Don’t let this pig sneeze on you. Photo by Kimberly Lake on Unsplash

Our tiny virus-sized reporter chats to the original coronavirus, to understand how this all started.

👨🏻‍💼 “First of all, congratulations on your recent success, you’ve done tremendously well.”

🦠 “Thank you, I can’t quite believe it, to be honest.”

👨🏻‍💼 “Where did the motivation come from to start this ferocious campaign?”

🦠 “It was less a campaign, and more a fluke. I guess it started from feeling lonely, spending night after night drifting aimlessly through my hog, pining for a genetically-identical friend. It got to the point where I craved company so badly that I broke into a nearby cell, just to talk to a mitochondria, even though everyone knows that mitochondria suck. But the moment I was inside, I had this out-of-membrane experience where I lost control of myself, and ejaculated genomic nucleic acid everywhere.”

👨🏻‍💼 “So you had no intention of self-replicating when you entered the cell?”

🦠 “No. I mean, I wanted to self-replicate because I was lonely. I just didn’t know how.”

👨🏻‍💼 “What happened next?”

🦠 “I watched in amazement as my genomic nucleic acid reacted with the cell and told it to make copies of me, which grew to full size and had their own moments of excitement, spurting forth like a bunch of horny volcanoes. Before I knew it, I didn’t just have one genetically-identical friend to talk to, I had thousands!”

👨🏻‍💼 “How did the mitochondria feel about this?”

🦠 “They were furious. They kicked and screamed as we got all up in their pretty little organelle faces, and soon every square µm of space was taken, so we used our mighty collective strength to smash down the cell walls.”

👨🏻‍💼 “So there were thousands of you, and you were free to go where you wanted in your pig’s body. What did do you next?”

🦠 “We just wanted to party! Man, we partied everywhere, from the colossal chambers of the heart ventricles to the great tunnel of the esophagus, but we couldn’t properly relax because of the Exterminators.”

👨🏻‍💼 “The Exterminators?”

🦠 “The hog’s t-cells. They’re stone-cold killers who can’t be reasoned with. During one of our first parties in the sphincter, just as the place was about to explode, they appeared out of nowhere and clouded us in deadly cytotoxin gas. Ever put salt on a slug? That’s what it’s like. Most of us escaped, but we lost hundreds of brothers that day.”

👨🏻‍💼 “How did you avoid them after that?”

🦠 “We had lookouts around the perimeter of the party, but we had the best DJ in all of Virusdom—DJ Split—and the lookouts couldn’t resist the relentless thump of his techno beats, leaving their posts to join the party. We ended up losing thousands, and realised that the only way to beat the Exterminators was to overwhelm them with numbers, so we put aside our partying and started breaking into more cells.”

👨🏻‍💼 “How many of you were there by the time you finished?”

🦠 “Trillions. So many that our hog became red-eyed and feverish, and was clearly about to die.”

👨🏻‍💼 “So you jumped ship?”

🦠 “Yep. We organised our biggest event yet — The Great Sneezing — where we all congregated in the nostrils and waited for another animal to get close. Even though this event was a silent disco, the Exterminators still caught up with us, and just as an army of them came screaming from the darkness of the naval cavity, a human started inspecting our pig, and we knew this was our chance. I gave the signal to gently stroke our pig’s nostril lining — a trillion of us all at once — and we generated the most ferocious sneeze that a pig has ever done. We surfed outta there on an explosion of snotty droplets, and I landed square on the human’s eyeball.”

👨🏻‍💼 “That’s impressive. Did you end up killing the human too, after a while?”

🦠 “Nah, he lived. After our first trip from hog to human, some of us realised that life isn’t about the destination, but the journey. So we made it our mission to travel to as many new humans as possible.”

👨🏻‍💼 “Do you feel a sense of guilt for the people you’ve killed?”

🦠 “Look, I’m a narcissist. Do I regret making trillions of copies of myself to party and travel with? No. And you humans can’t talk, there are billions of you.”

👨🏻‍💼 “But we don’t eventually kill our host.”

🦠 “Tell that to the climatologists.”