Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror

51 cops left the squad car. Eventually, carrying a weapon of any kind on the street was a death sentence, regardless of race. Even if you were defending your family from a horde of bloodvomiting cannibals, twitchy cops were as likely to shoot humans as they were Vectors. A little less than a week after the first victims got put down, even the short-term benefit of the “shoot first, ask never” policy started to wane. Cops are trained to shoot center mass; every urban morgue in the country suddenly became casualty central as the torpor ended. Don’t get me wrong: there was no win condition here. No police department in the world could hope to handle the volume of calls they received mid-Crash, and no one had been trained. They couldn’t cope with what they were seeing any more than the rest of us could, and they had to see the Blight first, unfiltered and raw. It’s hard to blame the ones that were derelict in their duty or turned the street into a free fire zone. Empathy makes the heroic stories all the more impressive. Many in law enforcement had backgrounds in the military, and a lot of jurisdictions were run by men and women used to getting the job done in spite of institutional groupthink. Many towns and cities became enclaves thanks to the efforts of officers that stopped denying what they were seeing: those were fucking zombies out there, and the movies had taught them what to do. They emptied the SWAT armories and went to war, buying valuable time for the uninfected to flee to the Recession or get to a safe zone. Basically, if someone claims to have survived being cop during the Crash, they’re a liar, a hero, a monster, or damned lucky. Healthcare In the movies, hospitals were the first to fall. In reality, they were some of the last. Vectors run too hot to make it to hospitals. Full transformation from a hot bite takes place in minutes, which is more than most response times can handle. Most of the time, paramedics arrived to find Vector and victims As an example, let’s say you’re a cop and you’ve just blown away an unarmed child. How do you spin that? Sure, the kid had been eating her mother’s neck, but teeth don’t warrant deadly force in the threat pyramid. How you going to get the press to believe that the Taser and pepper spray wouldn’t work? On a white pre-teen girl, no less? Or that Officer Johnson exhibited the same behavior after coming in contact with the assailant? Even your fellow cops aren’t going to be sympathetic when they find out the bullet that killed your partner came from your gun. It’s better to slap a drop piece into the girl’s hand and stash drugs in the house. Nobody wants to be the first to go up against a grand jury with the “she was a zombie” defense. For a couple of weeks, a lot of people that had never owned a gun suddenly had unregistered pistols in their dead hands. A surge of straightedge grandmas entered the criminal record listed as PCP addicts. Many officers died as heroes, slain in a hail of bullets matching the caliber of their partner’s gun. When patrols went missing entirely, along with the detectives sent to investigate their last known whereabouts? By that time, most precincts weren’t answering the phones. Ironically, a lot of bad cops actually stumbled backwards into fighting the infection. When Barney Fife saw some crazed asshole crying blood, he panicked and emptied a clip into it. Back then, that was 25-to-life in a federal prison. Meanwhile, the good officers were overwhelmingly more likely to get infected or die using nonlethal techniques. Super cops that managed to survive and apprehend the suspect did even more damage by dumping Vectors into holding cells or hospitals. The effect was that, the longer the Crash went on unacknowledged, true heroes died in droves and shitty cops got incentivized to be shittier. As the streets went mad, bad mistakes got rewarded with the gift of survival, and the cover-ups could be more and more flimsy the deeper into the shit we sank. The guns started to get drawn before

52 places that kept demanding proof of insurance right until the people they left to die outside turned and crashed the gates. There are a few documented cases where, once the building was secure, no one else came. The Romero Effect caused a lot of people to write medical care off as a deathtrap, and traffic patterns could sometimes keep random Vectors from the door. It’s these cases that really get me: imagine preparing for the pandemic, manning the battle stations, and then having no one come? Just silence and empty streets. Imagine sitting there, looking out the doors and listening to dead phone lines, knowing you’ll eventually have to venture out and see for yourself. The final determiner of whether a hospital made it to evacuation was whether or not they burned the dead. The bold few that said fuck propriety and threw slain Vectors into a burn pile usually went all the way. Those that started filling the morgue had a little less than a week after the first corpse went inside. Torpor can take as little as two days to revive a corpse into a shambling casualty, and most rational medical professionals couldn’t imagine the Blight curing death, no matter how many movies they’d seen. Other SocIal ServIces Firefighters got recruited to make up for the sudden paramedic shortage. Those left behind at the station house usually got eaten by the “survivors” of a rash of car crashes. By the time actual fires broke out due to neglect or improvised weaponry, all the volunteers were running for their lives and the professionals were dead. Entire cities began to slowly burn, one block at a time. True to form, commerce made things simultaneously better and worse. By the time of the Crash, the US had the worst employee sick leave and personal time policy amongst all the industrialized nations. A lot of desperate families careened into the parking lot of their closest camping superstores and mega-groceries to find the buildings fullyalready dead, already gone, or waiting to devour them. On the rare occasion some victims were still around and not yet turned, the ambulance rarely got back to the ER. Outbreaks locked in a high-speed vehicle usually took care of themselves. In urban areas, paramedics were all dead or missing long before even the police force called it quits. Most rural hospitals actually ended up running until the migration to the Recession; their response time was too slow and their paramedics figured out the score before it was too late. Either way, civilians that made it into hospitals usually had to get there on their own. A lot of these folks had secondary injuries incurred while fleeing or fighting, and boy did they have stories to tell. What happened next depended on numbers. If it was one or two assholes screaming about zombies, the Romero Effect assured they were dismissed as crazies. Once a dozen or so people independently verified symptoms, most doctors at least started calling around. When they found out the paramedics were all dropping off the face of the earth, the smart ones put the hospital on lockdown. The dumb ones kept thinking it was business as usual until the Vectors came crashing through the ER doors. Luckily, doctors tend towards the smart side of the spectrum. They called the CDC and started collecting data. They locked the doors. They requested police presence and, if the cops were still taking calls, they usually got it. At that point, too many variables came into play to generalize. If the hospital was old or built by some brutalist architect, it might survive by cordoning off wings and blocking limited windows. If it was new? Those lovely glass facades made the buildings about as secure as the inside of a blender. Sometimes, refugees would trail too many Vectors behind and overrun facilities. Operations with better triage and security managed to keep administering care until the medicine ran out or the lights died. There are stories of a few

53 MedIa No one exhibited and propagated the Romero Effect better than the media. If every so-called “journalist” burned in hell for their part in the Crash, I’d consider the injustice suffered by the few good ones the price of doing business. Economic incentives may have killed what little integrity journalism had left long before the first Vector, but individual human beings in those editing rooms and broadcast booths made moral choices that killed real goddamn people. To clarify, it’s not as if network news, radio, and online services failed to report on the Blight. On the contrary, they reported on every second of the Crash. They just didn’t change anything about how they did the job. If someone got mauled by a pack of cannibals, every click-bait traffic-monger on the internet smashed the caps-lock key and giggled as they typed “ZOMBIES!!!” for the headline. Just as they had tens-of-thousands of times before: every time someone got bit in a bar fight; every time a serial killer took cannibal trophies; every time a drug trip went bad. They wanted that motherfucking traffic, damn it, and they didn’t give a shit if the user was searching for dumb horror movies or trying to find an evac zone. Reporting actual events with terms that, up until that point, were purely fictional was standard operating procedure by the time the nightmare became real. By the time Vectors and casualties become deadly real, the average informed citizen was as likely to believe a headline with the z-word in it as the racist chainmail reposted by their grandparents. “Infotainment” had reached such saturation that the perpetually dying news industry no longer knew how to stop. The ad revenue for that brand of sensationalist bullshit had been in free fall for years, but the only people left standing in the industry intended to ride that ship until it sank. With all of us aboard. Blasting out news of the actual undead with the same schlocky tools of yesteryear wasn’t the only case of old narratives aiding the new staffed — their familiarity with facilities and inventory saved a lot of people. But while it was great if you worked in a gun store or easily defensible industrial complex, there wasn’t much comfort for those working hundreds of other professions. For every big box superstore destined to became an enclave, there were a dozen fast food joints demanding their workers leave the house and flood the area with Vector targets. Schools were an all-or-nothing affair. Either things had progressed far enough that administration cancelled on account of “flu,” or the Blight took the whole thing down at once. Believe it or not, the latter was actually preferable. Losing hundreds or thousands of children in an hour was enough to break even the most oblivious out of the denial phase of the Romero Effect. There are some interesting stats to suggest losing a school early in the outbreak could add as much as a week to a city’s lifespan. For less common social services, the all or nothing school scenario looked downright peachy in comparison. Homeless populations were some of the first to get infected, so shelters became hotbeds. The few remaining mental hospitals in existence hadn’t been decently funded in decades, so cops kept dropping off these bleeding “crazies” into buildings with paper-thin walls, under-trained staff, and no hope of survival. Prisons were fine so long as no one in general population suffered an emergence event. If not for that damned show, I imagine most correctional facilities would be enclaves today. As it was, everybody and their dog thought the local supermax would become their personal fortress. The guards could handle the inmates just fine, but not the thousands of desperate, armed families trying to break down the fence from the outside. Private and public correctional facilities became war zones, and the most severe loss was usually the same damn fence that made the place desirable.

54 without questioning the origins. We still see casualties wandering around wearing the remains of masks and make-up meant to make them look like zombies. Thousands were eaten while out in the woods, trying to scare folks like the stupid-ass “haunting clown” meme from pre-Ubiq web. Those that didn’t get killed in the process were actually more harmful; they’d document their pranks on social media and make the whole premise of the Blight seem that much more ridiculous. Then there were the outright trolls, half of who thought they were pranking the gullible with made-up zombie fiction. The other half knowingly spoofed evacuation orders and safe zone announcements so they could watch people get eaten for the lulz. The more serious things got — the more undeniably real — the faster the tide of misinformation multiplied. By the time no one could deny what was happening, everyone had lost someone close to the lies. The louder we screamed, the less intelligible things became. It would be wrong to say that the transfer of all broadcasting to the government under martial law didn’t improve things. Some smart folks in the administration stripped all genocide. When a cop couldn’t make some Vector shoot look clean, the media made it a race thing whenever possible. The guy may have eaten twenty people that then got up and had to be put down by an entire SWAT team, but dumbasses unable to tell fiction from reality paled in comparison to “righteous outrage” traffic. Was that rural hospital suspiciously fucking abandoned in mid-day? Or that school? Hand-wringing think pieces about post-millennials got more hits than fullblown mass disappearances. As always, I’m oversimplifying. Many a good journalist died trying to get the story, and a lot of people are alive today because of their warnings. But personal excellence couldn’t overcome the systemic corruption of the institution, a decades-old problem that practically begged to be ignored. It’s also not as if the public bears no responsibility. For every citizen journalist raising the alarm about the approaching apocalypse, there were a dozen assholes with ProGo cameras “locking and loading” for a zombie hunt. While those idiots streamed their own deaths, a completely different stripe of imbecile cynically traded on the memes

55 casualties there. For the Lost, these bloodless descriptions of an ongoing genocide were the last official communications they ever received. As they were deceived and abandoned, unwittingly recruited as decoys to save the powerful and the lucky streaming towards the Recession, the screams they heard outside their boarded-up homes became one more tic on the countdown. Dead loved ones became numbers, and their murderers shared the same column on the ledger. The vocabulary requirements grew less severe as the Recession government found its feet, but by then, no one in the Loss was listening. We already had to learn to live with our nightmares, and we couldn’t wait for a committee to give us the approved nomenclature. So if you were pissed off about your government abandoning you? You called them casualties out of spite. If you didn’t like the fact life had turned into a B-movie? You called them casualties to avoid the reminder. Or if you found being turned into a horror character absurd? Or loved living the trope? You called them casualties because the z-word was taboo. By the time the Takers came about, the term was cemented. “Taking casualties” became our literal profession. The government long ago went back to calling them zombies, and plenty of citizens only know them by that name. But out here in the Loss, saying “zombie” is a sure sign you’re a Bait-baby that watched the Crash from the safety of a smartphone. Maybe if I ever get to come back to the world, I’ll be able to call them “zombies” again without ironic derision. But until then, they’re never going to share the term I once used for bad make-up on worse actors. Casualties are real. They’re my loved ones and my victims. My demons and my ghosts. My employers and my oppressors — all rolled into one. “Casualties” is our word now. If the citizens of the Recession don’t like it, they’re welcome to come out here and take it back. reporting of everything save the bare facts. The crackdown on editorializing seen in lateCrash reporting made AP newswires look like teenage blog posts. It was bloodless, factual, necessary information, repeated every hour on the hour. It was also too late. “TakIng CasualtIes” I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but we are talking about the media. I suppose I should explain where the word “casualty” comes from. It feels weird even thinking about it. If this were the trope in the old movies, I wouldn’t have to explain why we don’t use the word “zombie”; it would just be accepted. And maybe that’s the real reason. Maybe we’re conforming to the genre conventions by which we are forced to survive. Casualty comes from the last few days of coverage before the old network completely failed. After all faith in the information industry had been lost, the newly nationalized broadcasts needed a way around the skepticism build up on the term “zombie.” It may have been evident by then that walking, cannibalistic corpses patrolled the streets, but they came in a confusing variety and were far from the only threat. People were being shot, starved, crushed by crashing vehicles, etc. If the response was going to work, the authorities didn’t have time to convince people they lived in a new reality. So new government censorship guidelines demanded zombies only be referred to tangentially. The policy demanded the information be reduced to its basest concept to prevent instilling more panic. So, when Reno was getting consumed and infected by the living dead, the news reported: “Reno is taking casualties.” When authorities would fortify and fight literal monsters, they were described as “clearing casualties.” The fact that dead people were getting up and eating folks stopped being mentioned entirely. The entire nightmare got boiled down to arithmetic: more casualties here, less

56 on. The fact that the entirety of North America isn’t a swarming graveyard right now is proof enough that a least a few saw the writing on the wall. Those same people, including President Punter up there, would have you believe they were just as overwhelmed as the average beat cop or ER nurse. They sell the lie that the nightmare of today is solely the result of their understandable confusion and God’s unpredictable wrath. They profit off the belief that this shitshow is the best case, and they trumpet it from every propaganda mouthpiece they have. Fuck that. Over half the country is abandoned. Not gone. Abandoned. Still out here, starving even as it’s eaten. Those fuckers dropped nukes, for Christ’s sake. No one slaps the red button and gets to say “Awww, shucks. It’s the best I could do.” ReactIon and PolIcy In President Hunter’s memoir, our former fearful leader writes, “Criticizing institutional reactions to the Crash is like blaming a figure skater for getting tackled by a linebacker on the ice. The rules of the game changed completely. The only strategy was improvisation, and the only victory was survival.” If we had nothing to rely on save mixed sports metaphors, that claim would be accurate enough. There was no framework for the Blight. Failures were inevitable, and any accusation of could’ve-done-better goes double for the civilian population. Myself included. But the Romero Effect didn’t catch everybody in denial. Climbing into the sphere of federal influence usually requires some degree of cunning, and a lot of very powerful people stopped fooling themselves very early

