Matthew Fish - C-Shapes

“Are you alright?” I ask as I cautiously enter the room of the old farmhouse. The floor creaks beneath each slow step I take. I see her there—the sun glowing against her shoulder length bleached blonde hair and her hazel eyes are illuminated like glowing gems. She is sitting motionless. Her eyes are fixed to the view of the window. She does not reply. She does not even acknowledge my presence.

There is a gun in her hand. The faint smell of smoke hangs in the air. Spent bullet casings line the hardwood floor around her. As I slowly enter the room, I spot a trail of blood that leads to a large, heavy set man. He is shirtless, wearing a pair of overalls. A large red axe with a wooden handle rests against the floor beside him. What remains of his head is a sight that I will never forget as very little of it is there, save for a mess of blood and scattered brain matter.

As I stand there, I reflect for a moment on how I got here. I do not know if I am still alive by luck, or because I have some purpose in the future… although, I highly doubt the latter. My name is Ethan Chase, and there is nothing remarkable about me. I do not have all the answers about what has happened. I will probably leave you with more questions than answers…. Regardless, this is the story of what I know I am—a survivor.

The date is September 29 2025; it has been a little over 8 years since a virus quickly swept across the world and rendered about half of the world’s population mentally ‘Unstable.’ No one knows where the virus originated. There are a lot of theories and government conspiracy ideas; however, most people are too busy dealing with the aftermath of the situation to spend time on its origin. Right now, the countries are more concerned with keeping it under control as best they can. Some countries were hit harder than we were… I remember the final reports, China’s 1.6 billion people had the largest ratio of loss with nearly sixty-five percent of its population rendered Unstable.

A little under two years after the virus hit, with the help of the government, a pharmaceutical research and treatment facility emerged in Virginia called C-Shapes. I know very little about them, other than the fact they are my employer and they employ a lot of people from all over the world… they have managed to mine the best and brightest of the survivors from every country as they are all desperately dependent on C-Shapes sole product. With the United States population of able and stable citizens cut down from four-hundred million down to a little over two-hundred million, there is no lack of employment. I worked for a few years doing menial jobs that needed to be done. I spent some time manning different gas stations; a long time stocking a grocery store… it took a rather long time for me to get into the C-Shapes program. I suppose, unless you are some kind of scientist, researcher, chemist, therapist, or someone of higher education, it probably amounts to a large number of waiting years for processing. However, the pay difference is well worth the wait.

There are a few different jobs available for those of us who do not really possess a specific talent, a few less for someone who barely graduated high school… myself specifically. Most of the people that were rendered Unstable were sent to C-Shapes offices to be evaluated, from there they go to Caseworkers, and then they are placed under the care of Sitters (A name I’m not particularly fond of.) There is also another section of C-Shapes called Hunters. They are basically government-sanctioned killers. Anyone with a gun and love for shooting things can usually apply—it’s a necessary evil for times when an Unstable goes Aggro. I have never been fond of shooting animals, and could not imagine the thought of shooting a human (although we’ve been trained to not think of them as human anymore). It is just not in my nature. So, naturally, I became a Sitter.

A Sitter’s job is not overly complicated. Even still, I had my reservations. You basically make sure your Unstable takes their dosage of C-Alysium, or Calm as it’s been affectionately nicknamed, and make sure that they are doing the basic functions necessary for living, keeping them company, helping with shopping, making sure they don’t go Aggro… I keep mentioning Aggro—it is probably a good time for an explanation. When the virus hit, to those susceptible, it affected people in different ways. At the low end there are the Catatonics, who just spend most of the day staring off at nothing at all or sleeping. They require the most work as they will often let themselves starve. Then there are the rare Mirrors, named for their behavior of sometimes mimicking the actions and words of people around them. Mirrors are often very capable and self sufficient, left to their own devices they will cook, dress themselves, do everything a normal person can do—they just sometimes do not act normal, they are most prone to anxiety attacks and often do not know where they are. Most, but not all, also often have severe memory issues. The next group they call the Amnesiacs—which are pretty high functioning, intelligent people who are lucid one moment but, completely incoherent the next. They can still work, usually under the supervision of someone familiar with dealing with Unstable. However, they sometimes forget to do important things and generally have a permanent memory loss of who they were before the virus hit. In what is considered the middle ground there are the Manics, they experience extreme mood swings and some lack inhibitions which leads to destructive behavior. They also share the same permanent memory loss as the Amnesiacs, and many do not function well with any type of interaction. On the high end, or what some consider the violent end, there are the Psychopaths. They were left in a constant state of anger and destruction, most of them cannot function under any kind of self sustaining condition and almost all of these Unstables are housed in mental care facilities. Finally, there is the last phase, what they’ve called the Aggro. These people are considered beyond hope. I’ve seen the first test footage they show during training…

There is a male, about 5’11, wearing a blue hospital gown slumped over in a wheelchair. He is clearly a Catatonic as he is staring blankly for hours at the ceiling, as the footage plays in fast forward. As the footage slows down, two men in white lab coats approach the Catatonic just as he snaps out of his state. He gets out of his wheelchair to the amazement of the men in the lab coats—however, a strange change happens. His face becomes flushed in crimson red like that of someone who has been drinking heavily. His muscles contract strangely and bulge, his face contorts oddly as though he can no longer control himself. He picks up the man closest to him and holds him by his neck into the air, his feel dangle off of the ground, as his companion attempts to subdue him with a stun gun. The stun gun has no effect and the Catatonic turned Aggro begins to violently eat away at the doctor’s face, all the while tearing away pieces of his flesh with his bare hands. It is a hauntingly terrible vision that still troubles me to this day. Armed guards enter the room moments later and it takes nearly eight gunshots to bring the Aggro down.

This footage is meant to scare you. Anyone who has been affected by the virus has the possibility to jump from any spectrum to Aggro at any moment. When I was in training, it was said that within the next ten years or so, even with the medication, all Unstables are eventually going to go Aggro at some point—unless a new cure can be manufactured. The C-Alysium slows down the rate at which an Unstable would go Aggro and breaks the chain of sending other nearby Unstables into an Aggro state (a domino effect that can cause entire groups of Unstables to go Aggro all at once), but even its effects are in no way a guarantee of safety. It at least buys the government and the C-Shapes organization some time by theoretically having to deal with only one Aggro encounter at a time, rather than a full mob. In the past, there have been times of military action against what used to be our own people, clashes between our military forces and mobs of Aggros… then again, it has been like that all around the world. It still happens in large numbers from time to time, even with the advances in the medication.