A Trivial Error and a Terminal Mistake

He swept down the busy New York sidewalks, hundreds of yellow cabs barreling down the street like a stampede, they were only a couple of feet away from Rorik Rivest and the rest of the peloton-like herd of people. It was 8:00 AM, the time when the sideroads of New York City fills with tens of thousands of people, each and every one of them preparing to run the wheel in the rat race. Rorik’s intent was no different, but his wheel was powering the fate of humanity.
Rorik was on his way to deliver a lab-made virus he developed. The virus would be used in the development of a range of vaccines for appalling diseases. This was due to it’s particular properties. An advanced protein coat and a lysogenic cycle of infection. Being stitched together from an all-encompassing library of deadly and evolutionary-genius-type viruses, it was immensely volatile and dangerous. This meant that the specimen he carried in his front pocket would perfectly suit researchers working to develop powerful vaccines, but could be potentially fatal if released into a zone of human activity, where people could easily spread and contract the disease. He, Rorik, had been entrusted to transport the specimen to a vaccine lab across the city.
The benefits of his simple, mundane task would be numerous, and as he entered the subway station, his head perked a little more, his eyes opened a little more, and his strides grew with pride that neared the point of pompousness.
“Whoa! Watch it buddy!” said a snide voice, not far away. Rorik fell back, staggered by the sudden noise.
A fight had broken out between two people. They were almost sadistic in the way they attacked each other. Rorik, startled that a stunt of such a callous nature could begin in a substation normally occupied by passive subway dwellers, regained his fortitude and advanced, in his prideful stride, toward the two men.
“Hey,” Rorik said in a voice of supremacy. “You two need to stop your quarreling,” he said with authority.
“Watch me kill this traitor,” one of the men roared.
Despite Rorik’s continued efforts, the two men stayed in a continuous fight to the death. It was when the people around him began to begin getting rowdy that Rorik realized that the thoughts occupying his mind--the greatness of his accomplishments--had led him to enter the wrong substation. This was not the type occupied by docile stock brokers and office workers, but the type lurked by street gangs, violent criminals, and others astute to the culture of the underworld and unsavory locals.
Others had begun a riot. People appeared to be forming alliances, picking sides, and pummeling all who stood in their way. Due to the influx of close-quarter physical conflict, Rorik was being crushed between people. All of whom wished to ax the next person over. He tried to drop below the people for some air.
“Hughf!” All he could remember was a fall and the crowds of people; like adults to a toddler, which was Rorik. He had awoken in a bed. A doctor glided over to the edge of his bed, a clipboard in his hand and a pleasant look on his face.
“You took quite a knee to the head, Mr. Rivest. You’re lucky there is no permanent damage.”
Rorik croaked a noise that only a legalese-speaking, Icelandic translator, who also happened to be a cryptographer, could decipher. “Ph-qk-ynl dj--klay--gip,” he said*.
Once Rorik had regained the ability to form coherent thoughts, he instinctively reached for his front pocket. As he felt around and his pocket was found to be untenanted, the thought of what could happen began to seep into his already stricken face.
“Gahh-gu--spur--cahhh,” he roared, still having trouble speaking.
He was unceremoniously discharged from the hospital the next day, probably before he was prepared. The shock of the upcoming potential consequences showed a state so poor, many nurses protested the doctor’s decision to release Rorik; many even resorted to elevating the decision to greater authorities, with no result.
His worst fears were realized later that night. “Just in--we have we have received numerous reports of a virus spreading rapidly throughout hospitals in the New York City area,” began the reporter. “Sources tell us the symptoms start off reassembling the common cold, progressively get better and less severe, however after the bettering of the symptoms, quick and rapid death sets in,” he said in a monotone only a reporter could mimic. “Known symptoms include colds that appear to heal quickly, sudden fever, and spontaneous loss of appetite,” said the robot of a reporter. “There are currently 42 known deaths from this pathogen,” he finished. The reporter then began to drone on about some organization that flew dogs across the United States.
Rorik settled into bed, he knew tremendous problems were bound to form following his sleep tonight. This severely worried him. However, using all of his willpower and willful blindness, he managed to sink into sleep. His hectic sleep cycle was dotted with seemingly endless fever dreams; he awoke in full body sweats many times.
When he woke the next day, the toils of last night’s attempt to sleep were very clear. When he looked into the mirror and saw himself glaring with hatred back, he considered calling in sick. However, that would only postpone the inevitabilities that day would bring.
He made it to work and, after explaining to his boss why a virus had been released, promptly began working on a cure for the newly spreading disease. The day came to an end, and Rorik trudged home on the now gloomy streets of New York City.
He arrived home and, the attention of the day now gone, he slowly began  to twitch, every few minutes, he twitched, as if he was a pendulum clock. For he had begun to feel the crushing weight of what he had caused. The pain, the loss, and the suffering so many would feel.
