Infection

It started without notice, there were no isolated cases, which could be analyzed and evaluated, before it got out of control. There were no cities or towns where small outbreaks occurred that would allow for hypotheses about their origin or courses of action to contain them. There was no patient zero, no prevention was possible, it took all the epidemiological warning systems by surprise, it attacked in silence and from the beginning, it was like a runaway beast, which invested everything that stood in its way.

Even today it is not known where it came from and because it stopped, it could only attack its symptoms, in those who were affected. It happened in Phaeton, a distant mining world, two days after the start of the storm season, where its inhabitants, nearly one hundred million, lived together in fifty-three cities, where there were also three hundred and fifty million robots, which were in charge of domestic work, services and deep mining.

The first documented case occurred in Minerva 1, the capital city of the planet. It involved a young man from the academy who had to be taken to the hospital in an emergency with acute respiratory syndrome and cardiac arrest. No more than three hours later, at Minerva 13, more than two thousand kilometers away, the second and third cases would occur. With similar symptoms, a worker from the mine administration and a woman who worked in the public administration had to be hospitalized after collapsing, in places far from the city. By the end of the day, more than 500 cases had been reported throughout the northern hemisphere.

The ships that had left from Phaeton and had not reached their destination were detained and quarantined, in orbit around the worlds or stations to which they were heading, and all those who had traveled from the planet and reached their destination in the last ten days were detained and subjected to rigorous medical evaluations, on the worlds where they were. But the contagion never left Phaeton.

There was no known pathogen, no bacteria or fungus, no virus or prion, no chemical or radioactive agents were sought, but none were found.

It would be believed that a society in which individuals are implanted from birth with cell regeneration and infection-fighting nanomachines would be protected against this type of event, but the contagion began precisely there, it was the medical nanomachines, the first to be affected by their action.

It was when the first robot became ill that the cause of the problem could be discovered, a strange form of life similar to a bacterium, but with a mutated form of nanomachine coupled to its internal structure, as if it were an organelle, which was responsible for the infection. Years after the contagion ended, exomicrobiologists from Dione's academy would categorize it as the first known symbiotic cybernetic life form that has formed naturally.

The cyberpathogen, as it was called, or CP20434 to the researchers, was formed in the upper layers of the atmosphere, where among the thousands of transformation nanomachines that still performed their work of purifying the ancient atmospheric gases, decomposing their molecules into carbon dioxide and oxygen, one mutated and for some reason, still unknown, combined with a bacterium. Several hundred of these mutated nanomachines were discovered in samples taken from the planet's atmosphere and proved to be completely inert on their own.

The microorganism attacked both the natural and cybernetic immune systems of humans and the robot repair nanomachines alike, reproducing on a scale far greater than any known microorganism. Once the host's defenses were over, it began to attack the cells of the lung and heart walls in humans and the muscle membranes in robots, after which it seemed to slow down its reproduction rate, until it was filtered out by the kidneys and excreted completely, this in the case of humans. In the case of robots, after destroying the muscle membranes, completely damaging the motor functions, it ended up dying and disappearing.

In a little less than thirty-six hours, after the symptoms began, the disease ceased and if the patient had resisted, he could receive a new dose of nanomachines and begin his recovery. However, if the dose of nanomachines was administered before the pathogen was completely expelled from the body, its action would be reactivated, giving rise to a new wave of symptoms that, because of the situation the patient was already in, was usually fatal.

The vector that allowed the transmission of the disease was never known, the most accepted hypothesis is that those infected had been exposed during the first rains of the season and that these transferred the microorganisms from the atmosphere. This could be demonstrated when the presence of the microorganism was found in the wells formed by the rains in the rock fields outside Minerva 1.

Even today, mutated nanomachines can be found in Phaeton's atmosphere, but the pathogen has never been found again and no new cases have occurred. After infecting more than twelve million humans and one hundred and twenty million robots, and causing the death of four million people and the need to replace the entire motor system of all infected robots, today, more than two hundred years after the epidemic, the inhabitants of Phaeton are still hiding from the rains, when the season starts, and the work in the mines, as well as any activity in the cities stops and the isolation vacations begin, until the storms stop.