Introduction:

Virus is a 12-episode anime series that aired in Japan in 1997. It has been available in fansub form for some time. I happened to get it in a large bunch of anime that a friend shared with me. It was one of the last things in that batch that I watched - I didn't know anything about it and I had heard things about some of the other series she sent.

When I did watch it, at first I wasn't sure if I liked it or not, but it became one of my favorite obsessions. When I hit the Web looking for more information about it, I was astounded that there was almost nothing out there. I figured since the series had been around since 1997, it must have some kind of fandom, but I failed to find any trace of such, aside from one English-language fansite that had been more or less abandoned in 1998, and some Japanese language sites (which I can't read!).

It remains a mystery to me why this anime has so little recognition.

Okay, it looks a bit like some other series out there. But the story and the characters are fascinating. I am hoping that the release of Virus in DVD format this year will give this series the wider audience it deserves.

The time is 2097. The location: Neo Hong Kong. At first glance, life seems to be pretty good - cities are filled with huge, shining skyscrapers, everywhere there are wonderful technological conveniences. Everything seems bright and clean and shining. But things, of course, are not all what they seem.

For one thing, Neo Hong Kong has slums, where people are evicted from their buildings by the establishment, and where the residents sometimes fight back by breaking the construction machinery sent to level their homes.

A mysterious, all-powerful cabal seems to control most things, at a level far above that of the average citizen. Beneath their notice, illegal activities flourish in the shadows - hacking, illegal cloning, implants, illicit forays into the 3-D virtual environment of the net. Credentials can be falsified, but the price of getting caught is to loose the right to honest work and basic benefits.

But even for the law-abiding and the well to do, this attractive-seeming world has a rotten chancre eating at its heart. Because no one can predict when or where the Virus will strike.

It's hard to define what the Virus is; rather we experience it through what it does. At first it seems to be some weird kind of contaminant, which aggressively targets humans and machines and mutates them, taking them over and melding them into some bizarre rapidly evolving hybrid which seems to have volition but little intelligence. Only an impulse to infect and destroy.

Since one feature of the new world is mechanical body suits which can be used for menial or combat purposes, infection by the Virus melds the operator into the machine and the resulting horrific creature looks and behaves like a blood-thirsty demon.

The Virus can also infect computer systems, and even cyber-implants used for various purposes by those who can afford them. So it seems that the machine is the Virus's conduit for infecting organic human life. Wherever we interface with technology, we are vulnerable.

The menace of this highly infectious and generally mysterious, if horrifying, plague can't be dealt with by normal law enforcement. A special unit of elite members exists solely to combat the Virus. The group is called S.T.A.N.D. and is under the direct oversight of the mysterious, multi-national ruling cabal, known as the Hive committee.

S.T.A.N.D. however acts in many ways as if it is independent of any authority, though it has to justify its expenditures, successes and failures to the committee.

The members of S.T.A.N.D. are young people for the most part, all collected by and loyal to the organization's mysterious leader, Raven.

When the Virus strikes, members of S.T.A.N.D. appear on the scene to eradicate the menace, using special weapons and armored body-suits known as Variable Gear. Each member's gear is unique in configuration, with the main shared feature being that the Gear enables its user to transcend the normal human limits of strength, agility and speed. It's only because of these special Variable Gear that S.T.A.N.D. are able to win over the Virus in combat situations, and each encounter is far from a certain victory.

This is the backdrop for the main action of the series, which begins with a nightmare, and the sudden, screaming awakening to a blaring alarm of the most mysterious character around which the series revolves.

Serge is a man without a past. He remembers little beyond the last couple of years, and what few memories seem to come from before are nightmare images and voices, which haunt his waking and sleeping hours. He knows almost nothing about himself, and only enough about the world around him to enable him to live with reasonable success on the fringes of society. The one thing of which he is certain is something about a man he has never met. And that fact, which he doesn't even know how he knows, is enough to drive him to find the man in question with intent to homicide.

The person Serge is driven to confront and attempt to kill is not an easy man to reach - it's none other than Raven.

As S.T.A.N.D., the Virus, and Serge, intersect at a public demonstration of a new commercial Gear, the confrontation has an unexpected result and a new future opens up for them all, a future which will eventually unlock the secrets of the Virus's true nature, and Serge's past.