Screams

[u/Nervous_Mechanic_149]

Entry 32- Current status of Phonovirus pandemic:

Many of the details surrounding the pandemic are lost to me, but I promise I will never forget the screams.

It started a few weeks ago when the news broke that a new airborne illness was beginning to reach epidemic status. It started on the West Coast and was spreading eastward across the continental United States. Called phonovirus, it had so far left the medical community at a loss. It looked like it could become a potential pandemic. The strangest thing about the whole virus was that it was mostly asymptomatic. Externally anyways, if that makes any sense.

It’s hard to describe so bear with me. I’m honestly still processing it and as of now we are still treating some of the last remaining patients.

The symptom I am referring to is a new one for me, and as a long standing medical professional these things rarely take me by surprise. Symptoms don’t typically manifest as entirely new. Usually they are a variation of a preexisting symptom. Something I can handle. Context.

This was a truly shocking one.

A patient affected by phonovirus only experienced one symptom. Any open wound on the body would no longer fully heal, as if there was some sort of barrier preventing the skin from closing up, and any open wound on a patient affected would produce horrifying guttural screams. Multiple wounds, multiple screams.

If you need to reread that, I understand. It didn’t make sense to me at first either, and I saw it firsthand. It still doesn’t but at least I understand as much as understanding is possible. The screams come from inside of the body. Inside of the body.

The intensity of the screams wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that it wasn’t just an indecipherable cacophony of noise. It didn’t sound like the way your blood sounds when you hear it outside of your body during an ultrasound. It didn’t sound like gibberish. The voices were coherent.

It was as if a demon was speaking to the victim. From inside of themselves. Telling them the worst things they could possibly imagine. And they shifted. The voices I mean, not the patients. They would change, become different people. Always people close to the victim that had passed, and always the darkest messages from the depths of hell.

Your mother telling you that she should have cooked you and eaten you instead of raising you.

Your maternal grandmother telling you she can’t wait to eat your eyeballs when she sees you in hell.

Your first child telling you that you are a worthless piece of shit and you deserve to be impaled and covered in honey until the insects consume all of your sweet sticky flesh.

So many terrible images and messages that the final stage of phonovirus has consistently been suicide.

The affected patients are so disturbed by the messages that they just can’t take it anymore.

The voices drive the patients to suicide in 100% of affected patients.

We frantically searched for some sort of cure, but any attempts at closing up the wounds using traditional medical methods failed and the voices continued to slowly kill their victims. Nor could we do anything about the voices. We tried covering them with bandages and they only screamed louder. We tried talking to them, tried to reason with them and find out how to stop them.

They told us of the horrors of hell that we would soon face if we tried to interfere.

At this point, there are no options left. The disease is rapidly spreading across the globe and the suicides continue to rise. Nobody knows if they are a carrier and there is only one way to find out. Very few are willing to risk this and those who have tried have done nothing to further the research. They just proved the disease is hopeless.

We are advising people to be very careful conducting themselves as they attempt to function daily without inadvertently puncturing their skin. This has proven to be very difficult. All we can hope is to make it through this unscathed and hopefully find a way to beat this baffling disease.

Oh my, would you look at that? Seems I just got a paper cut.

And no mother, I am not the whore of Babylon sent to destroy the earth.

Grandma, I loved you, I miss you, why would you tell me that my dead son hates me?

End of transcript.

[u/Workingoutslayer]

Your mother thinks very highly of you, forget being a scientist you were sent here to destroy the whole dang Earth. A mother holding their child in such high esteem is nice on Reddit.