57 compartmentalized, mannequin-facsimile of a human being that thrives in such roles, and the middle management, jingoistic meat robots that get off taking orders from such authoritarian alphas. Hey... call me reductive and prejudiced all you like. I might soften my opinions if the critique comes from one of my peers here on the terrorist watch list. Until then, shut it. So, these uber-Deep State operatives are the kind of folks who see blood start flying and immediately open up a spreadsheet file. Years in the Loss might force that kind of detachment on a person, but these spooks were psychopaths before it was cool. From that distance, you start to see the Blight’s weaknesses... primarily because you’re already thinking about how you’d design it better. By the time it came to the hard choices, upper-level government figures had already been fully briefed on the Blight’s “life cycle.” They knew about the difference between Vectors and casualties. They also knew about the seconds-long eclipse phase between a hot bite and transformation. They could compare that to the days it took for a cold bite to kill somebody. They’d seen time-lapse video of a dozen Vectors euthanized and slowly wrapped in the Blight’s parasitic nerves, and they had over/under times for the average torpor between death and undeath. There’s debate as to whether or not the powers-that-be knew about latency, immunity, or blank bites at that point. If they did, they certainly decided not to tell anyone. At this point, if you’re the kind of ghoulish lizard person that can put yourself in the mindset of the Blight, you can start to see what’s now referred to as “the survival window.” Put simply, the Blight burns too hot to be an extinction-level pandemic. Much like Ebola, no one in their right mind goes anywhere near someone bleeding out the eyes. Unless a victim jumped on a plane, bus, or train seconds after being bitten, the disease couldn’t travel using any man-made If you want to believe the Crash government were true patriots or the saviors of humanity, go ahead. I won’t argue with the results. Extinction looked absolutely assured, but the US’s anti-Blight tactics saved part of the country and inspired other nations to save nearly half the world. I wouldn’t be alive today were it not for the actions of President Hunter. I readily acknowledge that. Just don’t call them fucking heroes. The actions taken to secure the Recession were not performed by humble folk summoned against their will by a call to greatness. Reality isn’t some bullshit DHQS propo blasted over the PA of a refugee camp. At best, they were patriotic serial killers — amiable psychopaths aimed in a useful direction. Some might go so far as to call them sin-eaters. When confronted with a choice between damnation or saving the species, they had the strength to make the choice. At a minimum, the sheer willpower required to make the calls has to be respected... but it’s not heroism. Heroes don’t retire under house arrest in their ancestral East Coast estates, protected by Secret Service until the federal pardon comes through. It’s one thing to have sympathy for the devil and mourn the tragic decisions that led to his fall. But believing he’s the hero? That’s the lie the Recession teaches as gospel, the lie that gets you damned too. The truth? Choices were made. Arguably necessary. Certainly monstrous. The SurvIval WIndow So let’s imagine the sort of person that’s in charge during the Crash. Imagination is going to have to suffice: between confidential documents, scapegoating, and general chaos, there are no more than a handful of people we can definitively place as shot-callers during the crisis. Luckily, it’s not hard to get a picture anyway. They were involved in the security services and military/industrial complex of the pre-Crash world. As such, we’re talking the sort of high-functioning,

58 of casualties, they had hours or days to hide the bite. When the Blight finally resurrected and went hot, they could be states away, causing an apocalyptic outbreak in a city where the chances of encountering a Vector had been negligible. Casualties were making spies out of desperate people who, just by trying to survive, carried the poison back to the nest. Without the cold strain? The Crash would have ended on its own. But with it? The emergence events would just keep cycling hot and cold until no one was left. That’s the survival window: the time between when the last Vector runs out of gas and the first casualty wakes from torpor. According to most experts, it’s 3–4 days. If you can deny the enemy fresh troops until it burns out — or at least keep new infections beneath the p-value — it gives you a little less than a week to get quarantine set up. Get the Vectors off the street and you buy yourself a week to save the world. Whereas actual human beings would have viewed the survival window as a final hope, the bloodless securocrats of the Hunter administration kept crunching numbers. Nationalist propaganda expects us to applaud them for coming to the conclusion that while saving the whole world was possible, it was a safer bet to save only some of it. The ImpossIbIlIty of Recovery The complexity of the math used to decide the US’s torpor strategy was on par with big data algorithms like Spawn and Cull. For the sake of example, let’s simplify. I’ll always round towards the best-case scenario... to emphasize how truly fucked the idea of reclamation really is. Let’s say LA (population: 4.5 million) was a total loss (it was): all infected. We’ll be nice and say the Blight was kind enough to infect and kill everyone at the exact same moment. There were only 2.5 million active duty and reserve US military personnel during the Crash, spread all over the globe. But let’s err on side of humanity and magically teleport means. And when Vectors did go hot inside evac transportation, the whole fucking thing usually crashed and killed everyone inside. Then, there was the Romero Effect, which was a net positive from a statistical perspective. No one out there believed you could be bitten and not infected. Everyone had been trained by the movies to think that immunity was a myth and latency was nothing save a new, worse form of undeath. Most people showing signs of infection were being put down ASAP. When the monsters don’t have a bus pass, there are predictable numbers to crunch. A fit human being can jog between 19–20 miles on glucose stores alone; 40–50 if burning fat stores. But Vectors don’t jog; they fucking sprint with the maximum intensity allowed by the human body. So you can cut those numbers by 50% across the board. This presumes the infected had an active gym membership on day one. If they were obese, like 65% of the American population? Then the math starts looking even better. Those numbers also presume that the remaining 25 miles radius goes in a straight line, but a Vector is as likely to chase the family pet as it is to attack an evacuation convoy. Food didn’t help either, as every mouthful of flesh a Vector tore off got metabolized by the Blight’s magic to make more sinew; no matter how much they ate, the infected began starving the second they turned. The statistical models suggested that emergence events in densely populated areas would pretty much assure 90–95% fatality, but the knockdown effects of being next door to a hot zone were greatly lessened. If City A went down completely, City B might be okay if they had 10 miles of distance and shutdown the roadways. Those numbers got even better if there were natural barriers like rivers and mountains. The problem was cold strain. Casualties were slow and easier to kill, but they were so much more insidious as infection risks. Not only was a victim more likely to escape a mob

59 lower when you account for headshots. Bestcase scenario, our 3.5 million headshots per hour require 11.5 million rounds fired... all without anyone getting bit or hit by friendly fire. The barrels of the sturdiest guns on Earth would melt before the first hour was through. What point am I trying to prove with all these statistics? I hate the Hunter administration for what they did. I believe we should all hate them. But I can hate them, and they can still have been right. These are not mutually exclusive conditions. Full reclamation can be impossible, unforgivable sins can be committed, and both can exist in the same universe. There is no comforting narrative here. They did what they had to do... and what they had to do was let us all die. The Recession can have its math, but the Loss gets to keep its hate. The Torpor Lockdown The plan sounds simple when divorced from logistics: get everyone off the street. Everyone. If every single person stayed indoors and out-of-sight, it would deny the Blight new victims. Of course, not everyone would listen and not everyone would have shelter or supplies capable of withstanding a Vector onslaught, but the ravenous nature of infected would convert the majority of that sub-group within the first day. From there, you’ve got another couple of days spent waiting for the freshly turned to die of dehydration and exposure. After that window, the only casualties on the street would be from the earliest outbreaks, the deniably small incidents in isolated geographical locations. The number of Cs that entered torpor before the infection graph went exponential would be laughably small compared to the Vectors on the streets during peak Crash, and the increase of Cs would follow a predictable pattern. That’s two or three days before the hordes of Cs get unmanageable — two or three days to establish new borders, blow bridges, and block roads. Would have been nice if they’d let us know... them to the valley the very second the last Vector enters torpor. Let’s also teleport the county’s entire annual production of ammunition (all 10 billion rounds) and hand-wave the fact we don’t have enough guns to shoot it, not to mention most of that ammunition isn’t compatible with what we have in armory. Focus on the positive. The average tooth-to-tail ratio of US military operations had fallen steadily in the years before the Crash. At the time of the lockdown, it would have taken 80 support soldiers to field 20 combat troops. Our effective force is down to 500,000 shooters now. They have three days — at best — to euthanize every last man, woman, and child in the city before their bodies get back to biting folks. We can ration 1000 soldiers for every square mile. They must execute 62,500 headshots an hour, not accounting time spent on food, sleep, or bathroom breaks. If they could manage that (and they didn’t), LA would be clear by the time the torpor ended... leaving only the rest of California. At 45 million, the kill-per-hour ratio would have to be 625,000-to-1, and we’d have only one shooter for every two square miles. But what we’re really looking at is three days to clear the entire country. The most conservative estimates place the Crash at something like a 50% fatality rate. That’s 162.5 million Cs that need to be cleared in three days... 2.25 million headshots per hour. A single shooter would have to cover eight square miles. But clearing the US in that time wouldn’t be enough; you’d also have to stop casualties from crossing the border from Canada and Mexico. At the same fatality rate, that’s another 95 million casualties. Now we’re up to 3.5 million headshots an hour, or seven kills per soldier per hour... assuming the shooter can single-handedly comb through 20 square miles. If torpor ends before we’re through? Our 500,000 brave super solders now have active targets. Accuracy against a moving enemy is going to drop to 30% at best, and probably

60 over an American flag image on TV. Oldnetwork internet traffic began rooting out of a homepage that was just a PDF of the text. Only two things were allowed to interrupt repetition of the Torpor Order. The first were the new, bloodless “casualty updates,” but that was more for troops on the ground than the civilian populace under house arrest. The only other respite from the announced curfew was the bloody, televised execution of anyone violating it. They dressed the shootings up as best they could. Most footage showed at least one Vector or casualty amongst the throngs of people being gunned down, but the message MartIal Law The first step in martial law was nationalizing all broadcast apparatuses. This went by with little or no objection from the media, most of whom had lost their spine decades ago. The few that were still online by the time troops rolled into the broadcast booth were just hopeful the nice men in jackboots might take them to their bunker. Those internet service providers still in operation were also commandeered, and Executive Order #28933 (colloquially known as “The Torpor Order”) began broadcasting on all frequencies. The same, creepy calm voice read it over and over on the radio. They ran the same audio

61 the infection. Most would be across the river before they realized the last part was bullshit. Meanwhile, the US had already lost multiple bases abroad to Blight events, especially in friendly countries. Forwardoperating bases in our half-dozen bush wars fared better due to fortifications already in place, and everyone was ordered to blow up anything they couldn’t pack and doubletime home. The evacuation convoys pouring in from the Western military bases merely kept up appearances and saved valuable equipment; the combat veterans were welcomed home to a more brutal task. Metro QuarantInes and Cleanses The eastern seaboard of the United States was far from clean. The number of emergence events occurring in the modern day Recession paled in comparison to those experienced by California alone, but it was enough to leave multiple urban centers hemorrhaging Vectors into the countryside. In instances like the Philadelphia outbreak, the density of the population threatened to turn everything from New York to Richmond into a wasteland, effectively gutting what little state power remained to enact the plan. That’s where the bush wars veterans came in. We really tested that “boots on the ground anywhere in 48 hours” thing the military was so proud of. It just so happened to be our ground. Logistically, Central Command shifted everything we had in the Middle East up to the surviving European bases for refueling, and then dumped troops into the heart of ongoing US outbreaks like dirt on a forest fire. On Monday, a private could be on patrol, dealing with this brand of “berserk” insurgent sabotaging the Iranian regime change. By Wednesday, that same kid would be shooting Vectors trying to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, firing artillery barrages at refugees fleeing up Interstate 76, or bombing Fort Lauderdale into paste. The loss of life, both civilian and military, was catastrophic. It would be many months before the cities would be declared clear was clear: no matter how bad it gets, do not leave the home. Anything outside catches a bullet or a bite, no exceptions. To be fair, there’s a lot of hard evidence now suggesting 99% of that footage was either taken from civilian Crash footage or staged by Army psyops. Frankly, there weren’t enough actual troops on the streets to field even half that many war crimes, but the Torpor Lockdown wouldn’t work if anyone thought otherwise. Enough had died that US Central Command knew that people labored under the illusion that they could outrun the Vectors and go save their loved ones. They expended a lot of resources to ensure those that violated curfew also had to believe they could outrun a bullet. Troop MobIlzatIon The secondary goal of broadcasting all those mass shootings was to give the public the impression that the government was in the streets. The narrative that the war was going well never had wings, but they could float the lie that the war was everywhere. A lot of people felt certain they’d be shot the second they opened the door. Those not shot would certainly be torn apart by Vectors. Only the latter half was true, but the double-fear kept folks in place. Meanwhile, troops were on the ground... and streaming East as fast as fucking possible. The standard operating procedures for most units when pulling into a new community was to shout the Torpor Order through a megaphone, pop-off a few rounds, and get the hell out of town. In their defense, most of these troops were National Guard or old reservists reenlisted under emergency stop-loss powers. They didn’t have a lot of time to question their orders, and those orders certainly didn’t read, “Abandon the poor bastards.” Most convoys had civilians in tow already — the families of the enlisted men and survivors from around the base. As far as the average soldier knew, they were pushing east to drop off their refugees, regroup, and mount an East-to-West campaign against

