Ron Seybold's Viral Times

The Consumer Electronics Show for 2010 kicked off last night, and the expo illuminated a few technologies that could play a role in Viral Times. The Inada Doctor’s Choice Massage Chair offers a vast range of massage points for its $5,799 retail price tag.

It’s a chair that mimics human touch. Inada says it’s shaped for 106 different human body types. If the programming could be transferred to a suit, like those in Viral Times, this touch could be used for immunotherapy while people are isolated during a viral storm. The same SimSuit that offers Secure Sex could serve as a naturopath’s healing tool.

During pre-programmed massages, kneading speeds automatically vary between 10 and 32 strokes per minute while tapping varies between 180 to 500 taps per minute. Proprietary 3-D rollers thrust forward and relax backward up to 2.8 inches, creating highly desirable movements of the spine. All these actions and many others are carefully managed by the chair’s electronics.

Over at VentureBeat, the reporter there was calling it a “glove chair.” Just drop the first letter off of that name and you’ll get another sensual purpose for the technology of today. Give a society a roadblock to physical contact like the New Flu and you’ll create a market demand for a love chair, or suit, that can be sold for a lot less than $5,799.

One of the crucial concepts for Viral Times shows up right away in the novel. In the first chapter of the book the science of haptics, already well-developed today, has started to fill the gap that people created between themselves and communicable disease caused by viruses.

Given enough years and enough desire, haptics will offer the engine to drive another home electronics device: The SimSuit. You only need to look at the Wikipedia definition of haptics to see how a well-built, broadband suit could help us reach out and touch.

Haptics is the study of touching as nonverbal communication. Touches that can be defined as communication include handshakes, holding hands, kissing (cheek, lips, hand), back slapping, high fives, a pat on the shoulder, and brushing an arm. Touching of oneself may include licking, picking, holding, and scratching. These behaviors are referred to as “adaptor” and may send messages that reveal the intentions or feelings of a communicator. The meaning conveyed from touch is highly dependent upon the context of the situation, the relationship between communicators, and the manner of touch.

In 1992 I worked as a computer technology journalist and followed an emerging video game experience that let players fight in role-play onscreen, their movements tracked by a sensory ring on the floor, surrounding them. Less than 17 years later we have the Nintendo Wii — so popular it was sold out for stretches of 2008 — and advanced enough to let us play sports with one another. Or Just Dance.

An article today in Fast Company tracks the fun quotient and sweat rating of Wii games. By 2019, an emerging crisis of viral times can create a very different, haptic kind of sweat.

Jennifer Nation, the geneticist Laureate employed by the PharmAlliance conglomerate, is getting some hard news about her newest drug formula.

(Read Chapters 1-9 in a downloadable PDF)

Jennifer

Atlanta

I had to take off my sweater when I heard the news. The spun hemp garment was fastened with a chain across the pearl neck button, a clasp I undid slowly, trying to compose myself. I felt warm in the lab director’s office. I half expected the bronze Indian-and-buffalo sculpture on Bret Scanlon’s desk to start dripping, with beads of metal rolling off the buffalo hunter’s nose.

I never noticed that Scanlon had the same nose as his statue. “You look surprised, Jennifer.” He scratched his moustache and tapped his upper lip. He was trying to act consoling and professional, but the stooge didn’t know which was more important.

“Surprised?” I blurted out the word to take him off the hook. Now my stomach started to churn.

“What’s wrong, anyway? You know this organization by now. PharmAlliance controls all rights to any work we create.” He straightened the release forms in front of him. Those were the FDA certificates of the trials, the antique and officious use of paper in a world where nearly all documents were digital. Even on the fast track program, my Praizone formula had taken eight weeks to clear the mandatory tests. It passed; I knew that already. It turned out that he called me into his office to confirm the formula’s new target market. The drug I’d designed to induce love of every aspect of God was now going to be shopped out as a catalyst for SimSuit fornication.

The ringing started up in my ears, my early warning system about stress. “How did this ever happen?”

“It’s really for the same purpose, after all. We funded your project to protect the populace from Ultra, of course.” Scanlon broke a wan smile. “The best way to ensure that safety is to keep people out of each others’ arms. Some will love the ones they’re with, but regardless, the Suits are safer than Ultimate Sex contact.”

This abomination was just as I’d feared. The drug was supposed to unlock hearts and deliver souls to God’s mercies. But they were using it to spark addiction to sex, a perversion like a minister who couldn’t keep his hands off the sopranos in his choir. I felt my nostrils flare. “Don’t you dare smirk at me, Scanlon. I’m a Nobel Laureate. I’ve got a conscience, a soul. Principles. I didn’t invent a sex drug. You won’t succeed in this.”

