6 Digital Plagues More Terrifying Than Allergy Season

The Plague (Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America, by Damien Lincoln Ober)
In Ober’s wifi-enabled take on the founding of America, a violent plague is unleashed when the founding fathers’ social media posting of the Articles of Confederation goes literally viral, turning anyone who uses an internet-accessible device into a hideous crystalline incubator. As the Founders’ attempts to fix the situation spiral out of control, the plague becomes central to their internal power struggles, with various factions attempting to harness the disease’s crystal output, develop new systems to fight it and the alien monsters it attracts, experiment on healthy citizens to try and cure it, and manage the various cults and weird side effects further dictating the will of the country. It’s a digital disease whose impact is felt even after it’s eradicated, utterly changing the face of a fledgeling nation.

Snow Crash (Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson)
An insidious visual/digital plague that takes the form of a designer drug, the eponymous virus from Neal Stephenson’s post-cyberpunk classic first causes users’ digital interface rigs to crash with a static effect similar to “snow” on an old television screen. Its progression from there is dramatic, as the subliminal messages inside the viral program cause the user first to go comatose, then begin babbling in tongues thanks to a combination of audio signals, linguistic hacking, and ancient Sumerian memetic viruses that can alter DNA. Worse still, the virus makes its way into the hands of a Christian televangelist and his floating pirate nation, who want to use it to control both the physical world and the Metaverse, Snow Crash’s version of the internet. Scary stuff.

Being Taken (The Feed, by Nick Clark Windo)
After a worldwide event crashes the cybernetic augmented-reality network known as the Feed, people begin to notice a problem, caused by numerous digital consciousness backups meant to ensure immortality for Feed users. Instead, they cause anyone with a connection to the Feed (which is most everyone on Earth) to have their consciousness overwritten by their digital counterparts, who download into their sleeping bodies. Nick Clark Windo’s bleak portrait of a world where most practical knowledge (like how to grow food) is lost to time is made even bleaker by these events, which force people to watch each other while they sleep, wary of the possibility that they might have to kill the overwritten person upon waking. It puts immense stress on a stressful story of a family trying to hold together and find each other after their world collapses.

The Joker Bone (Nymphomation, by Jeff Noon)
It’s no surprise at least one novel by Jeff Noon, who frequently blends the virtual with the real, would feature a technological virus that infects humans. In fact, there are multiple examples of said throughout Nymphomation, from the advertising biomechs who infect people with their bites, to pulling the dreaded “Joker” result in the dystopian citywide lottery, a (rigged) random chance drawing that unleashes a skeletal avatar of misfortune to stalk and kill the unlucky, including our main characters, who are hunted and killed by the Joker in turn, each becoming its next host. While many of the mutations and hybridizations of Noon’s warped and trippy vision of Manchester have beneficial qualities—like making every computer system and door instantly accessible—the Joker is an actively malevolent plague upon the city, even as the team of renegade mathematicians fighting it tries to use its actively murderous nature against its creators.

The Ring Virus/MHC (Loop, by Koji Suzuki)
You probably know the plot of The Ring, the most successful Japanese horror franchise exported to the west: someone watches a cursed videotape of a bad student film, then receives a phone call that tells them they have seven days to live. While this fits the theme of viral killing technology, Loop, the third book in the Ring trilogy, is the one that best fits the theme, as the curse evolves into an actual biological virus (though one still passed on by technology), manifesting in tumors, then adding in virtual reality, cloning, and a new strain of the Ring Virus now affecting plants and animals as well as humans. The result is an apocalyptic pandemic. While perhaps not the tightest of Suzuki’s novels, Loop is definitely the most imaginative and bizarre, with a plot involving consciousness transfer and a cancer breaking through a simulated-reality quarantine.

Zen (Virology, by Ren Warom)
Due to the chaotic, bizarre nature of Warom’s new weird/cyberpunk thriller, it might not be quite correct to call Zen a virus. An engineered goddess imprisoned inside a polar bear that might also be an extension of her soul (I said it was chaotic and bizarre), Zen uses her viral nature to hack into the citizens of the megacity of Foon Gung and use them as her personal puppets. To make matters worse, she also infects their avatars in the Slip, a combination artificial-reality and collective subconscious, meaning she owns her infectees mind, body, and soul. It’s an insidious touch that makes Zen’s ability to unleash zombies on her enemies that much worse—knowing she’s using her godlike powers to infect a person in ways that can’t easily be cured.