Seithennin lived in the lowlands of Wales a long time ago. His job was to open and close the gates of the sea defences each day. But Seithennin was a big drinker, and one night after he’d passed out after a heavy session, a huge storm struck, and the gates were left open. The waters that rushed in were ferocious; the land flooded, and everything and everyone that Seithennin knew was lost beneath the waves.
I’d been thinking a lot about Seithennin recently. To explain why I need to tell you about my work as an epidemiologist. I specialize in zoonoses – diseases that jump from animals to humans. The Great Pandemic was a zoonosis. When it ended, a programme was set up to monitor wildlife populations around the world and track emerging diseases. I joined the programme in 2061 – straight from graduate school.
I was sent to live on an island off the northwest coast of Malaysia. Decades before, it was a popular tourist destination. But as temperatures soared with climate change, the land became dry and inhospitable. A peculiar effect of the changing ecology was the rapid increase in the number of Fruit Bats living in the island caves. Bats can be an incredible reservoir for human disease and my job was to monitor them for coronaviruses.
Until recently, I’d go to a place called the Bat Cave each day. This was not a superhero’s secret lair but the underground home of a huge population of Fruit Bats. Every morning I’d climb the scaffold in my hazmat suit and catch a couple of the critters before taking blood samples and releasing them.
I would then return to the lab – in an old guest house, where I also lived – and analyse the blood for viruses.
The town had been abandoned years before and the only non-virtual faces I’d see each month was when I travelled to the harbour to pick up supplies.
Every so often there’d be some commotion when I told the team in New York about a new variant. Most evenings I’d sit on the porch with a bottle of rum looking out over the dry valley. Sometimes I’d watch a movie on my laptop. But most nights I’d drink.
One night, I overdid it on the rum and the next morning I slept late. It was only a couple of hours but when I got to the Bat Cave, a group of young men were coming out. They’d been looking for bird’s nests – a delicacy and a very difficult food item to source in recent years.
In my basic Malay, I told them that access was prohibited. They looked at each other and laughed.
I’m not sure what else I could have said to them. Explaining that I’d recently identified a new viral strain among the bats would’ve been beyond my language skills. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to tell them that it shared many characteristics with the virus of the Great Pandemic; nor could I have said that it had features suggesting high transmissibility and virulence in humans.
I meant to flag it to the team in New York, but it slipped my mind. Because of the time difference, I often did the calls in the evening – after my first drink of the day.
I heard chatter about sickness on the island within a few days.
Inside the first month, the hospital was full. The island was quarantined but it was too late. Infections had spread to the mainland. It became evident that the infection spread before symptoms showed. But when they did, they were severe, and the likelihood of death was high. To boot, it was airborne. And it killed young and old alike.
Lessons from the Great Pandemic had been forgotten. Governments were too slow to close borders and stop air and space travel. Social distancing was a chore. Lockdown was bad for economies. People hated masks.
Scientists in China identified the virus and called it COVID-82. They told us that some of its sequences matched variants from the Bat Cave. I knew they matched the strain I recently identified one hundred per cent, but this wasn’t something I felt like sharing.
I sat on the porch of my guest house with a glass of rum in my hand. I looked out over the dry, dusty valley and listened to reports of the virus ravaging the planet.
Science failed. Redemption failed. God failed. Thousands of deaths became millions. Millions became billions. We ran out of ground to bury bodies. The dead now burned in huge bonfires built by sick soldiers.
Governments crumbled. Leadership was decimated. Nations collapsed. Humanity was lost. All gone beneath the waves.
My friends, I left the gates open.
I became – I am – Seithennin.
