Virus 2
Our ancestors arrived like Columbus and started
knocking on the doors of the native population which resided peculiarly deep
within the earth in a nucleus. Our ancestors might have opened a hidden trap
door and descended down an escalator to a huge sphere with multiple small
windows. Clothes weren't allowed and so his majesty, took leave of HBsAg and
HBeAg, shed off his royal robes and climbed into the sphere, as naked as a DNA.
There, he was greeted by the local chromatin population and shown around.
Great place! Thought the king and settled
down, had children, another life, and another kingdom. Now we Hep -B viruses
don't enter into sexual relations that easily but prefer to replicate our own
DNA, so the king sat to meditate.
His deficiencies and gaps were filled and
he became a covalently closed circular DNA (or you could say he was totally covered
up in a termite mound). The CCC-DNA was extruded out of one of the windows and
then the mound broke into three pieces of slithering snakes, ready for
transcription. It proceeded with the synthesis of a minus strand followed by a
plus strand and finally we had baby HBVs.
The first threat of an external aggressor
appeared around this period. It wasn't anything to do with the natives within
the nucleus who were pretty docile and never troubled us. It was the ocean
predators.
They were probably the other inhabitants of
this vast body of earth in areas, which still remain unexplored. They started
off by attacking our children. Dear little baby peptides dressed in colorful
epitopes loved playing in the beach. We never thought they would draw the
attention of those detestable classes of MHCs. They would play with our
children and hold them up in the air from time to time. Little did we know that
this would be a signal for their CD-8 (seedy-ate) ally that is until the first
bombardment.
The hepatocyte shores went up in flames.
Fire spread rapidly, lighting up the usually dark jungle silhouettes. Across
another corner, in a dim glow, one could barely discern other dark shapes
getting down from odd looking boats, starting to drill the earth with perforin
drillers and pouring poison into those drilled perforin channels .
The ravages we have survived along with our
coveted land are a tale often repeated. I guess, every society has its
persecutors, bombardments and yet life begins anew. Many of our brothers devised
increasingly cunning ways of eluding our seedy attackers. It’s been a topic of
research among you humans (some of us refer to you as Demons/Gods).
Mechanisms of persistence of Hep-B viruses
in chronic carriers, is a hot issue, the complete unraveling of which might
push the final nail into our coffins. However, before that I seriously believe
and wish to convey that your body of earth itself is in jeopardy.
Virus 3
Mechanisms of HBV Persistence
Some of our HBV brethren left the
hepatocyte shores and swam with the strong oceanic currents to seek refuge in
other greener pastures...kidneys, brain, testes, pancreas and the like. The
seedy cells couldn't pursue them all the way to these places apparently
dissuaded by micro-vascular anatomic barriers, which surprisingly are lacking
in the Hepatic sinusoids.
Other than this, some of us tried to fox
the MHCs by mutating the epitopes in our babies to evade recognition by seedy
eyes. Then there were some peculiar natural factors, which came to our rescue
as well. The MHCs we learnt were essentially polymorphic and all MHCs were not
equally bad and some of them just played with our kids. The MHC II came perched
on macrophages and these giant whales required a daily rubbing of Vitamin D oil
on their surface, to actually stay active.
Recently some of your people discovered a
mutation (T to C at 352 position) in the Vitamin D receptor gene that might
lead to inadequate activation of these killer whales. These whales also love to
eat with a particular sauce (mannose binding lectin) and again this was
successfully adulterated.
Another ploy that we had to devise was born
out of sheer desperation in our continued struggle against the seedy cells. One
night, hordes of our guerilla forces attacked a fleet of passing PBMCs
(peripheral blood mononuclear cells), climbed onto their ships and took over
after a bloody battle. Their wireless system with which they used to summon
more and more seedy cells were effectively silenced.
Virus 4
Carcinogenesis
Other avenues of survival opened up in our
very homes inside the hepatocytes. The local people we noticed were
surprisingly immune to seedy attackers. They had disagreeable features but in
the interest of survival we started marrying into their communities
(effectively, integrating with our host genomes). We married and multiplied
into a modern cosmopolitan society. Gradually, we lost our food gathering
nomadic existence and settled into concrete stable dwellings with equally
fine-processed food to satisfy us. Multi-storied buildings started adorning our
skylines. Gone were the palm trees, green fields were encroached by collagenous
cement that hardened with each passing day. You could almost hear the muffled
cries of earth as it stifled over this new overpowering burden.
Since the early part of this century ...we
had continued to rebuild and regenerate after each and every seedy attack.
However regeneration and degeneration can leave ugly scars. Presently we have
had the unfolding of another interesting scenario. The seedy missiles having
been silenced, what we have now is simply growth and more and more growth.
Some of us have begun to see through all
this growth and realize our days as well as that of the earth are numbered.
It's only a matter of months now. That is, if we can't devise new ingenious
methods to escape our present predicament. Life is generally defined by some
universal traits, which we suspect might be present even in you humans. It
might be present even in the myriad subatomic particles that make up our relatively
puny bodies.
Virus 5
The earth which we live in seems similar to
your earth and we are accumulating enough evidence that it’s inside you humans
where we might be residing (like your concept of a living earth). Therefore,
this uncontrolled growth of our civilization might be the death of your body
and therefore this desperate communication (By the way, is the growth of your
society too progressing exponentially - really, this concept of parallel
universes is fascinating).
Life grows as an expression of its
universal traits, chief among which is a perennial dissatisfaction with the
present and an insatiable urge to change, replicate and evolve. Look at our
evolved bodies, added up from myriads of subatomic particles and look at your
body (our earth) even more highly evolved and yet yearning for more. More love,
more growth, more reproduction both in thought and form ... yet survival is the
name of the game and we have evolved over the years, just to survive. I am
confident some of us will manage it even in the wake of this global cancer.
As night falls, a few dark silhouettes
among us have been noticed to wade out with their rubber dinghies into the
deeper waters of a darker ocean, hoping against hope.... someday ... another
tunnel, another universe, fresh green rice fields bordering dense forests.
Clouds you'll notice, too exhibit living characteristics of a non-linear
replication, summation and accumulation, which from time to time, bursts into a
downpour, catching you unawares in the rain. We wanted to live like a cloud but
ended blowing up in smoke.
Yours truly,
Hep-B alpha
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