I’ve got a cold right now that obviously strangled the guards to escape from a top-secret germ warfare lab. These malicious microbes have taken the moniker “common cold” as an affront, and have decided to make an example of me, illustrating just how uncommonly miserable a cold can be.

My nose, now red and inflamed from constant blowing and wiping, is like a faucet, above which the familiar “hot” and “cold” knobs have been replaced with one labeled simply (and disgustingly) “snot.” The viscous green goop just flows out as fast as I can wipe it away. I can’t imagine where it’s all coming from. It reminds me of that old circus routine with the clowns continually pouring out of a Volkswagen, but many orders of magnitude less fun.

I cough about once every ten seconds, each time producing gobs of mucus full of microscopic dead soldiers in the battle between the invading viruses and the stalwart defenders dispatched by my immune system. For some reason, with each cough some cells go running through my lungs with sandpaper and vigorously scrape the sides, then liberally sprinkle powdered glass, for therapeutic purposes. There must be a good reason for this, all in accordance with natural selection and millions of years of evolution, but no members of the immune system team were able to comment, being dead by the time I got to see them.

At this point in the essay, the author launched into a stream of abusive profanity directed at the germs and pretty much the rest of the universe, including—indeed, focusing on—the blameless reader. He’s really sick and miserable, so his irrational snipes are perhaps understandable, but nobody needs this sort of abuse, so we just edited the heck out of the grumpy cuss.

I suspect the viruses, well known for their singular devotion to reproduction, have decided, as have so many self-styled “higher organisms” before them, that the creation of progeny is not a close enough approximation of true immortality. Perhaps they have opted instead to live forever in literature.

If that was their plan, it’s been an unqualified success so far. Here I am, writing about nothing but them. I’ve got a dozen half-completed works of fiction calling out, but the characters are just going to have to hang on. My head is so filled with teeming mucus, I can’t remember their names, let alone any of the terrible things I’ve done to them. Some sort of political essay, perhaps? For most of my life a continuing font of unwavering opinions about everything wrong with the world, who is responsible, and how much better a job I would do, given unlimited authority and a generous expense account, I now find myself gripped with an unfamiliar complacency. Go ahead. Drop bombs on children. Cut down the forests. Kill the whales. I don’t care anymore. Just leave me my tissues.

The viruses have won. They’ve taken over the cells of my body, turning them into little virus factories. And the sneaky devils have commandeered my creative process as well. Instead of writing about a thousand other things, I’m just writing about them.

My immune system is going to hunt down and kill every last one of them, and I’m hoping the leukocytes torture the prisoners before they execute them. If you could see the fluorescent green loogie I just coughed up, you’d understand my deep animosity for those vile little bits of malicious genetic code. I have no doubt that my dutiful T-cells, B-cells, and macrophages will emerge triumphant. And being the hermit that I am, I’m not giving the germs any opportunity to escape into some other unsuspecting host. This is their Little Big Horn, their Waterloo. Their time is almost up.

But now they’re going to be remembered long after they are gone. Their story is preserved here on the Internet, where thousands of people can read about the plucky little organisms that laid me low. And maybe a few readers will copy the saga of the viruses’ last stand, or at least a link, and send it to others. And maybe some of them will copy it, and so on and so forth, and the viruses will laugh from beyond the grave as they claw their way toward immortality.

Clever little bastards.

Andy Breslin is a scientist-at-large whose first novel, Mother's Milk, is soon to be published by Emperor's New Clothes Press.