It begins quietly, in a small town just across the border. A child falls ill. No one is more than ordinarily concerned with the fever, coughing and sneezing. It's just the flu. Riding on droplets of exhaled moisture, the new flu covers the town. People come and go. The flu spreads. In twenty days, it crosses the border to the U.S., unnoticed. In twenty four days it makes its way to Eastern Europe, North Africa and China. Quietly exploring the invisible world of drugs and immune systems in its blind unthinking way, the new influenza evolves. It isn't deadly yet--it's growing, spreading and establishing itself. It has the potential for change.

That actually is not taken from today's news -- it's a scenario from a free strategy game I'm playing, called Pandemic II. PII has been around awhile and I happened across it on a boring afternoon a couple of weeks before the new swine flu was announced in Mexico. Just a few days ago I revived it on my play list because I read about the worst case scenario flu simulations being run on university computers to predict the course of the H1N1 influenza pandemic, and I wondered how the game Pandemic II would fare if pitted against the supercomputer software.

It's kind of creepy. With a slowly increasing bank account of evolution points, the player can choose traits for the chosen plague. Not everything wins the game. You have to learn the tricks of contagious illness.  Of the several disease options available, influenza is one of the easiest to play and an excellent model to follow.

In about forty more days the virtual influenza will mutate, spending its quietly earned evolution points on suddenly deadly symptoms. By then, it will be too late to stop it. Or will it? The fate of mankind lies in my hands. Influenza doesn't care -- win or lose, it will still be here when the game is over.

I first read about the Spanish Influenza when I was just a kid. Someone unearthed accounts of this forgotten tragedy and published a lengthy article in Reader's Digest back in the 60's. The Great Flu Pandemic has a strange history even in terms of cultural memory. For decades it was set aside and intentionally forgotten, hardly even mentioned in public schools. There was no official plan to do that; it just happened that way. The great influenza pandemic was one of those horrors people wanted to believe wouldn't happen again. Like the Holocaust of WWII, it took time for people to begin talking. Many who didn't live through it find what happened hard to believe. At the time it happened, many thought it was the end of the world.

The flu virus, now that we've understood it better, looks more and more alien all the time. In fact, some reputable scientists have theorized that it may be from out there, so strange that it might have ridden in on a comet's tail, or hidden in the core of an ancient meteorite. You could regard the flu as the organism at the top of our predator prey food chain -- that lofty seat we like to think we hold may be surpassed by a tinier viral chair.

When it wants to be nice to us, the flu is a miserable but mild illness. Endemic in birds, pigs, and humans, it tailors itself to each but occasionally mixes and creates hybrid forms. When it's at its worst, the living beings it infests explode from within, cell by cell, sometimes so quickly they literally appear to melt. When birds fall out of the air and explode, as was reported in China a few years ago, the flu may be the reason. It hits them fast, they die on the wing, and their structure is so softened by sudden cellular collapse that they splatter when they hit the ground.

The Hong Kong flu is the only pandemic I've lived through, and that was more drama than substance. We got warnings about it, and I honestly don't remember whether we got flu shots or not. If they were offered, we probably did. It was an era when most of us trusted our government. We'd also just seen the end of the Polio era, and were apt to be careful about such things. I do remember when that went through our school, and in two's and three's students from our classes went home and didn't come back again. Some we saw again years later, in wheelchairs or on crutches, and a few spent the rest of their lives in iron lungs. Disease was a real enemy to us, something we were afraid might come in the house and get us. When polio came through we sat in the car with the windows rolled up while our parents did the shopping, and no one thought that was an irresponsible thing to do.

So the Hong Kong flu was a bust, in terms of primal fear. Worldwide lots of people died, but mostly old people already near the end of their lives, and mostly no one we knew. People called it the Asiatic Flu, and because I was young when it happened, I blamed the Chinese. I imagined Asians were invading American attics, seeding the air with virulent communist spores, and I looked at every ceiling with suspicion. I did not understand for some years why it was that people laughed when I called it the Asian Attic flu.

Although I'm not fascinated by disease, I've read considerably about the Great Pandemics. Some people live through them, and some people don't. There's not always a clear reason why. One fellow who lived through the Spanish Flu was an immigrant working in a restaurant kitchen back East. He knew that garlic has curative qualities, and began eating seven raw cloves of garlic every day. Eight of the people who worked in the kitchen with him died. He stayed healthy, and attributed his survival to the garlic diet.

There may be something to that. Garlic is naturally antibiotic, and one of the things that kills people during a bad flu epidemic is not the flu, but the opportunistic bacterial infections that set in afterwards. Garlic might be of some medical help during recovery but in this fellow's case, he didn't even get sick. Again, garlic really may have been his protector, because the active ingredient is an oil that goes through the bloodstream and exudes from membranes and glands, inside and out. As the oil flows away, it takes debris and bacteria along with it, so in this guy's case it may have acted as an additional natural barrier to infection, as well as a reason for other people to keep their distance. Both would help, in a flu epidemic.

