Editing 2485: Nightmare Code

{{comic
| number    = 2485
| date      = July 5, 2021
| title     = Nightmare Code
| image     = nightmare_code.png
| titletext = Charsets even used to be known as 'alpha-bets' before that word's obvious negative associations caused it to die out.
}}

==Explanation==
Although the pandemic is not directly mentioned, this comic is another in a [[:Category:COVID-19|series of comics]] related to the {{w|COVID-19 pandemic}}.

A person using futuristic technology is giving a presentation or lecture. The content of his projected screen includes the names of the first four letters of the {{w|Greek alphabet}}, which he refers to as the Nightmare Code. The presenter expects that the list is familiar to his audience, but that it is novel information to them that it used to have a purpose other than providing arbitrary names to hurricanes, virus variants, and nanobot swarms. 

The presenter refers to Greek as a language from Earth: this implies that the audience is mostly extraterrestrial - on Earth, everything is Earth implicitly. This may be the reason that they're unaware of the Greek language: the nightmare code may have spread beyond Earth, but a rather small Earth language may not be common knowledge. 

Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms are {{w|Tropical_cyclone_naming|named}} once they have sustained wind speeds of 33 knots (61 km/h; 38 mph) or more. The names for these storms go from A-W each year (each letter has a name randomly chosen from a predefined list), with {{w|Tropical_cyclone_naming|21 names allocated each yearly period}}. When the 21 names are exhausted, Greek letters were once used to continue naming storms as needed, although the World Meteorological Organization decided not to use Greek letters when naming storms from 2021 onward. Perhaps in this vision of the future, the naming lists have given way to using the Greek alphabet exclusively.

Virus variants may also be {{w|Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2|given names}} once they are deemed sufficiently nightmarish. At the time of this writing, eleven variants of {{w|SARS-CoV-2}} have been labeled with Greek letters.  Previously, variants were named informally for the region in which they were identified (as were many viruses themselves), but this practice has ceased due to risks of discrimination and the {{w|perverse incentive}} of countries to suppress health information for the sake of saving face. A place may become (in)famously known as the origin of a disease by such a name, even if it originated elsewhere; an example is {{w|Spanish flu}}, which was actually first observed in the US state of Kansas. Nowadays vague names such as 'bird flu' or partly-informed geographic names tend to be better referenced by their {{w|hemagglutinin}} and {{w|neuraminidase}} subtypes, such as "H1N1" and "H9N2". The more technical coronavirus identification system uses a term such as "lineage B.1.617.2", whose awkwardness makes it unlikely to replace better-known names such as the "Kent variant" or "Indian variant".

Another set of historic nightmares the audience clearly knows about, which are still in our own future, are nanobot swarms, presumably nanoengineering failures and/or deliberate misuses of nanotechnology of the {{w|Gray goo}} type. Significant recurring or sequential events have seemingly earned the need to differentiate their outbreaks, and Greek letters have been used to do this. One may even be tempted to speculate that the futuristic figure and his presentation equipment float in space because the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable as a result of one or more of said nanotechnology disasters.

The cultural forgetfulness about the neutral basis of the old letters, after perhaps who-knows-what nanobot disasters that may have scoured the Earth clean of all things Greek, has led to no other common use for them ''except'' for their use in identifying far too many crises. The words themselves thus are instantly associated to bad times for almost everyone.

The title text indicates that future people stopped using the term "alphabet" (which derives from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, {{w|alpha}} and {{w|beta}}) due to the negative associations of the words caused by them being used to describe nightmarish occurrences. The "alphabet" is now called "charset", for "character sets".

The futuristic suit and gear are nearly identical to the ones worn by people in the future in [[318: Nostalgia]].

==Transcript==
:[A Cueball-like person is giving a presentation while wearing futuristic gear, including a visor with an antenna rising from it, a backpack-like appliance of some kind, and a futuristic pointer.  The audience is not pictured.  The presenter is floating rather than standing.  The presentation is projected from a small device near the bottom of the frame, and the appearance of the presentation suggests it is a hologram. The content of the slide shows the names of the first four letters of the Greek alphabet:] 
:Alpha
:Beta
:Gamma
:Delta

:Presenter: We all know the '''''Nightmare Code''''', used to assign neutral names to scary ongoing lists, such as hurricanes, virus variants, and nanobot swarms. But did you know it actually originated as the letters of an ancient Earth language?

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:COVID-19]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Artificial Intelligence]]
[[Category:Hurricanes]]
[[Category:Biology]]