Thursday

They say you’re not supposed to sleep with a concussion, but invariably everyone has to sleep sometime. Katia said it was a slight concussion.

There were a couple of cots and some blankets in the fallout shelter.

You woke up on Thursday morning alone in the dimly lit room. There was no sunlight. You had no idea what time it was.

You found a light switch and the indirect fluorescent lights gave you some bearings.

On a desk was a laptop and a note:

I saved this for you Jody. You can’t save the world with a laptop, but it certainly can’t hurt. If you need wheels, the title is in the glove box. Good Luck, Katia

Next to the laptop was a plastic bag with various items you were well acquainted with from the last pandemic: masks, sanitizer, gloves, etcetera―just provided without explanation.

There were copies of the papers that had been on the conference table too. You recognized the key fob to Katia’s car on top.

You wanted to stay in the vault all day, but you knew Thor and Lightning would be waiting for breakfast. So you made your way out of the basement and headed over to Dr. Khan’s house.

You saw a van for Monterey County Animal Control pulling away as you approached Dr. Khan’s home.

The front gate was open, the front door was open too. You could see where Thor and Lightning had met the storm troopers. There was black plastic and some biohazard tape haphazardly littered about.

The clean out crew had been here too. You could see the markings of the casters for their bins had scored patterns in blood into the house and out to the curb as they cleared the contents of Dr. Khan’s home. They had taken papers, electronics and personal effects. Shelves were bare and his home office was now empty.

Whatever Dr. Khan, Mac and Sara had tried to do, it didn’t seem like it was going well. Or at least, it didn’t seem like they were doing it in secret anymore.

You had lost your guardian; you had lost your four-legged friends. And you were slowly coming to the realization that three of the people who recruited you weren’t doing good either.

You were back to square one. And the only reason you were still alive was because you were small.

You walked on the grass out of Dr. Khan’s compound and then headed back toward the institute.

At “work” (whatever the informal job you had been doing was) things had deteriorated rapidly overnight as well.

You had been using a personal account on a public code repository to manage the data, but your account had been suspended overnight without explanation. You began the process of appeal. There were a number of people who had forked your data repository, all their accounts were suspended too.

You could still pull your data down to your fresh laptop, but the account block made it so no one else could view your work. You couldn’t collaborate publicly like that anymore.

In the group chat, the tone had sharply deteriorated twelve hours ago. There were resignations being posted in comments from about nine o’clock last night onward.

There were a number of graduate students that had resigned or no-showed without explanation. About half had resigned citing online harassment or targeted personal threats. Of the hard cases that stayed, they noted a significant amount of friction getting any hospital administrator to speak to them or give official counts.

Beyond obvious threats and sabotage, some of the hospital systems with the highest exposure rates from Wednesday were no longer answering the phones for anyone, period.

It seemed like every facet of your data tracking project was disintegrating as you touched it on Thursday.

What had seemed like a seamless turnkey open collaboration the day prior was now a chilling series of ghostings, dropped lines and dead ends.

By the time five o’clock rolled around, you were looking at a forty percent reporting rate instead of the nearly hundred percent coverage from the day prior. It appeared many of the hospitals that did report counts were smaller rural systems that simply hadn’t been threatened to keep quiet, yet.

Of the epicenter cities, only a few hospitals in New York City kept reporting.

Despite a sixty percent drop in hospitals reporting, the total count of exposed healthcare professionals went up. There were now over 2,400 healthcare professionals exposed. Roughly extrapolating, that would put complete totals at over six thousand nationally. That would be a roughly four-fold increase from the day prior, but you had lost a lot of data sources. Given the size and distribution of hospitals that stopped reporting, you feared the truth could be even worse.

How could you be the only one seeing this?

You turned around and found a remote cabled to an anchor point on the console under the TV. You turned the TV on and skipped around with sources and channels until you found a few national news programs.

The news programs were all talking about something controversial a high profile person had said on social media. They were covering protests against occupation and messages leaders were posting to social media in support (or against) some violence or protests.

There was nothing on the television about hospitals or cases of a novel disease. There was nothing in online news sources. There was nothing on social media. You checked international news sources, but most of them had scaled back to reporting on protests or legal processes from afar when their reporters were targeted earlier in the year.

If you published counts of exposed healthcare professionals again for Thursday (somehow, somewhere new) the remaining hospitals still reporting would be targeted overnight and more would refuse to report by tomorrow.

Your remaining data collection collaborators would be targeted again overnight too. Without new recruits, you were likely going to have fewer helpers tomorrow… with harder work to do. There were people you didn’t know that had joined the group chat yesterday. You didn’t understand why people who weren’t contributing would want to join the chat, but you understood why they were there now.

Even without threats and sabotage, you expected there to be more hospitals not taking any phone calls tomorrow.

From the trajectory of the data, there were likely a number of hospitals near epicenters approaching a one hundred percent exposure rate for healthcare professionals.