“We will, Doctor. You gave us a sound neuro-physical architecture in tuning your formula.” He struggled to contain his smile. “Frankly, Number 9–”

“Nine?”

“We’ve built up a few iterations from your fundamental. Frankly, Number 9 is going to sell itself.” Scanlon stood up. “I didn’t have to give you this little talk, honey. I did it as a favor. You don’t work for the Nobel committee. You work for us.”

“You’re disgusting, all of you. You don’t care about God’s world. It’s all just a playpen to you. His justice will prevail.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Scanlon said, dropping his smile. “But a Nobel Prize is no license to threaten anyone, not even us heathens. Try to get over it.” He opened the office door and stood beside it. I rose slowly, took a deep breath and left without another glance at him. Read the rest of this entry »

About 20 percent of Viral Times is online now for your reading pleasure. In our fresh chapters, 5-9, we read about Dayton’s adventure in the Health Camp, Jennifer Nation and her life as a Beast of Beauty, Angie’s arrival on Assateague Island and the exposure of Love’s Hurts, how Dayton manages in the aftermath of a loss and what a prized morning delivers to him along with its accolades.

You can download these first 43 pages of the novel from my Web site at ronseybold.com.

After a bout of wrestling with my page layout program InDesign, I’ve created the layout for my novel Viral Times.  Chapter 1 has been available here for a few weeks. The 21 pages of these chapters introduce our main characters:

Dayton Winstead, Pultizer-winning reporter for the media outlet Viral Times
Jennifer Nation, an evangelical Nobel Laureate geneticist
Angie Consoli, former porn star turned naturopathic healer

The story begins about a decade from now, when flu viruses, HIV-5 and AIDS have driven people into virtual contact for much of their intimate lives. Secure Sex is possible through SimSuits, which transmit touch across networks. The country falls into a promiscuity that sparks Dr. Nation to create something to stop the godless, anonymous sex. Can love overcome the fear that’s driven by faith?

Read the pages from my PDF file, or follow the jump to read it here on the blog. Read the rest of this entry »

Dayton Winstead
Austin, November 29, 2020

While the rains fall, we fall back in retreat from disease.

I type those words into my ScribePad and wipe sweat off my brow. I’m sweltering in my apartment while my Condo Cooler is forced to idle. I’m not supposed to be home now, a journalist writing in his private journal while the sun sets on a Texas hot with climate and viruses. Government clocks cycle our energy to restrain the temperature. But in these times, nothing we’ve tried controls the viruses.

They fall on us from the skies in rainstorms and leap between us in casual touch. These times have caused love to fail. A half-century ago people had sex–dad would say make love in one of his editorials–with no fears if they used simple precaution. Even when I grew up, sexual disease needed blood to cross between bodies. But HIV-5 is more aggressive than its viral ancestors. It enters the body while you battle the Blue Flu, a disease with an airborne range of 10 feet that’s soared into a 19-month pandemic. Nobody gets close now without the Hugo Boss masks, antiviral clothes, the viro-screen gel. In the ultimate of social distancing, the lucky ones can suit up and go virtual for sex. Secure Sex, they call it, breeding faster than mosquitoes in a holding pond.

I write to disinfect myself from my mission tomorrow and leave behind this record.

First the Flu, then HIV, and at the last, AIDS Ultra. Can love survive the terrors of touch? Nobody has an answer yet, although the new Simulation Suits mimic touch to make sex safe again. General Connectrics owns the field of haptics, game touch technology grown up to serve sex. Read the rest of this entry »

For more than six years I’ve written, polished and re-written my first novel, Viral Times. This book is the project that has tugged me into research on epidemics and pandemics, viralogy, gene therapy and public health. While it makes its way through agents’ offices, the novel will appear here in installments. You need only click on the category Viraltimes-book to keep up with the chapters. I await your comments eagerly.

Viral Times takes place during the next decade, when viruses threaten our means to have sex. A reporter and a natural healer try to stop evangelical terrorists who create a bio-virus that can attack over computer networks.

In the aftermath of a flu pandemic, disgraced reporter Dayton Winstead must try to stop a more deadly virus — before an evangelical scientist unleashes it across the world’s SecureSex virtual networks. In the name of protecting virtue from rampaging online promiscuity, the evangelist means to kill millions.

Starting tomorrow, the tale of Viral Times. I’ll keep up current day reporting about the world’s pandemics and health experts’ remedies on how to keep yourself safe in these times.