Rona, a tiny spherical bat-kisser, was taken from her home in the African jungle to Wuhan animal market in China along with her bat friends, where she jumped from bats to people, and fell in love with Pete, a young photographer. Together they travelled the world – until it suddenly dawned on Pete that Rona might be the source of the Coronavirus pandemic!
Read on.
Episode 5
Rona squirmed in the stream of electrons crashing down on her, fierce as the monsoon rains in Cherrapunji, India, the wettest place in the world. It was a weird sensation. She felt horribly exposed. For the first time in her 19 years she had become fully visible.
“You’re a fine little fellow aren’t you,” said the bespectacled geek gazing at her through his electron microscope. “What a remarkably large single-stranded RNA genome you’ve got! No wonder you’ve been causing such trouble!”
“Why d’you assume I’m a fellow?” Rona squeaked in hurt tones. “Isn’t it obvious that I’m a very attractive young woman? People find me impossible to resist. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“That’s why we’re spending so much money getting to know you,” he replied. “We want to understand the secret of your allure.”
“Please,” Rona said, changing tactics, “turn that rainy thing off, it’s making me shiver – all I want is to get back to my true love Pete!” But the
electrons kept pelting down.
**
Pete sat in his quarantine cell in the isolated terminal pier of Heathrow airport to which he had been consigned. He had been there for 48 hours. No-one would tell him how long his captivity would continue. Each minute of solitude felt like an hour, each day a year.
It was his own fault. Obedient as ever to Rona’s will, he had boarded the plane from Venice to London with the plan of spending a week visiting the capital’s top theatres and cinemas, hanging out in places like Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. But as Rona outlined her programme in the plane, Pete began to understand something. And it was probably important. Rona wasn’t interested in seeing London’s sights, let alone enjoying musicals and plays. She just wanted to kiss as many people as possible. Especially people who were on their way to somewhere else.
Pete felt fine. True, Rona’s kisses were strong, but apart from the occasional shudder he suffered no ill effects. But as the newspaper in Venice had spelled out, something really alarming was going on all over the world – people were dropping like flies, many of them later recovering but thousands dying – dying! Never to recover! Why was it happening? What, or who, was to blame?
Could it be anything to do with his tiny friend?
So when they got to the immigration counter in London he blurted out his suspicions.
“Got any symptoms?” asked the burly bloke at Passport control.
“Never felt better!”
“On your way sir, we’re too busy for time wasters.”
“Listen. I recently spent two weeks in the city of Wuhan.”
The official took a step backwards and pressed a button. In moments Pete found himself transformed from a paying passenger into a highly dangerous object, a radioactive isotope in human form. He was a suspected “super-spreader”. Shrouded in insulating garments, he was herded into quarantine and locked away.
**
“Wow,” said the journalist who had been dispatched by his newspaper, gazing round the laboratory. “Wowee! This is amazing!” He scribbled furiously in his notebook.
“Not really,” said the geek, “it’s just science. And here’s what you’re looking for.” He indicated the electron microscope. “Look through this,” he said. “That little critter’s the problem.”
The hack squinted down the tube. “Sorry,” he said, “what am I looking at?”
“It’s a positive-sense, single-stranded RNA virus,” the geek said. “That’s where the infection’s coming from.”
“Just call me Rona!” squeaked Rona, who was getting really fed up with being objectified.
“Shit, look at that,” the journalist gasped, scribbling like mad. “Gosh, now I’ve seen it: the face of evil! It’s like capturing the spirit of pure malice in living form.”
“Hey professor,” yelled Rona, “are you going to let him get away with writing this crap?”
The geek nodded at Rona to be patient. “Not really,” he said to the journalist. “She’s no more evil than you or me.”
“Why d’you call her ‘she’?”
“She reminds me strongly of Marilyn Monroe,” said the geek, who in his youth had gained much pleasure from films like ‘Some Like It Hot’.
On her glass slide, Rona lay back and purred with pleasure. This was more like it.
“Marilyn Monroe!?” spluttered the journalist. “Sorry professor, what are you on? How can you say that! Thousands have died, hundreds of thousands are in bed – how can you bring an old movie star into it?”
“No-one can resist this bug,” he explained. “Nothing in the world has swept the world like Rona since Marilyn’s nude calendar hit the newsstands.”
“Rona??”
“That’s our nickname for her. Not long ago she was a harmless little bat-kisser in the middle of the African jungle. She’d have lived out her life there, causing no trouble, giving her bat friends the odd tingle, the occasional sniffle and cough – no worse than that. It’s as if Norma Jean Baker had lived out her life in Californian obscurity.”
“That’s a pretty far-out comparison, professor. I think my readers would prefer the idea that this is the embodiment of pure evil.”
“Oh come on. Who brought her out of the jungle? It wasn’t her idea! Who started plundering the global south for its wildlife to satisfy the perverse appetites of consumers? Who was responsible for opening Africa up to this sort of devastation in the first place, centuries back?”
“Who are you referring to?”
“Young man - look in the mirror!”
THE END