The Grateful Virus: Missing Chapters

Chapters 6-10 haven’t yet been written, and are reserved for me
to write someday if enough of you want me to.  They include the
events at the restaurant and the hotel through the end of the
soccer tournament.  The story then fast-forwards through the next
four months, skipping to chapter 100.  The details of events
during these four months are open for other authors to fill in. 
Chapter numbers 103-199 are also open for contributions – for
more on this, see chapters 100-102 and 200.

If you write a chapter in the 11-99 range, try to fit it within
the general outline below.  And please make sure you read
chapters 100-102 and 200 before writing anything, so you know
where the story is headed.  If someone else has already written
any particular event or chapter number that you wanted to write,
feel free to write your own alternative version with the same
number as theirs.  If you want to write about events immediately
before or after a particular other chapter, use the adjacent
chapter number.  Otherwise, avoid adjacent numbers so that
there’s room for someone to fill in the connecting story.

Above all, if you write, be sure to email it to me at jim [dot]
adling [at] gmail.com so I don't miss it!


First two months (chapters 11 to 55)

The virus begins to spread quickly all over the world, curing all
infectious diseases, cancers, and obesity in everyone it infects.
 Drug companies, trying to delay the demise of their entire
industry, team up with allies in the FDA and CDC (and their
equivalents in other countries) to produce a PR campaign saying
it might be dangerous in the long term, so people should wear
masks to prevent its spread until more research can be done on
it.  Many people follow this suggestion for the first two months.
 The infection rate climbs steadily, reaching about 10% of the
population by the end of this period, but infection rates vary
wildly across locations.  Smaller cities with any infection
during the first week tend to very quickly reach 100%.  Other
small cities remain nearly or entirely uninfected.  The two
initial outbreak cities of LA and Chicago reach 80% in the first
week, before the CDC's warnings, and 90% by the end of the two
months.

During these two months, Jim is running scared.  After a
harrowing week in which he tries to continue with his sales trip,
he calls and tells his wife that he has to go into hiding and
can't tell her why, but that he loves her, hasn't done anything
illegal, and just wants her to trust him and be patient.  After
two more weeks, she suddenly stops answering his calls, for
reasons unknown to Jim until chapter 101.  At times this throws
him into doubt about whether to still consider himself married,
but his loyalty generally prevails.  When he manages to keep
ahead of the spread of the virus, and when he wears his surgical
mask to prevent sneezing on anyone, things remain normal.  About
half of the people he runs into are also wearing masks, so he
blends right in. In some places, nobody is wearing masks.  This
is a sign of either 100% or 0% infection.  Of course, the mask
doesn't protect him from already infected women who see his face.
 But early on, the infection is rare in most places, so as long
as he avoids sneezing on anyone (or sometimes shaking hands,
sharing food or drinks, touching door handles, etc), people act
normally toward him.  Newly infected hosts become active in 30
minutes.

And of course, just because a woman wants his baby does NOT make
her instantly lose her mind, run screaming after him, tear off
her clothes, and fuck his brains out in public no matter who is
watching (although some might).  Seeing Jim being fucked by
someone else, or even just in the nude, makes this kind of
behavior much more likely (as in chapter 5).  Each woman deals
with her desire for him in a different way, depending on her
personality and the situation.

Jen forms a secret cult called the Church of Sneezy starting with
her teammates.  Sarah is her second in command.  They recruit
other students at UCLA, which was rapidly saturated with the
virus, and then begin to expand to the general population of LA,
as it soon becomes a major hot-spot of the outbreak.  The "chosen
ones," girls pregnant with Jim's babies, form the inner circle. 
These few keep Jim's picture as a closely guarded secret.  Only
Jen has his home phone number, and his cell phone number as well,
which she got early on by simply calling his home and asking his
wife for it.  They identify potential recruits based on whether
their bodies are hot enough to deserve to mate with Jim, then
show them his picture and use the powerful resulting emotions to
indoctrinate them in a mishmash of prophecies and dogma concocted
by Jen, all driven by the promise that under her leadership, if
they can reach a critical mass of sexiness, Jim will return and
impregnate them all.  Soon Jen has thousands of the very hottest
girls in LA answering to her. She sends them out in squads to
scour the country looking for him.  Jen calls Jim often,
sometimes several times a day.  These calls usually begin with
out of the blue questions about whether he thinks particular
female celebrities are hot, and usually end with her begging him
to "visit and meet a few friends."  He soon gets paranoid,
thinking she might be able to track him by his cell signal.  He
throws his phone out.  Following a similar line of thought, he
wonders if anyone might somehow be able to find him by following
his credit card records.  He gets rid of his credit card and
begins supporting himself by selling his semen to random women on
the street for cash.

