Viruses in themselves resist coherence and categorization there isn’t a stable group we can refer to (as a brief passage later in this text on the shocking mimivirus will suggest). Every virus in its unfolding mattering and mutability is the creation of new worlds every jot and tittle come with their own universes. More importantly, there is no one world or stable category (like Gaia, or ‘nature’, or even ‘humans’) by which any of these narratives, useful they may be, might be treated as gospel truth. As such, I am very reluctant to offer an overview about what is happening, or to perpetuate those convenient stories because they tend to re-centralize humans as heroes-in-wait ( if only we could get our act together, you know). This virus is not a resource for the factories that produce human intelligibility it need not surrender to our appeals for everything to make sense. This isn’t the rise of Nature to correct everything that has been wrong this isn’t Eywa battling it out with the extractivist corporations. I speak of popularized stories about, say, the Earth’s comeuppance, about the virus being on ‘our’ side against the one-percenters and the boomer generation, about the fall of capitalism or Gaia’s revenge, about the way love always prevails. And we should be careful about smoothening the hard and recalcitrant edges of this phenomenon to fit our ready-made narratives about the so-called deeper meanings of the pandemic. One of the central questions I ask with this essay is: If this is indeed a war, do we really want to win it? What if winning is the worst possible outcome we could imagine? Do we want to come out on top, stamp out this viral enemy, and restore agency to the cold ossified tentacles of the familiar? Are we sure this disruption is not what we want, what we’ve cried for in unvoiced ways? Should we not treat this opening as our grand marronage, our fugitive departure from exhausted cottonfields? Modernity, whose abiding logic is stability and control, has a low tolerance for the strange, so it resorts to war. We trot out the generals and their soldiers and stand gloomily beholding the invader through angry pixels and crosshairs, thumbs hovering nervously over gleaming red buttons. In sci-fi depictions of encroaching extra-terrestrials, the military’s big guns are usually the first response. Ever since this novel coronavirus crept up in late 2019, a telluric war and public relations machine has revved up in response, promising – in the all-too-familiar self-promoting language of conquest and villainy – the eventual annihilation (or, more realistically, the containment and management) of the virus and its effects.

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