I didn’t want to go to bed that night. I didn’t even felt tired. The adrenaline for the day I spent was enough to keep me up. Listening to journalists saying where shrinking cases had been found was addictive and scary and the same time. It felt like I was maintained by a creepy desire to know more. At 11pm GMT, 119 shrinking persons had been found all over the world. That thing traveled fast. SH-02 was not yet an epidemic but the nature of the virus and its spreading speed was worrying everybody; The WHO in the first place. They kept repeating that for the moment, SH-02 was far from being an important threat. They should have told that to the persons that shrunk just to see how they reacted. At that time, SH-02 was only words. We hadn’t even seen a tiny person. I remember thinking that it was maybe just a hoax. However, I quickly remembered the tiny gorillas. That thing was real and felt oppressing.
My parents called me that night. They wanted to know if I was fine and if I heard the news. They tried to reassure me, but even they, were afraid of that virus. I could hear it in their voices.
It’s funny, that feeling we all have in common when a sign of outbreak happens to make the news. Even if it’s nothing, we are scared. I always believed it was coming from the time of the Great Plague when a third of Europe died. It ‘s kind of written in our genes since then. Diseases are not something to laugh about. Now that we had laughed of SH-01, its mutated little brother was coming to haunt us. I was worrying and I had many reasons to. I finally felt asleep, not even imagining what tomorrow would bring.
When I emerged the next day, it was already 10am on my watch. For a minute everything felt normal, like nothing happened yesterday. I got out of my bed and suddenly remembered: SH-02 exists. Fuck. I rushed in my living room and turned on the television to know how things evolved during the night. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Written in a red box underneath the two journalists speaking to the camera, there was the Breaking News:
“11061 cases of SH-02 have now been confirmed by the WHO. 92 countries are now touched by the disease.”
It had exploded. I had never seen in my life something spread this fast. Reporters were speaking of the paranoia that was beginning to emerge. People interviewed were scared of touching others. Above all else, we finally had videos of tiny people. I watched during an hour without even thinking of moving. The people affected were completely normal except for their sizes. The smallest I’ve seen was measuring a centimeter maximum. The biggest, a young Canadian, was 3 inches tall. They looked powerless in the hand of nurses that were trying to protect them from the cameras. Journalists were trying to get the first interview with a patient without success. By 12pm, the second victim of SH-02, a German girl I read about the day before, talked for the time to journalists. She was 1 inch tall. She seemed terrified. It was sad to see. The end of the microphone she had to speak into was twice as tall as she was. She must have felt so vulnerable at that moment. She didn’t even have the force to speak one sentence. She broke into tears, only capable of saying:
“Why me? What did I do to get myself into this?”
She was broken. Being around people 80 times her size was too much for her. She couldn’t adapt to this new reality. She wasn’t ready. Everything around her was a danger and it could be seen on her face. Everything was well for her, and in a minute her life was broken. The worst thing was to see that none of the journalist reacted to the state she was in. They just continued to scream questions at her. I thought this was terrible they weren’t caring about her.