......Just to give you one example, there aren’t actually any nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. The U.S. and the Soviet Union scrapped them all in the 1970s, as did their client states. Everyone realised that those weapons could not be used without destroying the whole world, so there was no need for them; but by pretending that they still had them, the big players were able to keep the non-nuclear powers in line.

Let me return to the virus.

Last year, large-scale anti-government protests erupted in Hong Kong. The Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party considered these to be a grave threat to the integrity and stability of the motherland. The U.S. government and the EU both knew that the Chinese were secretly working on a biological agent that was supposed to make the protesters docile and obedient. Without going into detail, I worked on that project. We tried to develop a sort of spray that could be dispersed from helicopters or drones and that would lead to mental retardation and behavioural change.

Naturally, as Hong Kong is one of the most open and international cities in the world, the Party decided that it was too risky to release the agent in Hong Kong without first testing it. For this, it needed a great number of human guinea pigs. Two groups were identified for this.

First, we rounded up a large number of so-called "islamic radicals" in Xinjiang Province and took them to what we called "training camps". We had already been using these camps for human experimentation for several years, but the Hong Kong protests meant that we redoubled our efforts. We exposed the inmates to various "alpha" experimental agents. As these were odourless and invisible, the subjects were not aware that they were taking part in medical trials. The resulting high rates of cancer, premature dementia, suicidal depression and death by organ failure could easily be suppressed, as the camps are located in very remote parts of our motherland.

Once the initial experiments had yielded a "beta" agent, it was transported to Hubei Province, where it was deployed in a special military testing facility outside the city of Wuhan. This was not even a particularly well-kept secret: the existence of this facility has been reported in international news. Even the fact that it is located close to the wild animal market is a known fact.

By then our President had already introduced a "social credit" system that allowed us to identify disloyal, counter-revolutionary and bourgeois elements in our society. Using the social credit scores — which are taken from online activity, electronic shopping behaviour and reports from informers in civil society — we selected some of the worst offenders. These included human rights lawyers and activists, Christians, homosexuals, artists, intellectuals, people who speak foreign languages, and other undesirables.

Once these troublemakers had been collected and placed in the testing facility, we exposed them to the Agent, which is biochemical in nature and spread in an invisible aerosol, akin to certain viruses. Initial results were encouraging, as we saw significant cognitive decline and reduction in higher mental processing facilities. Essentially, our undesirables were becoming mildly mentally disabled, which is precisely the effect we wanted to produce in order to pacify the restive population of Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the Agent also had other effects. About one week after the retardation set in, our subjects developed major anxiety and panic attacks. Eventually they developed symptoms akin to those of paranoid schizophrenics. At that point, their bodies rapidly deteriorated. They developed massive internal bleeding; the walls of their arteries dissolved; they bled out of their eyes and orifices, and their tissue disintegrated.

To put it in a more direct Western manner, they started to melt.

Death usually occurred through multiple organ failure. This was preceded by at least five days of severe agony which could not be alleviated by painkillers. It was at this time that I first violated our protocol: one subject, an elderly lady who had published defamatory cartoons of our President, begged me for death with such insistence that I took pity and shot her. I was reprimanded, but fortunately the complaint was dropped when I agreed to reimburse the cost of the bullet. I swore to myself never again to show such unnecessary emotion.

We decided that our Agent was unusable. It was far too destructive for our purposes. We wanted the population of Hong Kong to submit to us; we did not want to exterminate it.

Naturally, our American friends had by then taken an interest in our work and asked us for a sample for their own research and testing purposes. They hinted that they wished to use it to resolve certain difficulties in Venezuela. Normally we would have agreed, as we maintain friendly relations with the CIA, but given the extremely toxic nature of the Agent, we declined.

This, as it turned out, was a grave mistake. The CIA was convinced that we had developed something very powerful and wanted to keep it to ourselves. They offered a great deal of money to one of our researchers. Foolishly, he agreed to sell them a specimen. We found out just in time for the handover and tried to stop it from happening. In the ensuing shoot-out — don’t bother to look for it in the news, it was never reported anywhere — several dozen people were killed.

More importantly, however, the Agent escaped.