The Beginning of the End

“Remember: if you need anything, I’m just a phone call away!”

With that, the decrepit old landlady shuffled away, leaving me alone in the austere apartment I would call home for the foreseeable future. I collapsed onto a rickety, three-legged stool - the only piece of furniture in the vicinity - only for it to promptly give way, sending me toppling to the ground in a jumble of gangly limbs and cacophonous swearing. God, did I miss London.

I’d spent the four happiest years of my life studying virology at the Imperial College of London, expecting to stay and teach the same to fellow microbiology enthusiasts someday. Unfortunately, beating hundreds of my exam-acing, interview-nailing peers to a teaching post was easier said than done. Two weeks after my Visa expired, in September 2019, I arrived in Wuhan, homeless, unemployed and mourning for a version of me that had never existed, and now, never would.

But they say that when one door closes, another opens, and it wasn’t long before I came across an advertisement for an entry-level position at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sure, it was a far cry from a professorial career in a prestigious foreign university, but as long as it paid the bills and kept me from starvation, it’d have to do for now. With that in mind, I rose, intending to head straight to bed; I didn’t want to sleepwalk through my very first day of work.

Apparently some supreme being had it out for me and had decided to add a lack of sleep to my already lengthy list of vexations, though, because soon as I began to drift off, I was roused again by the ear-splitting shriek of a decades-old doorbell.

Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I opened the door to a petite figure wrapped in an ankle-length overcoat, a nondescript baseball cap tilted over their eyes.

“Uh… who are you?” I asked, too perplexed to bother with politeness. Their reply came in the form of an identity card, extended towards me in a gloved hand. Scanning through it, I had barely discerned their name and address when something strange caught my eye: a minuscule inscription in the top right corner of the card, claiming that it had been printed in 2025, or six years from today.

“Well, this is clearly fake,” I said, tossing it back to the intruder. I turned, and made to shut the door, when they finally spoke.

“Please let me in.” Their voice was soft yet steady. “I’ll explain everything as soon as you do so.”

“And I’ll do so as soon as you tell me whom you really are.”

The stranger sighed frustratedly, then plunged their hand back into the depths of their coat, only this time, drawing out a syringe. Before I could dodge, or snatch the instrument from them, or even holler for help, I felt a sharp sting on my upper arm. A moment of realisation, a bleat of alarm, a wave of numbness, and everything went black.

...

I came to in my living room, my hands and legs tied together with thick, unyielding ropes of twine. I tried to scream, but my exclamation was muffled into a mere whisper by the surgical mask covering my mouth.

“Relax.” I lifted my eyes to my captor, who was now pacing back and forth before me. “I’m not going to harm you in any way. I would release you, if I wasn’t sure you would try to escape or attack me immediately.”

“What do you want?” I groaned, though it came out sounding more like “waf joo oo wam?”

Somehow, they seemed to comprehend my words, because they responded simply, “to speak to you.”

With that, they shrugged off their coat to reveal an equally nondescript t-shirt and trousers, and crouched in front of me, resting their chin on their right palm. “First things first, let me introduce myself. I am, in fact, the Diya Khanna from the ID card I showed you. Another truth, though perhaps a less believable one, is that I live in the year 2025.”

I rolled my eyes and scoffed, no longer afraid of this stranger in my flat; after all, if she were planning to hurt me, wouldn’t she have done so by now? Besides, realising that she was a woman, a young, Asian one at that, provided some comfort to my disoriented mind.

“Look,” she exclaimed frustratedly, once again revealing the impatient nature beneath her otherwise detached demeanour, “I know that this is difficult to digest. I know that. But you have to open your mind and listen to me, because frankly, you don’t have any other option.”

Taking a deep breath, she continued, “time travel technology, an idea you’ve probably only been exposed to in works of fiction, has existed in the hands of the USA’s government since the early 2000s. While state scientists had run contained, risk-free tests with it, they agreed never to attempt to alter the past, fearing a major ripple effect that could turn the entire world on its head. In 2024, though, something happened that caused them to rethink this decision. Something so deadly that it ruined economies, overturned governments, annihilated entire populations. Something so terrible that any change in it, no matter how unexpected, could only be for the better. The seventh worldwide wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

...

“And that last vaccine, the one produced in 2022, that didn’t work either?”

“Technically, it worked, but only against the Omicron variant. The virus just mutated again and overcame it by the end of the year.”

As Diya narrated the horrors to come in the following six years, with sprinklings of statistics and spoonfuls of scientific evidence, I found myself trusting her against my own will. Eventually, she had loosened my mask, allowing me to voice my questions, which she answered as effortlessly as a practised virologist describing the basic structure of a cell.

She revealed how a virus had spread across China in December 2019, and reached every nook and cranny of the globe in mere months’ time. How it came in waves, tricking people into thinking it was gone during low tide and then returning during high tide to drown unsuspecting divers. How every precaution, every defence, every cure failed in the face of this mystifyingly murderous phenomenon. How the USA, after losing a tenth of its population, was forced to resort to means it had hoped never to even consider.

She showed me the letter she had received in mid-March in 2025, inviting her to a dinner party with a hand-picked collection of politicians, scholars and virologists, an NDA attached to the sheet. There, in a soundproof, windowless room in the White House’s West Wing, she had been covertly enlisted to join the force that would change the course of fate forever.

“But how does telling me all of this help?” I inquired, curious to finally hear how I’d gotten involved in this imbroglio.

“Well, before we arrived here, each of the nine travellers had a mission to fulfil. Mine was to find the person who could prevent this entire pandemic from occurring by a single action. And that person is you.”

Part 2 will be up on Friday, 7th January. Meanwhile, don't hesitate to leave a comment with your predictions on what happens next!