It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Dr Surya thought back to the bustling cities and their happy people – now ghost towns where those few still living hid at home or lay dying in understaffed hospitals. If she had realised sooner what was going on maybe there would have been some chance. After all, she was one of the lead chemists in the Project, and that had to count for something.

There was a cold breeze through a crumbled hole in the wall and Dr Surya pulled a blanket more tightly around her shoulders. Its fabric was worn and tattered but it was the cleanest she could find and it seemed to reflect her emotional state. Only recently the faintest hint of a wind from outside would have sent the lab into a frenzy, terrified of contamination carried in the air. Now it just made goosebumps appear along the arms of the lab's last occupant as she reminisced on all that had gone wrong.

For a small team of star chemists setting out to tackle their daunting task, a sponsorship deal as generous as Nerax's was more than welcome. If the scientists put up a little advertising here and there for the pharmaceutical superpower, they would receive equipment, lab hands, large donations and public exposure. Instantly the small-scale group became a global effort to collect and contain samples of all the world's diseases and Dr Surya found her progress spouted all through the press as work went ahead even better than planned.

How different things were now – and how lonely. Dr Surya shivered and looked around the place which had been, not so long ago, a busy testing room were dozens of fellow scientists had gathered to study and develop cures for their captured diseases. Now the storage fridge had been pulled down as survivors searched desperately for any antidote samples which may have been missed. But of course there were none: as demand increased a thousandfold, supply had dwindled and failed. That was how it had all fallen apart.

Now, looking back, Dr Surya wondered how no-one had known the real details of the sponsorship, how no-one saw what was happening and called it to a halt. Perhaps the other project leaders had known but were silenced by the promise of fame and money. When malaria mysteriously broke out in London, she was just thankful that a fail-proof cure was completed in the lab. Wide occurrences of Ebola and beriberi in France and Canada seemed perfectly timed to the creation of antidotes to both. And luckily, Nerax was there to distribute the medicines, if at a slight cost.

As her eyes roamed the dusty work station where she had toiled over vaccine after vaccine, Dr Surya let her gaze fall on a faded image that lay beside the lamp. Taking their photo in her hands she studied it closely, looking into the faces she would never see again. The Project had whisked her away when Dewi had been only two, and her dear Thomas... An absence of a few months became a trip she could never return from and Dr Surya's family dream was snatched away. When the flu epidemic hit Jakarta, Nerax's scheme was already crumbling and there was no hope. All night Dr Surya slaved over the beakers and centrifuges but her work was in vain. There were nowhere near enough cures and Jakarta wilted in days. After the terrible news she lost her faith but it didn't matter – by then only a handful of chemists remained and they had no way of stopping the global decline. Watching the news was watching a nightmare of emaciated faces and corpse-littered streets, and before long that bad dream was in the Project labs. Those scientists who remained healthy fled to seclusion or to stay with their dying families, leaving Dr Surya alone.

Left to explore the laboratory, she began reading records to pass the time. A horrible image unfurled. Of course a corporate titan like Nerax wouldn't sponsor a tiny science experiment for no more than a little advertising in return. The true cost of their aid became obvious in the many 'coincidences' which had occurred. An outbreak of SARS at the same time as a vaccine was discovered, and Nerax there as the hero to deliver it to the populace. Polio spreading across Australia just after Dr Surya herself had developed effective medicine for it – and once more, Nerax ready to play saviour and hand it out for what they had called nearly nothing. She gasped at the list of numbers recorded before her – 'nearly nothing' apparently meant almost two hundred dollars for a single course of tablets. Running her eyes down the page, Dr Surya watched the charges grow exponentially as scientists fell behind in production of cures. By then Nerax itself was losing staff at a rapid rate, massive spoils from the horrid set-up becoming far less attractive as death reared its ugly head. By collating the very diseases which Nerax had unleashed on the world for profit, Dr Surya had doomed her own family. There no longer seemed a point to hanging on in the lifeless laboratory, isolated from an equally lifeless world.

And it had seemed like such a good idea at the time...