62 convoys fleeing east. The first capable unit crossing the river was tasked with mining and fortifying the bridge. These initial troops usually stayed behind to man the checkpoints and process the refugee payloads of further incoming convoys. Meanwhile, all subsequent soldiers and supplies were funneled north towards Chicago. Chicago had miraculously survived without any uncontained infection events, and the city became the defacto command center of the entire US strategy. The #1 priority needed to be the defense of the Des Plaines and Illinois River. Though where they met Lake Michigan proved an impossible moat, these two river ways remained vulnerable to casualty invasion at various places until joining with the Mississippi in Grafton. This left the armed forces with some 200 miles worth of fortifications to build, mine, and guard. Furthermore, civilian presence near any such fortifications would risk the integrity of the line once the real strategy behind the Torpor Lockdown was learned. As such, the command was also tasked with evacuating North Chicago and every other major population center along the Illinois. It was one of the most hasty and admirable military actions in US history. Suffice it to say, wherever government psyops were still broadcasting “official” news, plenty of Chicago footage got thrown into the updates. The huddled lines of refugees didn’t look happy, but people moved in orderly lines through city streets that were slowly morphing into castle battlements. It looked like hope, and even to the cynical, it looked like the nation cared for its people. They were making sure no one could jam their foot in the door as they slammed it shut. OperatIon UtIlIty Many things could have sabotaged the entire operation. It was a hopeless roll of the dice that, if it failed, would have crippled the last US resources. If you can ascribe courage to the Hunter administration (you can’t, but they’re damn well going to pay historians to and some have yet to be rebuilt, but the primary goal was achieved: containment. By throwing everything they had at comparatively few infection sources, the Eastern US was improving. The Blight was blocked off from the Atlantic. The Gulf of Mexico kept them safe from the South, especially with the Coast Guard’s orders to blow any vessel out of the water on sight. Barring another emergence event that only left the border with Canada and the Mississippi. If the dead could be blocked from passing there, the Recession could let the rest of the world eat itself. EstablIshment of the MIssIssIppI LIne One of the few things the CDC had managed to figure out was that Blight effectively drowns. The pacing and control required to swim long distances remained beyond most Vectors. Once drowned, corpses would enter torpor and travel with the current. The Blight has some sort of devastating effect on human gut flora, so bloating rarely occurs in the bodies of the infected. This means Blight victims sink, and even once they are resurrected into casualties, the confusing stimulus of deep water keeps them wandering in circles until tissue saturation rips the bodies asunder. Most helpful of all, pure Blight is apparently much denser than water; it would consistently sink. This meant that tearing a casualty apart on a riverbed or ocean floor left little chance of infecting the water supply. With that in mind, the Mississippi River had been chosen as the last line of defense against the Blight. At over 2,500 miles long, no manmade barricade could ever hope to rival the river’s scope. The majority of its length spreads over a mile wide, with the widest sections stretching nearly 11 miles. The bridges could be blown. Protecting the few areas narrow enough for a casualty to cross would mean defending a mere 200 miles of frontier, leaving the river itself to defend a distance half the length of the Great Wall. The majority of the work establishing the Mississippi Line was performed by the

63 established beachheads and defended members of the Navel Construction Battalion and Army Corps of Engineers as they shuttered government projects and automated dams. They cut their way through entire states gone Vector, mothballing reactors with a pet team of Nuclear Regulatory Committee experts. They fought running wars through infected cities, trying to rescue VIPs identified in the Continuation of Government plan. For obvious reasons, I’m normally not one to wave the flag, but if you want to get your nationalism on for something that happened during the Crash, I’ll join you in heroworshipping most of these guys and gals. The amount of shit these people fought through cannot be overstated; we’re talking Vector outbreaks in the tens of thousands. They completed jobs that would make the most badass crew of Takers look fucking quaint by comparison, often while escorting civilians through the most alien, hostile environments imaginable. Most importantly, Utility actually saved people. It secured the Loss instead of ensuring its isolation. Thousands would be drowned or microwaved today were it not for try), it would be hooked on the unmitigated gall of the strategy. Some things couldn’t rely on luck, though. For starters, there were numerous pieces of infrastructure that couldn’t be shut down simply by hanging up a “Gone Fishin’” sign. Nuclear reactors couldn’t be abandoned unless the government wanted to return to an irradiated hellscape. If dams started bursting, the flooding would drive people from their homes and into the Blight’s awaiting jaws, negating the purpose of the lockdown. Even beyond the disasters resulting from neglected infrastructure, there was shit the powersthat-be just couldn’t bear to leave behind. NORAD comes foremost to mind, as its troops remain a persistent pain in the ass for every Moth in Colorado, but there were plenty of other cases. Great minds — especially in the biological sciences — had to be plucked from the doomed masses. Military bases responsible for drone piloting had to remain behind for air support and reconnaissance until suitable replacements could be erected behind the border. Most importantly, satellite communications had to be maintained if they were going to pull off the single most significant logistical repositioning in history. This is where Operation Utility came in, which evidence suggests went into effect almost a week before the declaration of martial law... maybe even earlier. Utility was the codename for a Joint Special Operations Command project executed by the USA’s professional badasses: Seals, Rangers, Delta, Raiders, Special Tactics Squadron, Special Activities Division, etc. They even conscripted the CIA’s preferred mercenary armies — sorry, “security contractors” — and scooped up every member of Strategic Forecasting Inc. they could rescue out of Austin. Basically, every deep-state spook and grizzled operator in the world got pulled off whatever extrajudicial political assassination they’d been working on and put on Utility. Each special unit was charged with escorting experts that needed to get somewhere and flip a switch. They Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate 'war, pestilence, and famine,’ than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun. -Ulysses S. Grant

64 know, being eaten by their own people. But the counter-hacking priorities were thrown out pretty much the second the brass got off the radio. The other half of the USCC’s work was actually vital to the evacuation. If the military couldn’t keep their communication structure together, the country would fall apart. The Raiders’ primary objective was to get the nerds into the command centers of various abandoned military bases and make sure the network stayed up. Easier said than done. The task force’s first target was a base the local civilians had tried to fortify once they saw the troops pull out. They’d failed in a big way, and the entire complex had gone Vector shortly before Utility rolled in. By the time the gunfire stopped, the company had dwindled down to two platoons. As they finally secured the fences and got underway, the power grid failed. This meant nearly 100 soldiers had died to secure communications for four more days, which is all the gas they had for the generators. There were twenty more targets on their list. Traitor took command after his CO took a bite and bit the bullet. “Traitor” obviously isn’t his real name — not all the Moths need be as publicly reviled as myself. The realization that this shit wasn’t going to work spread quickly through the demoralized ranks. Soldiers started debating desertion vs. Charge-of-the-Light Brigade, and the newly shaken command structure threatened to fall into mutiny. Traitor was desperately trying to get ahold of HQ for more orders when he finally got a communication: a text from his daughter, pinging the Ubiq Specs forgotten in his backpack. While my coworkers and I huddled in a janitor’s closet, Ubiq was still up and running. The DAO was by no means healthy, but as power grids failed and bandwidth usage fluctuated widely, the algorithm tried its best to keep the stratostructure working. Ubiq users could still access the internet archives stored on the servers powered by UCity’s geothermal plant, they could get on the few Utility teams. Atrocities and mismanagement happened, sure, but reports were rare and conflicting... unlike later massacres at the border. A lot of Utility teams died in battle. Each unit had a prioritized list of targets that would have been impossible to complete in the best of times, not to mention when the radio went dead and supplies stopped coming. Many pressed on anyway, ticking items off the list until they were consumed. Some even survived the whole ordeal and stayed behind, keeping up the good fight. Utility members ended up founding enclaves. They helped create the Moths or went full Rebel. Some even joined the Believers. I know at least one Shepherd whose kill count before conversion hit four digits. Some of Black Math’s most faithful are former operators that have been on the purge for nearly six years. They are the veterans of mankind’s war against monsters, and many that survived are Lost, just like the rest of us. Obviously, I’m biased. A big part of my crew is made up of Utility vets. I’d be dead without them. Securing Ubiq City became one of the operation’s biggest priorities... before I ended up turning it into their biggest mistake. CommandeerIng UbIq JSOC was smart enough to give field command a lot of autonomy. The US suffered from a shortage of super-soldiers even before the Crash, and the problem only got worse as the Blight started slaughtering them. As such, the list of targets was nonnegotiable, but priority could be reshuffled based on the tactical situation. That’s how Operation Utility came to Ubiq. A company of Marine Raiders drew the short straw; they got stuck escorting a bunch high-ranking technicians from the United States Cyber Command. Why would JSOC throw the IT nerds into the mix? Partly out of old school, military industrial complex paranoia. They were afraid China and Russia were exploiting the Blight to hack our networks rather than worrying about, you

65 was never going to happen, but it wasn’t part of their official orders. Even among those that managed to piece together the fact that reclamation was less likely than the rapture, nobody said shit. The families of Operation Utility soldiers had been guaranteed evacuation to a safe zone. After all, how else would the brass ensure everyone reported for duty when the temptation to go AWOL was so strong? Nobody in Utility knew much beyond their next objective, and those too smart for their own good kept quiet lest some National Guard unit forgot to pick up their kids. No one knew they were going to nuke Canada. No one. If I could have dipped my brain in the cold, inky black pool of Crash logic and let it soak, all it would’ve taken to guess the plan was staring at a map. Look at the USA. Take a red marker. Start at Lake Michigan and trace down through the Mississippi. Connect the line to the Gulf of Mexico and use the Atlantic to complete nature’s greatest moat. Mexico’s Blight problems might be cut off, but what about the North? What about New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine? Canada had plenty of Blight problems all their own, and runs on the border were inevitable. All it would take was one hidden bite on a refugee. One infected boat floating across Lake Ontario. One loose Vector in the wrong city. It could unravel the entire plan. If it didn’t doom the human race, it would certainly spell the end of America, and we know which of those two Hunter’s cronies valued more. I bitch a lot about being in the Loss, but I’m always grateful I’m in the part of the map they cut off instead of the part they set on fire. Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Saint-Jeansur Richelieu, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, Niagara Falls — they dropped low-yield nukes on them all. A line of fire was drawn from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River to Detroit. Where it got close to the US border, they dropped honking big MOABs instead of nuclear weapons, but “close” is a pretty relative term when picking your flavor of vaporization. nodes the old network could still power, and everyone could talk to fellow Ubiq users. The limited AI wouldn’t keep the system running indefinitely, but the Stratostructure remained literally above it all. Traitor realized that if his team could take back Ubiq, the military could keep communicating through anything, even if they had to steal Specs off dead civilians and hand crank battery chargers. Furthermore, it would let segments of the civilian population keep coordinating with each other, reducing casualties overall. So that’s how I met Traitor. Before he decapitated the casualties outside, I’d been contemplating drinking some bleach to make it quick. But he pulls me and the other cafeteria survivors out of there and tells me he’s rescued a few dozen more Ubiq employees on the way through town. He’s got to finish locking down the corporate campus; can I get the network back to full capacity? I told him I’d do anything if he’d shoot open the lock on a vending machine. One round of 5.56 and a dozen granola bars later, I was back on the job. Before he went off to secure the perimeter fence, Traitor informed his Cyber Command spooks that they now worked for Ubiq. I knew Palbicke’s tech, so I was in charge. It was an act of treason. Actual treason. Our operating system may have been firmware locked, but we were by no means encrypted for military traffic. We all tried to tell him this, but he shut us up quick. The infected were the enemy, he said, and they’d all forgotten their passwords. There was no need to worry about security. Humanity was united in this fight. If I had to pick my biggest regret from the Crash, it would be how badly I proved my friend wrong. PreemptIve GenocIde The “special” in Special Forces implies that operators like Traitor knew the score, but if Traitor could bring himself to talk about his service, he’d tell you that just wasn’t the case. It’s true that JSOC soldiers were in a better position to guess the western offensive

66 been seen past Winnipeg. We could have tried to cooperate with the Canadian military. I’ve read contingency plans where we collectively held the line at Red Rock or established a population buffer zone between Moosonee and Sault St. Marie. As plans go, they weren’t any crazier than Operation Utility or the Torpor Lockdown. But they were just as risky, and I guess Hunter felt they’d pushed their luck too far already. Anybody not fortifying Chicago worked to transport, by land, as much of the Naval Fleet as we could fit into the Great Lakes. Mackinaw City, Port Austin, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester — if a terrified Canadian might cross the border there, the city got bombed lifeless and replaced with a fortress. If it Blight doesn’t die under radiation, but something in it does stop being able to animate dead flesh after heavy exposure. Officially, the dirtiness of the bombs was selected as the bare minimum required to assure the radioactive moat held back the “massive influx of Canadian infected.” But, officially, a lot of bullshit gets thrown when talking about the Preemptive Genocide. I doubt the CDC radiation experiments got underway until well after the Crash, but you’d lie too if you’d just killed millions of your closest allies. The truth is that there was no tide of infection descending from the North. Canada had been hit in the West, just like us. Vancouver may have been doomed, but the light population density meant Vectors hadn’t

67 “The Border Offensive,” as Recession assholes would like you to call it, is the greatest ecological disaster in history. Cancer rates have tripled in areas served by the affected water tables. If reclamation ever does occur, it can only do so if we conquer the allies we abandoned to the South and those we murdered in the North. Otherwise, if the Canadians re-establish control and remain sovereign? The day the Blight ends is the day we start a war that’s going to make the Palestinians and Israelis look like besties. floated, we sunk it. If it flew, we shot it down. This isn’t to say no refugees escaped. Canadian insurgency and terrorism remains one of the Recession’s greatest security concerns, and it serves the bastards right. Members of Parliament survive nomadically, west of the radiation moat, and jealously guard their claims to legitimate state power. Any resource they don’t require for survival gets funneled towards righteous revenge. But as much as it pains me to say, Hunter’s plan worked. Those casualties that wandered East didn’t find anybody left alive to infect. If they shambled towards the border, the Blight either burned in the fallout or got lost with nothing but ash outlines to chase. What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing- -permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. -Howard Zinn

68 Shit... I don’t know how to talk about this. If you already know the truth, you don’t need to read this. If you don’t? The Recession spends millions each year trying to make what I have to say next sound like bullshit. Their continued existence hinges upon it. So how do I... Look, I’m not stupid, alright? I run an entire city-state that provides 75% of the entire world’s internet. On a daily basis, I extort my own survival from a country entirely dedicated to seeing me dead. I’m a capable lady. That said, the Whisper was not my best day. I hadn’t more than a few hours sleep in over a week. I was starved and dehydrated. I’d seen most of my friends ripped apart in close succession, and turning on the networks again gave me a front row seat to the worldwide slaughterhouse. Put simply, here’s what happened: Traitor threw me out of my shock and back into work. Retreat Becomes RecessIon After the sun rose in the north, the remainder of the plan was simple: wait for the last few surviving convoys and Utility teams to get across the line, then blow the bridges before the bulk of the casualties left torpor. Each unit would receive an order to blow its specific bridge under the guise of some inscrutable strategic consideration; nobody was told every other unit would receive the same order at the same time. There would be some outrage from the populace, but relief from the animal fear that had gripped people for weeks was a hell of a sedative. The Hunter administration didn’t anticipate too much resistance from the exhausted eastern populace, and by the time everybody else realized they’d been left? It’d be too late. It’s at this point history turns into memoir... because I fucked all that up.

