Eroflu Shanghai Ch. 01

Author’s note: Eroflu (erogenous influenza) is the new name for Final Flu. Apparently Final Flu wasn’t a unique enough name for search engines to find it. It may take a while to get all chapters renamed.

So you know what you’re getting into, this is a mass impregnation story. It started as a writing challenge to go way over the top and have one guy make a ridiculous number of babies, without some of the baggage that often bothers me about that genre (he’s not some evil rapist, he’s not even trying to make all this happen, and there’s at least a halfway plausible sci-fi explanation for it all). It’s kind of a re-try at my first series The Grateful Virus, but it’s unrelated, a different world with a different guy coincidentally named Jim being bred by a different virus.

In keeping with the main character’s nature as an accountant, there is a spreadsheet at bit.ly/efs-sheet of all the 200+ women, with a handy chapter totals tab at the bottom. Each woman’s name is also a link to an AI-generated face picture of her.

If you’re thinking it’s almost impossible to make a story erotic and non-repetitive with hundreds of women, you’re right. That’s why it’s a writing challenge. That difficulty is what’s fun for me about trying to write this crazy story. Give it a chance and please let me know in the comments which parts of it you think are working, or if you have ideas about how to make it work better.



***

Jim was on a work trip in Shanghai looking out his hotel room window. He couldn’t help but notice two stunningly beautiful women in the pool below. They were maybe mid-20s, lithe, shapely, graceful, and so full of youthful joy and energy, chasing each other around on inflatables, splashing and laughing. He couldn’t help fantasizing a little, imagining them joyriding him instead of those inflatable rafts.

His fantasy awakened something inside him. No, not that. Something that was actually not Jim, but was literally inside his body. Earlier that year, a mutated strain of the flu had built an intelligent network of modified nerve cells within his body and become a separate sentient being. For its own reasons, the virus needed more of Jim’s DNA in the human population. A lot more. In Jim, and in a precious few other humans scattered around the world who shared his rare combination of genetic quirks, the virus was able to take on its full form, an extensive parallel nervous system of infected cells throughout his body and especially in the gray matter of his brain, where it could watch his thoughts, borrow his senses, and develop its own intelligence by mimicking patterns in his brain.

The virus had already spread to everyone on the planet in a limited form, but it remained mostly dormant, watching, learning. The one action it had taken was to eradicate all other infectious diseases from the human population, mystifying scientists and making headlines around the world. The virus didn’t want anything else around that could ever evolve into a competitor. Everyone knew that all infectious diseases from the common cold to malaria to STDs were now a thing of the past, but nobody knew why. The only remaining exception was a single flu strain that briefly made headlines, becoming known as the final flu. It was never fatal, usually completely asymptomatic, and present in everyone. Unlike all past flu strains, it was not mutating at all and seemed to pose no danger, so medical science largely moved on from it as a curiosity not worthy of major research funding.

The final flu was renamed erogenous influenza, or eroflu, a few months later, by scientists who detected that it was infecting erogenous zones and pleasure centers in the brain. Again, all infected tissue was undamaged and the virus seemed to have no effect, so it didn’t get much attention.

For months the virus had been studying human reproduction and sexual attraction, observing and experimenting in other reproducing bodies, learning to optimize the process so it could be as effective as possible whenever Jim got around to doing it again. Just one of his babies was on the way in his wife’s womb, and it would be many months before she could begin to make another. Didn’t he know there were other wombs? Didn’t he know he had millions of sperm just going to waste every day? What the hell was he waiting for? It had been months! The virus was growing increasingly impatient with Jim’s apparent total lack of interest in spreading his precious DNA.

Then it saw his attraction to the women in the pool. This was it. Finally, he wants to breed with someone, it thought. It sprang into action. The viral network in Jim’s body could signal the network in another nearby host with tiny muscle twitches beneath their conscious perception. From farther away like this, the twitches would need to be a bit less subtle, but would still do the job.

