The air flows are my tormentors: fickle, fickle winds. One moment, I’m slammed into the ceiling, a passenger on a sunbeam; the next, I’m projectile at a ceiling fan’s dead zone, where I stick for one second, eye to eye with a cockroach’s fossil.

Then snort! A sneeze echoes in the room. A human, a meat puppet nearby, is a storm. Air flows turn to a vacuum, and I’m sucked into a brass and cold doorknob. I cling to it like a beggar at a soup kitchen, but then, a clatter, the knob twirls, spins me off its knuckle like a flung pebble. I ricochet, a pinball in the void now, and slam into a curtain panel silk, perfumed with the ghosts of dead flowers. I slide down the curtain’s throat, only to be spat out when the damn thing flutters from a draft.

I’m launched into the air again, this time into the maw of a chandelier jewels, glass grapes. I hang from the candelabra armature, a shard pocked palace where dust motes pirouette to the funereal dirge of the heating system.

I fall down, and I land on a woman’s glasses. They’re gold rimmed, the kind that scream “I have no idea who I am but I’m overpronouncing ‘avant garde.’” She adjusts them, their sparkle a minefield, and I’m squashed between the bridge and her nose prime real estate.

I leap onto a hair strand, a tightrope between two worlds, and swing toward the woman’s mouth, while she takes a sip. Fire! The scalding liquid is a pyre, my capsid blistering into a charred echo. I survive miracle, a pygmy in a teakettle ocean, until the drink is set down lips leaving a pucker, a crescent moat around the rim.

A fly smacks into the window. The window! It’s glass frosted with the memory of rain; The liquid lurches, and I’m dumped into her nose. Below, a child waddles by, clutching a stuffed dinosaur.

Clatter. A pen strikes the desk, plume, a cloud of graphite shavings. It left behind a handwritten note:"Don’t forget the morphine.” I whisper to the ink, “Morphine’s a lie, lady. The real pain is flying forever.

I dove into the nostril’s subway tunnel, a clogged ductwork of mucus and forgotten sneezes. Click, click, the cilia’s broomsticks scraped my shell janitors in a cathedral of bacteria. Deeper, deeper, until a billboard slung across my path, its signpainter a fever’s trembling hand: PNEUMONIA CITY.

The streets were slick, asphalted with snot. Buildings were lung cavities rickety, honeycombed, their walls oozing plasma. I stepped over a crack in the sidewalk, where a dead white blood cell oozed its guts like a burst fire hydrant.

I approach a club called The Ribcage, a VIP lounge where white blood cells guzzled adrenaline from champagne flutes and danced to the thump of a beating heart. The bouncer was a neutrophil in a trench coat, his phagocytic fists tucked into his belt. “Pass the ID,” he drawled. I didn’t have an ID. I had a mission. “Let me in or I’ll ” “Or you’ll what? This is the dead zone, buddy. Everyone here’s already been infected.

The club’s interior’s a fever dream. Ceilings hang low with strands of DNA, like spaghetti glued back together after a kid’s experiment. Pneumonia graffiti slathers the walls inked in phagocytic teeth marks. A disco ball, a crystalized lymph node, spins, throwing monomers into the crowd. White blood cells strut, their pseudopods swaying to a thump that could be the circulatory system’s heartbeat, but probably isn’t. I sidestep a drunk eosinophil barfing antibodies up the wall. “Watch it,” I snap.

“Hey!” A megaphone voice. The bartender a mast cell leans over, her granules glittering. “Want a shot of IgE?” She slams a glass on the bar: IgE full of histamines in ice cubes. “Drink it. But be careful. You’ll remember this.” She disappears behind a lymph follicle. I down it. My nucleic code burns.

I slink through the crowd, pseudopods squirming past a myeloid phagocytic’s drool slick trench a puddle of lysosomes where a dead erythrocyte’s face floats, half masticated.

The mayor’s a cytokine, a rotund fatty with a waist of interleukins, his jowls sagging under layers of inflammation. The mayor’s macrophage courtesan, she whispers something in his ear. He grins. “Ah. The intruder. A bacterium. Or a virus. “Give me a cell to shatter, a nucleus to colonize, a ribosome to bend to my will that’s my idea of a welcome party”, he adds.

A bacterion jackal with a turban stumbles toward me, his voice is a slide whistle:““Do you want a little something to give you energy?”, he said, his accent Indian. “Mitochondria,” he leaned in, sipping a stem cell margarita, “are the engine. Fusion of virion cell and mitochondria. They undead you longer. They undead you different. That’s the future.”

His jacket, a monstrosity of velvet and membrane, plopped like a sieve of living gizzards. Inside is a car wreck of glowing mitochondria. A thousand tiny engines, each a prismatic bead of stolen starlight, thrumming in unison, sloshing in gelatin capsules like jellyfish in a lukewarm bath.

I eye the mess. My job is to be a dead letter, a passenger in the corpse of a cell. “Mitochondria are engines, yes but my kind don’t live.”