Without vaccines, those hospitals would be closed in two weeks. Without vaccines, their fate might be sealed within hours in fact. When those hospitals closed and the public panicked and fled, the two week timer on all rural hospitals would start.

Given the trajectory of what you saw, you suddenly understood why Henderson’s guidelines for the highest impact incident weren’t really written with the expectation that hospitals would be treating the sick.

Henderson’s guidelines had assumed care would occur in the home or in community lead isolation centers. The guidelines themselves referred to non-existent guidelines, yet to be established. He said public health officials would need to establish protocols guiding at home care of individuals or for care at places established in the community, assuming hospitals would not be effective beyond a certain scale.

There were never going to be any hospitals for the big one.

You deny your conclusion and try to bargain one more time.

If you resisted, if you defiantly published data for a fourth day, you’d be marking those reporting hospitals and your collaborators for renewed targeting, which would eventually mean violence. They’d be harassed again overnight; fewer would cooperate tomorrow. Even if hospitals held on, without vaccines, weaponized strain or not, the math of the virus was fairly inevitable.

If you kept recording the data, even if hospitals wanted to report and people wanted to help you, without vaccines, in a matter of weeks there wouldn’t be anyone to answer the phone. The data would end.

You closed the laptop and moved it toward the middle of the conference table. Regardless of what you did, your data project was probably going to be over in a month. You could see the whole picture now.

You were only recording the initial trajectory of a genocide, a genocide that was long prepared for and well-organized, a genocide supported by well armed forces that did not want to be stopped. They had missed you in the first pass, but they would be back to stop you soon enough.

You understand why Khan’s team flew out on Tuesday. You understood why Katia had fled last night.

You stared at the whiteboard. You looked at the numbers Mac and Sara had drawn on Monday to record a few dozen hospitals.

Everything had deteriorated so quickly. These monsters were too big, too fast, too smart, too well prepared.

You all had lost.

There was nothing a dormouse could do to stop or even slow what was coming.

You were done.

So you did not commit your data or publish.

Instead you sat in silence in the conference room… thinking, until you heard a knock on the door frame.

“Is this nonproliferation?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Ahhh… nonproliferation is kind of over.” you said defeated.

“Are you Jody?”, the woman asked,

You turn to see a woman dressed in a work coverall holding a clipboard. You could see she had a pistol holstered under her jacket.

“Are you Alice?” you ask.

“My name is Flo. Were you waiting for Alice?” she said.

“Is that a gun?” you ask.

“I’m a licensed bonded courier. I’m licensed as a bodyguard too. It’s a legal registered firearm, Jody.” Flo said.

“Oh, well Francis didn’t … “ you said.

“Francis wasn’t strapped? vaxxed? masked? Francis didn’t believe in a lot of things.” Flo said coldly in the past tense.

Flo took a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to you.

“This is message from the Alliance of Like-minded Independent Cryptocurrency Experts. Can I give it to you?” She asked.

“I guess so?” you say.

You look down to see a short cryptic message. It didn’t really make sense.

“What does this mean?” you ask.

“It’s a website Jody. It’s a URL. It’s a publicly accessible webpage open to the world, anyone can view it with a computer or phone. You type it into an address bar of a browser.” Flo explains.

“May I take a picture of your hand holding the message Jody? As proof of delivery?”, Flo asks.

“I guess so.” you say.

She snaps a picture narrowly cropped on your hand and the message. And then flashes you the picture before sending it off.

“I assume Francis gave you a wallet with some seed money. Did you manage to keep that Jody?” Flo asked.

“We got attacked right after Francis made his delivery. They took everything.”

Flo looked down at the carpet of the conference room and took a few steps back before walking forward to pick something up off the floor.

She dropped the black card envelope from the Alliance on the conference table and pointed to it.

“Did you lose that Jody? The Alliance isn’t going to waste time on you if you can’t keep track of twelve words. You need to keep that like it’s valuable.” Flo said.

“Why do they want me to go to a website?” you ask.

“It’s a job Jody. It’s a job they think you can accomplish.” Flo said.

“Why would I work for a bunch of crypto bros?” you say,

“This is America. People can work for money Jody.” she says.

“But is crypto worth anything?” you ask.

“Do you know what a treasury market is? Or what is happening right now to your money? Do you even have any money Jody?” Flo asked.

“No. I don’t know. And I guess I don’t really have any money to lose I suppose.” you say.

“Do you work for Alice?” You ask.

“Well yes and no. Alice is not the Alliance. The Alliance works for Alice.” Flo explains.

“I don’t understand, is Alice like the head boss? Who is Alice?” You ask.

Flo chuckled, “Yeah, in a way, Alice is the boss of all the crypto nerds.”

“Alice is an idea.”

“Alice is the idea of a user that cryptographers, developers and gamers have been writing software for for fifty years. Alice represents a person that wants to do hard things. Alice is up against bad people that don’t want her to get what she wants. Alice needs software and cryptography to accomplish her goals safely. People who understand what Alice wants work for her; they try to build what she will need.”

