Virus Global

Jonathan Guernon

About this game

Design a pathogen in a laboratory, choose where and how to release it,
and watch it cross a real Earth. Then zoom all the way in and watch it
cross a street. Or take the other side, and try to stop one.

TWO SIDES, ONE SIMULATION

Build a pathogen. Choose what it is — a virus, a bacterium, a parasite,
a fungus, a prion, or something somebody built on purpose — then buy its
transmission routes, its resistances and its symptoms, and set six
continuous dials: how long it incubates, how long it stays contagious,
how long it survives on a doorknob, how much it kills, how readily it
crosses species, and how fast its genome drifts. Then decide how it gets
out: a traveller off a flight, a water tower, a rush-hour metro carriage,
a live animal market, a blood bank, a laboratory accident, or envelopes
of powder posted to one chosen country.

Build the cure. An unknown strain appears somewhere and you have two
budgets, a set of laboratories and a lot of borders. Sequencing is what
makes a vaccine work: one designed before the genome is understood
protects people from dying without stopping them shedding, so a country
vaccinates, relaxes, and keeps transmitting.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY SIMULATED

A compartmental model per region — susceptible, exposed, infectious,
asymptomatic, hospitalised, recovered, dead — across 173 REGIONS coupled
by a gravity-model travel graph of air, sea and land links.

Fourteen transmission channels, not one transmissibility. Contact,
fomites, droplets, aerosols, water, food, blood, sex, mother-to-child,
vectors, animal reservoir, hospitals, post and dust. Each region weights
them by its own crowding, sanitation, climate, livestock and health
system, so cholera is unstoppable where the water is bad and inert where
it is not.

An environmental reservoir. Surfaces, water, dust and post hold the
pathogen with nobody carrying it — the only reason a quarantine can fail
with every human accounted for. And an animal reservoir per region, which
drains far more slowly than an outbreak: once it is up, driving human
cases to zero pauses the epidemic rather than ending it.

The opposing side is an AI that CANNOT READ THE GENOME. It infers the
routes from the symptoms it can see and from which kinds of place are
being hit hardest, and it will spend two months chlorinating water
against something airborne. It is also late, political and uneven.

SIX PLACES ON THE GROUND

Double-tap a country and the camera dives into it. A city of streets,
traffic, a tram line and a market, with contaminated doorknobs and stalls
tinted the colour of your strain. An airport, with the flights that
actually connect that region to the rest of the graph. A port of gantry
cranes, quays and a ship alongside. A station with a train at the
platform. Countryside of fields, farmyards and paddocks. And wild
terrain: a valley, a river, forest to a treeline, a watering hole and a
bat roost.

Procedurally walked pedestrians, road traffic that queues and gives way,
aircraft that take off and land, and thirty-four species of animal. A day
and night cycle, weather that follows the climate, rain and snow and
sandstorms, shadows that swing with the sun. Nothing on the ground
decides an infection; zooming in only lets you see what the number on the
strategic view actually means.

NO NETWORK, NO ACCOUNT, NO ADS

The whole game is in the app: the simulation, the terrain, the crowd, the
typefaces and every creature. It asks for no permissions at all, collects
nothing, sends nothing, and works with the network unplugged.

French and English throughout, switchable at any moment — the news feed
switches with it, back catalogue and all.