“Fool!”The futurist insists,"We’re all parasites. Even mitochondria! They’re just… refined. Domesticated. Ask our human host. Ask the fossils in her bones.”.

“Cough, cough.” Suddenly the whole bronchus convulses, sends debris of mucus and lung cells flying. I’m flung like a bean in a clogged pipe, my protein coat scraping the trachea’s escalator of cilia that had decided that today they’d be trapeze artists. The walls of the trachea, a collage of epithelial cells screaming in cursive. I carom off a goblet cell’s mucus faucet glorp streak past a lymphocyte in a trench coat that’s definitely a mast cell.

The mayor dodges a spherical waistcoat of pro-inflammatory proteins, sputtering “ORDER!” while the futurist’s turban of inner membranes unravels like a toilet paper roll in a hurricane.

“Enough! This body’s a war. Every protein’s a spy. Every enzyme’s a traitor. We need a reset,” the mayor growls to the futurist. “Ditch the mitochondria. Let’s go analog. Retrovirus 1.0. Just integrate into our host’s genome and ruin them forever.”

And with that, he lobs a protease at my head. “You! Virion! Or… whatever your fanciable new name is!” The crowd coalesces into a mob macrophages flexing their pseudopods, a T cell guitarist shredding a solo on a B cell’s ax.

“This is your fault!” the mayor yells at me, pointing his interleukin finger like a loaded grenade, “You’re a rogue microbe with all the etiquette of a bacterial infection!”

“I’m a microbe with the survival instincts of a cell in a chemotherapy trial,” I say, dodging a phagosome that’s trying to catch me.

Time to pivot. I leap onto a passing microtubule, slide down it like a toboggan made of protein. The ride ends at a junction of calcium ions. I attach to it, a spider in a disco ball. The mayor’s shouting orders. A squadron of dendrites storms my way, each tipped with a lysosomal grenade. The futurist cheers them on. “Annihilate the anomaly! Let entropy win!”

The ribosomes see me. These protein slingers are churning out enzymes, receptors, antibodies everything our host’s future corpse needs to feel alive for a moment longer. I land on one, and it goes clickity click, like a slot machine with low batteries.

The air reeks of phagocytosis. A mitochondrion hurls itself at me like a shuriken, trailing a filament of ATP. I dodge, but the explosion coats me in a film of nicotinamide. I’m sticky, flammable.

I skid into a cell, any cell! a lymphocyte with a broken membrane, it is sagging, a curtain of glycocalyx frayed. Perfect. I dock at its receptor, fake my handshake. “Hey, long time no see. Let’s merge.” The cell gurgles. Its nucleus blinks. The DNA’s got my script memorized. Infection confirmed.

“I’ve got three minutes. Three glorious, generational sprawl minutes,” I mutter. My nucleic code is already sweating. Multiply. Multiply. Multiply. Each division is a mitosis cha cha with my RNA, a twirl of protein ghosts. One thousand generations poof! a million copies, each a sylph in a suit of capsid. We’ll swarm the blood like confetti at a circulatory system carnival.

I leap. The polymerase unzips a stretch of DNA, and I dive headfirst into the helix. I am racking open a chromosome like an oyster to find a pearl of RNA plunging into a hot pink waterfall made of letter chunks. The bases G-C-T-A scream as I spiral through them. Adenine’s a pratfall artist, guanine’s always trying to one up cytosine.

Inside, I split. My genome unzips, a zipper of nucleotides oozing. Out spring my clones: 100 virions, each a shrunken me with a nucleic acid lollipop. They split. 10,000. They split again. 100,000. 1,000,000. My future scuttles up the cell’s microtubules, a swarm of protein beetles, while the host cell’s ribosomes begin their sabbatical, busy knitting coats for my brood.

The futurist’s stem cell margarita glass shatters. He’s crying. “This wasn’t in the future’s manual!”

My clones bloom, a polyplosion of us, each a prismatic shard in the soup of the vacuole. We burrow into a lipid bilayer, kiss its phospholipid lips, and WHOOSH the membrane’s a womb, our protein coat a seed. By the time the mayor wises up, our RNA a thousand spaghetti legs scurrying through the cytosol.

The mayor, on a lipid raft with a cholesterol crown, screams: “Everyone’s a virus! Even the mitochondria!”

I’m not listening. I’m making. The nucleus’s doors burst open my millions of selves spill into the cytoplasm like a glitter bomb. The cell’s a warzone of viral particles and ribosome zombies.

A child cell in a centrosome boat floats by, yelling, “I’m not ready to die!” I toss him a capsid. “Here. This’ll keep you busy.”

Three minutes and thirteen seconds later, the host cell dies. Not from the mayor’s reset plan. Not from the futurist’s ATP dream. But from too many of me, partying in it’s mitochondria, making out with it’s kinases, rearranging it’s nucleotide furniture.

I sit on the corpse’s lipid raft throne, wearing a hat made of mucus filament strands. The futurist is a melted statue in the corner. The mayor’s a cytokine ghost, whispering, “Never trust anyone who says ’analog’.”