So nuking a city is the last resort reserved for worst-case scenarios. Nukes definitely contain outbreaks, but then the city would have been destroyed (a loss of billions of dollars) and uninhabitable for years after such a containment measure. The best military response is to preserve as much of the city and people as possible while ensuring the eradication of the Z-virus and all Z-tech.
I’m confused. Your outbreak incident described a “zombie hive.” I don’t get it. What is or how or where does a zombie hive come from?
You may think that a zombie apocalypse is the sign of the times, the end of the world. I have experience dealing with zombie outbreaks and this gives me some confidence that even a pandemic zombie outbreak may not completely end the world. Of course, a pandemic zombie outbreak means the world is swirling around the crapper and sinking fast, but humanity has a toughness and resiliency that suggests we can rebuild and rebound from some of the worst catastrophes that you can imagine. We have rebounded as a species many times before.
A pandemic zombie outbreak piggybacking after some other deadly pandemic viral outbreak is certainly a very bad thing, but some people will survive. The odds that the entire world’s population of humans could be wiped out by a pandemic event are astronomically and statistically, infinitely small. Viral pandemic outbreaks are certainly extinction level events (ELE), but there are just too many people in the world for ALL of us to die in a short pandemic event. A whole lot of us would die, but not ALL of us.
However, if a zombie outbreak goes uncontained long enough following some other deadly pandemic outbreak and zombie hives have a chance to manifest, then we are in a full-blown World War Z, a zombie pandemonium. If illegal Z-tech gets into the wrong hands and they use the Z-tech to start an outbreak in say, North Korea, things could still get pretty nasty pretty quick if containment fails. This would be a Z-virus zombie outbreak without piggybacking a pandemic event such as a deadly flu outbreak. We would survive, but we may have to go to war to survive.
When I say we have to fight zombies and be ready to go to war, I’m really talking about advanced stages of the Z-virus. In my last few PSAs, I described how an illegal biological weapons manufacturing facility created Z-tech (Z-virus and/or zombies and/or hive material) and tried to create a zombie hive for its own study, research, or terrorist actions…who knows?
The facility created a zombie hive and this hive broke out and attempted to move. A zombie hive is a massive collective of advanced biological Z-virus intelligence. After more than 50 years of research at Harvard and Texas A&M, here is what we know in summary.
Your regular stumbling bumbling biting and shrieking zombies are the first wave of a Z-virus war. Z-virus intends to spread and take over all life on the planet. It can do this, but to do it takes time and it has to mutate significantly to accomplish its goal. The routine mindless zombie you see chasing people and biting and infecting people is the first stage mutation of the Z-virus—the first wave of the invasion. As the Z-virus continues to spread, it continues to mutate. It produces much more bizarre and intelligent zombies in subsequent invasion waves. Continued mutations can result in a zombie hive. The Texas A&M Health Sciences zombie researchers and scientists determined that there are a wide number of ways to produce a zombie hive.
If someone traps a large number of advanced stage zombies in a confined place, they will start to feed on each other, causing mutations and eventually becoming a small hive in a short time. If this hive cannot escape, then it will die. It’s as if the Z-virus is aware that it has run out of people to infect, so it must radically mutate in order to survive. This is the most common way to produce a zombie hive in a laboratory.
Every zombie hive outbreak incident I am aware of started this way. Zombie hives are like enormous brains. They emit signals similar to brain waves, which can be detected with sensitive electronic equipment. These waves are like radio signals to advanced zombies and zombie mutants. In some rare cases, zombie hives can actually control non-infected people. One way to fight and/or contain a hive is to jam the frequencies—I’ll tell you more about this later. As the combined intelligence of the Z-virus and its human and animal hosts becomes one intelligence, you can see how something like this can be extremely deadly to the world and mainly to people and quite difficult to contain if it escapes.
I mentioned all this to an audience at a conference over the weekend and one audience member said this all sounds like Aliens and another said it all sounds like the Resident Evil video games and movies. Maybe so. The creatures in the Alien movies were a type of bio-weapon. The fictional aliens were part of some collective hive where the center of the hive was always some sort of alien egg-laying queen. The aliens needed human hosts to propagate and the aliens were a lot more intelligent as a hive than humans seemed to expect.
That’s also a lot like ant and termite colonies and bee hives. Zombies do not have queens. Once a hive is created, it acts more like a computer server or a central intelligence hub, but not like a queen at all. If there is more than one zombie hive, then the combined intelligence and threat increases exponentially just like if you connect a bunch of servers together to form a world-wide-web. That’s what the Z-virus wants to do, mutate, build, create, collaborate, and spread.
There are zombie hives in Resident Evil, and the game designers have a sense of what zombies and zombie hives can really do because they consult with other zombie experts like me, but the games and the movies really exaggerate the way a zombie hive works.
The games and movies show a zombie intelligence that seeks to mimic human life. The zombies in the game are super intelligent and bent on world conquest and tend to look like people, act like people, collect cash and riches, and operate machines, and build things like people do, at least until they need to attack. Perhaps some radical mad scientist or immoral corporation created the Resident Evil zombie virus because they thought it would purify humanity or it would make some humans super human perhaps as a type of military weapon. I am aware that there are terrorist groups out there who want to get their hands on Z-tech for the ideological purpose of bringing on the end of the world and purging humanity of its impurities. I think the Z-virus can do that.
