“Community Uninfected United”

by Jade Robinson

January 1st, 2036

It’s New Year’s day today. Technically. My people stopped celebrating a long time ago.

Before, the Global Pandemic in 2020, people used to gather around in crowds and celebrate the first day of the new year. It wasn’t until half the Earth’s population was wiped out, that everybody became scared of each other. There were no longer congregations of human bodies wanting to share a space and relate. There was no longer a connection.

Technology became the bridge between us. Facetime, zoom, social media. All ways to see eachother, without spreading the illness.

It wasn’t until people became sick and tired of the disconnection that they began to form clusters of communities that included only a limited amount of uninfected people.

Quarantining lasted over five years before people said fuck it. Everything became digital, people lost their jobs, their houses, and their livelihoods. A large portion of the population became homeless. Suicide rates went up, but those who did the work, got jobs in tech. More computerized jobs became available and for those who owned computers and knew software inside out and out, thrived.

It became a matter of survival.

I was 10 when the pandemic began and by the time I was 26, I was living in a cluster called CUU — community uninfected united.

To qualify to be in this community, you’d have to quarantine for an entire year, meaning you’d have to apply and wait a year to see if you’d get approved to get in.

I did this when I was 21, after all the people around me were getting sick with the virus and I could barely afford where I lived. Before applying, I spent 6 months teaching myself how to code and caught myself up on the new development of AI– another requirement of the cluster.

Naturally, our cluster was secluded; away from society. The community waslocated in oregon where there were great weather conditions to grow food.

The reason for choosing this cluster wasn’t just because they were a group of uninfected individuals, but because this was a group of diverse people from all over the world. They would only accept one person into their community every two years and sometimes they couldn’t find somebody who could pass their tests to qualify. Once somebody spent 5 years in the cluster, CUU collectively decided who’d go out and start another similar cluster elsewhere. Change was the most important. A verse of ours is:

“All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”

Some of their tests included:

• Short essay on why pro-choice matters
• Short essay on how to properly grow food
• Research on health living via plant based diet
• Historical context of the world’s history
• Background information on technology’s advancement in the last 5 years.

For some, it seemed damn near impossible to answer any one question correctly, but the secret was, there weren’t any right answers. Mostly, they wanted to see if you cared about socio-economic issues to see if you were someone who could use their logic when it came down to making difficult decisions.

I passed with flying colors.

* * *

Everybody has a role in these communities reflecting socialism. My role was to help maintain everybody’s mental and emotional health; since they noticed I was someone they could rely on empathically.

I entered data into a new system CUU’s early developers created that monetized people’s emotional well-being; containing their stress levels, since we all agreed and did research on how stress can contribute to disease and illness. From this data, we’d create a personal wellness plan for each person within our cluster.

Everything we did was to help our people live in a world contagious of a virus that was never going to go away. The majority of the world saw the pandemic as a curse but we looked at it as a blessing. Since the government couldn’t take the measures to save the world, we’d do it one person at a time; de-colonozing our minds, making us a stronger species. Using our intelligence to adapt in a dying world:

““Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability”

And help people do the same.