Common Cold or Zombie Retrovirus?

Dani came back from that museum science exposition sick. I am watching her carefully in case it's some kind of horrible zombie plague. There was another outbreak of that stuff in France pretty recently. Dani assures me that the exhibits were mostly robotics. A couple of the robots danced, which is always awesome. There were a few chemistry displays, but most of those were in the form of posters and PowerPoints. It's hard to make chemistry sexy, and even harder to truck around all that glassware. I mean, most of the robotics exhibits can walk themselves into the building. I never got any robotics classes in high school (damn you, block schedule!), but I remember being bored stiff by AP Chemistry. Even when we had acids and bases to play with, they were inevitably watered down, and the most you could do with them was produce a white precipitate. We didn't even get to make that chemical that smells like pineapples. To be fair, I totally would have sprayed lockers with it. I remember once I held a glass stirring rod over the Bunsen burner until the flame turned green. It was really cool, but the lab was nearly over and I didn't want to leave a scorching hot glass wand lying around to set things on fire and spark off a doomsday reaction, so I tried to cool it off by running some cold water over it. Thermodynamics 101: sudden temperature changes render brittle solids structurally unstable. So then I had to smuggle the shattered glass wand out of the lab. The only other memorable thing that happened in that class was the godawful cabbage experiment, which I don't actually want to remember.
I fully expect our local tech institute to churn out a few villains. I mean, everyone KNOWS they're making zombies over there. FIR-Tech doesn't have the kind of funding you need for quantum-reactor gene-splicer nanobot-builder equipment, but I expect they'll produce a rampaging robot or two around finals week. Most metatech villains are the ones who lose their funding, get expelled or commit grave breaches of lab protocol that get somebody killed/mutated/infected by alien parasites, but I think FIR-Tech is going to produce more than the odd evil dropout. I kinda see why the government is so interested in keeping tabs on advanced science dropouts. I'm worried that it's a magnet for a lot of the South Florida metatechs, and I'd kind of like them to fight on the side of good.
Some people say metatechs don't count as real supers, but in my books a raygun and a pair of rocket boots gets you entry to the subculture, if not the technical definition. I kind of think of them like cyborgs: not superhumans per se, but very similar, and there is some definite overlap between the categories. Some metatechs are actually supers. WonderSmith had superstrength, even though nobody seems to remember it. Some people are supers, cyborgs and metatechs at the same time, like Pygmalion back in the day. And quite a few metatechs wind up going cyborg in the end. Besides, a lot of metatechs have some form of superpower that they use the gadgets to boost. Chiro's got to have some basic levitation ability, since those wings don't look like they could support her weight. I think they're mostly for changing direction. The metatechs that really annoy me are the ones who wear exoskeletons that mimic the exact same powers that they sneer at when superhumans have them. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Vector. You don't have some sort of moral high ground just because Velocity was born with her powers and you had the resources to build yours. And don't even get me started on The Kelvinator.