Somewhere in a hospital of infectious diseases from Italy.

Dora was dying. She knew that much. With every breath she took, drawn inside her of her chest with much effort, she felt that she was getting less and less oxygen. Her vision was getting blurry and the thoughts inside her head were moving like walking through the insides of a swamp. Dora could do nothing else but curse the world, the Saints and the Gods, to curse her own fate which had brought her down to this despicable level. In all of the 15 years that she had been around in this world, she had never had any luck. Ever since she had been born, everything had gone wrong for her. Her mother, a notorious harlot, had contracted AIDS from a client, and then had gotten pregnant with her. Therefore Dora had been born right from the start infected with the HIV virus. Of course the moment that her mother had found out that the child had HIV, she had abandoned little Dora in the warm embrace of the state orphanage system. While she had grown up, little Dora had been pushed around and abused, not to mention ostracized by all of the other children, which all treated her like she had the bubonic plague.

Raised in a place and inside a society that was way too stupid to understand how HIV worked, she had always been kept at a distance by everyone around her. Nobody cared about little Dora, and her disappearance would most likely not even get noticed by anybody. The worst blow to her life had arrived about 1 year ago, when after being taken to the hospital while feeling sick, the doctors had told her that she had developed cancer somewhere inside of her body and that it had metastasized already. Of course the whole appearance of the cancer had been facilitated by the already existing presence of the HIV virus, and it seemed that her fate had already been decided the moment she had been born. Of course, an even more “hilarious” event had come at the beginning of this month, when about half of the entire orphanage had come down with this new disease that everybody was yelling about in all of the papers and news outlets. At the current moment, Dora already had AIDS, cancer, the new coronavirus and a bundle of other joyous afflictions that she had caught while inside the infectious disease hospital, after her immune system had plummeted to near zero.

Usually all of these things put together would result in the rapid death of the victim, which was exactly what was happening right at that moment, except that the despair, the helplessness and the sheer fury of the girl against this planet and nature itself had created the ideal context for a small “miracle” to happen inside one of her cancerous cells. The cell, which had no idea what type of cell it was anymore because of the damaged DNA, had been infected by a bunch of the viruses which were running freely through the girl’s bloodstream, all who had hooked themselves to the wall of the cell and were trying to copy their own genetic material using the already defective protein sequencing “factory” meant for copying DNA from inside of the host cell. The pure DNA copying factory was absolutely confused by all of the signals it was receiving, and had no idea what to do anymore, therefore it decided to take all of the available genomes that were near it and squeezed them all together, creating a whole new strand of DNA, a new fresh and updated mutation of the old coronavirus, which now included a drastic immunodeficiency syndrome and an increased infectivity rate. The moment that the new virus stand had burst out of the cancerous cell and into the bloodstream of poor Dora, the Fate of the entire planet had become sealed.

The next day, Dora had expired. During her last waking moments in this world, she thought that she saw a light come over to her and embracing her warmly, with a voice seemingly whispering in her ear:

Congratulations! For enduring throughout a whole life filled with miseries and suffering, Your soul has leveled up!

New achievement unlocked: [I have become death, destroyer of worlds] for killing more than 6 billion people with the virus that has been developed inside of yourself.

The doctors had found next morning the stiff body of Dora, which was sporting a huge grin on her face forever stuck like that in Rigor Mortis.

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The first two evenings at the bedside of my daughter had been terrible. Her fever was not going down and her coughing was getting worse. She was slightly delirious and she was thinking that she was seeing her mother. Also she was quoting lines from SpongeBob. I kept changing wet towels from her forehead, which she kept drying up with her fever. At least, she still had an appetite. The two nights had gone by like a bad dream. I had stayed permanently glued to the side of her bed.