Flo continues,

“Alice could be a girl or boy. Alice could be old or young. Alice is legion; Alice is everyone and no one.”

“Alice is like a princess in a castle we are trying to free with a flash light and morse code.”

“We are trying to free Alice with safe general computing.”

“Alice is a metaphor for all humanity, for all who strive for knowledge, connection and freedom.”

“So the Alliance of like-minded indy crypto nerds work for Alice, yes, which is a way to say they work for everyone and no one.” Flo says.

“I sometimes work for the Alliance, but I’m almost always working for Alice.” Flo finishes.

“Why does the Alliance want to hire me?” you ask.

“I don’t know exactly, but what good is a currency for the world if everyone in it is dead or a slave?” Flo asked.

“Given what is happening, most individual members of The Alliance will survive just fine, they’ll probably thrive in fact. They can shield themselves and their families atomically. But the Alliance needs Alice to survive, and Alice needs a community. And how to defend a community or a town in real life is outside the scope of what the Alliance normally does or can do quickly.” Flo explains.

“Having glanced at the job description, it seems the Alliance wants someone, or some group of people, to write protocols that communities can use to protect themselves in the face of what is coming. Protocols that can be adapted and owned at a grassroots level. They’d be rules that need to adapt faster and be more localized than a global monetary protocol. Some rules need to be immutable and other parts need to be flexible.” Flo said.

“I don’t think I can do that alone.” you say.

“You won’t Jody, Ministers are meeting in Japan, Korea and China. Europe is unifying in Brussels. In Africa, a message from Athens is being disseminated into hundreds of languages. The King is scheduled to address his commonwealth on Sunday.”

“We have been fighting this virus, this weapon, this war, for thousands of years. Many individuals have stood against it far more alone than you feel, with much much less at their disposal. We have won before and we will prevail again.”

Flo’s explanation is punctuated by the ring of a coin sound effect being flung into the air from her phone.

“Well Jody. It was nice to meet you. I’m not sure what the Alliance is doing betting so much on you, but they know a thing or two about math and long bets, so…” Flo trailed off as she walked toward the door.

“Good night and good luck Jody.” she said, and was gone.

You open your laptop and fire off a message in the group chat.

You explain the current status of the tracking project and why you’re stepping back. You make some recommendations if volunteers want to continue the project in a more secure fashion, and recommend some folks you know Mac and Sara trusted to lead in your place.

It was 5:56PM.

You stare at the whiteboard again to decompress and second guess your decision.

You were pondering in silence when an national alert went off on your phone.

The alert directed you to a live broadcast for an important message.

You turned the television back on.

The screen was full of brightly colored graphic AI slop, the kind you saw on classmates tictok feeds. This crap couldn’t possibly be it. And yet, those cheap graphics were on every channel.

On national broadcast television, you saw fake AI generated videos of the President doing various things: holding a trained bald eagle, driving a huge truck through crowds of zombies, directing troops into battle. It was a big flashy opening spread with flags and fireworks. It was like a graphics package that might be produced for a major sporting event, but it was all AI generated―poorly.

The voice over sounded like the leader, but you could tell from the vocabulary and cadence when they had words read by the “Dear Leader” AI.

“On Sunday August second, our great nation suffered a horrendous terrorist attack, the likes of which few people could imagine. The nuke was not just an attack on the great city of Chicago, but was part of a deep state conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. Tonight, we have assembled twenty five of the conspirators. They have been convicted of high treason against the United States.”

“The traitors include eight members of my own cabinet, four senators, three congressmen, five generals and five evil fear-mongering scientists that sought to destroy our booming economy. We have gathered them here tonight to bring them to justice and carry out their sentence before the American people.”

The canned music and generated voiceover stopped. The video switched abruptly to a live feed from the ballroom and a hot mic.

There was a conventionally produced professional graphic overlaid with the names and mugshots of all twenty-five people. They were all shown under the heading “PROVEN GUILTY” in red and black.

There were Dr. Khan, Mac, and Sara listed alongside a doctor from the CDC and another from USAMRIID.

The feed cut to a brightly lit outdoor stage. It was surrounded with screens saying “PROVEN GUILTY” and “TRAITORS”. There’s a sweeping pan of live closeups.

You hear an announcer say:

“Please rise for our national anthem.”

They couldn’t seem to find a professional singer for their last minute event. You could tell the people assembled on the stage were singing, but that feed couldn’t be heard through the broadcast.

Instead, the nation heard the confused ramblings on the hot mic. The open and stark juxtaposition between the cognitive function depicted in the state produced narrative and reality was now one of the most terrifying features of the propaganda.

“Yo say does that star spanger banner yet whale. ‘n it all belongs to me, pa pa ping, ba de da, pa paaaa POP!”

The End.

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