about having something so dangerous in the house.
Well, I went on about all of the failsafes. Don’t know why I did that. I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. The only way her toxin was going to be released was if she chose to release it.
And then she said something else. What if we had a son? My immunity wouldn’t work for him. He could die in the womb.
I said, and I remember this exactly “Well, if you’re going to think like that, you’re never going to release it.”
I shouldn’t have said it. It was hurtful and I wasn’t thinking. But it didn’t hurt half as much as what she said next.
“You know what, Rob. You’re right.” I felt like I’d been kicked. I just sat down. Didn’t say anything. What do you say to that? First, she phoned the centre and asked for a disposal team. Then she phoned her mother and said she would be coming over to stay for a while.
Three years, three bloody years we’d been together and she got well. I guess I could have fought, tried to get her to stay, but it wouldn’t have made a difference, and I couldn’t face her telling me I “wasn’t a good person to be around”.
So, if some of you have been wondering where we’ve been the last month, now you know. Sorry I haven’t called, but I haven’t left the house. You see, I decided to throw away my bio-toxin and replace it with a new one. I’m really proud of it. It’s broad-spectrum but asymptomatic in most cases. All it kills is Rebecca, and her family to within a twenty-five percent genetic match. That’s two generations in any direction.
What I can’t work out is: am I making progress?
