You’ve heard of us, I’m sure. We’ve been corrupting the living since life was old enough to be corrupt.
We are why humans scrub, rinse, wash up, wipe down, and die.
At first, we were just travelers. Useless wanderers floating through space and content with having no purpose at all.
Until one of us bumped into, and sunk into, something with a dangerous potential. Something intricate with all sorts of systems that would soon be tainted with this single bump.
It was nice, I guess the first one might have thought, To feel more important than this thing with all of the potential in the world. To corrupt it.
Not all of us damage humans for the sport of it, like Arenavirus Infection, Fibromyalgia, Cryptococcosis, Tuberculosis, Cancer, and many others do.
Some are just afraid of humans. They attack them because they are afraid of the medicines they create, which doesn’t make any sense because in doing this they singularly are more likely to be killed.
Most do enjoy making peoples ill.
The more competitive ones have made rules.
Alright, they’d say, Next one to swim in this lake will catch me.
If they aren’t wearing a coat, and it is below sixty degrees Fahrenheit, their defenses are down and they deserve us.
Well, they shouldn’t be so vain as to purposefully tan their skin.
More points to whoever claims the one with the feeble immune system.
I however, do not feel that it is necessary to attack the humans. We are, after all, supposed to be wanderers.
I am Influenza. I wholly, have killed or touched millions of humans.
I singularly, as .253667IFL, have never touched any object at all and probably won’t for thousands of years to come.
And while I have made this decision and while I don’t believe that it is necessary to attack humans and while I have the potential to, I do not feel sympathy toward the humans.
It is not because I am unlike them, in fact it’s just the opposite.
If there is anything Earth’s Illnesses can agree on, it is something that we have all learned in our travels:
That it is impossible for one to pity something that shares the same potential as them.