“Well, we’re back,” Ilzee said, spreading out her arms, “and everything’s crazy. At this point, I’ve been telling Stewart we might just need to barricade ourselves inside the studio, and not just for our safety, but for yours too. There’s a wildfire of information coming out of all the usual places, and someone needs to sort through it, because most of the talking heads certainly aren’t. According to piping hot datasets fresh from the Institute for Public Policy at the University of Gekkōhama, when ranked in decreasing order of GDP per capita, a whopping 63%—63%!—of the top fifty countries in the world have yet to declare a state of national emergency following DAISHU Health’s announcement early yesterday morning that we’re now apparently in the middle of a pandemic. And the numbers only get worse when you look at industrial or industrializing nations! In certain quarters—such as in our very own United Prefectures of Trenton—threats of political violence have broken out against public officials for attempting to adhere to the DCC’s health guidelines. Look no further than Songard Prefecture; Governor Talberson has had to take shelter in Prefecture Capitol Building’s nuclear bunker because of repeated bomb threats against him and his administration for implementing lockdown protocols.”

Sighing, Ilzee let her head drop onto her hand, which she kept propped up by resting her elbow on the tabletop. She gazed back into the camera after clearing her throat. “Misinformation and disinformation go hand-in-hand with political violence as the last refuge of scoundrels. The whole world’s a hot mess right now, and for this to have any chance of a happy ending, we need to cultivate a relationship of bilateral trust between institutions and the public they serve. It’s astonishing that things are already looking as grim as they are, especially when we have a deep history of effective action and reaction to pandemics. Really, it’s as if everyone has magically forgotten about how to make coordinated national and international efforts to combat pandemic disease. The Darkpox of ’43; does that ring a bell, anyone? Representative George Seymour? Defense Minister Archie Dunker? Chief Minister Gant? Anyone?”

Ilzee shook her head and took a deep breath.

As media and market research showed time and again, in this country, political partisanship was a stronger predictor of individuals’ preferences than nearly any other metric. And, to that end, you could tell a lot about a person—arguably, too much—just by knowing which news channel(s) they watched. As the saying went, “When the Church stopped being news, the News became the Church.” And how right they were. The preachers of the church of news were its talking heads; the newscaster’s desk was its pulpit; every household across the nation was part of its cathedral, and its Convocations played out all day long, every day.

The church of news was more streamlined than its Lasseditic counterpart. It had only three main denominations: the triumvirate of NNN, CBN, and VOL. VOL would have the public believe that the journalists at CBN were the latter-day incarnation of the Sunbasked: depraved heretics who held the nation—no, the world—by puppet-strings, despite somehow also working in secret to destroy the very institutions and traditions that they supposedly controlled. While there was no doubt a part of me that would have loved to see some of their wilder claims come true—universal basic income, universal healthcare, and so on—the truth was far more moderate. To the extent to which CBN served as the mouthpiece of the post-Prelatory Trentonian Angelicals—of which I was a card-carrying (though inactive) member—it was mostly at the cultural level, reflecting changes in attitudes and norms that had propagated throughout the country at large. And while there was a small handful of talking heads on CBN who really did call for wholesale economic revolution, the bulk of the network was perfectly content with tacitly nudging the corporatist status quo in a more equitable direction. As for NNN, it was what I watched when my favorite talking-heads weren’t on, and most people agreed that, lately, they’d been trying too hard to “groove up” their public image.

“Of course,” Ilzee said, pyramiding her fingers, continuing her diatribe, “that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Plagues are truly apocalyptic events—and I mean that in the ancient sense. The root of the word apocalypse actually means to uncover or reveal. And in that sense, we’re in an apocalyptic moment. Beyond the socioeconomic damage it will inflict, and the death toll it will take, this plague reveals our politics’ dirty laundry. Our selfish tendencies, our wanton ignorance, our tolerance of the intolerable; all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out. And once we’ve opened that can of worms, not even the Moonlight Queen herself could bring back the lost, illusory sense of order, not without bloodshed, anyhow. And there’s no better example of this than the ongoing crisis down in Araka over Agricultural Reform, and, well… basically everything else. CBN’s Foreign Correspondent Lana Subhranehta has the story for us, live from Tinesh.”

Stab me, it’s worse than before!