69 Gnat’s WhIsper I should actually say what the Whisper is, huh? Sorry. It’s weird to write as if people don’t know, but that’s the nature of history. The remaining staff and the Cybercommados were busy trying to whip the DAO back into shape. Our AI had robust programming, but a tide of statistical anomalies jammed up the works. Our “crunch” servers hooked into the old cable network failed as the grid went dark. Meanwhile, peak usage was hammering the system all over the world as people talked about the Crash. Until that point, the DAO had stayed online by block-chaining traffic onto the Aloft servers floating above areas of curiously low traffic. But the DAO couldn’t understand the logic behind these huge spikes and valleys in traffic, so its resource allocation was far from optimal. The algorithm didn’t know that the only thing keeping the internet I saw something curious in the system. The engineer’s instinct kicked in, and I traced the anomaly to the source. What I discovered was wrong — evil, even — so I fixed it. On that fateful day, my thought process went no deeper. This is wrong; fix it. I don’t regret what I did, but don’t you dare buy that DHQS bullshit about the Whisper being my “master plan.” Everything shitty about your life is not the result of my Machiavellian scheme. I didn’t seize some opportunity to make myself a queen; I just reacted, like we all were back in those days. It was a decision made from my soul, not some fucking government spreadsheet. Nobody could’ve predicted what happened next, least of all me. The Whisper was an animal reflex during the worst moment in my life. Ultimately, it helped more than it hurt. But my condemnation of Hunter cuts both ways; the right choice isn’t always the good one.

70 the in-house OS really sluggish, so I used time in-between lagging security vetting to start cleaning up the network optimization. And, finally, I kept collecting 404s in another browser, as I tried to see if my parents and boyfriend had been eaten. In the middle of all this, I start to think I’ve crashed the whole stratostructure. In Canadian airspace, I start getting these weird signal interference codes I’d never seen before. They coincide with these insane spikes in traffic from population centers further West, until those servers freak out with interference as well, and the whole usage rate drops to zero. So I open the ad-sniffers, start spying on traffic for common terms: the top three are “nuke,” “God,” and “pray.” Second only to the victims, I had the clearest view of the genocide. I watched the bombs hit in real time, long before any sanitation and spin. I’m slipping back into shock when another window pops up. This is a program I’ve never seen before, telling me someone is accessing a “targeted” IP. I check it. It’s a known NSA address, and the person talking to them is one of the cybercommandos I’d just given privileges. Later, I would realize Palbicke conning the cable monopolies had made him unpopular with a major portion of the cybersecurity industry. Add in the fact that we had data from people in “Great Firewalled” enemy nations using Ubiq to undermine regimes? The boss had been justifiably paranoid about spies both private and public... to the point he’d wormed spyware into everything in the building. So I get a first-hand look at keylogs as this spook reports to his bosses. They’d taken Ubiq: time to use it to open up communications with Operation Utility teams. The higher-ups are not happy about this. Go out and die for a secure line, they order. Spook makes it clear that’s not going to happen; just send him an encryption packet instead. He’ll wire it via satellite to the guys they left back at the one military base they actually managed to reclaim. They can get screaming was the bandwidth freed up by all the dead users. Our first task was to “teach” this information to the program so it didn’t overload the network. From a purely hardware perspective, the Stratostructure was over-engineered for its users by about 60% after all the casualties, but we had to stop errors in the procedurally generated reprogramming from piling up or they would “self-correct” the whole network into failure. Which is to say I was deep-diving Ubiq’s DAO code in a way I’d never been allowed to before. The terminal I was on belonged to my boss’s boss’s boss, and we’d have been screwed if the dumbshit hadn’t written his passwords on the bottom of his desk blotter. On one tab, I passed out admin privileges to spooks as fast as possible. In another, I was promoting the security clearance of any programmer still left alive. The only way I could figure out how to help Traitor secure the perimeter fast enough was to somehow reverse the master unlock code sent by the fire alarm, so I was trying to hack our alarm system at the same time. Waking up all our sleeping systems, along with the trash code the DAO had added in our absence, made That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. -Noam Chomsky

71 the cypher to everyone in the field, and then government chatter can switch over to this newly nationalized network. There’s a pause. Then a file drops into the spook’s inbox. With a click of the button, I can install the encryption too. What would you have done? It wasn’t a master hack. People were scared and tired. They started cutting corners. All I had to do was click a link. Over the six hours, I’m “briefed” a half dozen times by these cybercommando spooks. They make me sign “official secrecy forms” they’d hastily drafted minutes earlier on my computers. They lie about a “Canadian invasion” that had to be stopped with extreme measures and tell me to ignore the news. They ask me questions about the network architecture and how to do this or that. The whole time, I nod and pretend to answer. Meanwhile, I’m keeping one eye on my Specs feed, looking at the troop locations of everyone on the continent, noticing all of the blue dots heading East really fast. Out of the corner of my eye, I’m reading the cover stories this fucking Lieutenant is currently reading to me as they’re being written. I’m seeing their plans to lock the employees out of the network entirely: plans for a “specialized unit to rendition civilian personnel after securing the network.” Then power outages start in the Recession, backup generators start running out of gas. The brass, in their idiocy, starts using Ubiq to talk not just to the Utility teams, but to each other. Their plans are at a pivotal stage, after all, and they can’t afford to lose touch now. At this point, I’ve spent all day building virtual networks and turning them into accessibility cages for these Cybercommand assholes. Everything they do affects the Ubiq simulation housed in our on-site servers only, but I’ve completely locked them out of altering the stratostructure and DAO. As they continue to chat with each other about how they’re going to convince Traitor to line me up against a wall, they keep routing these emails and phone calls between members of the Hunter Gnat’s WhIsper TranscrIpt The government is lying to you. Rescue is not coming. Ever. Those things - their “casualties” - are waking up. They are going to leave you to them. Their troops have taken over Ubiq, and they are using it to coordinate your abandonment to the monsters. While you are being eaten, they will flee to safety. Click the link. Read for yourself. Or don’t. They will assume you know now, either way, and they will kill you all the faster for it. Attention all members of the Armed Services: If you are West of the Mississippi, they are not going to evacuate you. They have not evacuated your families. Your loved ones are still trapped, or they are dead. This was always a suicide mission, but your children are on it with you. If you are in the East, know that Hunter plans to blow the bridges in a few hours. After reading this, he will try immediately. Understand what pressing that button really means. I beg you to do what is right instead of what is ordered. It may be mutiny, but your officers are paper tigers. No one will be coming to shoot you for treason; they cannot afford the bullet. If you’re in control of a bridge, you are now responsible for the lives of everyone in the West. You cannot say you were just following orders. For Everyone Else: if you’re too far West, find someplace safe. Find like-minded people. Hide behind sturdy walls. Get essentials and hole up. Work together. The only rescue coming is the one we provide each other. If you’re close enough to the river: RUN. Good people may keep the border open. Or they might not. You will be gambling with your life. We all are now. The Hunter administration is not trying to save you. They are trying to save themselves. They murdered millions because it might make them safer. You are nothing to them besides acceptable losses. They do not want you to make it.

72 So what was the Whisper? It wasn’t the leak itself. Leaks are a dime-a-dozen, and nobody had time to parse all that data during the apocalypse. The Whisper was the message I posted as the homepage of every Ubiq user in the world: the cover letter for my data dump. I’d signed the warning with my handle — Gnat — and I suppose some pundit later thought it poetic to name the message “the Whisper of Gnat’s wings.” It didn’t feel like a Whisper. It felt like screaming. The Battle of UbIq CIty I had locked everyone out of the system. The spooks needed me if they were going to take the message down. The only other option was to blow up the servers or the power supply. That would get rid of the Whisper, but it would also eliminate the only reliable communication the Recession government had. While Hunter really needed me and the Whisper deleted, I had gambled he couldn’t administration. Each starts with an order and a bunch of federal legalese, along with these new encryption programs and threats of treason for the spooks if they open them. But what the fuck do I care? They’re planning on killing me tomorrow anyway. So I read them. I learn that the Canadian attack was completely unprovoked. I learn that there is no intention to rescue anyone in the West. I learn that the brass never had evacuation plans for Utility operatives or their families. It was all a lie, to get them out there fighting. I do some digging. I learn about Traitor’s daughter — the little girl that messaged her Daddy and gave him the idea to come save me. I learn she’s likely dead, burned alive as the refinery in her Louisiana town blew up. I learn her name. Most importantly, I learned the deadline. I learned when they were going to blow the bridges and activate the river mines. It was dawn the next day. In a little over twelve hours. How would the introduction of flesh-eating ghouls affect world politics? The realist answer is simple if surprising - international relations would be largely unaffected. This paradigm would be unimpressed with the claim that a new existential threat to the human condition leads to any radical change in human behavior. To them, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues and disasters. Disease has affected world politics from the Black Death of the fourteenth century to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. In the past, most of these plagues simply reified existing power relationships. Because more dynamic and powerful societies developed stronger immunities to plague, they gained a greater share of the relative power during pandemics. -Daniel Drezner

73 and that went double for those under his command. But if someone was going to shoot me, I wanted them to know the truth first. Honestly, I can’t tell which version is real anymore. When your choice kills people, you do everything you can to justify it after the fact. Hunter and I at least have that much in common. All I know is that less than a third of the soldiers alive when I posted the Whisper lived to see the next day. The war between loyalists and those that would become Moths was bloodier than any Vector outbreak. It was a war between people desperate to find a new way of living in this strange world, and those for whom a blaze of glory was the more attractive option. Evac Caravans People may have been locked in their homes, but they hadn’t been isolated from each other. Ubiq had been the #1 traded tech company for seven years before the Crash. 88% of every household in the US chose Ubiq as an alternative internet provider, and we were the sole provider for 52% of those homes. afford to go dark, especially with the shit show I’d thrown his way. That’s why I posted the message without doing anything to disrupt user-to-user traffic: I knew the Whisper would make me a target, but they’d have to come for me in person. A drone strike on UCity would have screwed them harder than anything I could ever do. So, yeah, some calculation certainly went through my mind. I don’t deny it. But you can’t be a smart woman without being accused of being a bitch in the same breath. Being smart enough to stay alive is proof enough for some that I engineered the civil war between the Raiders and the Cyber Command. In the Recession’s version of events, I schemed. I made sure get to Traitor before the Whisper went live. I used news of his daughter’s death and exploited that betrayal to secure his protection in the coming war. I timed it perfectly, making sure the perimeter was secured from the undead before I coerced a squad of Marines to murder their comrades. All just to keep me alive. Personally, I’d like to believe I didn’t want to die before telling Traitor about his daughter. I couldn’t know how he was going to react,

74 enough that a couple tanks of gas and a prayer might carry them to safety. But those that made it to the border were far from safe. No amount of skill ensures survival. For those trying to get last minute admission into the Recession, it depended on which crossing you went to and how far the Blight was behind you. The Flood and AmputatIon No hard numbers exist for any of this. The chaos of the evacuation was as confusing as any Vector outbreak. The best estimates guess about 75 of 140 available bridges were blown the second the Whisper got posted because good little soldiers followed orders. After that, the secondary demolitions started in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northern Missouri. A lot of military units left up there either listened to the Whisper or were smart enough to realize their deaths were meant to establish a buffer zone between the undead and fortifications being hastily erected along the Illinois River. The generals didn’t trust those units to volunteer for the suicide mission they’d already been tricked into. The most mercy those troops saw was a single repetition of the order to secure the crossing and retreat. The subtext was clear: blow those fucking bridges and we might let you through the gate before it slams shut. To their credit, many of the northern postings held the line, preparing to let refugees through. After all, why believe their commanders? They’d nuked thousands on a maybe already, and the troops had no reason to believe they’d honor any agreement. In response, the generals dedicated every fighter jet and drone the US could muster to the destruction of every crossing north of Chicago. By blocking all escape across the northern Mississippi, St. Croix, Rock, and St. Louis rivers, Chicago command bought themselves time to finish fortifications on the narrower parts of the Illinois River. Infected refugees would have to ford at least two major waterways before reaching a ‘safe zone.’ This 62% of families had at least one Ubiq Spec or off-brand AR device in the home. The devices were chargeable through replacement battery packs, solar grids, and hand-cranked chargers. Hell, you could plug them in and leech off the batteries of hybrid cars for years. The Whisper reached a lot of folks, and it caused a lot of panic. There was no such thing as “too far West” for some people. Even in places like Oregon, people began coordinating evacuation caravans. Terrified people would load up whatever resources they could into whatever vehicles they could find. They’d crowdsource traffic reports around the chaotic jams clogging up all the roadways and make coordinated breaks from their homes. Entire suburban neighborhoods and rural towns would make a break for their cars all at once, hoping their neighbors were the ones to be eaten and buy time for the rest to get away. The nightmare that was the evac caravans is well documented. They ran out of gas. They got stalled by pile-ups and trapped each other, reversing into hordes of casualties pursuing the herd. Some escaped the casualties only to fall victim to their fellow man. Loyalist teams from Operation Utility wiped out more than a few as traitors. Some fell to internal criminal elements, turning into the Loss’s first raider bands. And all of this before you get into the conspiracy theory shit: entire caravans ghosted by super-black ops military teams that made the guys in Utility look like weekend warriors. Hundreds kidnapped as experimental subjects for what would become the DHQS’s programs studying Immunity and Latency. Still, some caravans got lucky. Good Utility teams or die-hard law enforcement groups took caravans under their wing, coordinating massive migrations across the country. Others that got stalled realized how hopeless the distance was and founded enclaves nearby, saving themselves. Most that got into the Midwest were in the relative clear. Population density had kept infection spread out and easily bypassed by car. The border was close

