To be honest, reality has never been completely normal for me. Once I was aware of the world, time, mortality, people, ideas and so on, I didn’t know how to be ‘normal’ – although I kept trying for quite some time. Everything is constantly changing, there is no stopping, standing still and taking stock of it all. To me it’s like trying to review what it was like being on a rollercoaster while you are still on it.

Reality has been really thrown out of shape this last year and a half for many. When we started to hear whispers of this ‘pandemic’ in January last year, my brain adjusted and adapted without me even trying. You see, for the past two decades, maybe longer, I have been fixated and focused on the idea of a virus. A virus outbreak to be more specific. My interest was actually first piqued in the early 90’s at school when we learnt about HIV/AIDS in PSE (Personal and Social Education – i think), I became quite interested in the science of it all and concerned by the risk fed to me by the media. Then came foot and mouth, and bird flu, and swine flu and the rest of the more recent ‘outbreaks’ which did the rounds, leading to the culling of many animals and overall made very little impact to peoples general day to day lives. But each time, I would be on alert. Watching and monitoring for any evidence or paper that would show it has crossed over, it had mutated, the risk has increased. But it never happened. No evidence ever did materialize and I did not see what I had decided were the next stages of a real outbreak with a viable threat to humans.

Along the way, I also happened to get into Zombie films. They used to freak me out, and played on what I decided was a natural fear of unseen disease, but in zombie films they made it seen, and it looked like you and me, it was the grotesque exaggeration of it all really impacted me (I think having Hyperphantasia did not help here at all!). But eventually it made me question the reality of their scenarios and setting for it. Picking it apart so I could understand it and know when to have appropriate fear. It can easily be misplaced and does not usually go well when it is present but not necessary. Fear really can control you.

Around 2018 I got quite into a game on my phone, I believe it was called Pandemic, so no guesses needed what it was about. The player is to start the virus in their preferred country and then gather ‘points’ as you infect more and more people, adapting the virus and working out how to make it supreme and deadly. It seemed just like a biological weapon skill game, how to fuck up as many people as you could and kill the world. While you are doing this, the world fights back by trying to find a cure, and if you aren’t good enough with your mutations and variants, then they cure it and the world recovers. Now in this, other things occur – even though it is just one screen of the world with flashing blobs to pop, and seeing small blue planes fly around to sort out the cure. After a number of attempts, I won. I created the one that took out the world. And it didn’t feel like a win, in any way. In fact, something else happened. I ran through all the data in my mind, all the scenarios and variants being played out in a ‘simulated’ setting, but I realised all that data goes somewhere. Yes, it could be paranoia, I considered that and thought you know what, whether it is or isn’t, I’m not playing anymore. It felt uncomfortable and I am only usually faced with that kind of discomfort when my spidey senses activate. I stopped playing it a year before the wheels were set in motion with Event201 in Oct 2019. Once that started, it was inevitable what was going to follow.

So, last January 2020, whispers from abroad started to happen. A co-ordinated effort to get the patchy information out and start reacting – they did a good job at first. It was substantial enough to take notice, more than just an article here and there, top medical people were discussing it. But there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on that didn’t add up. All the stories and pictures seemed very set up, not natural at all. They were so specific with giving us a ‘heads up’ on everything and doing things so illogically, it gave it away to me. And the fact that all the governments (mostly) gave a co-ordinated response – that does not happen and I don’t believe we are that organised to do it if we were indeed ‘taken by surprise’ by a virus out of the blue. But where it was heading didn’t look good to me, real virus or not. I decided to start ordering a few more packets of things for the cupboard and organised to use some of our savings to send my husband on his dream trip, to Egypt to see the pyramids. I had a feeling the way they were telling it, travel would not be something we should be planning too far ahead for. I worried he wouldn’t be able to go, so we booked it and he went, in the first week of March and was back before lockdown. By this time however, my view of it all had changed. Not on him going away, I still think that was the right thing to do and the right time. The overview of my personal thought had changed.

In all my wondering and thinking of viruses and pandemics, something occurred I did not foresee. All the makings of an outbreak but without there being a virus. With this new scenario playing out, so came a new state of thought, I call it Schrödinger’s virus. I now simultaneously live in a world where the virus both exists and doesn’t exist. Part of me is ready to accept that there could be a virus that has the ability to cause untold mortality as they say, but with no evidence to back that up, that idea is put into my theory category. And in day to day life and from what I see it doesn’t exist. Death rates and figures, funeral directors and all parties who should be able to make it obvious but they are saying the opposite, so believe both, or neither, or one? We are also being pummelled by high level propaganda every day from every media outlet and social media side, it’s difficult to not be consumed by it. I wrote a fictional book a few years ago about a virus outbreak, not a zombie one surprisingly, just one that changes humanity. I worried though that there may be too many plot holes or that it didn’t quite hold up – having seen what was rolled out and used to convince the masses to be under the spell of pushers peddling their wares, I really shouldn’t have worried. I feel like I am now living a badly scripted, badly acted plot hole. It has taken a twist though with recent increases in infection, but not unexpected. I have been theorizing on all this since last March/April time and following the articles as best I can, which only a few months ago predicted that the roll out of the miracle cure, is in fact causing unintended (as far as we know) consequences. Only time and data can tell on that one – I want to be wrong. I really do hope I am.

(c) K Wicks