#GreasyChadFlu #ReduceReuseRecycle?

A quick hand and trained eye scrolled through a webpage, a site linked up along with every other to her email, and to her own worries an algorithm trained on her movements, as much as on those like her.

Lilith didn’t like how this now intrinsic part of society reflected her life back at her.

Or how, it became the only small window into her living family’s life.

In the year of 3024 the hashtag, #GreasyChadFlu, spread by the corporate think tank Right-Clean, was trending on social media.

The entirely fictional disease was rumoured in a matter of hours to be the next black death for partying youth, luckily it was revealed as an April fools day hoax by seven o’clock pm, just in time for the joke to get old.

No one really looked at it again, it was a stupid joke spread on the web by people in the ultimate proof of cognitive bias.

No one needed to care. Right?

Well it wasn’t the only worrisome happening of that year, when a new disease managed to wreak havoc on the very same population as the supposedly fictional Virus.

As it turns out, more than one stupid thing can happen in a year.

A fact which Lilith Barros had long since internalized, though earlier then the event that was the virus, and much earlier than the addition of citalopram into her daily regimen. 

It didn’t help when the conglomerate made more avoidant statements, or when the general response soured, muddying the waters.

“How could it matter if you’re angry?”

The actual medical response was a snap, but with a media itching to spite sense in the name of the economy, and an easy listening crowd already spiteful of an ever changing world, no one trusted it.

Not no one, but it was enough.

Enough that for every one who actually followed guidelines and took care where they could there were a dozen who played to hype, “this isn’t a problem, it’s a joke that went too far!”

Never acknowledging the less than savory connections that led to Right-Cleans statements, that being the weapons division of the pharmaceutical company, Health-Matters.

Lilith remembered when it came off as a conspiracy theory.

It didn’t help that it was the majorly irresponsible that most ascribed to it, like #GreasyChad being made in a Lab would make it less deadly.

Or make them not arses for spreading lies in the interim.

She had such a large circle back then, friends all across the state that wanted to be blind to it.

She missed her mom. The ghost service that ran her account now was more disturbing than anything, and it made for bad company overall.

Now, she carried on with peaceful nonrelationships with strangers, at least when off work.

The only real presence over her phone, on her computer, was her sister.

Daisy, was. Daisy was a lot of things to Lilith. She was an incredible presence in her life, and really the only sensible person in her family.

But that evaluation was always disproven by her willingness to throw dice at any guy she fancied. She’s married permanently since that time in their youth, but it was all still a horrendous mess last they talked.

Out of all the things on her feed that week, she’d gotten a direct message from her sister, Daisy wanted to drag her out of her depression spiral with a party, she wasn’t so trusting.

Her sister was a good person, she knew this, but Lilith didn’t feel ready, even if Daisy was.

Though to be fair, how serious can it be when indirect from states away?

It was a hard thing to trust the world when billionaires cosplaying as inventors had more than just a say.

Daisy hadn’t been the type back then to avoid the vaccine, but Lilith was still apprehensive, so many of her family and friends had died in due part of that spiteful recklessness.

That same affliction that made it the duty of the common person to assault those deemed the enemy, or made those same people look away from cruelty in the name of an ignorant whitewashed peace. Was the one that made it that easy to throw out lifes for the notion of freedom.

Even now, a decade later it hasn't gone away.

So easy to forget that which was inconvenient to know in the first place.

Lilith had been to a dozen skype funerals in two years, and even without that particular risk, she felt bereaved.

Half her peer group was gone and she wasn’t yet thirty, she honestly didn’t know how to live with it.

She’d thought back then, that vague semblance of a five year plan she never bothered to finish.

She couldn’t even identify with her hopes from back then, Lilith might’ve felt a lot of things back then 

She also knew the relative size of Daisy’s circle, she would've been low risk even at #GreasyChad’s height.

Daisy had decided a long time before the pandemic what she wanted to do with her life, and Lilith was proud of her, but only really from a distance since then.

Lilith was lonely at this point in her life, and she needed to get close again, if she wanted anyone at all.

So she decided to call her.

She knew that it would be unexpected, she wondered vaguely if it was still her number,and decided to go the long way around.

‘Is your number still the same?’

She knew that it would be a while before Daisy responded, instant message was never her favorite. It would be better if she didn’t worry herself in the interim, if only to be less divisive in case of a response.

And so she went back to her day. She may have been depressed but she had a life outside of waiting for that to change, a job, stories to sink herself into. Medications she could barely afford if not for her work.

She couldn’t stay in those moments anymore, not if she wanted to be sensible, or happy, or remotely okay.

She should really just call, at least once she knows.