Hi. My name is Virus. You can call me Crony. Lovely to meet you, but please do not expect any dialogue. Forgive me, but any communication between us will be a one-way street—from me to you. Talk to me if you must, but do not expect me to listen. You need to understand at the outset that I am mindless. Yep—that’s right, any attempts to endow me with a mind are at least three billion years in the future. However, I do possess other qualities. For a start, I love bats. Adore them. Treasure them. Idolize them. Devour them. From the inside.

My obsession with bats has a long history—several thousand years, in fact. But I won’t bore you with the details. The exciting news for me is much more recent. In 2019 in one of those rare strokes of luck from Mother Nature, I stumbled upon the key to a new cave of bats. Billions of ’em. All of them enormous, and most of them well-fed and succulent. Like the other bats, they were all blind. Unlike the other bats, their eyesight was fine. Their blindness was more of a mental affliction. They simply never saw me coming. And they never heard my newly evolved key turning in their lock.

I refer, of course, dear reader, to you. To you and all the seven billion giant bats like you. You were ill-prepared, ill-informed, self-obsessed, self-deluded, arrogant, greedy, credulous, and complacent—not a bad string of adjectives from a tiny dollop of mindless protein, don’t you agree? Abracadabra!

By the way, in case you are wondering, I do not respond to incantations, magic tricks, homeopathy, voodoo, or prayers. Indeed, I thrive on prayer meetings—the more the merrier. All I ask is that you gather prayerfully in one place so that, like a collection plate, I can pass among you. Preyfully. Bring it on!

A vaccine will fence me out for a while, but I will merely change my disguise and return at a later date. Anyway, you won’t have a vaccine for at least twelve months. Plenty of time for me to wreak yet more havoc. Remember, I have found the key to your cells, sweet prisoners.

So, thank you for having me. Thank you for being so amenable. Thank you for being so gullible. Above all, thank you for being so edible.