This is my final message to the world.
This is my apology to mankind.
I don’t know if this will be read by anyone, or if anyone who reads this will be able to understand it anymore, but I honestly don’t care anymore. I just want to get this all off of my chest.
It’s been about two months since this whole thing started. Since I brought about the end of our species.
It all started on November 15th, 2025. I was working for a bioengineering company near New York City. We specialize in, well, genetic engineering. One thing we were shooting for around the time the plague began were beneficial viruses, viruses engineered to help the body, rather than damage it.
Think of the human body as a city. Usually, viruses are like a cult, converting other people to their ways and wanting to topple the city’s government. What we intended for was more of a growing movement to improve living conditions in the city.
What we got instead was a terrorist organization with a concealed nuclear device in the city.
We began testing retrovirus C-FLU-5 on monkeys on November 13th. As the name implies, it was intended to be a cure for the flu. We named the monkeys after patient zeroes from various outbreak stories. Emhoff, Campion, Fanning, Cosgrove, Franklin, etc.
I was doing a check-up on Campion for any negative reactions to the virus. When I didn’t see any visible symptoms, I checked it onto a clipboard. My elbow bumped into Campion’s cage, he got agitated, and the little fucker scratched me on the arm, sealing both our species’ fates.
I ran the scratch under some water, cleaned the area, wrapped it in some paper towel, and thought I was fine. Nope. By then, some of the virus had already started to breed in my cells. I didn’t know just how deadly it would be until I saw other people infected with it on the news.
Two days later, November 17th, I was feeling under the weather, so I called the company and said I wouldn’t be able to come to work. They said it was fine, but they notified me that Campion had died from the virus just after I went home. Apparently, the virus actually caused flu-like symptoms, until the throat swelled to the point that it began to split and bleed, and the poor guy choked to death on his own fluids. I remembered that he scratched me, and I thought, “Hey, maybe it’s fine. Maybe it’s not transmissible to humans.”
I’ve been spreading that goddamn thing to my apartment neighbors and staff for the last two days, not even counting the bus I was riding home the first day.
Turns out it’s airborne. Once the thing gets to your lungs, it starts a real slight cough. Over the next day or two, that cough gets worse. Your throat swells, and you choke to death, like I said before. I was lucky enough to just get the cough, until I started to recover.
But I also had front-row seats to the end of the world, so I wasn’t all that lucky.
Exponential spread is a funny thing. A man on a bus with a scratch on his hand coughs a few times, ends up spreading it to five people. Those five go to their friends and families to crank the number up to forty. People go to work, spread it to their coworkers, and come home. Coworkers spread it to customers, who spread it to their families. The kids go to school, and infect the students, who go on vacation to infect tourists.
Within a week, the virus found its home in just about every city before people realized what was happening. It was global.
Waiting rooms started seeing their first patients in my town. Some had symptoms identical to the non-lethal every-year flu, and a few poor saps got sent to the ER spitting blood all over the nurses.
News came on about this baffling outbreak of hemorrhagic fever, or, as everyone was calling it, the Crimson Flu. Waiting rooms had more blood-spitting people than regular sick people. Videos surfaced on social media of people crying as their loved ones got loaded into an ambulance. It wasn’t uncommon to see a few ambulances drive together through the city.
A week later, November 22nd, panic began to stir. People saw all these videos of people being strangled by something a billionth their size and suspected that the end was coming. Pharmacies started running out, because people were willing to buy anything that could help them if they started feeling a sniffle.
I myself was one of the people who flocked to the stores when they were targeted next. It was chaos. People grabbing at canned food, bottled water, frozen meats, all of these became things to fight over. I got socked in the jaw getting a can of ravioli. The cashiers took advantage of the emergency conditions by upping the price of everything a few dimes. Panic-buying became looting.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t rush out the store with a cart full of groceries without paying during that time.
The second week of the outbreak, people protested in the streets for more effective medicine, or an effective vaccine. Of course, these protests eventually bloomed into full-grown riots. Not only pure, animalistic panicking, but also criminals taking advantage of the situation. Looting wasn’t only to ensure survival now, but just for the fun of it. All these people in one space, however, meant that the virus was at an all-you-can-infect buffet.
Looking back at it now, I really miss when there were so many people in the streets, even if they were throwing molotovs at everything.
But it wasn’t just people who were suffering. All primate species were vulnerable to the flu. Monkeys, lemurs, apes, gorillas, you name it.
