By: Don Tassone

     Jayden knew his father was home because he could hear his parents’ raised voices downstairs.  To him, that sound was like nails on a chalkboard.

     He’d been looking at the news.  Not that he was into the news.  He was just putting off his homework.

     He scanned the headlines.  Protests.  Boycotts.  Political vendettas.  He couldn’t take it and slammed his laptop shut.

     He grabbed his backpack, unzipped it and pulled out his notebook.  He had only one homework assignment.  It was for social studies.  He read his notes:

     The world seems more divided than ever.  Why do you think that is?  What do you think we should do about it?  What’s one thing you can do to help bring people together?

     That was the last thing Jayden wanted to think about.  He’d grown up with division.  He could hear it just then downstairs.  The country was divided too, and every day the news made that painfully obvious.  Cable news had become a shouting match.  Forever wars.  Income inequality.  Democracy versus autocracy.

     The world was not only divided, but filled with rancor.  Just thinking about it made Jayden anxious.  And now he was supposed to write about it?  And come up with something he could do about it?

     He got up and lay down on his bed.  He closed his eyes and thought about his homework assignment.  His whole life, the world had seemed divided.  Why?  He had no clue.  What could bring people together?  Maybe an asteroid heading for Earth.

     It would take something like that, be thought, some cataclysm, to bring people together.  Diplomacy, alliances, even religion hadn’t worked.  It would have to be a threat, a common enemy.  But what kind of threat?

     Jayden thought of Covid.  To some extent, the pandemic had brought people together, even though how to deal with it had become politicized.  What if a virus, maybe even one more lethal than Covid, were to hit?

     That’ll be my answer, Jayden thought, sitting up.  It’s not so far-fetched.  After all, researchers had said it’s only a matter of time before the next pandemic strikes.

     Jayden went over to his desk, opened his laptop and created a new document.

Why is the world so divided?

The lack of something that everyone sees as a big threat.

What could bring people together?

Rallying around solutions to a problem that poses an existential threat to all mankind.

     There.  That wasn’t so bad.  It’s simple, he thought.  Fear is the thing that can bring people together.  Covid illustrated that.  If people feared for their survival, they would act as one.

     I can pull this off, Jayden thought.  But what about my role in all of it?

     “Jayden!” his mother called.

     “Yeah?”

     “Dinner.”

     “Okay.  Be right down.”

     His role would have to wait.

#

     Over dinner, while his parents bickered, Jayden thought of a news story he’d read recently about a scientific journal that had gotten into trouble for publishing a paper with fudged data.  That gave him an idea.

     Back in his bedroom, Jayden went online and found the story — and several others linked to it.  They were about the growing number of cases where fake research had been published, cases where all the data and the text had been invented from whole cloth, generated with artificial intelligence.  They are fake all the way through.

     Which led to Jayden’s role.  Even as a junior in high school, he had developed the digital skills and was familiar enough with AI programs to fabricate a scientific study and post it online. 

     He knew he might get caught.  But so what?  He’d say he was doing it as part of a class assignment.  Besides, everyone knows teenage boys do crazy things.

     But what should his fake research be about?  It had to be something specific, something everyone sees as a threat and wants to work together to stop.

     Climate change hadn’t worked.  Nor had the threat of nuclear annihilation.  But Covid had worked, at least for a short time.

     A new virus, he thought.  I’ll make up a new virus, even deadlier and more contagious than the coronavirus.

     Jayden decided the new virus would be “10 times more dangerous than Covid.”  Where would it come from?  He decided it should be a remote part of the world so it would be hard for people to determine the truth.

     Jayden looked up the world’s most remote places and landed on the Mamberamo region of Indonesia.  It was mainly jungle and not in a country that might be out to get the world.

     Jayden figured creating a scientific paper and posting it online would take some time.  His social studies homework was due the following day.  Of course, he couldn’t say anything about his real plan anyway. 

     So in response to the question about the one thing he could do to help bring people together, Jayden wrote:

Use my digital knowledge and skills to alert people to the danger.

     It was a half truth.  He just wouldn’t be specific about how he was going to use his digital knowledge and skills.

#

     Jayden got an A on his homework assignment.  His teacher even wrote:  “Great insight.”

     So he’d checked that box, and there was no need to pursue his idea about a new virus in Indonesia any further.

     Except that the bitter division all around him made Jayden more and more uneasy, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he could not only pull off the virus hoax but that it might actually bring people together, at least in Indonesia.

     So he went online and found several medical journals published in Indonesia.  Then he found and downloaded a dozen scientific papers on Covid. 

     He mashed up the titles of the medical journals and came up with The Journal of Indonesian Medicine.  Using AI, he did the same with the scientific papers, creating a “new” research study that revealed a virulent new strain of a Covid-like virus that nearly wiped out a village in the Mamberamo region. 

     Jayden named it C2.  Again using AI, he generated fake news stories and social media posts about the mysterious new virus.

     But then he began having second thoughts.  He knew that, despite his clever use of digital tools, he could be found out and, if he was, he could be charged with a crime.  He wondered if he might even do jail time.

     But he had gone into this with both eyes open.  The anxiety he felt from the neverending division in the world, and in his daily life, compelled him to do something. 

     Jayden believed what he had written in his homework assignment.  He believed in fear as a motivator.  But he also believed in people and that they would come together if they had to.  That’s ultimately how he justified his actions.

     At any rate, it was too late now.  If things went sideways, at least he’d done something constructive.  Or so he hoped.

     And so Jayden braced himself and checked the Internet nearly constantly.  What he would see he could never have predicted.

     Soon researchers from every region of the world began to report similar new strains of a Covid-like virus.  What they’d been observing was so concerning that they’d be hesitant to go public for fear of causing a health scare.  They were also concerned their home countries might be blamed for the new virus, as China was blamed for Covid-19.  But when they saw the Indonesian study, they quickly reported their own findings.

     Soon the awful truth became evident to everyone.  C2 was much more contagious and deadly than the original strain of the coronavirus.  Covid-19 had claimed more than 7,000,000 lives over five years.  In just a few months, C2 had quietly killed nearly 1,000,000 people.  Jayden’s idea that the new virus would be “10 times more dangerous than Covid” wasn’t far off.

     The world was stunned.  There was some finger pointing, but within days, the World Health Organization convened a global summit to set a plan for dealing with the new threat. 

     Unlike with Covid-19, there would be no piecemeal approach and no political games.  The world had learned its lesson.  This time, all countries worked together to develop and implement a plan that made sense for the world because the whole world was at dire risk.

     It worked.  Within a year, new vaccines were developed and distributed to every country in the world.  Within two years, C2 was no more.

     Ultimately, the new virus claimed the lives of 20 million people.  But in that time, the world came together, and the rancorous, corrosive and petty divisions that had plagued daily life simply fell away.

     Jayden watched it with awe.  No one ever found out he was behind the Indonesian “study” or even suspected it was fake.  But for the rest of his life, Jayden would know his stunt not only helped save countless lives but showed division doesn’t have to be a way of life.

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Don Tassone is the author of two novels and nine short story collections.  He lives in Loveland, Ohio.