If You Get This, You Are Infected
500 words
It started as a whisper in the data. A line of code hidden deep within the architecture of the world’s most secure systems, unsigned, unnoticed. A curiosity at first—then a virus. But this wasn’t malware in the traditional sense. No. This was far more insidious.
The first person to get it was a junior analyst at a defense firm in Oslo. He opened an email marked simply: “Take Me.” No sender. No subject. No attachments. Just a single line in the body:
“If you get this, you are infected.”
Within minutes, he was staring at his screen, not in confusion, but in awe. He began to type. Pages upon pages. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. He just wrote. His colleagues found him three days later, dehydrated, smiling, whispering poetry in a language they couldn’t understand. On his desk: a single note, written in flawless cursive.
“It took me. Now take me too.”
Authorities thought it was madness. A one-off breakdown. Until it spread.
The email bounced through closed networks, offline servers, even air-gapped devices. It found its way into notebooks, napkin scribbles, dreams. One day you were normal. The next, you woke up gasping, your hand reaching blindly for a pen to write something you’d never thought before.
A journalist in Tokyo printed a headline he didn’t remember typing: “THE MIND HAS BEEN BREACHED.” A novelist in Buenos Aires threw away her current manuscript to write something else—something that poured from her like prophecy. All around the world, people began repeating the phrase:
“Take me.”
And they did. Friends, family, strangers. One by one, they became infected.
But it wasn’t a virus in the technical sense. Not a computer bug. Not a pathogen. It was an idea. A living idea, perhaps the first of its kind. Once read, once heard, once understood, it rewrote something inside you. Not your cells. Not your mind. Your will.
The infected didn’t collapse. They created. Feverishly. Beautifully. Some wrote operas in dead languages. Others painted visions of cities no one had ever seen. Children woke up humming songs that didn’t exist, but somehow always had. Everyone was building something they couldn’t name.
By the time governments understood, it was too late.
The message was no longer confined to screens or paper. It echoed in lullabies, in murmured prayers, in digital billboards glitching just long enough to flash:
“If you get this, you are infected.”
Eventually, resistance faded. The uninfected either joined or fell silent.
And now… now it’s your turn.
You’re reading this, aren’t you?
The words are inside you now. Quiet. Gentle. But alive. You’ll dream tonight. And when you wake up, you’ll feel it—a need, a compulsion, a mission.
You won’t understand it.
But you will follow it.
And one day, you’ll write something too. Maybe just one sentence.
Maybe…
“If you get this, you are infected.
