Free Technosis: The Kensington Virus by Morgan Bell

without any form of communications tech, they shut down to a lower energy level and sulk; until tech is available.”
    The same officer raised his hand. “Yes?”
    “Have the customer service divisions become infected?”
    “No. They are automated. They ignore all complaints and the few humans who were ever involved with those operations have been dead for more than a decade.”
    The officer nodded his head, made another note, this time about why he’d not gotten the replacement for the tech he’d returned that was damaged in delivery.
    “At present, the CDC is only able to offer tracking data. We’ve no information on resistance to direct exposure to the virus or counter measures,” Dr. Lee said. She unclipped the microphone and returned to her seat.
    A man in a conservative three piece suit offset by a very loud tie put on the clip microphone and stepped forward. “I’m Agent Weckohov of the FBI, tech criminal investigation division. I have a few points I need to make. The virus is jumping tech. As you know from the Paramus incident, the virus has moved to public grids and commercial monitor displays, and in Nevada it has moved to public address systems. While we have had tech viruses crash planes, derail commuter lines, snarl traffic and cause discharges of radioactive gas and waste as far back as 2002, all of these were targeted and designed software viruses that were delivered by trojans and controlled by remote systems. Outside of our own capability to run such cyber ops, the leading world powers to run them were Russian, with the aid of the Russian Mob, China and North Korea. We have seen some Middle East operatives launch successful cyber-attacks. But the present virus does not have any back feeds or check-in codes that take us to main systems. So not only is it unique in that it crosses the tech human barrier. It is unique in that it is entirely autonomous.”
    “Do we have any domestic suspects?” the general asked.
    “While I rarely concede jurisdiction, I believe my colleague in the CIA is the person to answer that question,” Agent Weckohov said and took off the microphone, handing it to the man who was seated to his left.
    “I’m Assistant Director Peter Morrison,” the man, who looked like an emaciated accountant, informed them.
    His voice was slightly high and his words vacillated in a way that carried them throughout the room and jarred the listener.
    “We have been focusing on finding the originator of this particular virus as we believe it is a variant of the graphosocial virus, that the U.S., Russia and European Union security agencies were developing in the teens. The graphosocial was an exploit virus that worked its way backwards through social media psychographics and pushed data in a way that would influence the media exposure of social media members.”
    The officer’s hand went up.
    “Yes?” Assistant Director Morrison asked.
    “What was the benefit of that particular approach?”
    “As you know, from the fort’s cyber command, we have successfully demoralized troops through emails in several Middle Eastern conflicts in the previous three decades. The graphosocial allowed us to target general populations and manage their media exposure. In test runs, the graphosocial was using social media psychographics to identify fears of social media members. Men who were afraid of losing their virility would receive advertisements that would heighten their anxiety, images that should arouse them but were encoded to cause performance anxiety, and news items that suggested that if they were unable to sustain a three hour erection they were clinically suffering from erectile dysfunction.”
    Assistant Director Morrison paused to let the full significance of the graphosocial virus sink in. “Before we suspended testing, we successfully made impotent over five hundred healthy, active and heterosexual males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five.”
    There was a murmur among the troops,