When you grew up, as I did, with Elpeck nearly always in view, it became difficult to picture a city without a soaring skyline, but that was Tinesh. Heck, in a nutshell, that was most of Araka. The only structures adamant enough to rise above the mosaic of modern hovels and agèd were the sterling, skyscraper headquarters of the handful of agribusiness and chemical manufacturing conglomerates that DAISHU had yet to acquire. Back in the mosaic, time was stitched together in an odd quilt: here, clusters of outdated mini-marts, fan-cooled bungalows, and two-story buildings; there, ancient stone terraced housing, sett-paved bazaars, and verdant courtyards with the boughs of sacred trees.

Now, take that sight and ramrod through it half-magnetized concrete freeways which cast long shadows over the dusty roads that trundled underneath them, and then fill the whole mess to the brim with people and parked buses and RVs beside barbecue grills, all barely restrained by traffic barriers and flimsy anti-riot wall. Soak the people with fire hoses, try to stamp down turbans and raised fists and battalions of flags of a hundred and one different causes, here gold and brown—God and country; there gray and blue—mountains and sky; there again, green—fair compensation for the literal fruits of farmers’ labors. Do that, and you would have gotten pretty close to the situation as it had been a week and a half ago. To get to the present, throw in riot police in gas masks and riot gear, and shoot it full with ambulances, their sirens endlessly wailing.

And make everyone cough.

“These protesters aren’t going to let a plague stop them,” Ms. Subhranehta said. “The tens of thousands of demonstrators you can see here in Tinesh are just a drop in the bucket. Over half a million people in total have taken to the streets across Araka’s major cities. And, Ilzee, they’re about as far from one mind as you can get. The largest faction is a continuation of last month’s protests in response to proposed changes to agricultural laws, which would privatize the market and remove minimum income guarantees for farmers throughout the country. But other factions have been rising to prominence in recent days: government loyalists, in support of the Oligarchy; ethnic Biyadi émigré communities demanding a cessation to the hostilities with Dalus and immediate independence for the Borderlands; others have loyalties toward the national religious revival movement. All together, it’s as if half the continent is coming apart at the seams. And now, add NFP-20 to the mix.”

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The reporter stopped, keeling over in a coughing fit. Her ragged breaths buffeted against her microphone.

Off-screen, a voice screamed through a loudspeaker. “Sarabadi vejanta-la!”

Lana turned toward the sound with her hands raised. She shook her head. “We’re foreign media.”

“Sarabadi vejanta-la!”

“Foreign—”

—A glove-armored hand obstructed the lens and shoved the camera down to the ground, and then the feed cut to static.

“Lana?” Ilzee leaned in over the table. “Lana!?”

I couldn’t watch any more of this.

Groaning, I lurched up off the sofa and walked over to the wide-screen console, tapped the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and closed the TV app, disgusted with the world, and with myself for not having the fortitude to stare it in the face. That brought the console back to its desktop: an impossibly gorgeous autumn riverside scene. Flame-hued leaves carpeted an exotic, arched, woodwork bridge. Sunlight dappled on the water. But I couldn’t stomach its serenity, no matter how much I wanted to.

This was just Day One. What kinds of madness did the future have in store for me? If, as Ilzee said, all the poisons that lurk in the mud are going to hatch out, what would that mean for my country? For my family? For my friends and colleagues?

For myself?

I shuddered.

The lag affecting my movements hadn’t gone away. If anything, I was almost getting used to it—

—I exhaled sharply—

—And that terrified me.

There were many positive experiences I associated with Staff Lounge 3. Years of playing clarinet in it were almost certainly to blame. I think people failed to grasp just how important place was to the human mind. The architecture around us helped us carry key parts of the architectures of our psyche, parts we all too often took for granted.

I thought of all the people I’d seen on the news just now. All over the world, folks were taking action in response to the pandemic. And—leave it to me to feel this way, but—even with all that I’d done today, I still felt woefully inadequate.

I could still make it back to the house if I wanted to. Ordinarily, traffic should have begun to die down by now, but, peeking out through the curtains, I saw bumper-to-bumper traffic filling the streets in the city and the hills with rivers of light. No doubt some of the hospital’s employees were among them.

I’d checked the WeElMed app a little while ago; about two-thirds of our staff had chosen to stay put and spend the next few nights at the hospital, for safety’s sake. There were plenty of supplies and just as many lodgings.

I was almost certainly going to stay, myself, but I had yet to work up the courage to tell that to Pell and the kids.

