A Terrifying Possibility

Xu Chen looked at Ouyang Xing.

Ouyang Xing had been observing the patient when he sensed Xu Chen's gaze and turned around. Xu Chen was staring straight at him, seemingly imagining something.

The stare made his scalp tingle.

"Senior."

Ouyang Xing jolted and said irritably, "What is it?"

"Have you ever played Plague Inc.?"

"I have. Why?"

Plague Inc. was a game about creating viruses. The goal was to create and guide the evolution of a virus until it wiped out the world. The player was a full-fledged villain, but Ouyang Xing clearly didn't understand why Xu Chen had brought it up.

"Since you've played it, this'll be easy. Suppose—and I mean suppose—you were designing a pathogenic microorganism with the same goal as in the game. What would you make it like?"

Ouyang Xing scoffed. "Junior, we're here to treat a microorganism, and you want to design a pathogenic one?"

"I said suppose. Besides, you're not busy anyway."

Ouyang Xing glanced at the patient on the bed. Even if they injected the medication right away, it couldn't possibly take effect immediately.

Then his interest was piqued.

"All right. What are the limitations?"

"None. Just achieve the goal as quickly as possible."

"In that case, I'd design an extremely infectious microorganism, I suppose? At the very least, it would have to be airborne."

Airborne transmission generally meant aerosol transmission, though, less strictly speaking, it could also include droplet transmission. It didn't sound like much, but it was actually incredibly powerful. In a modern city, it could be called the most efficient means of transmission.

That was unless the area was vast and sparsely populated, as this method of transmission didn't reach very far.

Xu Chen nodded for him to continue.

"And it would have to be lethal..." As he spoke, Ouyang Xing frowned, realizing something, and looked at Xu Chen.

In Plague Inc., a virus could evolve toward either high infectivity or high lethality. Generally, players made it highly infectious first and highly lethal afterward, because if it was too deadly from the start, all its initial hosts would die and be unable to spread it further.

Ebola was the prime example of this. Before a drug could even be developed, all the patients were dead.

If it wasn't lethal, however, that would give humanity time to develop a specific drug, causing the player to lose the game. Plenty of viruses could serve as examples of that.

"Do you mean designing this microorganism according to real-world conditions?"

"Of course."

"Then set the time to death at one to two weeks."

Most epidemics took a week or two to kill, or even less. That time frame was chosen so the microorganism could both kill and have time to spread.

This wasn't the Middle Ages. In that time, all sorts of efficient transportation could spread it around the world in short order.

"Right, and what about, uh, drug resistance?"

"Huh? Oh, as for drug resistance, of course it would be resistant. No drug would work. It would also survive well in the air, and ideally, it could lie dormant outside the body and make a comeback."

"It wouldn't be affected by atmospheric ultraviolet radiation, oxygen-poor or oxygen-rich environments. Ideally, it would also resist all kinds of disinfectants and sterilizing agents, including alcohol."

"It would bypass the human immune system while attacking the brain, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, and the motor and nervous systems."

After hearing him out, Xu Chen gave him a thumbs-up. "Senior, impressive. Even the King of Hell would have a tattoo of you on his back."

Ouyang Xing smiled wryly. "How could a microorganism like that exist? If one really did appear, how complex would its DNA or RNA have to be? How would it survive competition with other dominant microbial strains?"

Viruses and bacteria were also subject to natural selection, and theirs was even more brutal.

Their DNA and RNA were, bluntly put, storage chips. They held a limited amount of information and were easily altered during replication. The more information they held, the more easily it was lost, so they couldn't be very long and could only record the information most useful for survival.

For example, a virus might have a segment of information that gave it resistance to ultraviolet radiation. After it entered a human body, the person might take large amounts of medication, selecting for a virus that had lost its ultraviolet resistance but had DNA information for drug resistance. That virus could then multiply rapidly inside the body, but be useless outside it.

For bacteria and viruses to excel in any one area, they had to give something up in return. A bacterium with super drug resistance would have its DNA packed with information for resisting drugs, so it would surely be weak in other areas, such as transmission, reproduction, and competition with other microorganisms. Drug resistance would be the only thing it was good at.

So for an all-around virus like that to appear naturally was probably impossible.

After hearing Ouyang Xing, Xu Chen jerked his chin toward the isolation chamber. "Isn't that one right there?"

Startled, Ouyang Xing looked at the patient.

It was impossible for it to have arisen naturally, but if it were man-made, perhaps it was possible.

"Also, let me show you something."

Xu Chen patted the documents in his hand and pointed to the data he had seen earlier.

"Although it says here that it reproduces and spreads according to suitable temperatures, if you look at it from another angle..."

Ouyang Xing frowned at first, then understood what Xu Chen meant.

"You mean that if it spreads, it's more inclined to kill humans when it infects them, but when it infects other species, it slows down the killing of its host and instead uses their activity to spread more widely?"

Xu Chen nodded. Humans were the most numerous species in the world whose body temperature was suitable for its reproduction.

"Then who developed this virus? What was their goal? Weren't they afraid it would really get out of control?"

"Who knows? Maybe their goal was the same as in the game?"

"!"

Ouyang Xing couldn't sit still. He got up and called over all the seniors who had nothing to do at the moment to discuss it. If they reached a conclusion, he intended to report it directly.

Even if they couldn't reach a conclusion, they still had to mention the possibility.

Xu Chen also brought over a stool to watch.

Ouyang Xing first recounted his conversation with Xu Chen, then passed around the documents Xu Chen had found for the others to read.

Some were skeptical, some looked grim, and some were still puzzled, but at least none of them dismissed what Ouyang Xing had said.

One of the seniors suddenly thought of something. He hurried to his desk, fetched a record sheet, and set it on the table. Then he looked at Ouyang Xing in silence, his brow tightly furrowed.

Ouyang Xing picked up the record sheet, and Xu Chen tilted his head to look at it as well. It documented the patient's physical condition.

The patient's vital signs on the sheet were extremely poor and worsened every day. One measurement, however, was quite stable: it hadn't changed at all from beginning to end.

That was his body temperature.

If the human body had an inflammatory response, the injured area would become inflamed and warm. This was a physiological mechanism affected by many factors. Yet large patches of the patient's skin had eroded, and he also had blood poisoning, but his temperature hadn't changed at all. Clearly, something was wrong.

"We thought it was good for the patient that his body temperature was staying normal. I didn't expect that it might have been caused by this Aspergillus flavus infection."

"True. If his temperature rose, he might die even faster."

Ouyang Xing nodded. He really hadn't expected them to come up with something new through the discussion, and he promptly decided to report it.