The only time that I had been forced to leave was when I had to take Obelix out for his “evacuation” time, for about a quarter of an hour. I would sleep for only three or four hours, taking turns with big mama to watch over my daughter. From the third night onwards, I began to get used to the whole situation. I was starting to look at this whole pandemic thing with different eyes. 40 years ago, there had been a great movie called “All the President's Men”, which referred to the Watergate scandal. From inside of the movie I had remembered the saying: “follow the money, and see where it leads you”. Began to wonder who had the most to gain out of this whole coronavirus debacle. I was inclined to believe that even the virus itself may not have come around by sheer accident. There was a lot of debatable evidence around the internet that was pointing towards the little Chinese and their attempts at playing around with viruses. A few years ago China had simulated a conflict in which their own army had been pinned against the army of the United States, and they had come to the conclusion that they would lose the conflict. Of course, the CCP would never admit to such a thing. After that, a lot of “shady” projects had begun to show up, with one of them being viral research at, guess where, Wuhan, exactly where the pandemic had started from. Whether the virus had been released on purpose, or it had gotten out of the laboratory by sheer stupidity, it still made no difference. A few months before the virus had exploded, there had been a collaboration between the Americans, the Chinese and the French, which had as main subject for debate the hypothetical occurance of a lethal virus, and how the world would react to it. One of the richest men in the world, “Citizen Gain”, had been seemingly obsessed by the whole idea of a deadly virus. At first glance it seems that the “Citizen” had nothing to earn from the plague, and that he only showed a scientific interest in the subject. But by looking at the stocks of his “minor” pharmaceutical side company, he was making a profit head over heels. The company's spokespersons had declared that they were already in the position of a vaccine against the coronavirus, while the rest of the world was still trying to figure out what the hell this new virus was all about. It now looked like the “Citizen” was not so disinterested in the financial aspect of the whole thing anymore.

China might have been also targeted by outside sources. Considering that the only two mega powers in the world were now the United States and China, since the “Russian Bear” had fallen into torpor, and “Auntie Europe” was too cowardly to take any sides, a strange picture was beginning to unravel itself inside of my mind. Everybody wanted to keep Europe out of the picture, because having it lean on one side or the other would risk the balance of power around the world. Having the EU ally itself with China was something that the United States could not afford. Germany had been pushing for a while now the idea of a joint army of the entire European Union, which could ignore NATO altogether. That had been too much for Uncle Sam.

Stolen novel; please report.

Another suspicious occurrence that had come to my attention had been the subtle death of Dr. Lee Whenliang. He had been a Chinese eye doctor from Wuhan, and had been the first person to warn the world about the existence of this virus, somewhere around the 30th of December. The Chinese police had instantly arrested him and had told him to shut the hell up and stop spreading alarmist rumours. Also “coincidentally”, the doctor had died from Corvid-119 on the 7th of February. He had been only slightly over 30 and in full health, so everything was fishy as hell. Still, out of this whole virus affair, only China stood to lose something.

Maybe I was beginning to take after Aplhie and the Zeppelin and I was seeing conspiracy theories at every corner, but no major event in the last century has occurred “accidentally” on this blue planet. I still had no idea whether the virus had been cooked up, or it had occurred accidentally in nature, but the results spoke for themselves. But as it was most commonly often in the last three decades, telling the blunt truth about anything that was not deemed “politically correct” would garner you much hate mail. Nowadays, it was all about the “ballet”. Everybody was dancing around everybody, like some drunken flamingoes from a musical animation clip.

I felt amused by the idea of viral interspecies transmission based on the pangolin. The Chinese had been eating those poor scaled critters for years now, and none of them had come down with any sort of pandemic. It was probably just another cloud of smoke, meant to hide the true source of the virus. For now, everything was made out of assumptions, and I would have loved to exchange my ideas with my friend Wu, but given his station, any straight answers that he might have given me could have compromised his social and professional position. I knew that I would not be getting any answers from that side.

Painfully, the first ten days of my daughter's ordeal had gone by. To my surprise, even though the test has come out positive in the case of big mama, she was still seemingly completely healthy. I guess being a doctor for all of those years might have boosted her internal immunity to a higher degree than that of the common people. She seemed to be asymptomatic. In my case, I was feeling a whole lot better. I was definitely out of the dangerous phase of the disease. My daughter was also improving. She was coughing much more rarely, and the chills and shivers had gone away. The happiest were the two furries, who had been forgotten by everybody and were doing whatever the hell they pleased.

After the week when my daughter had fallen ill, Mariah and the Zeppelin had followed in her footsteps. They had both gotten quarantined at the Tropical Diseases Hospital, due to the good relations that I had with the Chief of Staff over there. They had been given a decent amount of special attention, since the clinic had not yet been overrun with too many patients. It was a new clinic, much more modern and comfortable than all of the communist hospitals from my country, where you would risk dying by having even a meager appendicitis. It also helped by a lot that Mariah was a doctor, so she received much more attention than the regular patients.

