The Moral Virologist is a science fiction novella by Greg Egan. It was originally published in Pulphouse in 1990. It can be read here
or here.
Provides examples of:
- Apocalypse How: The Synthetic Plague is at least a Societal Disruption, since it is intentionally designed to kill anyone who has ever had multiple sex partners, and spreads through the air so that settling down in a monogamous relationship after sowing your wild oats can't save you. The revelation that the proteins in breastmilk also activate the virus's kill switch, killing babies regardless of the chastity of their mothers pushes this potentially into Societal Collapse range if a cure or vaccine isn't discovered in time, and possibly even Human Extinction if everyone who was once breastfed is lethally affected.
- Book Ends: Shawcross was led down the path of evil after realizing that AIDS couldn't be God's punishment for homosexuality because the virus also infects innocent babies. His downfall is ultimately caused by his discovery that the bioweapon he made in order to kill off the sexually promiscuous is also killing innocent babies, who get exposed through breastmilk.
- Control Freak:
- Shawcross cannot abide the fact that someone, somewhere, is defying the edicts of his religion. Indeed, most people ignore at least part of it. This not only makes him create a virus to kill off most of the world's population, but he thinks children dying is an acceptable sacrifice to make people obey him.
- Indeed, the only time he ever loses his cool is when he loses control of the situation.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: Shawcross is one for the Mad Scientist. That trope is almost always used to argue that Science Is Bad and that scientists cannot be trusted. But this story points out that an evil scientist would, rather than viewing himself as a godlike being above mere mortals, be much more likely to be a true believer in a harmful and antiscientific ideology, and use science only as a means to an end rather than actually care about it or people.
- Disposable Sex Worker: Downplayed. The prostitute the Villain Protagonist targets is doomed to die from his Synthetic Plague, but she is a fully developed character in her own right, gives him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech and Kirk Summation, and clearly speaks the author's own viewpoint (which is that bioterrorism is bad). This makes her a Doomed Moral Victor instead.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The villain chooses to punish those who have had premarital sex by killing them. Even though he subscribes to the more extreme form of Christianity which preaches that All Crimes Are Equal, even fundamentalists would usually argue that sinners should not be denied a chance to repent. The villain ignores this.
- Fake-Out Opening: The story begins with a scientist admiring the beauty of some genetic sequence, making the reader think he will use that knowledge to cure some disease. Then the story pans out to give the scientist's backstory of him Slowly Slipping Into Evil, and how he is now intentionally causing a disease.
- The Fundamentalist: John Shawcross is even worse than your typical example. As the son of a public-access televangelist, he was indoctrinated into believing that the AIDS pandemic was divine punishment for homosexuality, and that it was immoral to do anything to try to treat the disease or halt its spread. After he went to college and learned that everyone is susceptible to AIDS, heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, and even celibate people who got it from a blood transfusion, and even babies, he realized that AIDS could not be the instrument of God's wrath because an omnipotent god wouldn't target the innocent as well as the guilty. But instead of moderating his views like a normal person would, he becomes convinced that he is God's instrument instead and that he was chosen to create a synthetic disease that will kill only sinners. And so he entered the field of microbiology with the intention of killing people, not curing them of illness.
- Ignored Epiphany: Shawcross finds out that even babies are dying of his virus, and realizes that he messed up big time. What does he do? Does he turn himself in to the police and give the CDC the data on his virus so that they can stop it? Heck no; he figures that doing that would just cause people to go back to their promiscuous lifestyles, so instead he buys adspace in a magazine and gives a vague warning about breastfeeding that is no more credible than any other doomsday preaching, especially since he never mentions the virus or its effects at all but just says The End Is Nigh. Obviously this would do nothing to halt the virus's spread and he knows it.
- Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Shawcross has such hatred for those who have committed even minor sins against his religion that he engineers a virus with the express intent to kill off anyone who has sinned even once. This is despite The Bible including such passages as "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord" and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Even if one sinned in the past, but repented and now lives a chaste life, one will be killed by Shawcross's plague.
- Karmic Twist Ending: Subversion. The Mad Scientist who created the Synthetic Plague is convinced that he is doing God's will, but once he is told that he made a miscalculation and his virus is also killing innocent babies, he has a Villainous BSoD. He contemplates turning himself in, so that the world will have the knowledge to cure the virus, and it looks like he will get his comeuppance. But then, he decides that that would undo all of his plans to force people to conform to fundamentalist morality, and instead chooses the least-effective method of warning people about the virus's effects possible, thereby changing the story to a Shoot the Shaggy Dog.
- Never My Fault: Shawcross is guilty of bioterrorism and mass murder, to say nothing of blasphemy and believing himself to be God's avenger. He never takes responsibility for his crimes, and gets over his Villainous BSoD very quickly, only being worried about the fact he'll be caught, not that his actions are even killing babies, whom even he thinks don't deserve it. Yet he straight up refuses to intervene even to save the infants.
- Platonic Prostitution: Shawcross regularly spends time at brothels, not to have sex, but to resist the temptation as well as tell the prostitutes that he is more righteous than they. After he completes his bioweapon, he chooses a prostitute as his disease's first victim.
- Sarcastic Title: The virologist in this story is extremely immoral. The title is a Take That! towards religious fundamentalists who think that condemning and even killing people for not following their religious rules is in any way morality.
- Schizo Tech: The story is set in the year 2000, yet is about a religious fanatic engineering a virus that would kill much of the world's population, all by himself. Fortunately, people are nowhere close to creating synthetic viruses in Real Life even at the current time, let alone all the way back in 2000.
- The Scourge of God: Shawcross is more or less a serial killer with this kind of motivation, as he desires for his virus to kill anyone who violates the teachings of his religion, which in his mind means anyone who has sex outside of marriage. (Presumably he thinks that all nonbelievers are also fornicators, and that no Christians are.)
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The story ends with the maker of the synthetic disease taking the secret of its creation to his grave, effectively ensuring that it takes years for the world's disease-control agencies to even isolate the virus that causes the pandemic, let alone come up with a vaccine or cure. By this time, millions of people will die since the virus spreads through the air and has a 100% mortality rate for those who have had sex with more than one person at any point throughout their lives. Worse, even some people who have never had sex die of the disease—including all babies who have been breastfed. Even if mankind eventually does come up with a vaccine for the virus, that means that millions of babies will die, too, wiping out almost the entire next generation. And if it transpires that the virus kills anyone who was ever breastfed as a baby, then more than 99% of the population could die. Shawcross could very well bring about the extinction of humanity.
- Synthetic Plague: No existing virus selectively kills only those guilty of sexual sin, so Shawcross, a microbiologist who is also a Christian fundamentalist, made his own.
- Typhoid Mary: Shawcross is a virgin, and as such is immune to the virus he made. It spreads through the air, but as a virus, needs to incubate in a human body first. So he intentionally infects himself and then heads to a brothel.
- Villain Protagonist: The first few paragraphs lead the readers to think that Shawcross is your typical Science Hero; however, he is anything but, actually being a fundamentalist Mad Scientist engineering a virus that will kill off much of the world's population.
- Would Hurt a Child: Shawcross did not originally intend for children to be affected by his virus. But once he finds out that they are, he just sits back and lets it kill them, only putting a token warning against breastfeeding in an obscure magazine to salve the self-righteousness and hypocrisy he mistakenly thinks is a conscience. In effect, he considers the lives of children to be an acceptable sacrifice to make adults behave the way he wants them to.
