Viral By Committee
is a Forum Quest posted on Quest Den, run by a user called Doors.
It follows Alex, who is trying to survive a Zombie Apocalypse after splitting from their friends due to getting bit.
Note: Alex is nonbinary and most other characters are implied to be genderless, so everyone on this page goes by they/them pronouns.
Viral By Committee contain examples of:
- Anti-Mentor: In the end, Sloth's only positive contribution ended up being this, showing Contagion exactly what NOT to do.
- Deadly Lunge: As Alex leaves the radio tower, a zombie climbs a nearby fence and tries to pounce on Alex as they flee on bike.
- Digital Avatar: In every mental conversation they're part in, Anarchy appears as a set of hands, whereas their true form looks like a tree encased in protective gel.
- Dog Food Diet: At the end of the first day, Alex manages to scavenge a few tins of cat food.
- Dream Sequence: The second chapter takes place as Alex is dreaming of an interplanetary war.
- Honest Corporate Executive: Contagion genuinely does their best to run their project with environmental preservation as a major priority. Their convictions born in large part from seeing firsthand what damage a corrupt and incompetent project lead can cause, their previous boss Sloth having caused their project's catastrophic failure with a string of short-sighted and selfish decisions. There is a possible blemish in Contagion's past, but they were still under Sloth's orders at the time.
- Humans by Any Other Name:
- Humans Are Special: Contagion's manifesto (SPOILERS) mentions human inventiveness and adaptiveness as rationale for their special project plan.
- Mundane Utility: The Security Bypass researchers study the immune system to work around it, but also discover that macrophages produce acids that could be useful in manufacturing.
- No Zombie Cannibals: Zig-zagged. Fully turned zombies will work together even over radio, but before that they're competing for resources and the strong may well eat the weak.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Dream-Alex's invader disguise consists in a giant calculator and a ridiculous helmet.
- Perception Filter: As far as we know Alex can see just fine what happens around them, but other entities have filters all over the place. The Nulls are initially cut from the nanite network by the Liminal Quarantine, the zombie nanites see through a filter that scrambles faces and textnote , the Committee is first seen through a filter making them look humanoid, Alex themself (and a lot of infected people) are stopped from knowing what's happening inside them by a "data filter" to prevent suicide, and in the second chapter Alex is explicitly dreaming, which greatly distorts what they see.
- Phoning the Phantom: When Anarchy first speaks using Alex's mouth, they initially address Alex directly. They're promptly advised to address Alex in first-person instead, so that people (including Alex) will see Alex thinking out loud rather than holding both sides of a conversation.
- Prince and Pauper: a mysterious contact high-ranked among the alien invaders offers dream-Alex the means to impersonate them, allowing both Alex to get insight on the invaders' upper echelons and the contact to go snoop without their absence being noticed.
- Pointy-Haired Boss: Sloth is described as incompetent and selfish, letting subordinates patch up the damage he causes and even double-crossing allies.
- Synthetic Plague: It quickly turns out the zombie plague is artificial and controlled by some shady organization.
- Tomato in the Mirror: The readers are parts of the very plague infecting Alex.
- Zombie Infectee: The story starts mere minutes after Alex gets bit, and Alex's friends no longer trust them. Alex pleads to them to leave them alive but split off. Since the zombie virus is already influencing Alex's mind, their friends were right to be wary of them.
