I frowned. “What are we looking at?”
The entire screen was filled with pictures of Kelly. Kelly in elementary school. Kelly at what looked like her senior prom. Kelly holding up one end of a banner that read STOP SHARK FISHING in big yellow hand-painted letters. Pretty standard snapshots, the kind you’d find on anybody’s personal site or bias page.
Look again, prompted George, sounding exasperated.
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I looked again, and actually saw what I was looking at. “Holy… are all those pictures fakes?”
“Yes and no,” Alaric said, pulling up another set of pictures, including what looked like a still frame from an ATM’s security camera and a shot where she was clearly drunk and flipping off the camera. “They’re not really pictures of the Doc,” he nodded toward Kelly, “but they’re real pictures. The Monkey must’ve taken every picture of Mary on the entire Internet and somehow forced Kelly’s physical isometrics over them. Seamless transition. Add the paperwork I’m finding, and—”
“No one ever knows the difference,” Becks finished. “Slick.”
“I’m glad you all understand what the fuck that means, because I don’t,” I said sharply.
“Magic computer pictures make old Mary go bye-bye, put pretty new Mary instead. Now pretty new Mary not get shot by CDC for failure to be her own dead clone,” said Dave, in the lilting voice of a children’s teaching-blog host.
“Great. So you’ve got an ID that’s unbreakable as long as some chick in Canada doesn’t get homesick, a bunch of numbers I don’t understand, and a bunch of dead researchers. Oh, and folks like George are dying way too fast for anything short of a massive conspiracy. Okay, people, can anyone come up with a way to make this day any worse?”
That’s when everything started to happen at once.
The building’s siren began blaring almost at the instant that my phone started screaming with Mahir’s emergency ringtone. I smacked it without taking it out of my pocket, triggering my headset to pick it up. “We’re having a situation here, Mahir,” I snapped. I could see Dave and Alaric out of the corner of my eye, rushing through the effort of tearing down our gear. “Sirens just started going off. We don’t know why yet.”
“Yes, well, I bloody well do!” he shouted. “Your building’s surrounded, you’ve got no evac routes, and the civic authorities are declaring a state of general emergency through the surrounding cities! I don’t know how you’re supposed to do it, but you need to get the hell out of there, and you need to do it now!”
“Wait—Mahir, what the fuck are you talking about?” Becks started to say something. I held up a hand for quiet. It was already hard enough to hear Mahir over the siren.
“Good God, man, you mean you didn’t know?” Mahir managed to sound horrified and unsurprised at the same time. It was a nifty trick, but I didn’t have long to appreciate it; his next words took all the appreciation out of the world:
“There’s an outbreak in Oakland, Shaun. And you’re right in the fucking middle of it.”
The formation of the modern health-care system was an organic process, guided almost entirely by the stresses imposed by the Rising and by the panic of the general populace. Given the death rates at hospitals during the worst of the outbreak, it wasn’t a surprise that people would be afraid of them. Given thrisk of amplification, it wasn’t a surprise that people would need medical attention more than ever. The answer was complex, involving the restoration of house calls and private care, increased access to home medical technology… and the sudden semi-autonomy of the CDC and the World Health Organization. If they couldn’t do what needed to be done, when it was needed, there was the risk that none of us would live long enough to make a better choice about how things should be handled.
The CDC enjoys relative freedom from all ethical medical laws and local restrictions. The WHO enjoys absolute freedom in almost every nation in the world. Maybe it’s time we stopped and thought about that a little more.
—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, April 15, 2041
Five
I dropped my phone and lunged for the window, swearing. The sirens were making it difficult to focus on anything but the noise. Outbreak alarms are supposed to get your attention and make you focus on the problem at hand. They work well for the first, and not so much for the second. Behind me, Alaric and Becks were shouting at Dave to shut the damn thing off already, while he shouted at them to be quiet, he was trying, and they were making it harder for him to concentrate.