As he lay in bed,  he was continually haunted by what he had caused. He felt his head expand with the frustrating pressure of knowing what he caused, then contracting with a quick burst of escaping air pressure. The disarray of precarious cords holding his broken pumkin of a head together were fraying. He had intolerable trouble sleeping that night. His head kept him awake and woke him if he ever slept.
After three days of little sleep and cumbersome amounts of work, his mental state was beginning to converge to an inevitable terror. Fortunately, his mental state only flared when his thoughts of the day were over. He was able to continue developing the cure to the disease, which had now earned the name R. Riv, through the process of mediafication.
Days passed and days went--some days ran, some crawled. His mental state was dropping like the DOW in 2008; every day he combated problems that occurred with developing a cure for R. Riv. The bureaucracy of the genetics lab is preventing me from fixing X, Manny won’t give me the paperwork for Y, someone sneezed on our cultures, and the problems dragged on; yet, everyday he trudged on. The one thing that kept his mental sanity off the deep end was the knowledge that he could develop a cure for R. Riv.
Months later, the cure for R. Riv just out of reach, Rorik slipped into the deep end. Preliminary attempts to test the cure on lab mice had failed miserably. He drooped like a wilted flower all the way to his home. The ceiling was spinning when he lay down on his bed, around and around and around it flowed. The twitching he was experiencing had evolved to become something resembling Chinese Water Torture.
“Why did I not develop a cure for R. Riv before it was transported?” he spontaneously exclaimed, loudly, in a groggy voice. “Why did I not hire a professional transport service to move R. Riv over to the vaccine lab?” he exclaimed in the same groggy voice.
“Look at you, Rorik Rivest, the destroyer of humanity,” a spectral, empty, and almost impelling voice said. Rorik, preoccupied, did not hear this.
“Why! Why! W--”
Rorik heard the voice this time. “You will destroy humanity, you will destroy humanity!”
Rorik decided that he had now gone off, not the deep end, but the continental shelf. Having voices taunt him was never a good thing. He tried not to think about it. He fell asleep to the voice of what could only be described as a very talkative mosquito buzzing around his ear. He expected this sleep to be his last.
The next day, he could feel himself melting away to the eroding winds of his mental health. He could feel the fibers holding his brain together, snapping, twitching, and firing randomly. He lay in bed the fairy in his ear now describing the technical details of the IA-64 in the most boring, slug-like voice possible, only stopping to remind Rorik he could of stopped R. Riv before it began.
“And each instruction of 128 bits contains 3 words … there are 128 integer registers and 128 floating-point registers--you could of stopped R. Riv and ended this quagmire before it began! Actually, I suppose you still can,” it said.
Something in that statement made Rorik’s pendulum stop twitching like water torture. He leapt from bed in a superhero-like fashion. He sprinted ahead of the peloton-like herd. He flew into the genetics lab he worked at. He began improving the cure for R. Riv. He spliced genes and concocted a gargantuan mass of antiviral drugs. He built molecular structures that function in a mechanical manner in mere hours, with no doubt of any error. Through his new-found motivation he worked with superhuman endurance, executing many all-nighters, sleeping at the lab, and mentally operating with the speed and precision of Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer. He finished in only 5 days. It was agreed that now that he had found the cure it would be tested the next day. The stakes were high. Rorik would need to skip the initial testing on lab mice to save as many people as possible. He had developed the cure for R. Riv!
Pride and proudness was swelling in his gills as he began to test the cure for R. Riv. The patient he initially tested showed hopeful signs at first but later died. The death went unnoticed. Many had already died from R. Riv, and any authority forces with any reach left were spread too thin to notice failure, only success. Other tests on more patients showed the cure for R. Riv was ultimately inefficacious.
    Rorik, realizing that his tireless work and toil is worthless, goes insane. His mental conditions greatly diminishes. He is struck by his failure with a gruesome bowie knife with sinister-looking blades. It dug in to him, in to his heart. For he was in a state of more than shock shock, a sensation in which he felt paralyzed and hardly conscious, unable to comprehend speech or communicate through any form. He was basically an overloaded computer. The ear fairy might as well be talking to a rock. Rorik became effectively brain-dead and was only able to lie in his bed and watch the world fall apart and destroy itself. His last breath is coughed up from the filth and obliteration that filled the cataclysmic world around him.

Epilogue
    The world cannot overcome R. Riv and everyone dies, either by R. Riv or other diseases that manifest in the copious amount of decaying corpses of the millions that perished from R. Riv. It marks the end of the human’s tyranny and misappropriation of Earth. The mood is one of a people who have been oppressed for years finally gaining a fair footing. Earth returns to a natural state without the influence of pollution and corruption.
For the humans had brought about their own demise. Their carelessness in the production of arbitrary human wants, only to profit and receive an arbitrary number. Their sheer neglect for the host that provided them with the natural resources required to produce their arbitrary human wants. What did the humans contribute to Earth? They took and took and took. Humans were like lice to humans, compared to Earth. A parasite, exploiting it's well-meaning and initially-generous host. It is an inevitability that the neglected and exploited will eventually retaliate against it's abuser.