Nicole, Erin, Heather, and a few other members of Jen's church
reject her new religion and split off, forming their own
competing group, which they name Jim's Angels.  They too use his
picture to recruit, but their approach is scientific, not
religious.  They keep their recruiting much more selective and
their organization smaller.  They choose recruits intelligently
based on a broad range of resources they bring to the
organization.  Because they quickly figure out that infection
with the virus is necessary before a woman can be affected by
Jim’s picture, they are able to establish a national network
instead of remaining limited to the Los Angeles viral hot spot,
as Jen's organization initially is.  They comb news reports and
divorce filings from around the country looking for signs of Jim,
and their agents are ready at all times to fly in and investigate
any possible leads.

Members of either Jen's or Nicole's organizations may have brief
encounters with Jim during this period, but neither group manages
to bring him in to their main base until chapter 100.  Jen has
spies in Nicole's organization, so they know when Nicole's group
has a lead and are usually right on the Angels' heels in far
greater numbers.  However, the Church of Sneezy is full of
selfish, shallow, egotistical princesses.  Their squads tend to
lose all discipline when they do capture him, allowing him to
escape again at the end of the catfight and/or orgy that ensues.
Refer to chapters 100-101 for more on what they wear and how they
act, but keep in mind both groups are less organized in earlier
chapters.

Scientists do not understand much about the virus during this
period.  They certainly don't guess that it's intelligent. 
Likewise, the virus remains basically at the same level of
understanding of people.  It knows how to make them want to
replicate with Jim.  It knows only to try to do this to people
who could actually get pregnant.  In other words the elderly,
pre-pubescent girls, and men do not respond to Jim any
differently than they normally would, except to be unable to
cause him harm.  The programming that makes women lust after Jim
and want to have his babies only activates when a fertile woman
sees him, or sees a picture of his face.  This programming is
therefore inactive in almost all people, because the media has
not connected the virus back to Jim in any way and therefore has
not shown his picture (although the CDC has traced the virus back
to two seemingly simultaneous outbreaks in downtown Chicago and
on the UCLA campus).  The virus still can't understand human
language or higher brain functions.  It doesn't even believe
people are intelligent, so it doesn't make any effort to
communicate with them. Its mission remains solely to help Jim
replicate.


Next two months (chapters 56 to 99)

Some people begin to see the cure-all virus as a gift from god,
and the efforts to stop its spread as evil.  Two months after the
outbreak of the virus, self-described "vigilante healers" execute
coordinated raids on the terminal cancer wings of a few major
hospitals around the world.  Although they are caught and locked
up, the media loves the story, giving endless airtime to the
people they saved, all of whom are of course very grateful to the
vigilantes.  Over the next few days, various kinds of religious
fanatics everywhere copy the vigilante healer idea, but not just
for terminally ill patients, and not just in hospitals.  The idea
gives a green light to every restaurant worker who has ever
wanted to spit in someone's food.  Some people go around ripping
off people's masks and sneezing on them or kissing them.  More
organized groups pop up all over the world with more
sophisticated techniques, like targeting the water supplies of
major cities or soft drink bottling facilities.  In three days,
the worldwide infection rate goes from under 10% to over 99%.

Suddenly Jim can't seem to show his face anywhere.  Like everyone
else, he ditches his now useless surgical mask.  He tries wearing
a hood, but it makes buying anything difficult, because they
assume a man hiding his face is planning to rob them.  When he
slips up, he sometimes loses most or all of his clothing, which
then tends to lead to a very difficult period indeed until he
manages to find new clothing and, most importantly, a new way to
hide his face. He tries a variety of disguises, but each one only
works briefly. See chapter 101 for more on this.

The Church of Sneezy goes national and tops off at thirty
thousand members, then stops recruiting and focuses on hunting. 
The tabloids have taken notice of their secret activities, since
they recruited numerous famous models and actresses due to
starting out in LA.  The organization refuses all interviews, but
wild rumors circulate about its connection with the equally
tabloid-worthy story that the entire UCLA soccer team is
inexplicably pregnant, all with the same due date, all with at
least twins, and most with quadruplets.  They too refuse to be
interviewed, but they are often seen with members of the strange
new celebrity / supermodel cult.  The tabloids love the story. 
It has everything: quadruplets, celebrities, secret cults; one
tabloid even manages to work an alien invasion into the story,
and another asserts they're planning to form a radical lesbian
commune and kill all the male children.  All that the members of
the Church of Sneezy will say to the media is "Jim, come home." 
No explanation of who this Jim is or what they mean by telling
him to come home.  Tabloids speculate that this cult thinks it
can use the media to communicate with their prophet in the
afterlife.  The media can't seem to get enough of Hollywood's
hottest women, many of whom seemed perfectly sane the day before,
looking right into the camera and saying “Jim, come home” in a
sultry tone.  There's at least one new famous convert every day.
Nobody connects these stories to the more serious news story of
the virus.