75 Standard operating procedure was to fortify the Western approach with concrete partitions and shipping containers. That’s where they had people strip. Every scrap of clothing, every belonging, every vehicle — it all got abandoned by the side of the road if you wanted to cross. Once stripped of everything, including dignity, the refugees were allowed on the bridge. There the military inspected everyone for bites. The cleared were thrown off the eastern edge, naked and born anew in the Recession. Those with bites — or even particularly suggestive cuts and bruises — never made it to the other side of the bridge. The cattle chutes were brutal. They deprived desperate people of even the clothes off their backs. They mistakenly executed thousands, not to mention the Immune and the Latents killed. But they worked. The chutes got people to safety... at least until one of two things happened. If someone turned Vector inside the chute, it spelled doom for everyone on the bridge. Naked people packed like sardines between the rails couldn’t hope to contain a hot outbreak. The eastern side of the bridge would have to close their gate and open fire on the bridge, which tended to discourage anyone left alive on the western shore from retreating east. Even without new Vector outbreaks, casualties put a hard time limit on the cattle chutes. Every evac caravan trailed behind it a horde of hungry dead. Some chutes managed to operate non-stop for days, but the Cs always caught up eventually. The grey tide flowed over the naked, desperate masses, and even the most softhearted officers had to blow the bridge or lock the gate. A few days after my little message, all lines of escape had been cut off. The western states had been amputated from the union. gave Chicago the time it needed to solidify the shaky allegiance of those troops lucky enough to be stationed across the line already. There wasn’t enough air support left to stop crossings in St. Louis City and further south. Past that point, refugees were at the whim of whatever officer had been placed in charge of their lifeline. Many a caravan pulled up to find a blown bridge waiting for them. I’d like to say that sight smartened people up and they retreated, founding last-minute enclaves. But the fact is most people just tried to find boats. When that predictably failed, they tried to swim it. Both solutions were typically met with a hail of gunfire from the opposite shore. Tangled flotillas of corpses were floating into New Orleans as much as a year after evacuation. If your caravan found somebody with a soul in charge, it was still dicey. Some units suffered from what we call “all hearts; no minds.” These well-meaning idiots threw open the gates... at which point the panicked flood of humanity trying to get across began trampling itself to death. At those few checkpoints where unhindered crossing didn’t descend into a riot, things got even worse. Exactly what the Hunter administration feared began happening: people in the caravans had been bitten by casualties during the migration. They’d hidden the bites out of fear, and few days later, they went Vector on the wrong side of the bridge. Thousands of people found themselves trapped on bridges with Vector outbreaks on one side and an approaching horde of casualties on the other. Thankfully, the nightmare scenarios brought about by “all hearts/no minds” were rare, and all ended with the bridge being blown in a final act of desperation. Subsequent outbreaks on the eastern bank were contained by other military units. Those that threatened to get out of hand were a high enough priority for Chicago Command that air assets bombed the infected populations into paste. Most that made it into the Recession uninvited got there through a “cattle chute.”

76 border. The units tasked with cleansing NYC fought on anyway, trying to cleanse as many infected as possible during the torpor. It didn’t work. In the end, something like 90% of the soldiers became casualties. The few that escaped blew the tunnels and bridges behind them. Other eastern towns and cities suffered hot outbreaks as a result of the refugees. The losses were, thankfully, small and contained. No more than a few thousand... quarantined and mopped up a week later, after things had settled down. Force ExhaustIon Active duty military in the Crash fought a literal war against hell. On the frontline, they were unwittingly fed into the Blight’s jaws, ordered to shoot civilians, or forced to choose mutiny. Those lucky enough to keep away from the Cs had to deal with The Result The Whisper brought a couple million more people into the Recession’s safety than Hunter had intended. It also let people use the torpor to enclave-up rather than wait around to be eaten. But how many millions died in the caravans that might have survived if they’d stayed home? How many Immunes and Latents were executed in the chutes because of me? Is the world better or worse for what I’ve done? I don’t know. Lost CItIes Between bombing civilians and their own soldiers, my actions had spread the US military very thin. Philadelphia’s outbreak had been contained, but what little resources were being directed towards the retake of Manhattan got siphoned off to maintain the

77 rank-and-file agreed and started spinning their mutiny. They hadn’t refused orders; they’d never received them. It was a chaotic time, after all, and how could they have trusted orders from a compromised network? In the wake of learning the world actually might survive this shit, anybody with a stake in the Torpor Lockdown or Operation Utility shifted over into covering their asses. Meanwhile, the National Guard and other reservists had become the most monumentally disillusioned soldiers in history. Entire platoons went AWOL, disappearing into the chaos. It would take months for the different branches of the command structure to stabilize. In that delicate time, the Recession only stayed infection free due to the hard work of a few units that refused to quit. In the wake of amputation, things got done only at the behest of middle-rank officers gone rogue or civilian an unprecedented refugee crisis and the uncertain fate of their own loved ones. Early on, a few delusional Hunter loyalists gathered small forces to rain reprisal down on insubordinate bridge crews, but of those crews still alive, none were too eager to be arrested by cowards after shooting men, women, and children in the chutes for days. In the worst cases, certain postings descended into the sort of civil war that racked Ubiq, with the pissed-off enlisted troops doing a number on any rat-fuck officer that tried to discipline them for not killing American citizens. After they broadcast the first General hanging from a bridge he ordered blown, everyone got the message quick. The upper ranks started claiming their orders were being spoofed. The whole affair had been a tragic cyber-attack organized by antigovernment terrorists and the traitors at Ubiq. Too tired for an outright revolution, the

78 enough to know that, if it appeared they were abandoning people on both sides of the fence, the revolution and riots that followed would be the final nail in the coffin. Private property got conscripted for soldiers. High schools turned into hospitals. Any business that didn’t put food on the table, medicine in a syringe, or clothes on a back got cannibalized for parts, their workers sent to join the homeless thousands huddling in what was now being referred to as “Free Parking:” refugee camps that popped up wherever people ran out of gas. That shit made the Great Depression look like a paid vacation. Mass unemployment didn’t make for a docile, obedient electorate either, but displaced Easterners would need time to marinate in their resentment before coming to a revolutionary boil. Until then, wealth redistribution for the benefit of refugees kept the desperate masses licking their wounds rather than continuing the destructive march of animal terror straight into Washington DC. As always, the Hunter administration used human lives to buy time... time they used to begin hunting and betraying each other. Governmental Purges Even if I had never been born, heads were going to roll for the Preemptive Genocide. They might not have been the right heads, but even in the best case, some scapegoats were going to answer for nuking millions. Before the Whisper, when it had looked like the plan might work as intended, the sacrificial lambs were evident; the people actually responsible had known who to distance themselves from. After the Whisper, it was every asshole for himself. The leak was still up there for everyone to see, and removing it would mean effectively muting the human race. The old tricks for silencing dissenters weren’t going to work on this one. The only escape possible was through narrative. Everyone involved scrambled to appear witless, whispering “just following orders” like a fucking mantra. But the really smart ones knew that to make the narrative stick, one had organizations turning into militias. Some helped out of a sense of duty; others saw an opportunity to set themselves up as power brokers in the new order. Refugee CrIsIs Uncontrolled river crossings, before collapsing under the weight of desperate hordes, often let traffic through. Thousands of vehicles had poured across the bridges before the Whisper, leaving parking lots and fields crammed with families living out of trunks and suitcases. Those evacuated through chutes had it even worse. They entered the Recession naked and shivering. It would have been the worst refugee crisis in history if the Blight had only hit the US. With the rest of the world going through the same or worse? Emergency services couldn’t even begin to meet the needs of refugees. Deaths from starvation, dehydration, and exposure began moments after people crossed into so-called safety, and they would continue for years to come. EconomIc Collapse The cold math behind Hunter’s strategy had accounted for the disastrous effect the Blight would have on the economy. The loss of labor alone dwarfed anything seen in the World Wars, not to mention the death of global trade partnerships, supply lines, and production schedules. The strategy had knowingly sacrificed America’s breadbasket to slow the denser stampedes of casualties. Famine was the new normal until land could be repurposed and drone farming established. The plan had always promised lean years in the wake of the amputation. Everyone in the Hunter administration prepared for some belt-tightening. No one was prepared for a few million more mouths to feed. While no amount of aid and assistance would ever calm the voracious need of the refugees, leaving the naked masses out of rationing wasn’t possible. They were legion, they were pissed, and they were desperate. Those in power were smart

79 unemployment, and the increased infection risk threatened by all those variables. If it wanted to survive long enough to enjoy power, the new government had to calm things down enough that they could focus on getting the house in order. The to-do list of cascading social issues to fix had no room for casualties. In short, the new bosses had to live the dream of the Hunter administration: pretend the Blight and all its victims didn’t exist. That’s when they declared us all dead. Declared dead is a bit of a simplification. The policy paper known as “The Denouncement” actually declares any and all former US citizens west of the Mississippi to be homo sacer (Latin for “the accursed man”). It’s the most extreme form of civil death. As a legal concept, homo sacer means the people so labeled are afforded no legal rights by the laws of any nation, especially their nation of origin. Legally, the person isn’t even considered a human for the purposes of human rights. The clearest historical example of this concept occurred in the 16th to 18th centuries with the rise of naval mercantilism. The major state powers operating on the high seas declared certain pirate groups literally “out-laws:” beyond the protection of any nation’s laws. Basically, you could do whatever you wanted to a pirate, no matter what nation you or they were from, and those operating under a national flag had no legal responsibilities whatsoever to any victims or their family. It wasn’t an act of war. It wasn’t a crime. Losing your ship to pirates was an act of God, but killing an entire pirate crew was, on paper, no more than a spot of luck. The flip side of homo sacer, however, is that there is no legal recourse against them beyond what you personally have the physical power to enforce: military and law enforcement officers have no more obligation to protect you from homo sacer than, say, from an animal attack. Suing someone so thoroughly disenfranchised would be akin to suing a dog that bit you or a raccoon that overturned your trash. You either shoot the thing or it gets away with it. to look more than repentant; one had to look indignant. They had to mirror the betrayal the torches-and-pitchforks crowd was bound to be feeling. Stalin would have been proud of the weeks following the Crash. Coups, court martials, “people’s courts” — martial law, after all, was still in effect. Nobody was interested in repealing it until they were sure they’d cleared the board. Hunter left the White House in shackles and remains under house arrest to this day. Generals court martialed each other for crimes real and imagined. Special elections became the norm, and the first entertainment to come to the car camps was the new electronic voting system that weekly deposed one despot in place of another. Before the year was out, the Recession government was clean as a laundered sheet. Everyone that could be construed as responsible for the lockdown strategy had been arrested, killed, or named “instrumental in rooting out the corruption.” There was only the new government, operating under the oldest mandate in history: do what we say, for your safety. The Homo Sacer PolIcy Most of the politicians and military leadership at the time of the Crash were arrested or disgraced within a few months of the last bridge closing. Their successors, whether supportive or backstabbing, had no desire to atone for the sins of the past. Though distasteful and taboo, the work of the amputation remained arguably necessary. Why expend political capital trying to undo war crimes that had likely ensured the continued survival of the US? With a new government installed, it was possible to both condemn and profit from the same policy. The only problem was surviving long enough to reap the rewards. If the Blight had decimated the nation, the Whisper and ensuing rush on the borders had almost destroyed it entirely. To this day, the Recession exists in a perpetual economic sinkhole, coping with overcrowding, famine,

80 the government would have fought to keep it, wouldn’t they? Once the people give up hope, make a call for realism. Maybe someone over there is a loved one, and leaving them behind is hard, but if they aren’t dead yet, it’s only a matter of time. Can we really risk it? Maybe people are still fighting in the West, but they risk infection every day. Infection means Vectors — sprinting, river-swimming, fence-climbing Vectors. Every so-called “survivor” in the Loss threatens to carry the Blight over the Mississippi and start a second Crash from whence no one will escape. Think about it: who could be so selfish? And once the jump has been made from hopelessness to realism, it’s a short hop to accusation. Of course, no one in the federal government expects anyone to believe that absolutely everyone over the border is actually dead. But maybe they deserve to be dead. The government issued the same evacuation orders to them as they did to everyone else in the Recession. If they didn’t receive them in time, whose fault is that? The terrorists that sabotaged the plan and leaked misinformation onto Ubiq, that’s who. Their anti-government obstructionism nearly doomed all of America — no, the entire human race. The people over there are too stupid to run, too selfish to die, or too evil to mourn. They’re no longer even human. They’re casualties waiting to happen, and they must be exterminated like the threat they are. Of course, not everyone ascribes to the official ideology. Many see through the thin facade and recognize propaganda meant to support an ailing administration. Many more, caught in the crushing poverty of the Recession, simply don’t have the luxury to believe such precepts. But that’s the brilliance of the Denouncement: until everyone believes homo sacer is bullshit, it traps dissenters into pretending the story is gospel. The longer that goes on, the more people believe the lie, and the harder everyone else has to pretend: the hegemonic feedback loop. So that’s the legal standing of everyone over the border: we are no more than animals. We can be shot, robbed, and raped with total impunity. Protecting the remaining US citizens from us is no different than protecting them from casualties: all force can be lethal force. The Denouncement makes it clear that anyone crossing the river, for any reason not expressly ordered by the federal government, instantly gives up all property and their rights as a human being. The purpose of the homo sacer policy is multifaceted. Discouraging smuggling across the border was the most immediate goal. Let’s say some noble human trafficker floats a canoe across the river every night to smuggle people into the safe zone. Let’s say that same smuggler originally made it across the bridge in a nice truck. He sleeps in a heated camper run off solar panels every night while his chute-shit neighbors camp on the ground with no more than silvery shock blankets to protect from exposure. If anybody in the Free Parking ghetto gets covetous, all they have to do is tell. One anonymous tip saying when he plans to break quarantine, and the betrayer’s family doesn’t have to die from exposure this winter. It’s not stealing. The soldiers do the fighting. The average refugee was far too desperate to pass up such a profitable betrayal. Now, smuggling required more than a trusted group of confederates; it required trusting literally everyone. If anyone might want anything you might have, it effectively de-incentivized thoughts of running the border. Coupled with the risk of casualties? No one was eager to run West for any cause, no matter how noble. The policy was also the first step in shifting the narrative from “unprecedented government betrayal” to the old reliable “us vs. them.” The process begins with giving up hope. Everyone that didn’t get across has to be dead by now, right? The casualties are awake in full force, and hot outbreaks would leave Vectors pinging around any survivor communities that did coalesce. Being left is as good as a bite. After all, if that wasteland over there wasn’t completely uninhabitable,