I’m also aware that researchers here in the US have studied military applications for Z-virus, but probably not quite like in the video games or as portrayed in Hollywood. Our researchers have developed certain weapons like anti-Z-virus, a virus that attacks Z-virus. Another military application uses soldiers enhanced with advanced stage Z-virus in a way that makes them not only immune, but also stronger, faster, smarter, and more resilient to the adverse nature of intense combat. During a zombie apocalypse, the military will enlist a number of soldiers to receive these enhancements and then send them out to help reestablish order from the chaos.
Fighting zombie hives is a nightmare. However, today’s Zombie fighters have a few things working in their favor. For one thing, we have weapons. No Z-virus hive experiments have ever shown the Z-virus to mutate into zombies that can do more than carry and use basic weapons. A higher level zombie can fire a gun, but not much more than that. Zombies, even the most advanced zombies cannot create weapons. Advanced zombies won’t pilot a plane or build a booby-trap or pull the pin on a hand grenade and then throw it. The Z-virus is purely biological and tends to ignore and not take advantage of human technology such as vehicles, computers, electrical grids, and weapons.
I am aware of a report that during an advanced zombie outbreak in a secret Chinese military missile depot, a series of advanced zombies got into the missile control room and launched several missiles by pushing the correct sequence of buttons. It’s worth noting that these zombies were the previous missile control personnel who were operating the depot and were infected and became advance stage zombies during that outbreak. The Chinese deactivated the missiles remotely and the inactive missiles crashed into farming areas.
Side Note: That outbreak incident was back in the 80s when the Chinese actually tried to use
zombies to guard some of their secret facilities. They had a strange notion that they could control zombies by attaching electric stimulation devices to their heads and into their brains.
They also tried to create zombie factory workers using the same brain stimulating devices. I heard someone recently discuss the potential to create factories in foreign countries like in Burma or Sudan using zombies as factory workers with nanotechnology helping to control the zombie.
There are plenty of rich idiots in the world with nothing better to do…always looking for the cheapest labor. A positive side result of these experiments found a potential for nanotech to be used to inoculate people against the Z-virus. I like this—taking the Z-War fight down to the microscopic level!
Almost all the documented zombie hive outbreaks in the last 10 years were the result of experimentation—some experiment with zombies to find a cure, to develop a vaccine, and some rare experiments try to create super zombies that can be controlled for military and other purposes.
Regular everyday-people can be exceptional mindless drones, so I’m not sure what logic there is in creating difficult to manage, infectious zombie drones, especially when regular mindless people are so abundant and come pre-loaded with pretty decent hardware and software and very low potential to escape their facilities and take over the world.
Several global business conglomerates have clauses in their international agreements that prohibit using zombies and other immoral labor practices…take a look at some international child labor, slave labor, and animal labor business restrictions (South Africa) if you get a chance and keep a look out for the words like “other artificially produced” or “unnaturally acquired” labor sources, in their codes of conduct. By the way, take a look at your own company’s zombie outbreak protocols. Look for any sort of policy related to pandemic events and continuing operations. Most city governments, schools, and large mega-companies have policies like these and some of them post their policies online.
New Jersey State Government
Sterling Group Corporate Pandemic Plan
Flu.gov Website Listing of all US State Plans
I played the Resident Evil games this weekend. Are you saying the mutant zombies in these games are possible? How is this possible?
Let’s start with the definition of mutant. A biological mutant is merely different from its ancestors/predecessors. So all life is mutated life. People today are advanced mutants of the people who were on this planet 100,000 years ago. Even when the mutations are not as obvious to see with the eyes, you can bet that mutations occur all the way down to the microscopic level in all organisms, large and small. My own kids are all taller than I am. They are mutants. Mutations are necessary for survival. That’s the essence of life—mutate or die. My own kids are much more resistant to some viral and biological threats than I am.
With any virus there is some chance that infected populations will develop internal and natural autoimmune defenses against the virus over time. As the human body comes in contact with Z-virus and other contagions, the human body itself starts to mutate or evolve to better fight the contagion. A successful virus will mutate and evolve faster than the human body can match. The Z-virus mutates, adapts, and overcomes biological obstacles better than most viruses.
Scientists working in disease control keep track of a variety of factors in any viral outbreak. Among the many statistical analyses are: infectious period—how long an infected person is contagious; rate of transmission—how many people can become infected through contact with one infected person (also called R-rate, reproduction rate); death rate—how many infected people will die and how long it takes them to die once they are infected; vaccine production time—the rate and chance of developing and testing a viable vaccine; and rate of mutations—how quickly the contagion mutates compared to the average rate the human body can create its own defenses—this includes a measure of how long before a vaccine strain becomes useless because the virus mutated. This is why you have to get annual flu shots. This year’s strain of the flu has mutated since last year’s strain. Old flu vaccines stop working. There is often no one-and-done vaccine.
