The Devil's Alphabet

“So TDS can be contagious?” the argo asked.

“Of course it is,” someone said in a loud voice. “We caught it, didn’t we?”

Paxton held up a hand to Lorraine, but the girl jumped down on her own.

Rhonda caught the eye of Chelsea Wilson, a charlie woman in her forties who was sitting in the third row. Chelsea lifted her hand and said, “Is there going to be a quarantine?”

Preisswerk looked at his boss. The Man from COPTER stood, started to speak.

“Louder!” someone shouted.

“I said, there are no current plans for quarantine.”

The room erupted in shouts and questions. Rhonda glanced at Deke. He was staring at the floor, frowning. She’d told him what the government people would say.

Rhonda stood and called for quiet. When she had the room back under control she said, “Dr. Markle, almost everybody in this room lived through the quarantine, and in the end there turned out to be no reason for it. I think the question they’re asking, what we’re all asking, is not whether you have plans for a quarantine, but whether you will guarantee that there won’t be one.”

He seemed to flinch at the word “guarantee.” “Mayor, I already said that there are no plans whatsoever for, for any kind of detention.”

Rhonda touched his arm. “Just say, ‘I promise, there will be no quarantine. Period.’”

He blinked at her.

“That’s all you’ve got to say.”

Markle addressed the crowd. “Let me assure you,” he said. And then louder, “I promise, there are no plans that I know of for any-”

He never finished the sentence. The charlies in the audience had jumped to their feet, followed by a few betas, everyone shouting and talking. Markle didn’t understand who he was talking to. These people had been quarantined before, and after the quarantine they saw their neighbors riot just because they wanted to go to the damn supermarket. They’d seen dead boys by the side of the road, and one of their girls raped, and the feds and the police hadn’t done a damn thing for them. They could smell weasel words at a hundred yards. Now they were sure the government was coming for them.

Deke and the Reverend Hooke rose to stand next to Rhonda. The reverend leaned close to her and said, “I hope you’re happy.”

Damn straight, she was happy. Her people were waking up.

It was nearly midnight before Rhonda shook the hand of the last visiting official, soothed the last constituent, begged off from the last reporter, and finally made her way down the hall to the teachers’ lounge. Deke sat on the floor with his arms around his knees. The Reverend Hooke and Dr. Fraelich sat at the largest table, holding Styrofoam coffee cups. The reverend, despite her masklike face, exuded impatience. Dr. Fraelich, looking more flushed than usual, had picked apart the rim of her cup and made a tiny snowdrift beside it.

“I thought they’d never leave,” Rhonda said by way of apology. She assessed the structural integrity of one of the thin plastic chairs, chose a marginally newer one next to it, and gingerly sat. “I suppose the doctor told y’all that I’d invited her to sit in on our conversation.”

“Is Mr. Sparks not coming?” Dr. Fraelich asked.

“Oh, this isn’t a town council meeting, hon,” Rhonda said.

The doctor smiled tightly. “The inner circle, then? The Star Chamber?”

“Call it the executive board,” the Reverend said.

The doctor glanced at Deke. “I didn’t know the town had one,” she said.

Rhonda chuckled. “Neither does Mr. Sparks. Don’t tell him, it’ll hurt his feelings.” She folded her hands on the table. “So. You speak their language, Doctor, and you’ve already had a run-in with the field team. What do you think they’re planning?”

“Run-in?” Deke asked.

“This morning, Eric Preisswerk and his team came to my office and started going through my records,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Everything they could get their hands on, paper or electronic.”

“That can’t be legal,” the reverend said. “Those are private medical records.”

“I don’t think they’re worried about lawsuits at the moment,” Rhonda said. To the doctor she said, “So will they find a link?”

The doctor shook her head. “I can’t believe they’d find something new. For thirteen years we’ve looked at all the usual causes and vectors-viral, bacteriological, toxicological-and come up with nothing.”

“So why is Preisswerk doing it?”

“I’ve known Eric for several years. He’s got to look for a standard link because that’s his job, but what he’s really working on is the quantum transmission theory.”

“This teleportation stuff?” Deke said. “But he was putting Rainy down about it.”

“Eric was being cautious because he was in public.”

“And because his boss was right there,” Rhonda said.

The doctor picked up the coffee cup again and pinched off a bit of Styrofoam. “Eric told me the CDC is taking the theory more seriously now. Ecuador is making them take it seriously.”

“So is TDS contagious or not?” the reverend asked. “If they think we can spread it, then they’re going to crack down.”

“It’s not that simple,” Dr. Fraelich said. “If the theory’s correct, and I don’t believe it is, then TDS is transmittable, but not in the way we normally think. Instead it’s-well, it’s too complicated to explain.”

“I think you better try,” Rhonda said.

“Tell them what you told me, Marla,” Deke said. “About quantum calculation, parallel universes.”

Dr. Fraelich exchanged a look with Deke-the doctor wasn’t enjoying this. She exhaled heavily. “Imagine that next to our universe there are millions of other universes. Trillions. Now imagine that in just one of them, some bacteria or virus figures out how to transmit its genetic instructions to the universe next door.”

“How?” the reverend asked.

“If a cell is isolated from measuring events, then-never mind, let’s just say it’s theoretically possible. The point is, the probability of that happening is very, very low, almost impossible, but not quite. Given enough alternate universes, it’s practically inevitable that one of them learns the trick.” Everyone regarded her blankly. The doctor smiled in frustration. “Okay, think of how land animals that evolved in one place end up on other continents, like new world monkeys migrating from Africa to South America. It’s too far for them to swim, obviously. But say a hurricane picks up a tree on the shore where a couple of monkeys are hanging on, and the tree gets blown into the right current, and somehow the monkeys run aground on an island before they die of starvation or thirst. Then a thousand years later it happens again, to their descendants, and they get blown to the next island, and the next. Eventually we get marmosets in South America.”

“Come on now,” the reverend said. “A hurricane, a tree, and not one but two monkeys…”

“Adam and Eve,” Deke said, a smile in his voice.

“Or just one pregnant female monkey,” Rhonda said.

“And then it happens again and again?” the reverend said.

“But that chain of events only has to happen once,” the doctor said. “Once in ten million years. We know it happened, or something equally improbable, because the monkeys weren’t there forty million years ago, and then they were.

“Now imagine what you could do with trillions of universes and millions of years. Just once, one virus has to figure out how to get to the next universe. Once that happens, the viruses ripple across many universes. The way quantum mechanics works, you’ll have a nearly infinite number of universes in which this has happened, and a nearly infinite number where this has never happened. We just happened to be in the haves.”

“I don’t believe this,” the reverend said. “That all this could happen by chance.”

The doctor bristled. “I’m not going to argue with you about whether this is an act of God.”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing,” the reverend said.

Rhonda rapped the table with the underside of one of her rings. “Ladies. It doesn’t matter whether God did it, or a virus, or quantum Santa Claus.”

“Of course it matters!” the reverend exclaimed.