81 blows up some family paddling across the river, it was an act of heroism instead of a war crime. Why not choose the explanation that’s comforting? Sure, it’s a lie, but who wants to be reminded how privileged they are as they shiver and starve in an abandoned Wal-Mart parking lot? Like I said, declared dead is a simplification. It’s more accurate to say that big sections of the Recession population have a psychological need to believe that everyone over here should be dead. That base is represented by a power structure with a professional responsibility to kill us for their voters. And as for the sane population, they’re outnumbered by psychos on both sides, meaning their interactions with the Loss — whether motivated by necessity, compassion, or profit — need to remain plausibly deniable if they don’t want to join the dispossessed. NamIng the DIvIde “The nation has suffered a great loss today...” “Even as we keep those affected by this loss in our thoughts and prayers, we must...” “Your loss is your own; but tooooogether our future is sown...” “Now we mourn our loss and begin to heal...” “The loss of sovereign territory has affected...” Once I stopped getting shot at long enough to catch up on the news, it was already clear what our side was called: the Loss. I kept letting the government broadcast over Ubiq, both during and after the battle for the city. It’s safe enough; I’ve limited their inputs like any other user. They don’t know how to hack us remotely, and most that could have figured it out lie in the mass grave we dug behind the cafeteria. The rest work for me now. They could take us over by force, but not before I send every Aloft server crashing out of the sky. Our survival is embarrassing to them, but they can’t afford to build a new network right now. The signal all day keeps the drone After awhile, why would you want to believe any differently? Citizens could believe that the situation is a result of desperation, mismanagement, and poorly thought out policies, but the cost of that truth is the subsequent realization that those very same forces are in charge of security even now. Being “woke” means acknowledging (with your every. waking. thought) that the most terrifying event in human history could repeat itself at any moment. Or, as an alternative, citizens can believe the governmental narrative. That it’s those people’s fault. That they could have evacuated if they wanted to. Their refusal caused all this to get worse. Maybe they’re even responsible for the Crash in the first place. Then citizens can believe that there’s someone to blame for all their nightmares. That when a soldier

82 Things weren’t going to turn out well, but they had mostly escaped the gnawing, animal terror inflicted by the Blight. The Loss was denied even that small respite. The Crash never stopped out here. It compounded every humiliation and deprivation life had ever inflicted on humanity with living nightmares. We can sympathize with the Recession about as much as an adult sympathizes with a toddler’s scraped knee. Play-acting empathy is the most one can expect: an assurance that we, too, remember that unpleasant sensation. But don’t expect us to really identify. It’s hard to take citizen whining seriously when you know how deep the well of pain really goes. DwIndlIng People that have never lived Loss don’t understand how time works. All of us used to think of the future in terms of lateral movement: rivers of time, marches of progress, etc. History was this race and we were always moving forward, our speed varying but never wavering from the path. Bullshit. History moves up. Humanity only gets as far into the future as it can climb out of the abyss of raw animal need. We climb towards the future on precarious mounds of new ideas and inventions and laws. You don’t need a machine to travel back in time; something only needs to come along and shake the stack. The Loss sent along a couple million casualties to kick progress out from under us. Infrastructure FaIlure America’s bridges and highways were receiving failing grades well before they became choked with undead. Our city planning had been so deregulated that water was a precious commodity all over the country. Climate change and water barons had caused drought all over the West. A number of Midwestern cities had completely toxic pipe systems or sewage contaminated reservoirs. And irradiating a bunch of river strikes away. They’ll allow our petty crosstalk about surviving the dead so long as it remains cheaper than killing my ass. So we became the Loss. Naming them was trickier. They want us to call them the United States of America. Fuck that. Ain’t nobody feeling united out here, especially not this bitch holding all your internet. They made finding something appropriate difficult. The news was still nationalized, and the Orwellian newspeak in effect after the Crash made “casualties” look quaint. No anchor or politician mourning the Loss could ever admit murdering it. It wasn’t lies; it was “confidential.” It wasn’t running away; it was “repositioning.” It’s not isolation; it’s “quarantine.” It wasn’t defeat. They didn’t retreat. They “receded.” That last one’s my favorite. Such imagery: a tide pulling back across a line in the sand. A perfectly natural movement backwards. As if we were the ones who went too far — like floodwaters — and we’re now pooling back into our rightful boundaries. Recession — a term rich people use when they can’t even spare historical significance for the starving poor. Not a Depression; nothing so dramatic as that. This is just a bump in the road; a hiccup in the market. It’ll self-correct. Don’t get maudlin as you bury your family. Recession: (noun) 1). A period of temporary economic decline during which trade and production are reduced 2) the action of receding; motioning away from an observer 3) a condescending non-statement, meant to protect the egos of morally bankrupt assholes removed from the consequences of their actions. WrItIng Off The Loss Like a man jumping from a burning building, the Recession regarded the hang-time between burning with infection and smashing into its own shortsightedness with relief.

83 won’t loot one for love or money. The fucking things are casualty nests. Every asshole imaginable got the bright idea they’d be safe in the crosstown, faux-Cape Cod architectural abortion they’d been ignorantly envying for years. The geniuses get there and realize too late the goddamn walls are built of no more than plaster, foam, and dreams. The Cs could literally chew their way in through imitationbrick siding. That’s when they didn’t come crashing through honking-big bay windows: the ones made of sugar-glass never meant to withstand a child’s tee ball, not to mention a goddamn Vector stampede. The idiots would have fared better in a 1960s mobile home. Neglect before the Crash meant death after it, and where useful shit wasn’t falling apart, most people couldn’t even recognize it. FloodIng On a good day, the network of valves, sluices, drains, and maintenance workers required to basins certainly didn’t fucking help matters. Water and transportation were just the biggest symptoms of an endemic American disease. We spent generations devaluing maintenance and vocational work. Everybody wanted to give a TED talk; no one wanted to be a plumber. Our demographic/employment mismatch was one of the major causes of the Education Default, and it didn’t stop there. If “cheap and shitty” beat “less cheap and durable” by one red cent, we picked the former. This may not seem like a big deal to Recession folks, what with their recovering manufacturing and construction sectors. But that hole in the fence that the facilities crew was going to “get around to” becomes a lifeand-death issue when Vectors are trying to get in. A lot of people died because their culture didn’t teach them the meaning of quality. For example, consider the McMansion, the holy grail of every WASP’s five-year plan. I

84 infamously shitty maintenance record finally caught up with it. Regardless, there’s a 50–75 mile radius around the plant that’s doing its best impression of Chernobyl. Anybody still alive in Arizona steers clear by double that distance unless they want to get microwaved. I’ve heard rumors of secret government research projects or cartel smuggling operations hiding in the exclusion zone, but they have to be bullshit. Nobody that’s ever seen a “Verde baby” would risk it. AddItIonal CasualtIes That thing the Recession was afraid would happen? Where casualties start new Vector outbreaks, which turn into more casualties, which cause new Vector outbreaks? Yeah. That’s every day out here. Or at least it was right after the amputation. Five years down the road, things have stabilized somewhat. Hot Blight is still a very real danger, but the only enclaves left have their shit together. But in the early days — when no one knew what the hell what they were doing — enclaves rose and fell in a matter of days. The people inside that went Vector would test the defenses of any other nearby communities. It was an iterative process where the tests kept coming and failure only happened once. The ratio of humans to casualties may have stabilized now, but that road was paved with a few hundred thousand new infections after the bridges blew. Mass ExpIratIons Imagine a grocery store. Think of all the different sections. Now imagine them dying, one by one, like cascading organ failure. Dairy was almost extinct before the Torpor Lockdown even started. Without refrigeration, pretty much everything but cheese went bad instantly. It’s also not like we can make more; casualties like the taste of beef as much as human. Protein didn’t fare much better. If it wasn’t jerky or a nut, everything in the butcher shop was poisonous by the time the looting really picked up. keep certain cities from drowning approached staggering levels of complexity. Contrary to popular belief, all these systems were not automated. The Crash knocked out both the personnel and power required to keep these towns afloat through more than light drizzle. If plastic bags collecting in gutters were the only result of the crisis, it still would have been enough to leave thousands of blocks immersed in knee-high water. To make matters worse, more idiots than I care to name thought blowing up dams and reservoirs was a great strategy for eliminating casualties. Depending on the area, some of them were even right... and destroyed nearly all the salvageable resources in the area. In more egregious cases, people established enclaves free from the dead only to be wiped out in a tidal wave from upstream. People huddling for safety behind some fence often assume that the ruin-porn vistas of the Loss only exist after years of neglect. But any Taker knows it takes mere days to turn a metropolis into desolate swampland. FIres and Meltdowns Lightning strikes, Molotov cocktails, electrical shorts, campfires, discarded cigarettes — anything can start a fire in the Loss, but almost nothing can put it out. One week, your crew will be raiding supplies from the next town over. The next? You find a pile of ashes where a city used to be. Many a survivor community has been wiped out by no more than a stove. But that’s little stuff compared to the downright biblical proportions of climate change. The drought wildfires that plagued the West for decades no longer had armies of smokejumpers to stop them. Once the dry season came after the Crash, California basically became one giant inferno. Operation Utility was designed to minimize the human causes of these disasters. For the most part, it succeeded. Where teams failed... well, no one is ever going to discover why, that’s for damn sure. Palo Verde went into meltdown. Vectors either overran the soldiers or the plant’s

85 when your stomach hasn’t had that much sugar in years. The freeze-dried coffee lasts for 20 years though; I’ve seen entire Taker crews die fighting over coffee tins some basic Recessionista wouldn’t drink on a dare. If you’re really lucky? Maybe you scored some MREs. That’s five years of good (read: adequate) eating so long as the stock lasts. But folks rocking MREs better not have let anyone know they have them. Flaunting that kind of nutrition in the Loss is a good way to get shot. And that’s pretty much it. We’re five years in now. Starvation and dehydration killed more than any other element of the dwindling combined. The people still left alive knew how to farm already, learned real fast, or became indispensable to the first two groups. PopulatIon CullIng Survival after the amputation depended on time, specifically what we Lost tend to call the “Rule of Three.” These aren’t official, psychological symptoms or anything, but everyone that managed to live this long went through three major steps. A. You realize looting to fulfill a need isn’t sustainable. B. You find looting to fulfill a need has become impossible. C. You find a way to fulfill the need yourself. Ideally, you want the maximum amount of time between phases A and C. If A and B happen at the same time? You’re thrown onto the mercy of the other rules of three: Need shelter? 3 hours. Need water? 3 days. Need food? 3 weeks. It’s an approximation, but the 3s are a safe bet for an average pre-Crash soft-body. Nowadays, we have plenty of stories about hard-asses that lived off nothing but rainwater for months, but that heroic, based-on-a-truestory inspirational shit only happens after the Loss has whittled all the weakness from a person with its dull blades. Most folks couldn’t hope for more than the 3s in the best of The hardiest fruits and vegetables can last about two weeks without refrigeration, but only for those willing to dig through the compost piles of any leafy greens around them. Quite a few idiots looking to keep up their ‘paleo’ diets during the apocalypse ended up starving the next month. Let’s move on to the grains: crackers, cereals, bread, snack foods. Empty carbohydrates? Now we’re talking! Bread’s got about as long as the fruits and vegetables, but eating around the mold will stretch a loaf for a month. Cereal has 4–6 months in an open box before it turns to poison, though stale is a flavor most survivors have had to remove from their vocabulary. Canned goods — good luck finding any. The food pantry fare likely got stripped before the Blight was even officially acknowledged. But those lucky enough to get away with a few carts were set for a bit. If it had a high-acid content like tomatoes or citrus fruits, the cans were good for a year and could stretch to two. Everything else could last for five years! Granted, you can eat most things after that date so long as the can hasn’t blown up with botulism, but keeping the shit down requires a Loss-trained stomach. In addition to lasting longer, those canned goods mean you don’t have to worry about scurvy or rickets as much as those folks scrounging around in the cereal aisle. The crafty folks raided the pharmacy. Most drugs don’t have immediate uses, but somebody always needs them somewhere. A big score of drugs can keep trading for four years before they lose effectiveness or become poison. The pharmacy aisles also had the protein powder for the body-builders: that shit is dusty gold. It basically never goes bad, and preparation only requires water. Which is its own problem. Bottled water is another one on everybody’s “loot first” list. If you do find some, it’s probably safe, but conditions determine the speed at which it’s going to evaporate. Soda and soft drinks don’t turn harmful as fast as they evaporate, but good luck keeping down carbonated red-shit

86 missed doses, and the thing that interrupted treatment happened to be the most tragic loss of life in human history. The news of homo sacer killed people as quickly as actually blowing the bridges. Obesity wasn’t great for avoiding casualties. Neither were assistive technologies that were perfectly fine in the old world, such as wheelchairs. Those with moderate to severe developmental disabilities needed people willing to risk their lives for them, or else... This isn’t to say that the Loss is now solely populated by the hardened survivors of a eugenic super-race (though a certain brand of Believer would love to think so). Outside the Hunter administration, the majority of humans aren’t monsters. They helped each other, and one of the major motivations for the first Takers was making runs for things like medication. Many with pre-existing conditions survive in the enclaves today, and they remain vital contributors to their new communities. But thousands didn’t make it, and every single person was someone’s family. survival situations... So that’s thousands dead just from the Rule of Three. Those numbers are nothing compared to people killed by “pre-existing conditions.” The Loss does not accept people with pre-existing conditions. There were nearly a million people with HIV/AIDS before the Crash went down; if those folks were on the wrong side of the border, nobody kept delivering their retrovirals. Diabetic? Finding insulin that hadn’t gone bad in some dead refrigerator was nearly impossible. Saved by an organ donation? Not once the rejection drugs stop. The tragedies reached far beyond those in need of daily life-saving medication. Addiction to recreational drugs claimed thousands. Hearing the casualties click their teeth outside your walls all night is not the best time to go through withdrawal. Even people that “just” suffered from depression got claimed by their disease. I mean, the most dangerous side effect of antidepressants — suicidal impulses — is primarily triggered by The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical freemarket reforms. -Naomi Klein

