Photographs are real. Digitised, they become bitmaps. The atom of the digitised photograph is the pixel. Zoom in on any digital photograph and there you will witness the bitmap. Choose, then, any pixel within that bitmap, and crop closely around that chosen pixel. Resize the resultant image of that single pixel to the original image dimensions. The resultant image is now made up of identical copies of that single pixel – another bitmap has just been born.
The pixel cannot annihilate itself (unless there happens to be a power cut). All it can do is make endless copies of itself.
Just like the virus.
The pixel cannot generate itself. Since all a pixel can do is make endless copies of itself, if it did have the capability of generating itself from scratch, all would be governed by The Same (the pixel knows no geometry; the pixel contains the same information).
The pixel depends on perturbations in reality.
The pixel must keep in tight sync with reality.