I AM THE REDUCER

Slightly futuristic story, for a sleepless night.

(Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental, or a product of your imagination).

After a long pandemic of that stubborn virus that was mutating from variant to variant to try to infect you, and thus inhabit in you, I arrived, the unsuspected, the implacable, the definitive one, the one that threatens to end your civilization, reducing your number to a few fortunate ones who might survive me. I am the Reducer.

What took the other virus three long years, I will achieve in three months, and it will only be the beginning. Not only more effective in my task, I am also more silent, I act incognito until it is too late. The symptoms are difficult to recognize, as I will tell you later; tell you, yes, infesting species, plague of the planet. The worst, the most harmful, the most dangerous. You guys.

Your haste to combat the stubborn mutant, combined with certain unusual customs - the ingestion of products that do not provide you with anything or almost nothing apart from a series of risks - led you to me. Let's see the combinations that made my development possible:
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· The vaccines against the stubborn virus in combination with drinking Coca Cola (or Fanta).

· The vaccines against the stubborn virus in combination with the red sauce you call “Ketchup”.

· Being infected by the stubborn virus, and, upon recovery, drinking coffee.

There are other factors, it would be long to list all of them, but those three were the main ones.

They call me the “reducer” because I operate by gradually reducing your organs, a process that I will explain in detail later. It's a very appropriate name, but not for the reasons you think. Not because of my way of operating, but because of the purpose of my existence: to reduce you, to lessen this plague that threatens the life of all living beings on the planet, so that nature has the possibility of resurfacing healthy and strong again. The stubborn was essentially selfish, he cared only about itself, his own existence, his reproduction, having a home in your bodies. Ingenious in his mutations but limited in his goals. You fought hard against him, wearing masks, washing your hands every so often, keeping distance between you, inventing vaccines, haphazardly but with dedication and haste. I, on the other hand, have a much broader purpose, with the implicit consent of nature to carry it out.

I operate, as I said, by gradually reducing your organs. I don't focus on just one, I change from organ to organ, returning to the initial one and starting again, to make my detection and the development of an eventual solution on your part more difficult. I tend to focus on a few of the major organs: the liver, the heart, the lungs, the stomach, the pancreas, the spleen. The reduction is as if I were eating them at the edges and thus shrinking their size, although that is only an image. It would be more accurate to compare the result of each reduction with the way in which the Jíbaro Indians reduce heads: the head is whole, with all its parts, but smaller.

During the first cycles the organs adapt and continue to function with almost the same effectiveness. The symptoms are barely noticeable: a slight itching in an earlobe, an urge to pick at the navel to remove an imaginary piece of dust you think you have there, waking up with one side of your nose stuffed at night, a slight increase in sweating on your feet and hands. No one goes around having X-rays taken because an ear itched or one side of the nose got clogged up when while sleeping. It is only in the third reductive round of these organs when the nightmares begin. You begin to dream with spiders that crawl on your body with long and hairy legs, with scorpions in the bed, with heavy rats climbing up the legs, with thousands of cockroaches crawling on the floor. After several nights of nightmares, the discomfort first, then the pain: repetitive dizziness, increased stomach gas, constant need to urinate, soon followed by a sharp pain that punctures the body from the inside, a burning sensation as if a hot bullet were deposited in the lungs or liver, claws tearing the chest from the inside. Then it is too late to recover, there is no medical solution possible, and the suffering it’s so excruciating that it leaves no other practical remedy than suicide or euthanasia. If you insist on enduring the pain, I will finish you, with a final assault on the heart and the liver.

Silent, efficient, implacable, I am fulfilling my task: to reduce your kind.

Thus, your unescapable destiny is forged.

(A casa de Jorge)