I don’t care about you. Not your story or feelings, not your lies, not your wounds. My job is to get out the full truth of what you did and help the jury come to a just decision. I care about justice and the triumph of civilised humanity.

Your actions caused the most destructive pandemic in human history. Everyone else involved in the development and deployment of this biological weapon has already been sentenced, though none of them survived the outbreak so far as we know.

The heroic collaboration of Chinese, Russian and American scientists finally found a cure amidst the chaos of a broken world. The stories of how they worked under impossible conditions, generating electricity by hand to power the necessary machinery, sleeping next to deadly pathogens because leaving the laboratory was more dangerous and how many of them were lost in riots or to general panic. These stories will be told by generations to come. Yours will not. It has already been decided that your memory will be cleansed from history. Your name will be erased from all proceedings at the end of this trial. There will be no grave nor tombstone for you.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Your guilt is proven beyond doubt, by your own admission, by evidence and by witness testimony. The only decision left is the appropriate punishment. The death penalty has been called for, as has torture and mutilation until your body gives up. Under the post-pandemic provisional laws, both are permissible for your extreme crimes against humanity. We made that law specifically for you. Too few of us are left to allow valuable workforce to go to waste with death or prison sentences. But prison for life has been called for as well, under the most harsh conditions, to keep you but barely alive to suffer.

As chief judge of this tribunal, I reject all of those proposals. We are at a historic point that will be in history books for all eternity. Humanity has survived, though barely. Civilisation has not ended as you wished, but prevailed. Civilisation means justice and it means restraint. We cannot afford ourselves to behave as animals.

You will not have an opportunity for last words after the judgment has been issued. So anything else you wish to say, say it now, as it will be the last that the world will ever hear from you.