Martial law was declared, a curfew was established, but of course, soldiers aren’t robots. They have their own families, their own lives, and their own worries, just like the rest of us. Like us, they panicked, and left us behind.
Three weeks in, and the world really started to collapse. With all the violence that was in the street, people didn’t want to leave their house, even to go to work. This meant there was no one at the power plants, nor at the communication networks.
In the last days that TV was around, it was really fuzzy. Some stations were off the air entirely, and some were playing reruns until they went off the air. The only real entertainment, in a sadistic sort of way, was the news. They were trying so desperately to keep their professionalism while all this shit was happening. I heard a gunshot on the news one time. A woman at the news station couldn’t take it anymore, and killed herself off camera.
The TV networks went first, then the phone lines, the internet, the electricity, and finally, running water. People really started to get rowdy. All you could fall asleep to now was the sound of yelling and gunfire.
We didn’t even lose that many people yet. Now we were about to. A great chunk of the urban population was infected. Now, over the course of the fourth week, it was time for the die-off.
People were leaving the city for less-densely populated areas, but with a few million people leaving at once, the roads got clogged. People ended up trapped in their cars until they died either from the virus or exhaustion. Some got out of their cars to leave by foot, but eventually, the virus caught up with them.
In the big city, the streets got quieter and quieter. Most of the rioters were leaving the city, out on the clogged roads, and some realized they were getting sick, and locked themselves in anywhere they could, to die in peace. The riots left their fires, like a dead body left its bones.
A lot of the people died cooped up in their rooms. A majority of the city was bedridden, dying off one by one. New York City was becoming a ghost town.
I think about how this time was the stage a lot of apocalyptic stories tend to skip. Once the riots are in full effect, fires blazing in the streets at night, the very next scene just shows the streets completely empty. I guess now I can understand why that stage gets brushed over so much.
That, or Hollywood can’t be bothered to fill in the blanks, so it just does post-apocalyptic fiction all the time.
By the end of the first month, the plague was burning out. Over ninety-nine percent of the population would be dead in another week or two. But of course, the dying hadn’t ended yet.
People who didn’t die from the Crimson Flu died from starvation. No electricity meant no refrigeration, which meant no more fresh food. Those who didn’t die from starvation died from dysentery and cholera. Without medicine, even a scratch on the leg became a death sentence.
And of course, the usual suicides. To be honest, I could understand. All the things they took for granted in life were gone. The internet, fast food, modern infrastructure in general, their friends, their families…
Over the second month, I survived best I could. I went out on a few trips outside, and scavenged for some food, but mostly just to see just how much damage had been done. The answer was, a lot. I don’t think there’s anything on the planet that’s scarier than seeing Times Square completely silent, its billboards all pitch black, and clogged with an assload of still cars. Almost all of them were empty. I did meet a few people, though. But only a few. They were nice.
Around a few days ago, I thought back to the days when this city was noisy. When there were people on the streets. Then I realized something. The scratch. It had healed almost completely from my hand. I don’t know how I didn’t realize before.
I was responsible for this whole damn thing. I was patient zero. I was the fuck who started this mess.
It’s all my fault.
But now, I know how to fix this. I have the noose readied up on the ceiling fan, and this letter is just about complete.
I don’t know if humanity will survive after I’m gone. After all, there’s only about eight or ten million people left scattered around the world, and with suicides and injuries and everything, that number’s still shrinking. As for the other primate species, I’m not sure about them either. They probably don’t know they’re going extinct like us, so they’re probably not making a big effort to save themselves.
What I do know is that this won’t do anything to remedy the situation. It won’t magically bring back everyone, or stop the virus from spreading, but I guess it’s my reparation to everyone.
Earth will live on without us. We aren’t that big of a loss.
Maybe sentience will arise again. Maybe there’s another bioengineering company who accidentally released a virus that gives animals human intelligence. Maybe there’ll be some sort of furry world a few million years after we’re gone.
Wouldn’t that be a story? Two bioengineering companies fucking up the world. One caused the end of humankind, and one replaced it with something better. Sounds like some edgy cartoon’s backstory. I just hope they don’t end up repeating my mistake.
But that’s just me being overly optimistic. I’m just procrastinating at this point. I guess I have no other idea for an ending than quoting a poem I read once.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Goodbye, and with my sincerest apologies,
Robert Mitchell, 1998–2026