87 realized the financial capital they’d been banking on never existed. Speculation bubbles are bad, but they’re at least based on predictable cycles of human stupidity and greed. The second type of economic collapse comes from war. Capital goods, like laborers and equipment, get destroyed in war, but the losses to the global economy are offset by the flurry of production caused by conflict. The capital doesn’t turn out to be imaginary, but it gets lost through redistribution. The victors use the new capital goods to create more wealth, and they trade the scraps back to the losers for financial capital. One man’s bust becomes another’s boom. The master/slave dynamic at the end of a war happens daily among enclaves in the Loss. Our troubles go so much deeper than that. The rarest collapse stems from natural disaster. A volcano erupts, a tsunami hits — the economy tanks because real capital goods are wiped out on a massive scale. There’s no RIse of CarrIon Economy The Carrion Economy got its name because all our trade lives inside the corpse of the old world globalism. To understand it, you have to understand how the host died. There are three major types of economic collapse. The first and most common is a speculative bubble. In the Education Default, the market considered student loan debt a capital good. Payment on those loans created financial capital. The profits from buying the debt were initially so good that everybody got into the game. Demand increased the price of the debt bundles to the point where expected financial capital outpaced the realistic output of the capital good. In short, they dumbly expected every college kid to help pay back trillions in debt despite stagnant wages since before they were born. When the market realized there was no way it was going to get the financial capital it had stupidly expected, the value of capital goods plummeted. Costs exceeded profits instantaneously as everyone

88 began. Afterwards? Pretty much everything was slipping into chaos: food riots, fresh outbreaks, Canadian insurgency attacks. Nobody was looking to replace the various armed services — veterans of the Crash relied on the pride and identity of their particular branch more than ever before — but it was clear the security apparatus was failing the Recession. The first major action of the restored (read: replaced) executive and surviving congress was the creation of the Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship. The DHQS. Everybody’s enclave has their own name for them. The Ducks. The Dicks. The FUQS. Imperial Stormtroopers. Citizen Cains. Judas Boys. Needless to say, we Moths aren’t fans either. ContrIbutIng EntItIes The government reinstituted the draft with two years of mandatory armed-service across the entire Recession, and nobody did much besides say thank you. After all, getting conscripted out of Free Parking ghettos at least meant you wouldn’t starve. If you were old enough to grow half-a-titty or a wispy mustache, you lied about your age and signed on the dotted line. With force levels slowly rising back to preCrash levels, about a third of all new recruits were siphoned away from other armed services and trained for the new DHQS army. The newly installed DHQS command structure had been poached from other branches due to their expertise or repurposed after their previous assignments went defunct. Pretty much anybody that survived Utility, made it back, and stayed loyal got pulled into the DHQS. After all, they had more experience fighting the Blight than anyone else. The vets served as training staff in the new bases hastily being constructed along the Mississippi. Those operators that refused to give up “kicking doors and cracking skulls” got promised their own special operations squads hand-picked from amongst the rabble. one profiting off the suffering of others, so trade offers no respite. There was nothing imaginary about the lost assets; everything lost was vital to maintaining society. This last type is the hardest to recover from. The Crash was most similar to a natural disaster, but the scope was immeasurably larger than anything in history. Yet even this fails to describe the current situation. The obstacles to our recovery are so much more insidious. Normally, when large swaths of capital are wiped out in an instant, the only option is to start over. Rebuild from scratch. Find a new way. But after the Crash, the majority of our lost capital goods weren’t truly destroyed; they were just inaccessible. Raw materials, machinery, land, real estate — all of it is just lying there, waiting to be snatched by the first over the fence. So, in the Recession, you have this unprecedented destruction of capital. It causes an economic depression so severe that replacing the means of production requires dauntingly expensive investment and decades of development. Yet... a “quick and easy” solution lies just over the river. The Loss is a bank where the vault is endless and the bills never come due. The good times aren’t gone forever; people need only walk over and pick them up off the ground. But here’s the thing: the Recession has a reverse speculation bubble working for it: a surprise surplus. All those folks they wrote of as dead? Most of them didn’t get the memo. For the Recession economy, the lives of the Lost are free money, meant to be spent as quickly as possible. How many lives are you willing to pay to get back the good life? That’s the question of the Carrion Economy. FoundatIon of the DHQS Operation Utility saved a lot of lives, but “the Whisper” pretty much assured it was going to be regarded as a failure. JSOC had its hands filled maintaining the border before the Hunter administration purges

89 MIssIon “The Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship is tasked to ensure border security from quarantined zones, to protect the citizenry from the infected, to eliminate enemies of the state seeking to spread disease, to research treatments for the Blight, to monitor formerly occupied territory for developing threats, to command settlements and expeditionary forces in quarantine zones, and to preserve vital economic assets necessary for the reclamation and continued security of the United States of America.” In short, a “license to bungle.” Their mission statement is an unfocused, military junta catchall that permits everything even as it ensures none of it will be done well. When faced with struggles still to come in the Recession, it’s no wonder the DHQS’s solutions were so shortsighted. They were joined by hardcore elements from law enforcement agencies like the DEA, ATF, and ICE. Nobody gave a fuck about drugs, firearms, or immigration anymore, and badasses need jobs too. Department of Defense personnel became logistical support as AFRICOM, EUCOM, SOUTHCOM, and pretty much every foreign theater closed up shop. Special Operations and Command (SOCOM) had been so heavily invested in Utility they ended up under the tent by default. The DHQS mandate also snatched up enough assets from the Air Force to coordinate their air operations and enough Navy folks to coordinate the Great Lakes defense. The CDC and the EPA were consumed and militarized. One developed and enforced procedures to maintain quarantine while the other became a targeting apparatus, prioritizing areas of the Loss for government reclamation, resettlement, and drone farming. In law enforcement, the FBI was too involved in the Hunter administration purges to risk losing their autonomy, and the Department of State was the government’s only remaining point of contact between surviving nations. But the other aspects of the intelligence apparatus became redundant under the US’s new isolationism. For instance, most Islamic terror groups lost interest in “the Great Satan” around the time literal devils arrived, so unless you were on a new anti-terror squad dedicated to the Canadian insurgency, you were looking at a pink slip. That went double for spies and analysts working the desk on countries that no longer existed. If the government hadn’t given these deep-state spooks a jobs program in the form of the DHQS, fuck knows what kind of havoc they would have wrought upon the struggling Recession government. Better to place them high up in the new organization and get their devious little minds pointed at their former countrymen. Let the professional skull-splitters and raw recruits deal with the casualties; the spies’ new job was to monitor the homo sacer and ensure they stayed dead.

90 To their credit, the Hunter administration recognized the severity of the situation even as they were being dragged from power. The concern wasn’t just theft and crime (though there certainly was a lot of that). The biggest threat was outright anarchy as refugees realized they had no hope of survival. Death tolls from exposure, disease, and dehydration were already mounting. With no income streams coming in to replenish an already depressed cash supply, desperate people were going to realize that they outnumbered those fucks whose suburban soccer field they were living on. The car camps also didn’t have fences around them yet. There was no quarantecture in place to stop pissed-off lot folk from starting the revolution. Before impeachment began, the Hunter administration’s last desperate order created a new currency: ration dollars. Ration dollars were a specified currency that could only be used for subsistence goods like food, water, medicine, etc. Aid organizations distributed an allowance of ration dollars to everyone in refugee camps with populations large enough to be a threat. In more organized Free Parking, labor was rewarded with additional ration dollars, which is how most of the fences, walls, and other infrastructure used to police the poor bastards got built in the first place. Recession citizens that hadn’t been displaced didn’t get a ration allowance, but they could exchange ration dollars for a cash reimbursement. Essentially, locals were being forced to sell their hoarded supplies to the refugees, then exchanging ration dollars for real money at a depreciated rate. It left original Easterners with surviving jobs hurting due to the massive price hike in food they themselves had created, but it kept the poor from burning the country down. How could the government afford to pay an exchange rate for every ration dollar in circulation? Well, they couldn’t... so they just printed more money. It made some sense at the time. A huge amount of cash had left circulation during Currency FaIlure Take it from a girl who knows: barter systems suck. Haggling through every financial interaction wastes an enormous amount of time and is a good way to get screwed. Money is a great invention for this reason. There’s no getting rid of human greed and corruption, but currency at least gets that shit done faster. The problem is that currency requires faith; people have to believe those little slips of paper with dead people’s faces on them can transform into goods and services. It turns out nothing shakes people’s faith quite like watching reality die. The near total collapse of the dollar, and its eventual stabilization, were vital moments in the development of the Carrion Economy. RatIon Dollars The Free Parking ghettos would have represented the greatest refugee crisis in US history even if we’d planned for it. The fact that something like 65–75% of every camp was made up of people that heard the Whisper — people that were not meant to survive — didn’t help matters. In such places, the US dollar quickly became worthless. Firstly, no one had much money in the first place. Many fled their homes with nothing. Even if a family had stockpiled cash, most used it to purchase supplies off profiteers or to bribe guards in the camp. Millions were abandoned in pants pockets and suitcases on the Eastern side of the cattle chute checkpoints. And who had used cash before the Blight in the first place? Almost no one. Banking and credit companies were months from recovery. No one was accepting plastic. Secondly, the money left in the system wasn’t with the right people or in the right place. People stopped wherever the cars ran out of gas, leaving the logistical distribution of the population in total disarray. The need for food, medicine, water, and other essentials began immediately, but those lucky enough to be in the Recession had already begun buying up everything the refugees needed to survive with money only they had.

91 farms — were being paid by the owners in devalued cash rather than R-dollars. The exhausted and desperate didn’t have the strength or resources to demand more, so business got back to oppressing folks again after only a few months vacation. The whole time, the government is pumping more currency into the system to back up the R-dollars. The labor markets, already upended by the Crash, continued going haywire. No one needed wedding planners or social media specialists or a hundred other occupations anymore. Those folks could starve to death on the street, or they could move into Free Parking and get an allowance of R-dollars. The rolls swelled with refugees and unemployed, necessitating more R-dollars, which necessitated more currency, which devalued everything further, requiring more R-dollars... While the ration dollars may have prevented mass starvation and rioting in the short term, it poisoned the currency system for years to come and cemented millions into a permanent underclass. CItIzen ImmIgrants Economic classes must be educated and acclimated to their own suffering. The problem with turning more than half the country into serfs overnight is one of training and expectations. The new proles didn’t know how to survive in poverty, and they were fool enough to think they were entitled to their own lives. Quarantecture and RezonIng To their credit, the new government wanted to figure out what exactly had gone wrong during the Crash before making any big policy decisions. Their first action after renewing ties with the shattered UN was a resolution to share as much information about the Crash as possible. Quantifying what was lost, how it died, and what remains defines Recession politics to this day, but those early days were about the big statistics: where did the Blight hit? How hard and how fast? the Crash, and some of it had to be replaced to reflect the Recession’s current population. However, the executive order demanding the Federal Reserve Bureau print as much money as possible was the last thing Hunter did in office. Between all the tribunals, imprisonment, and special elections in the purges that followed, no one had the authority to turn off the mint. By the time someone with the power to rescind the order came around, it was already too late. HyperInflatIon Hyperinflation occurs when the real value (i.e. how much bread can this paper buy?) of a currency depreciates at an accelerated rate. Regular inflation happens naturally in any economy, but hyperinflation happens so fast that the populace exchanges their holdings of traditional currency for a more stable foreign currency. As the government started printing money to cash its own checks, the “foreign” currency that began replacing the US dollar was the ration dollar. The problem wasn’t traditional cash getting screwed in the exchange between dollars and R-dollars. The value disparity was intentional, and it placed the buying power for essential goods where it belonged. The problem was that people immediately recognized the shitty exchange rate and started gaming the system. Business owners selling goods now only purchasable with R-dollars began hoarding them rather than exchanging for US currency. They used the R-dollars to purchase more stock for themselves at a better price, or they sold them to non-refugee citizens at a better exchange rate than the one the government offered. Businesses that were supplying non-essential goods to Free Parking started demanding payment in ration cards rather than cash. Meanwhile, as profiteers started to work around the system, the price of food and water continued to inflate. The standard dollar grew increasingly worthless. Refugees that were getting back to work — for example, harvesting the first crops at new emergency

92 bastards in a single neighborhood rather than daisy-chaining infections all the way down the interstate. Cities built to withstand actual sieges, like Venice, Jerusalem, or Paris, maximized an urbanite’s chance of surviving hot Blight. Some locations with historically preserved fortifications and militarization, like Cyprus, actually managed to reclaim the city after massive infections. If neighborhoods were designed as closed loops, with vital services located within a few blocks and contained within fortifiable district borders, new occurrences of the Blight could be controlled. If it could stop guys with swords from stabbing you, it could stop Vectors from biting you. Learning that the city wasn’t a doomed concept was welcome news: urbanity was It turned out that stop-and-frisk urban stormtroopers actually found a use for all those automatic weapons, APCs, and rooftop missile batteries during the Crash. The enhanced ability to kill Vectors retroactively justified Orwellian police tactics by slightly increasing the chance of survival in cities where the population was already treated like the enemy. It wasn’t much of an advantage, but percentage points in the Crash amounted to thousands of lives. By Recession standards, that buys a lot of forgiveness for jackboots in faces. The odder trend was a positive correlation between a city’s age and its chances of surviving hot Blight. The difficult traffic situations plaguing historic places didn’t stop Vectors from tearing through the place, but the monsters got distracted killing the poor

