From Wuhan with love

Shi Zhengli had had enough of those jerks from the internal security services. They had been watching her for months, monitoring her e-mails, her phone conversations, her movements, what she wrote in scientific papers. Those jerks weren't even hiding.

She had already told them that she would not say anything to foreign journalists. What were they afraid of? She was a prominent member of the Chinese Microbiology Committee and had therefore always been, of course, faithful to the Chinese Communist Party line.

She didn't play politics anyway, she had enough to worry about with her viruses. Those thugs in the Political Bureau didn't understand anything. They were a bunch of ignorant peasants, voracious illiterates who didn't understand anything about health issues. Their only method was to arrest, to lock up brutally, to silence. Their only advantage had been to be able to confine people, as only a dictatorship could do.

The coronavirus was obviously a bacteriological weapon, but Shi didn't think that the damn coronavirus was Chinese. At least, it wasn't coming out of the virology institute where she worked, despite the rumors. China was devastated by the pandemic, its economic and political ambitions had been dashed by the health crisis that had brutally paralyzed the country. The case of Iran, which had been hit hard, could suggest a targeted act against Washington's opponents.

Shi recalled that Wuhan had hosted the Military Olympics the previous year. The pitiful performance of the American team had been surprising. Had these American athletes really been athletes or agents on a terrorist mission?

In any case, China had had its share of infected people. Tens of thousands had died. Beijing was not giving the numbers. They minimized the impact to save face. They were silencing the journalists, it was grotesque.

Now that the entire planet had been hit by the pandemic, there would be more episodes to come; probably millions of deaths for years to come.

Shi Zhengli was overwhelmed by her work. All the politicians and the military were demanding results, they wanted a return to normalcy so that the economy could recover, so that the goose that lays the golden egg would make them richer and richer. This was not the way a vaccine was created. It was strange to see the Americans find a solution so quickly. It is true that China was also announcing cures that it did not know...

Shi was intrigued by one issue: population control. China was struggling with its billion or so people to feed. Perhaps the promoters of the virus had in mind to reduce the world population to a level more favorable to their economic and political interests? Shi only knew one thing: there were men behind this bacteriological weapon; maybe they were sorcerers' apprentices, maybe they were cynics who knew exactly what they were doing.

They would come out with a brand new vaccine when the time was right. Shi didn't know who was behind this bacteriological attack, and if she didn't know, then few people did. There would still be many deaths.

Shi had spent some time in France, in Montpellier, for her doctorate. She imagined that the necessary containment measures had shaken French society. The outbreak of such a bacteriological assault had many advantages for those who wanted to control Western societies. It was the beginning of the end of democracy and individual freedom in the West. The "free" world would gradually live in an atmosphere similar to that imposed by the Chinese Communist Party on its citizens, with cameras, tests, mobile applications. Shi remembered her few French classmates, those nice, sometimes attractive boys. She hadn't been around them too much, though, she was then an ugly girl with glasses, a girl who worked night and day. Today, she had already had plastic surgery, had her teeth fixed. Soon she would have her breasts augmented. The Chinese Communist Party forbade her to have relations with foreigners, for fear that she would go to the West. But Shi, who was divorced, didn't think about it. She was still quite pretty in her fifties. She would be able to get a Sugar Daddy for her old age. She was tired of working alone in her lab, in front of her tubes, handling putrid -and dangerous- liquids all day. She had to find a way out.

In any case, the West no longer interested her. She had spent enough time in France to no longer be fascinated by the Eiffel Tower and old buildings. Everything in Europe was old. African migrants were invading the cities, the French didn't even think about defending their daughters. France was in full decline, without vision, without hope to give to its people. Everything was over in Europe. While China was conquering the 21st century, the century of its return to the forefront of the world stage.

Shi had no trouble imagining that these young people from Montpellier had become frigid bourgeois, still as pretentious as ever; purring doctors and biologists, privileged by a materialistic system of thought that put at the pinnacle those who delayed the hour of death.

Many of them had to die, moreover, sacrificed by egotistical politicians lacking strategic vision, entrusting China with the very manufacturing of protective equipment, masks and medicines that could save the population.

This thought made the virologist smile sadly. It was true, capitalism would sell the very rope that would hang them. This coronavirus may have been a dirty trick of the Westerners, but they would be the first to suffer.