If a virus, computer or otherwise, has a fancy name, expect an opposite or at least related name for the cure.
Examples:
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Anime
Comic Books
- The Green Lantern Corps includes a sentient smallpox virus, Leezle Pon, who fights off the evil Sinestro Corps virus Despotellis.
Film
- Chimera (virus) and Bellerophon (cure) in Mission: Impossible 2. Named for a monster from Greek Mythology and its slayer. This is justified, as those are actually their codenames for the project that created them.
- Subverted in Escape from L.A.: Virus: Plutoxin 7. Cure: Nothing, it's just a common flu virus; Snake is tricked into believing otherwise.
Literature
- Orson Scott Card's descolada and recolada viruses in the Ender saga. They translate as "un-glueing" and "re-glueing" because of their effect on DNA.
- Snow Crash and Snow Melt.
- Not a virus/clue pairing, but the Veritas drug in Kevin J. Anderson's Blindfold grants temporary Psychic Powers to the Truthsayers, while a mutated version is a deadly airborne virus named Mindfire, which fries the brain by causing it to wildly fire off a massive amount of neural impulses. "Veritas" is Latin for "truth".
- Note the similarity of Veritas to spice in Dune. This is because Blindfold was originally written by Anderson to audition for helping Brian Herbert continue his father's books. Unlike spice, though, there is nothing mystical about Veritas, although the science is iffy.
Live Action TV
Video Games
- The Revelation computer virus and the cure Faith in the game Uplink.
- Resident Evil has: T-Virus/Daylight Vaccine (because in the daylight, you don't need an umbrella); G-Virus/DEVIL; Las Plaga/Las Plaga Removal Lazer.
- From the Metal Gear Solid series, there's FOXDIE and FOXALIVE.
- Deus Ex: Gray Death, cured by Ambrosia.
- Also, the "good" AI Daedalus and the "evil" AI Icarus. And they merge to form...Helios.
- Starcraft: Brood War: Hyperevolutionary virus, cured by Infestation Antidote
- Snatcher gives us a backstory where "Lucifer-Alpha" ravages eastern Europe, but mutates into a benign form by the present day. SD Snatcher follows more in line with the trope with "Lucifer-Beta" (the New and Improved virus) and "L-Angel" (the antidote).
Real Life
- Old-school hackers had a taste for the dramatic that actually made this sort of thing reasonably common, e.g. "Creeper
" vs. "Reaper".
