The Logistics of Pandemic

Abstract

A. Plague. Agent Smith was exasperated. He had been brutally interrogating Morpheus for several hours now, without being able to crack him. Never had he been so close to the goal of his mission: to wrest from a human being who knew him the means of accessing Zion, the last resistant city. He was on the brink, however. But Morpheus' was entirely sustained by the conviction that he had just discovered the Chosen One – the one who, precisely, would allow Zion to rise up against the reign of the machines represented by Smith. In an unexpected move, the officer therefore decided to address the rebel captain directly, privately – and disconnected his headset from the Matrix. "I'd like to share a revelation that I have had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.” His was an aggressive and relentless monologue testifying for a superior form of lucidity – while demoralizing his interlocutor. Of course, it was quite possible to dismiss it with the back of the hand, as one would do with a speech too often heard, a caricature as it is drawn from time to time on the side of the great misanthropes. However, Agent Smith was not entirely wrong. If we put aside the rhetoric of contempt, there was something true in the description of a humanity with more than one trait in common with the modes of operation of a virus. Two points in his speech, in particular, echoed the truth: that which characterizes human beings and viruses by their tendency to move; and that this trend is related to the management of the consequences of their wild multiplication – that is, their quantity. One word synthesizes these two points: the word "logistics".