It is the year 2033. You enter the decon lobby of your corporate campus. Everyone including you takes off their gasketed masks, breathing in spores lingering in the air of a genetically-engineered vaccination booster fungi. The taste of zinc as it coats your throat and lungs.

Unzipping disposable vapor permeable smocks, you leave them on the floor for collection by sweeper robots, pushed into chemical reconstitution vats to be disintegrated and reformed for your trip home later.
This world is infected. Your nose can’t even smell the bleach anymore.

Once inside, you enter a massive hermetic atrium of blossoms and flora. A creek burbles around the inside perimeter, hugging corridors taking you underground to towering buildings similarly sealed. You only now realize the ceiling is tinted blue to hide an eternally feverish sky.

The walk to your elevator is senrene - punctuated by food carts - like visions of an eastern seaboard summer. At least, a vision of the past unimpinged by virulence. For a moment you panic you’ve forgotten your mask, then you remember. You are among the elite now.

You are clean.

With a chime the elevator arrives and a group boards. This would have scared you before, to be so close.

As doors close, metallic walls turn to OLED visions of an eden as the lift rises - a visual reference to combat motion sickness caused by the fungus now dying inside you.

Each get off with a smile. Level 5, your turn out into the armored nucleus column on to the floor, taking quick turns to your desk. The floor to ceiling glass wraps your entire view, omnipresent hospital-grade HVAC punctuating the subtle din of a modern office, post-deskphone.

Instead of sitting, you walk all the way out and take in the view, overlooking the perimeter. Rail-mounted defoliant sentinels should be spraying mists of anti-biologicals, but instead they’re paused. There must be rain coming, shoals readying redirection to stormwater basins.

This is empire pandemic built. If not you, some other would come to pollinate secreted-away tassels.

The company is Halioxen. Pharmaceutical. Chemical. Heavy industry.

A world in recluse dominated by its agents, empowered to exist with a fearlessness unscalable to public mass.

Turning back, you glance at the corporate messaging and information screens present in every quartile of every floor. It was showing an ad — drone footage flying over a crop of next-generation molecular factories. That was the trillion-dollar technology.

It was rows of corn.

Taps on the wrist from watch haptics. You walk back to your desk and slide your laptop onto the docking mat, ready to work.

It’s a message from genomics. You are a carrier of super-spreader gene TR8. They offer a “transition” plan to work from home.

You know it’s a termination.

Last month, Halioxen received approval to perform population-scale genetic testing to search for super-spreader susceptibility.

It had long been understood that 95% of the population was not dangerously viral after infection with COVID-23.

So they would find the ones who were.