I used to work in a tourist town, a place with a summer population of about ten million people and a winter population of around thirty thousand. People came from all over the world, and brought lots of illnesses with them. I've never been sick so often as I was when I worked there. Instead of getting the flu once a year, something many of us consider normal, I was sick half a dozen times a year and usually during the summer. Some were bad, some were mild, and I don't recall ever having to go to a doctor for treatment. I would try the garlic cure, and really did see some improvement because of it.

Then I changed jobs, and began working as part of the maintenance crew at a local resort. One of the jobs no one wanted to do there was to clean the concrete patios and basements that fronted ground and below ground levels of the buildings. A horrible mixture of concrete dust, dessicated dead bug bodies, pollen and the feces and even dead bodies of wild birds lay in a thick layer on the floors of those areas. Swipe through it with a broom and a cloud of heavy dusty powder rose into the air, and no mask we were given would cut it. The people who had worked there before me had decided to skip that job, no matter what the complaints.

I decided to clean the place up, which was not a chore with a beginning and end. It was a constant job, with a constantly renewing layer of debris. When I began to get sick from this, it was no longer a mild illness. It followed up with sinus infections that wouldn't go away, lung infections that went on for months, and left me so sick that I used to wonder what it took to actually get admitted to a hospital these days.

This was before the days of bird flu, but a bird borne virus may have been the cause of two of the worst illnesses I've ever had, one of which laid me up for ten days and the other, for four weeks. I had all the symptoms of the flu, but about a thousand times worse than any flu I'd ever had before. The first round kept me awake and coughing up ropy strands of infective gel for about a week before it abated. At the worst of it, the coughing fits came about every five minutes, so extreme that pieces of me were coming out along with the bacterial or viral mucous. My sink was lined with streaks of membrane the size and shape of my bronchial tubes. The reaction I had was so bad that the skin on my upper lip blistered -- the same thing was happening to my insides. I did get over it, but not without being very scared and thinking that I really was close to dying. If I'd stopped coughing I'd have drowned in the goo.

The second round was worse, coming a few months later. After that I began to look for ways to change jobs. This may have been the same flu coming back yet again, in that typical pattern, but in my case it was a pandemic of one and no one I knew ever caught it from me. Human to human transmission wasn't in its bag of tricks. I think about that, though, when the talk is of China or Southeast Asia and all the focus is there, where we expect the next killer flu to originate. The Spanish Flu had its origin here in America, in Kansas. America makes some bad ones, and we don't expect it to happen here. To us, disease is something that begins in poor areas of the world, not here at home.

One of the problems in dealing with flu is us. When I was sick with my strange versions, for example, I drew very little attention from the physicians who treated me. No one was particularly interested in my problem, because the flu is a viral illness that doesn't respond to antibiotics. The usual advice is to go home and get well. Since most flu is relatively mild, few tests are done to determine what sort of flu it may be. Odd varieties with little contagious ability are apt to come and go without being noticed. Not noticing them is a human decision.

We are the other part of the problem, in pandemic situations, choosing to ignore problems until too late, and to cling to ordinary patterns of behaviour until the threshold for preventative action has already been crossed. We see that today, in the way our governments respond to a new threat, closing schools to prevent the spread of illness and suggesting that in order to deal with all the children staying at home, they be sent to day care. People do things that are nonsensical when faced with a spreading disease. People want someone to blame. We already see that in the treatment of this first wave, as public figures accuse the government of intentionally seeding the virus. Certain human behaviours seem instinctive rather than rational, with the mentality of war and the reaction to pandemic ranking high among those that go beyond logic to deeper animalistic motivations.

Predicting disease has been difficult because of the unpredictability of human participation. If we do as we should, the theoretical situations are controllable; but humans in this situation rarely do as we should. A recent example from the virtual world was the spread of an illness in the computer game World of Warcraft -- not among players, but among player characters. Created as a challenge in one of WoW's many virtual caverns, the disease was to be encountered only by high level players, who would discover the cure and emerge from the cavern instance healed, as part of the quest. Some decided not to do that. A few intentionally exited the cavern, bringing the illness with them, and spread it to every corner of the player map.

Outside the instanced dungeon, the plague hit lower level characters so fast that they died on the spot with no chance to seek a cure. High level healers traveled here and there within the game, treating the sick player avatars, and with the help of the game's "government" the disease was brought under control. The game's plague is now being studied as a real life example of how diseases spread, aided by aberrant human behaviour.

My little game, Pandemic II, keeps ticking quietly away, doing a fairly good job of mimicking the real world. None of the countries involved has noticed the problem yet. It's just a seasonal flu now, but developing the potential for much more. With resistance building to most drugs and work towards a vaccine months away, the future looks bright for my little monster. In the Fall, well established in an unsuspecting population, it will develop new habits.

I wonder how bad it will be.