I’d been planning on getting to sleep early—early to bed, early to rise, and all that—but now, how could I do that and keep my conscience clear?

I needed to do something. Right then and there, I should have gone back out to join the fight, to help people in need. But… would I really be giving it my all if I did? How could I? My mind was elsewhere—sometimes almost literally. How could I do a good job of helping others if I was consumed with doubts and worries about myself, and whatever it was that was happening inside me.

“Andalon? Please, Andalon, if you can hear me… please, can we talk?”

The only response was silence.

Clenching my fists, I turned around to face the table, staring at the water bottle for a seventh time.

I took a deep breath, only to let it out in a sigh.

If Andalon was somehow involved in this—and I was nearly certain that she was—I would have preferred to go through it with her at my side. Perhaps she might have been able to help. Or, at the very least, I would have felt less lonesome.

I sat down on the carpet by the edge of the table, fixing my gaze on the water bottle the whole time. In a moment of hesitation, I pressed my fingers onto the back of my neck, trying to feel out any… irregularities that might have been lurking in my flesh. But there weren’t.

For now.

I crossed my legs and let my hands rest in my lap.

“Am I really doing this?” I muttered, but then shook my head. “No, no. It’s better to be sure.”

What would I need to do?

Focus, I guess?

Isn’t that how powers usually worked in fiction?

Well, focus I did. I turned all my focus to the water bottle. My brow tensed. I forced my eyes to open as wide as possible. My hand trembled atop my knee.

As it often did when I was stressed, music filled my thoughts—specifically, the accelerando passage from Jared Hornsteene Sr.’s Tumble Waltz. Figurations in the strings sawed back and forth inside my brain, repeating over and over again, modulating up by a perfect fifth each time.

I shot an irritated thought at the water bottle.

Move!

…

Nothing happened—nothing outside my mind, anyhow. Inside, the sounds inside me rose higher and higher, higher than they ever went in the piece itself. It inundated me. I nearly started to hum it.

Tension swelled.

At that moment, I didn’t know which scared me more: the thought that I might have powers, or the thought that I didn’t.

One of my knees trembled like mad. My unblinking eyes began to water.

“Move!” I hissed.

Again, nothing happened.

Sighing, I let go of the sound-storm in my thoughts. I let my jaw unclench, only just realizing I’d been clenching it. In an instant, the music in my head fell silent.

I almost didn’t notice what happened next. I almost turned away from the subtle quiver in the air. A shimmer like translucent haze.

But there was no missing what happened after that.

Without a sound, an unseen force kicked the bottle off the table. The water bottle flew through the air, bounced off a cabinet, clattered onto the floor, rolled onto the carpet, bounced across the carpet, rolled off the carpet and came to a recoiling stop as it bumped the base of the sofa.

I watched the whole thing, following along with my eyes, even turning my head when the bottle passed me by on its trip across the carpet. I did a double take, and then crawled over to the sofa and reached out to grab the water bottle, squeezing it slightly to make sure it was real.

The music had gone out of me in a form like fabric, only woven from sound.

Can sound even be solid?

I didn’t know, but that was certainly what it felt like.

Once summoned, the fabric swept through the air and right into the water bottle, almost completely unseen, except for that subtle quivering. Despite this, somehow, I still saw it, but with my mind’s eye, not my physical eyes. It was more a feat of knowing than seeing. I “saw” in the same way that I saw my little girl's quizzical, yearning face buried beneath the stressed mask adolescence had put on her. I “heard” it the way I heard the memory of a mastered sonata playing between my ears. But this sensation was far more potent than either of them.

From a clinical perspective, I might have called it a migraine aura, only without the visual disturbances, or the mental distress. On another day, in a different frame of mind, in another life altogether, I might have called it a “sixth sense”.

It was also possible I was having a stroke, a transient ischemic attack, or even a cerebral aneurysm or hemorrhage.

I blinked, snorted, licked my molars, pronated my arms, scratched my head, and spoke my name, and other than the lag or the fact I was convinced I was dead, my nervous system seemed to be in perfect order.

So… no. It was not a stroke, nor any of the other stuff.

The plastic bottle clicked and clacked as my grip got a little too tight for it. I cursed softly.

“Oh fudge.”

Without a second thought, I picked up my fresh set of PPE—mask, visor, gown, and gloves—and darted out of the room, my heart in free-fall, a thousand feet per second.

I didn’t care what time it was.

I needed to get back to work.