As Jim watched the two women below, one of them seemed to feel his eyes on her and looked up directly at his window. He felt a quick series of muscle twitches all around his eyes as they made eye contact, and then he saw her gasp and stare wide-eyed at him. Her friend, following her gaze, looked up a moment later and saw him too. The twitches came again and she too immediately gasped and stared. He stood there in shock, locked in their gaze. Their expressions weren’t the anger or disgust he expected and probably deserved as a voyeur. Slowly it dawned on him. They were… aroused? Their hips ground subtly against the inflatable rafts they were straddling as they stared, panting, up at him, their eyes smoldering. Smoldering and grinding, right at him. They wanted him? It seemed ridiculous. It was ridiculous. Even more ridiculously, somehow he felt they were now connected to him and would try to find him. And then what? Nothing, of course, he told himself. He was happily married. And probably imagining things anyway, he told himself as he forced himself to step back from the window. Of course you’re imagining things, Jim, you idiot, he told himself firmly, you’re not that attractive. Also, nobody is.

Still, he hurriedly left his room a little early to meet with some colleagues for dinner, just in case his crazy hunch was right and there was some unwanted attention on its way from those swimmers. He was still freaked out by what happened so he kept his head down, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone. Hurrying out of the hotel onto the sidewalk, he accidentally bumped into a jogger and they both fell. Her two jogging companions helped them up. Forgetting to avoid eye contact and instead trying to avoid staring at their amazingly shapely bodies in their tight running clothes, he forced his gaze upward to their faces as he apologized politely in his fluent Mandarin (the main reason his company often sent him here).

The virus was thrilled to see Jim’s strong attraction to the joggers. It had been disappointed when Jim hurried away from the swimmers who were trying to breed with him. Humans were so confusing. But still, now that it had acted it was worth trying again, maybe with a little stronger push of arousal on Jim’s end. The virus couldn’t control their behavior, and it couldn’t create attraction out of nothing. All it could do was heighten their attraction and awaken their natural breeding instincts. The more attraction there was to start with, the more the virus could do with it. But just like naturally occurring attraction, no matter how strong it was, it was still up to them to choose what to do about it.

Each of the joggers in turn gasped and stared wide-eyed at him as they met his gaze. It was happening again. This time, up close, there was no mistaking it. The only difference was he didn’t feel any muscle twitches. The timing, the feeling of it. It was utterly convincing. It happened exactly as he made eye contact with each of them. Those same sudden lustful wide-eyed stares. That intense sudden rush of desire he felt for each of them right when their eyes went wide. And wow, what a sight they were. Their sweet faces that had been radiating the wholesome pleasure of a good runner’s high now gaped at him panting with wide-eyed lust, their toned, athletic, shapely bodies tensed up, seeming ready to spring on him and take him right there on the sidewalk. He froze mid-sentence, his mouth open, unable to speak, move, or even breathe in his own sudden desire. Still frozen, he saw their gazes become more intense, even predatory. One of them reached out a small trembling hand toward him.

He panicked and fled, not realizing he had dropped something. It was his room key, still in its envelope with the room number written on it.

They didn’t seem to be following, but anyway he jumped in a cab, slamming the door behind him, and was soon safely speeding off toward the restaurant. When he arrived, being careful to avoid eye contact on the way in, he took a seat at a table with his colleagues, trying to focus on the conversation. Thankfully none of them were attractive young women, and he found that he seemed to have no effect on them, so he began to relax.

The waitress approached their table, a beautiful willowy woman with an incredibly sweet face, an impossibly narrow waist, wide hips, and long, slender legs. She introduced herself as Yuming. He managed to avoid eye contact, focusing instead on his menu. But his peripheral vision couldn’t help but take in her every movement. She glided across the floor, graceful and fluid, her every step mesmerizing the men in the restaurant.

Eventually it happened. She surprised him, happening to approach from directly behind him when she brought their drinks. He instinctively turned to look, accidentally meeting her gaze before he realized it was her. Her eyes grew wide and he felt it again, that feeling that she was inextricably connected to him, with that inevitable driving purpose he couldn’t yet name. It was still scary and confusing, and he wasn’t anywhere near used to it yet, but he had to admit it was also so fucking sexy to see it happen to her.