I had no idea what was happening with my pal Wu anymore. He had stopped answering my emails for almost a week now, and not even the Chief of Staff was able to get in contact with him. He was either extremely busy or the Chinese leaders had cut off all of his means of communication with the exterior. The whole situation was boiling at a Planetary level. The virus had spread all throughout Europe, with Italy being the worst affected. Having one of the most aged population in the world, Italy became a veritable haven for the virus, which was churning out dead victims by the hundreds every day. Like any Latin based people, the old macaroni-munchers were not used to being alone at all. They would have all of their morning coffees together, or frequented the neighbouring bistros and cafeterias near their homes by the dozens.

They had known each other for many years, and they were practically living like a family. This formal socialisation had facilitated the spread of the virus at a rapid rate. Paradoxically, the most victims had occurred in the north of Italy, which was the most developed, and the least had occurred in the south, which was still archaic. The pandemic had also spread to France and Spain, with the latter proving to be almost as hard hit as Italy had been. If things kept going at the same rate, there was a chance that Spain might overtake Italy. The healthcare system of most of these western European countries was much more developed than the one inside of my country, yet many people were still dying by the hundreds. Funny enough, the virus had begun to blow up in scale even inside of the United States. Was this truly a runaway virus after all? Fortunately, if you could call it that, most of the victims were the old and the sick, people that would have died because of their afflictions a little bit later anyway.

Maybe this virus had been created with the specific purpose to get rid of the pensionaries. It is a known fact that old people have become much more numerous in the latest decades. The mass of the geezers was now a burden for the social insurance systems, all over the world. Maybe this was a rather insidious method balancing the scales, but it was extremely efficient. I know it sounds quite cynical but it's rather true. There's almost 8 billion bipeds on this blue planet right now, and we have no idea for how long Mother Earth is going to stand and accept our existence on her surface. The virus was only dumping away some of the ballast. You might get upset at the idea of me calling your recently departed Grandma or Grandpa as ballast, but nature does not think in human terms. Nature only sees living animals or dead animals, which still includes us humans. The fact that the majority of people who were dying had been over 70 years of age was warming up the hearts of all of the economists from the developed western states. The death of the old folk was balancing the pension budget in most of the countries. If the pandemic kept up its current rate of spreading, in about three months we would witness the demise of a large amount of old people, which would free up a whole lot of money from the pension funds. The pandemic was “solving” some of the insurmountable financial problems for the politicians. This somewhat gave credit to the idea of an intentional release of the virus, because it was extremely efficient at doing its “job”.

The social situation was deteriorating rapidly inside of my country. The bipeds, alarmed by the evolution of the global situation, had swarmed towards the supermarkets. A lot of fake news were pointing out towards the end of the world. The governing party was once again displaying it's full political incompetence. The outburst of the pandemic had caught our national healthcare system with its pants down, lacking any sort of resources to cope with the flow. There were no disinfectants, surgical masks, medical shoes or hazmat suits anywhere. Even worse was the fact that most of the infectious disease sections of all hospitals did not have enough respirator apparatuses. Since most of the deaths occurred because of respiratory insufficiency, the mechanical ventilators were very useful in the fight against the virus. Still, the country had very few of those because they were usually meant for postoperative tre.atment, and not for handling diseased patients over a long period of time. In my country, if you wound up in a comatose state and needed a respirator to keep functioning, you might as well have called yourself dead already. The entire Healthcare system had been ground to pieces by three decades of absolutely incompetent and corrupt leadership, with no foresight whatsoever. Not even the blackest bolshevik period had possessed so many idiotic examples of incompetent politicians. Most of them were barely at functional literacy, but on the other hand they were quite swift when it came to filling their own pockets. Out of the whole population of the country, millions of people had chosen to leave the state and head towards the West, to greener pastures and better job opportunities. Practically, the smartest and the most capable of work among the younger people had already departed the country, leaving the insides of the borders to be filled with only aged and decrepit fossils or incompetents with very little aptitude, brain or qualifications. Of course there were also exceptions. The older doctors, professors or engineers that had chosen to remain behind inside of the country, were very skilled but very few in number. They had no way to cope on with the disasters brought about by the incompetence of the corrupt political class, which kept being voted in its position by the majority of the voting imbeciles, which would sell out their vote for a meager bag of sugar, flour, or bundle of salami. Democracy had given the power of voting to a majority made out of illiterates and easy to manipulable people, which had resulted in the crash of the entire infrastructure.