WHEN
A MALARIAL PARASITE attacks the host’s body, its sole aim is to infiltrate the
liver. Once that’s done, it’s free to make more and more of itself in order to
escape into parasite paradise: the red blood cell.
Inside
this heaven-like disk, the parasite evades any detection from the body and is
fully protected from any of the host’s immunity defences. It, once again, is
unrestricted to multiply until it’s ready to break into another blood cell. And
while repeating these processes of growth over and over, the parasite gains
control over the host until the destruction of the red blood cells becomes too
much and inevitably, the host dies.
Years
back, an illegal group in Norway named HIRU, standing for Human Intelligence Research Unit, developed a cure for malaria.
Although it had not been tested yet, they were
certain it could work; that was until a member of the researching team was
exposed to the new chemical and minutes later died. Questions would be asked if
word of this dreadful accident got out, and so after its failure, HIRU decided
to destroy all of their laboratories and terminate the rest of the research and
development of the cure- which they had built up for years.
After that, HIRU ceased to exist and the sites of
the old labs were left to ruin, a large brood of bats and smaller rodents
taking residence in the abandoned facilities. In time however, population
numbers of the Norwegian rat began to fall drastically, baffling scientists
around the country, up until a group of ecologists stumbled across the
underground researching warehouses of HIRU. When the group ventured down into
HIRU’s facilities, nothing but thousands of rats’ and mice’s corpses were found.
They alerted the government -who seemed oblivious to an organisation under that
name ever existing- yet still paid off the ecologists, making an effort to preclude
them from dispersing details of the so-called ‘animal abuse’ situation in the
underground labs.
Pest control teams were sent down to remove the
bodies of the rodents but realised that the ‘thousand-or-so’ corpses they were
told about was more like millions. It was described as a sea of carcasses and a
week’s job turned into a month’s. Over two million rats were recorded to have
been removed from HIRU’s facilities which led to a need for a greater
comprehension of why. Why had so many rats died here, in the middle of Norway,
in an unknown, underground building? Biologists, forensic examiners,
archaeologists and groups alike teamed up to investigate and a set of totally
unforeseen results were gathered.
An unidentified chemical had leaked throughout the
entirety of the building and spread in a radius of almost a mile outwards
underground and this chemical seemed to be fatal to the specific species of rat
most commonly found in Norway; an understanding of the reason for the
deterioration of the number of rats had come to light. However, after this, the
substance was tested again and again on an assortment of animals, ranging from
mice to horses and it appeared to be lethal to any being that ingested it. All
apart from one species of animal was immune, mystifying everyone who knew. Mosquitoes.
From then on, the mosquitoes with the unique ability
to resist the substance were captured and put under confidential observation at
the Institute of Science in Norway’s capital, Oslo. Extortionate amounts of
time were spent analysing every segment of the insects, trying to work out how
they could have such a unique response to something so deadly to every other species
it touched.
Sometime later, the research of the creature led to
a discovery which the scientists again could not appreciate. The mosquitoes
were not only unable to succumb to the poisonous effects of the chemical, but
they were also vectors for a virus which was evidently present in it. Virology
experts later discovered that when the mosquitoes fed on human blood, microscopic
viral agents (the same ones identified in the substance found in HIRU’s
facilities) were transmitted into the bloodstream and subsequently latched onto
the disk-shaped cell carrying the oxygen.
Parasite Paradise.
