Coronavirus Sketchy: Micro 'link'

Sketchy floated in the middle of the inferno, his shaggy corona glowing orange in the heat. He watched the grandmother’s own body burn down its own lung tissue trying to find him.

One day, he found himself in the airway of a healthy marathon runner. The man’s immune cells—the neutrophils and macrophages—were lean, mean, and fast. They spotted Sketchy immediately. coronavirus sketchy micro

But here was the truly sketchy part. As he replicated, he made mistakes. Lots of them. A normal virus panics over mutations. Sketchy celebrated them. Every typo in his genetic code was a new disguise. A spike that bent a different way. A protein that could gum up the cell’s alarms. He was a virus improvising a jazz solo, and the human immune system was trying to read sheet music. Sketchy floated in the middle of the inferno,

“I didn’t do this,” he whispered to a dying alveoli cell. “You did this to yourself. I just... gave you a bad blueprint.” As he replicated, he made mistakes

The macrophage squinted. Its pattern-recognition receptors were designed to find smooth, perfect spikes. Sketchy’s looked like... well, like a fragment of a human protein. A bit of dust. A misfolded piece of cell debris.

He didn't kill the runner. He just made him cough for three days. Then he jumped to the runner’s friend. Then to the friend’s grandmother.