You can read about outbreak rates with HIV, SARS, and West Nile at the CDC’s and the WHO’s websites. You can also see how they are tracking the continued, albeit slow and increasingly deadly, mutations of the Swine Flu, the Zika Virus, and other pandemic potentials.
Flu Outbreaks CDC
Z-virus is known to have the highest adverse rates of most known viral potentials along with a very low human resistance and no potential for delivering a vaccine fast enough. With Z-virus, Harvard breakout model researchers have argued that a vaccination response to a pandemic Z-virus outbreak would be a waste of time and money. They theorize that allowing an uncontained pandemic global zombie outbreak to run its course is the best recourse. I disagree with this kind of science that forgets to factor in the human will to fight and survive. Ah well, that’s why scientists are NOT in charge of the world.
While everyone always pays attention to human viral outbreaks, you have to at least also take a look at animal viral outbreaks to get a sense of what these little killing machines can do. Take a look at Zika, Nipah, and Mad Cow. West Nile is also transmitted from animals to humans typically through mosquitoes.
Mad Cow
Nipah
West Nile
HIV
Zika
US CDC Zombie Outbreak Guidance
European Viral Outbreak Kills Lambs
US Viral Bird Flu Outbreak
Viral Outbreak Killing of Frogs Worldwide
The DNA sequences of Z-virus are different from the DNA sequences of all known life-forms on this planet, suggesting again that Z-virus may not be from this planet. Unlike all other viruses, Z-virus breaks into other DNA codes and then rewrites them with zombie code, reprogramming the host. The ultimate threat is a completely zombified world.
When I imagine this, I imagine a world filled with grotesque shifting masses of living polymorphs, a collection of coalescent organisms connected to a singular zombie hive collective. It’s a world where every life-form, all plants, animals, sea creatures, and even microorganisms become twisted versions of life similar to the creatures from John Carpenter’s The Thing movie. Uncontained Z-virus outbreaks can eventually assimilate multiple organisms into one zombified life-form, one massive global unnatural biological viral creature.
So Z-virus will mutate quickly and seek to continue its full attack on all life on this world by prolonging its own life for starters, and it can do this by keeping an infected human mobile and alive (technically, the walking dead) for as long as possible. By continuing to infect and spread, it continues to mutate and evolve.
In my own experiences, we did not encounter mutated zombies that looked like the creatures in the Resident Evil movies or video games. These gun-toting super-zombies are exaggerated purely for dramatic effect. In a video game, it’s definitely a lot more fun to fight zombies that can shoot, pilot vehicles, and think like humans.
The mutants we encountered on our zombie response teams were only mildly mutated people and animals—dogs, cats, horses and I have to agree with Lt. Martin, zombie cats are the worst of all. Still, these were low-level mutated zombies that were produced by a relatively short-lived hive. The zombie mutants we saw in 2005 at the Guantanamo Bay labs were advanced mutants created from a hive that had been alive in a lab for nearly 15 years. These mutants were very much like the creatures in The Thing, except they never pretended to be human. These mutant zombies mutated for suitability to the environment they were in—some mutated into swimming things, crawling things, snake-like things, and twisted flapping flying things. Of note, the mutants from this hive had increased and psychic and heightened pheromonal abilities.
When talking about extinction level events, typically the discussions revolve around what happened to the dinosaurs, or the possibility of a gamma ray burst, or something else like a massive volcanic event. None of thes
e events is like a pandemic zombie outbreak. None of these events rewrites DNA codes. In this way, a Z-virus outbreak is a lot like an alien invasion.
A zombie apocalypse is the ultimate extinction level event that could ever happen. This is why the biggest threat to life on Earth compared to any other potential extinction level event is a pandemic virus outbreak combined with a pandemic zombie outbreak. You can watch a number of TV shows like 2006’s Countdown to Doomsday and see why a pandemic global outbreak always ranks as the number one threat to humanity.
Extinction Level Events
The US maintains a secret zombie hive testing facility connected to the terrorist prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and another Z-tech testing facility in Adak, Alaska. I am aware of a few other Z-virus testing facilities in remote locations worldwide, co-sponsored by the US. I’m also aware of several illegal facilities around the world, perhaps the largest of which is in India where I honestly expect the no-shit zombie apocalypse to start. You know someone is testing Z-tech because the info about what Z-tech can and cannot do always ends up on the internet.
Before troops landed in Iraq in 2003, one of the first targets US forces destroyed were two Z-virus test facilities constructed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Coalition forces dropped the largest fuel air explosives ever used in peace or war on those two facilities to prevent anything living or otherwise from escaping the destruction. Small localized nukes were authorized, but not used.
Just keep in mind, the first sign of Z-virus mutations is when you see zombies acting atypical. If you are in a zombie outbreak and you see a zombie doing something unusual, like hiding, climbing a wall, or throwing something, or playing dead, or not chasing something to bite when other zombies are chasing it, then it is your duty to kill that zombie immediately. A zombie that can’t seem to escape a bathroom because it can’t figure out how to pull the door inward to open it, is nowhere near as threatening as a zombie that can open doors and climb ladders and ropes and can run away from danger. These will be the first mutations of many more to come if you don’t kill them fast and with great impunity.