'Oskar Roberts,' the biology teacher shouted at me. I had fallen asleep in the middle of class. It was in the middle of second year when I fell asleep in class. 'Oscar Roberts, are you sleeping in my class?' I opened my wounded eyes as she called on me to name the picture on the projector.
'The first layer is the intestinal outer layer, then the intestinal mucosa and then the blood vessels.'
A little taken aback, she agreed with my statements and asked me what the purpose of the hairs in the outer layer of the intestine was. I didn't know, and she smiled. 'Next time you should read your homework more carefully,' she mocked me. 'Its function is to isolate bad bacteria. It limits all bad pathogens, except for certain types of parasites, because they can bore into it and get into the blood vessel.'
I travelled a few metres around the small intestine when the first good bacteria began to ingest the woman's food. They attracted it to the intestinal wall, which then flowed through. Good bacteria also came towards me, but they surrounded me so as not to damage the intestine. They also activated an inhibitory substance that was supposed to calm me down. But when they tried to do this, I moved my body back and forth and was able to attach to the intestinal wall.
While the good bacteria surrounded me again, I was able to drill through it with my teeth. I managed to destroy the layers. The longer I dug into the body, the more I could hear the woman's pulse. With the last bite, I opened my way into the blood vessel. I let myself be pulled in and promptly I was in my host's largest nutrient cycle. It takes seven to ten minutes for the wound to close up again and for white blood cells to attack me. For this reason, I flowed along the current.
More and more white blood cells gathered around me, like the bacteria in my stomach. But unlike the bacteria, the white blood cells formed specially trained antibodies against parasites. The immune system began its ubiquitous fight against pathogens. At first it stung, before gradually becoming more and more painful. I had only just arrived at the heart, which pumped me out again straight away. More and more white blood cells gathered around me and released more and more toxic poisons into my body. The longer I could go on, the more I couldn't bear it, so I tried harder to swim along the pulmonary vein. Just as the pain was numbing me more and more, I caught sight of my exit, the brain barrier.
I would shake my body in a crooked way so that the white blood cells would blow themselves up like a mine. When I had damaged most of the white blood cells, I drilled through the barrier and found myself in my host's brain. I felt my exhaustion, the pain along my body, so I dropped onto the brain. At the same time, my host dropped a glass on the floor. I lay on the surface of her brain and could hear her cursing. She grabbed the shards before going for a run outside in the heat. Completely paralysed, I could hear her heartbeat and her footsteps. By now I was feeling increasingly unwell, so I took a nap. Unnoticed, my tongue connected with her brain so that I too could feed off her synapses.