Coronavirus log: "The art of being nothing more than a virus", In the blogiblag of April 15, 2020 (LJ © 2020).

Stephen Hawking* thought: "My subhuman condition can be summed up like this... All those who would obviously like to see me as a superman are mistaken. At best, I am a brain trapped in a skull.
 

For example, a child standing in front of me, eye to eye, swings me in the face:
_Mr Hawking, what is the universe?
_The universe is... a compression which explodes... an expansive wave... which opens up an enlarged space... at the speed of 300,000 km/s... Planets and stars are like sand and gravel in concrete... Black holes are points of absorption of excess energy... which burn the space-time framework... and rebalance gravitation... in primitive soup.
 

The boy stares at me, speechless, as if he had shaken hands with Michael Jordan.
 

Huh, huh... It amazes you... But this answer, I did not do it in a snap of my fingers... I typed it with the micro-movements of my thumb for more than 20 minutes on my tablet and I recorded it among a dozen other responses of my choice to be used for my interviews... I guess the content of my words exceeds the understanding of this young person but this is not my goal... It is simply to testify before the whole world that "I think therefore I am still alive".
 

Alas, I am getting old, my neurons are crystallizing, I get exhausted very quickly and I lose my concentration... This is why I have been using artificial intelligence applied to language since 2010 to assist me... I just have to type three words of any theme for a program using a predictive algorithm to compose a text of half a page in my style and with my favorite words... The best results obtained on the theme of God have been compiled in the form of a discussion to make it a book published under my name... the criticism was not kind to me... I also offered some so-called "scholarly" texts to serve as an introduction to works of my friends... Now, most often, I just type three letters at random and predictive writing makes me say anything... No, it's not really me because this program artificialises my comments, caricature me, perverts me... Worse still, my thinking is simplified to extreme and I become ordinary.
 

No more dreams of interplanetary travel... Today, I am reduced to being nothing more than a rag doll connected to a computer, my head crooked in an eternal grin... a puppet with which we cut the wires, collapsed into himself, the hollow chest and the too long legs which hang miserably on a wheelchair... Others men before me were "extinct" definitively because nobody cared to receive their good word.
 

That's why I want to be modest. The beginning of the end of my story is written in these words:
 

Singularity
Of humanity, I am no longer the alpha but the omega
Walled in my conscience, I do not predict the future like the Oracle of Delphi but I have some flashes

Thinking about it, I see myself as "the lowest common denominator" of the human species
In my nightmares I'm a talking tree, with a metallic voice, when we cut the forest
Am I the last representative of an endangered species, that of the great thinkers?
And it's amazing that I can still speak and that people listen to me carefully
I'm a star dust
Basically, I am the atom and the molecule 
Alive, I am the microbe and the protozoan
I am the yeast, the fungus, the paramecium
I am the bacteria and the virus essential for the skin and digestion
And in a thousand ways I'm essential to the renewal of life on Earth
By becoming a more complex association I am a man
Disabled, I left a name and a leaning smile
But I opened the cosmos to theorize it
And I offered my thoughts to all of humanity
In simpler terms, I popularized it...
I am... I was Stephen Hawking".
 

* Stephen William Hawking, British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford and died on March 14, 2018 in Cambridge.