Andy the threat

 "The threat of bioterrorism is increasing!" joked Andy. Biotechnology was now cheap enough that a young man like him, twenty years old, could threaten the survival of humanity. Andy worked on his crops in his father's garage. Well, in his garage, since his bastard father had run off ten years earlier.

Andy would be content to take out the people in the Roscoe Village neighborhood in the North Center area. Those jerks were trying to keep him out of their territory, keep him from doing his little drug business there.

Well, they wouldn't have a business at all! Portable manufacturing labs, genetic databases, and AI software had become available to all. With a basic biotech degree and a lot of talent, rapid DNA research and synthesis, had become a breeze.

Andy, like everyone else, had started making over-the-counter drugs, then synthetic drugs. Now he wanted to have a little fun at the expense of his competitors in Roscoe Village.

Government agencies, once able to fight bioterrorism by restricting access to pathogens, had oddly been ordered to let it happen. The order came from the presidency.

The goal was to reduce the world's population, so a few homemade bioterrorist attacks were useful to cover the tracks of the agencies' own attacks.

DNA synthesis technology was used to circumvent the restricted access to potential pathogens. Organism sequencing allowed synthesis without the need for culture samples or DNA stocks.

Under the guise of a continuing need for medical breakthroughs, security agencies had therefore gradually relaxed the regulation of databases. DNA sequences from anthrax, botulism or smallpox had long been available on the Internet. All that was left was to trust a population of Western degenerates, kids abandoned by their fathers, kids thrown into wars all over the world, to do the job.

That poor bastard Andy Escott, who lived in an old house at the corner of Carmen and Ravenswood Avenue, was the cause of a tuberculosis epidemic that killed almost the entire North American population and a large part of the Central American population.

He had found a way to develop a strain that attacked the lungs as well as the bones and lymph nodes. The volatility of his invention was such that the entire continent was affected within a month.

Andy had emulators all over the world, including Ali Khan of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, who broke Andy's "record" by producing a strain of typhoid fever, akin to Athens fever, that depopulated the entire Indian continent as far as Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, which were also depopulated within a year.

These two budding bioterrorists, proved by example that it had become extremely easy to produce an even more deadly version of an existing virus using a relatively unsophisticated brain and a relatively modest level of knowledge and equipment.