The rain hadn't stopped in three days.
It fell in thin, colorless threads outside the cracked dormitory window, tracing crooked paths down the glass before dripping into the gutter. The gutters themselves were overflowing; the streets below were slick with a thin sheen of water and oil.
Beyond the campus, Washington, D.C. was swallowed in a dull gray fog, the outlines of monuments and bureaucratic towers blurred into shapeless blocks.
The heart of a nation looked more like a carcass left out in the rain.
Inside the cramped dormitory room, the light of a single desk lamp cast long shadows. A thin figure sat hunched forward, his shoulders sharp beneath his hoodie, his pale face illuminated by the glow of his laptop.
Dorian Veyne was twenty-three, though he often looked older. The bags beneath his eyes were deep, purple crescents, his hair an unkempt brown mess. His desk was buried under a graveyard of coffee cups, empty ramen bowls, scattered textbooks, and unpaid bills. Half-scribbled anatomy notes curled at the corners beneath the weight of unopened envelopes from debt collectors.
There had been a time when Dorian believed in medicine. Believed that if he studied hard enough, if he became a doctor, he could mend the fractures of the world. He believed doctors were modern priests, healers who stood between life and death.
That was before his father's cancer went untreated because insurance deemed the treatment "experimental and not covered." Before his mother's unemployment benefits vanished when a technical error "couldn't be resolved." Before he himself was swallowed by student loans the size of small graves.
Medicine had not saved his family. It had not even saved itself.
It had sold itself to politics, to corporations, to the highest bidder.
Now, Dorian studied something else.
His laptop hummed quietly, its cooling fan rattling with a faint metallic buzz. On the screen, a terminal window scrolled with endless strings of code and access requests. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, pale in the phosphorescent light. He was not revising case studies or writing essays.
He was breaking into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The decision hadn't been moral. It hadn't even been political.
At first, it was boredom. The kind of gnawing, marrow-deep boredom that grows inside when the world itself feels rotten. Professors lectured on ethics while pocketing pharmaceutical money. Classmates bragged about cheating on tests while reselling stolen opioids behind closed doors. Politicians on television argued about healthcare costs while their own children attended private clinics shielded from the suffering of ordinary Americans.
The hypocrisy made Dorian feel sick, but the sickness quickly calcified into something colder: curiosity.
If the world was a corpse, then medicine wasn't a cure. It was makeup. Foundation smeared over the smell of decay.
Dorian wanted to see the rot beneath.
And tonight, he had found a way in.
His screen blinked once. Twice. Then flashed green. Access granted.
A thin smile tugged at the corner of his lips. "Well," he murmured under his breath, "let's see what the gods of health are hiding."
He began scrolling.
Most of the files were dull. Shipment manifests for vaccines, influenza surveys, tuberculosis case counts. Data, data, and more data—sterile, bureaucratic, all dressed up in acronyms to lull the public into believing the system was working.
He nearly gave up when he saw it.
Buried in a subfolder, hidden among endless spreadsheets, was a file. It had no human-readable name, only a string of characters: 74-PORC-LLIUM.
Dorian frowned.
"Porc…llium?"
The word was strange. It didn't match the CDC's naming conventions. It wasn't a disease he recognized, not Latin, not Greek, not even pharmaceutical jargon.
It was something else.
His hand hovered above the trackpad. A hesitation. A pulse of instinct telling him not to open it.
Then, with a click, he did.
The file unfolded into hundreds of reports. His eyes caught on the first line, and for a heartbeat, he thought it was some kind of joke.
Subject 12. Male. 34 years old. Incarcerated protestor. Refused to cooperate during questioning. Administered injection.
His breath hitched. He scrolled lower.
Phase I: Swelling of soft tissues, bristling of skin.
Phase II: Nasal protrusion, restructuring of jaw.
Phase III: Vocal distortions — squeals.
Phase IV: Total quadrupedal gait.
Phase V: Complete porcine phenotype. Subject unrecognizable.
Final state: Non-human. Disposal recommended.
Dorian's lips parted. His chest went cold.
He scrolled further. Report after report. Each clinical, stripped of humanity. Prisoners. Dissidents. Test subjects taken from forgotten corners of society.
Attached to each report was a photograph.
Dorian clicked the first.
A man's face stared back. Or rather, what had once been a man's face. His skull was stretched grotesquely forward, flesh bristled with coarse hair, his jaw deformed into a pink snout. The eyes were still human, wide, terrified, pleading, but the rest of him was… wrong.
The next image was worse. A woman, or what remained of her. Her jaw hung slack, tongue swollen, arms bent at unnatural angles. Her body pitched forward on all fours. Her report was stamped with a single word in red: DISPOSAL.
Dorian recoiled. His stomach lurched violently, bile burning the back of his throat. He pressed a trembling hand against his mouth, unable to look away, unable to blink.
They weren't metaphors. Not poetry. Not symbolism.
They had turned people into pigs.
He clicked another file.
Subject 47. Female. 22. Student activist. Injected after arrest.
Phase I: Bristling of scalp, loss of speech within 12 hours.
Phase II: Ocular disfigurement, jaw elongation.
Phase III: Subject attempted suicide by head trauma. Failed.
Phase IV: Full porcine transformation. Subject culled.
The photo showed her body slumped in a cell, her hands, if they could still be called hands bloodied from pounding against the concrete wall.
Dorian's whole body trembled. He tore his gaze away, but the images burned into the backs of his eyes.
This wasn't medicine. This was livestock engineering.
Porcillium.
The name repeated in his head like a whisper. A secret drug. A punishment. A weapon.
And the government was using it.
His pulse quickened. His breathing came shallow, ragged. The air in the dormitory suddenly felt thick, choking. He could hear the rain louder now, hammering against the window like claws scratching glass.
He sat there for minutes, maybe longer, staring at the screen.
Then, slowly, something shifted inside him.
The horror was still there, cold and sharp as a knife lodged in his chest but around it grew something else.
A smile.
It came small at first. A twitch at the corner of his lips. Then wider, baring his teeth. His reflection in the window grinned back at him hollow-eyed, gaunt, but alive.
The government had revealed its true face. Not wolves in sheep's clothing. Not shepherds guiding the herd.
They were butchers.
And butchers could be replaced.
Dorian leaned back in his chair. His laughter filled the room low, shaky at first, then rising until it was something feral, echoing off the walls.
He snapped the laptop shut with a decisive click.
"Then let the swine devour their masters."
That night, as the campus slept under gray skies, Dorian Veyne began to plan.
His first message would be simple.
No manifesto. No speech. No explanation.
Just a vial of stolen Porcillium and a single note:
Oink well.