Virus Global

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.