93 tilled into farmland. Every possible rooftop had to be turned into a garden. Building walls, establishing checkpoints, laying fence, hauling fertilizer, planting crops — it was a public works project to rival the WPA with only a fraction of the labor force to complete it. So what did they do? Find another solution? Nah. They stopped the allowance of ration dollars. Now anyone in Free Parking that wanted to eat had to become a manual laborer or die. And thus, every person I saved with the Whisper got turned into a slave. Free ParkIng Ghettos Recession propaganda dismisses the terrifying poverty of Free Parking ghettos as the result of entitlement. The government came in and saved everyone with their ration dollars allowance, but folks spoiled by preCrash life were so ungrateful they started preying on each other anyway! Because Pumpkin Spice lattes were an unalienable right! Or something! Gimme a fucking break. The reality is as it ever was: people start acting like assholes when their lives get shitty. And life in Free Parking is shitty, often literally. Diseases like cholera and dysentery came back in a big way. The race to build shelter against the winter was always a losing one, and frozen corpses were as common as human feces in the muddy streets. The ration dollar fiasco kept accelerating even as allowances dropped and camp populations rose. Work outside the subsistence slavery of quarantecture construction was scarce and charity scarcer. The only entertainment was nationalized news, and the only things they were allowed to report on besides the failing economy were new Vector outbreaks... which meant the security forces remained eager to napalm your entire family at the slightest provocation. That much fear and suffering on top of the worst trauma in human history? It’s no wonder things got nasty. Armed robbery, gang violence, prostitution, drugs, human the Recession’s only hope. Rural spaces may have been the only effective firebreak against the casualties pouring from the West, but small towns in America required use of a car. No one had the gas to maintain the fleets of trucks needed to keep those people fed, and that kind of unsustainable distance was already killing the environment before the Crash. To survive, the Recession had to pack people and resources together as densely as possible. But how to do so without inviting destruction from the most communicable disease known to mankind? The answer that solved both the distribution and public health problem was quarantine architecture. Quarantine architecture — or quarantecture, as it is known — is a combination of medieval city planning and dystopian police tactics. Frequent walls and fences. Security doors on exterior and interior entranceways. Magnetic locks and murder holes. Minimal windows set high above street level. Checkpoints and guard towers. Walledoff interior expressways exiting into isolated motor pools, slowly feeding into narrow neighborhood streets. It’s the kind of interior decorating that views a recessed tile drain for cleaning the blood off floors as a selling point for family rooms. And it’s the antithesis of 99% of every structure built in the last 200 years. Obviously, transforming entire metropolitan areas into easily abandoned, militarized labyrinths couldn’t happen overnight. The challenge of bringing resources into smaller, sustainable communities was far more difficult than even the security measures. Before the Crash, every piece of American produce had to be shipped thousands of miles before reaching market. Drone farming initiatives in the Midwest didn’t have the remote combine technology established until the DHQS was at full power, so feeding the Recession would mean converting every nonessential urban space into either housing or food production as fast as possible. Colleges had to be shut down and refugees moved into the dorms. Sports fields and parks had to be

94 new labor market might have worked, but they certainly weren’t good at or enthusiastic about those jobs. The DHQS recruits fresh off the production line kept workers moving, but only because they didn’t want to be down there in the dirt with the scrubs. Basically no one knew what they were doing, and progress was glacially slow. The labor mismatch occurred on both ends of the spectrum. The needs of the Recession may have kicked most people back into a 19th century economy, but quarantecture simultaneously promised to bring about the sustainable infrastructure falsely promised for to us for decades. New types of buildings had to be designed. Computer networks that could wean the populace off Ubiq had to be built (still working on that). Hordes of mechanics were needed to maintain the remaining fleets of manufacturing, construction, and agriculture equipment, plus everything had to be converted to work with solar panels, wind farms, and other energy sources not easily shut down by outbreaks. In addition to the administrative expertise required to coordinate all the above, the Recession needed the most brilliant medical minds ever seen to research a cure to the most baffling disease ever encountered. The majority of the workforce may have been over-trained for their new lives as beasts of burden, but the Recession suffers from a dearth of highly trained experts to this day. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. Retraining and upward mobility requires education, and no labor sector got poached for construction, agriculture, and quarantecture planning faster than teachers. You can read plenty of Recession propaganda about the triumphant “return to the classrooms” dating back years ago, but considering my little tree orphan can’t read, I doubt such claims. If they are educating anyone over there, it certainly isn’t the poor. MedIcal Advances As the Recession engineered hyperinflation and enslaved a huge segment of the trafficking — Free Parking has it all. The eventual phase out of the ration dollar allowance only made the predation worse. Five years on, the criminal operations have only grown more sophisticated and brutal. Turf is stable and rackets robust. Every camp is cut into little fiefdoms, each group bribing the DHQS guards to look the other way as they leech off a perpetual victim caste. We call the bosses that run Free Parking ghettos Valets (they control the lots; you have to pay them to leave, etc.) Most dealings the Loss makes across the border have to run through these sociopaths, and they don’t buy anything for the good of their community. They smuggle to perpetuate the lawless kleptocracy they live in, and who can blame them? If they hadn’t sold their souls, they’d be working themselves to death on 16-hour construction shifts. Trust me: the hardest Takers I know jumped the border to get away from Free Parking. Labor Struggles If we want to get all Adam Smith-y about it, certain skills just transfer better into criminality than brute force labor. It’s economically predictable that “rational actors” able to do something more productive than slave away in a field would choose to do so. The Recession government knew ending the R-dollar allowance would turn every refugee lot into “a hive of scum and villainy;” they just didn’t give a shit so long as their societal redesign got underway. And it did... in a fantastically inefficient, bloody fashion. It turns out programmers, marketing executives, and literature professors weren’t very good at stringing barbed wire or planting sweet potatoes. The Education Default happened precisely because we were over-educated before the Crash. After it launched half the population back into subsistence farming? There hadn’t been a labor skill mismatch so extreme since Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Withholding vital goods to coerce millions of workers into a

95 absurd than, say, surviving two wrestling matches with Vectors and escaping both? Or surviving two bites without being shot by fellow humans? Think about it. If you knew you were Immune before anybody else, what possible incentive would you have to tell anyone? Imagine a bunch of Vectors turned you into a chew toy during the Crash, but you were somehow lucky enough to get away and live. You’re covered in bleeding, Blight-filled wounds, but you can’t work up the courage to off yourself like a good soldier. Lets say you’re also lucky enough to have all those wounds in spots easily concealed by clothing, and you manage to survive long enough in isolation to get a change of clothes. After threading the needle and avoiding so many terrible fates, do you mean to tell me that when you got back to your fellow man, you’d volunteer, “Hey guys! I’ve been bitten a dozen times and nothing’s happened yet! Pretty neat huh?” Anybody that dumb is long dead. The only Immune that live long enough to utilize their gift are the ones smart enough to shut the fuck up about it. LeakIng DIscovery Despite literally everything working against its discovery, we have evidence proving that certain aspects of the Hunter administration knew about immunity even before Operation Utility. How is that possible, you might ask? Good question. We’d like to know too. Documents proving the existence of immunity leaked onto Ubiq about a year after the declaration of homo sacer. As scientific papers go, they aren’t a scintillating read. The Immune Papers are basically a collection of baffled, anonymous scientists sharing wild conjectures about why certain “subjects” never seemed to get infected when exposed to the pathogens. Redacted of all names and dates, it would be easy to dismiss the studies as a cheap hoax, but their release occurred across multiple organizations at the same time. Immunity documents were uploaded from secure IPs at the Department population they’d already tried to kill, it would be easy to see medical advances in the Blight as a bright spot in the all the darkness. Nothing about the Blight is comforting: not even its mercies. The Secret of ImmunIty During peak Crash, nobody sat around waiting to see if a bite was going to turn. The Romero Effect assured that every bite meant a bullet, even before the government adopted it as a slogan. Person got bite? Person got shot. It was that simple. Murder often is. No disease — not even the Blight — has a 100% transmission ratio. There is such a thing as a blank bite. Vector contact may be far more infectious than casualty exposure, but it’s still possible in both cases. Any way you cut it, a lot of people out there shot loved ones in the head for something no worse than a flesh wound. But in the early days of the Crash, not a lot of people had to deal with this harsh truth. The kind of folks that “waited to see what happened” may have gotten lucky once, maybe even twice, but that kind of mercy is terminal. A bite only has to turn hot once for the Blight to wipe out all the good Samaritans and everyone around them. So while there were always rumors that certain people got bit and stayed healthy, the news always came via hearsay or anonymous internet commenters. Trying to trace such miracles to the source usually dead-ended at a pile of casualties, so the idea of blank bites was easily dismissible as more Romero Effect bullshit. If it was that hard for us to believe in missed infections, is it any wonder it took us so long to discover total immunity? In those early days, we had no way to test for it besides multiple exposures. To even suspect immunity existed was to see the same person infected with Blight on multiple occasions. Even then, the answer could have been two blank bites occurring in miraculous succession, but how are those odds more

96 to live because we allowed people to organize car pools and trade. I suspected actively exposing the government’s crimes was the last straw, so everyone worked double-time to archive and correlate the documents before the drones came. The DHQS’s actual solution was much more elegant. It came in the form of a simple command: broadcast an incoming press conference to everyone or they’d blow us up. I held my nose and pressed play (see p. 97). The DHQS was competent in a way the Hunter administration could have only dreamed of. In their very first press conference, they had threatened the Moths into broadcasting their own disgrace. Simultaneously, they managed to throw the most urgent news development since the Crash into doubt, obscuring any wrongdoing in the same fog of Romero Effect misinformation we’d all come to loathe. of Homeland Security, Department of Health, and the CDC simultaneously: down to the second. Furthermore, while certain documents remain the same across all sources, the moles in each various entity included unique emails from dozens of redacted staffers referencing the core research papers. Unlike the scientific reports themselves, these emails were helpfully timestamped and dated back to a time when it was still possible to consider the Blight a meme. Whipping the reams of disorganized documents into actionable shape took a lot of work. Sadly, any professional journalism that could have helped us was long dead; the DHQS had already rammed a hand up the corpse’s ass and started a propaganda puppet show. But Ubiq had its own resources, and we were certainly motivated. Back then, I was fairly certain the leak was going to get us all killed. UCity was suffered

97 personnel to understand the science, and no small number of true journalists — the last of their dying breed — were attracted to the faith. They had the skills needed to package the information into something digestible. People can read the complete findings for themselves, but the results could best be summarized as “always unsettling, never satisfactory.” We learned the rumors of secret kidnappings during the evacuation were true. Thousands had been processed through heavily militarized chokepoints and given mysterious blood tests. It always ended the same way: people waited the night for government forces to escort them to safety... and woke up to find the troops already gone, absconded with a dozen or so civilians identified from their tests. More insane Loss legends got confirmed. A couple of folks claimed to have escaped from fortified secret Loss research facilities. They’d been kidnapped and experimented on for weeks. A few that got out were missing limbs from repeated tissue extraction, and Watching that announcement... that’s the moment I truly understood the relationship between the Moths and the Recession. The stratostructure is only one perk to keeping us alive. The real reason they never finish the job is that we’re more profitable as bogeymen. The DHQS blames their every crime on the Moths — a devil everyone can see but no one can touch — and while every dumbass in the Recession glares hatefully at me up on my mountain, those fuckers take the opportunity to rob America blind. The SupressIn Mystery We didn’t give up after a single press conference, but continued digging only revealed deeper questions. It was clear my analysis of the leaks wasn’t going to be trusted any longer. I passed the job along to a group of Crusaders we’d been working with. As full-blown cultists, their credibility was only slightly greater than my own, but at least they were cultists worshiping the concept of a cure. They had the medical The ImmunIty Announcement The Department of Homeland Quarantine and Stewardship is pleased to announce that our scientists, in conjunction with fellow researchers from around the world, have confirmed that a natural immunity to the Blight exists within certain members of the American populace. Estimates derived from lab experimentation performed on brave volunteers suggest that anywhere from 1-5% is completely impervious to infection from any means. As I’m sure you understand, these ’Immunes’ are mankind’s best hope for survival and our greatest tool for unraveling the mysteries of this terrible disease. Scientists are currently perfecting a blood test that can identify these individuals so that they might help us in the race to a cure. As we prepare to administer these tests, any individuals that suspect themselves of immunity are to report to the nearest DHQS outpost for future testing. Until such a time as we have more developments to share, please allow me a somber reminder amidst such a joyous announcement. We here at the DHQS would like to take a moment to urge the public, once again, to ignore the seditionist lies being spread by this so-called Gnat and the mutineers hijacking the Ubiq network upon which we have come to rely. These anti-government radicals already sabotaged the evacuation plan set in place by President Hunter during our time of crisis, and they hold a major tool of our recovering economy hostage in order to ensure the spread of their anarchic message. I have no doubt that forged documents concocted by this witch and her followers are already being dispersed, accusing corporations and civil servants of conspiring to hide this vital information for inscrutable reasons. The DHQS assures you that this terrorist organization will be brought to justice for their crimes against millions of American citizens, but we beg for your patience as we prioritize all our efforts towards utilizing these exciting scientific advances. There will be no questions. Thank you and God bless America.

98 disinformation campaign they pulled on the Moths only a day before. The only reason they rushed things was to get out ahead of the documents. The leak held the raw data suggesting how Supressin K-7864 was discovered. Considering it’s one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time, one would expect to find Supressin in something a little sexier than a spreadsheet. At least, until you realize what that spreadsheet means.... There are varying opinions on this, but as far as I’m concerned, the Supressin data is nothing more than a roll of victims. Firstly, the spreadsheet has embedded U-translate codes from 26 different languages. Nearly half the entries come from China, but they fade off as the timestamps match with the country’s approaching governmental collapse. It’s the same with languages from other countries that never recovered from the Crash. So it’s obvious this was a shared document, being used by similar operations all over the world as the infection got worse. Then there are anatomical columns. A person looking at the raw data can scroll right for days looking at a dizzying, exhaustive anatomical inventory for each entry: age, height, blood type, eye color, etc. It’s clear they were looking for any commonality across their subjects. Then, at the far right, there are the most damning columns: IT1, V, and IT2. IT1, near as we can tell, stands for “Infection Test One.” The results come from whatever they did to identify targets at the secret checkpoints. It merely reads “Positive” or “Negative.” Our best guess? They took blood, threw it in a petri dish with Blight, and looked to see what happened. If there was no visible reaction, they assumed immunity. But everyone in the database reads as “Positive.” The Immune people they tested, it seems, were busy elsewhere in the experiment. The rolls are made up of your average future casualty, folks like you and me. V stands for variables. Most of them are cocktails of chemicals and drugs — usually they claimed hundreds more had been held prisoner with them. They called the site “Scrape.” But what the Loss counts as confirmation and what stands up in a court of law are two different standards. The documents only tangentially refer to things such as “subject collection” and “tissue extraction.” Enough people out here had interaction with the “Scrape Squads” to recognize their torturers, but every lab’s location had long since been abandoned and burned. Even if we had found one in operation, we couldn’t have done much besides raid it; it’s not as if the FBI can send an evidence collection team out here. Most infuriating of all, the documents portrayed a dizzying, circular command structure that made blame impossible to assign. CDC officials thought the Army was in charge, but they were contracting the work out to Alosine Corp, who was subcontracting out to StopLoss, who was to report to the Department of Health.... In the rare instance we could piece together the likely identity of a program participant, investigations always dead-ended: most of the time literally. They’d been eaten, shot, imprisoned, or declared homo sacer. Some guilty party had anticipated which doctors were identifiable and made sure they couldn’t talk. The most startling of the documents, obviously, was the discovery of Supressin K-7864. The DHQS made sure to announce “the cure to the Blight” the day after their little counter-intelligence press conference. While it didn’t destroy the infection, it could suppress most symptoms and make the host merely a carrier. They expected a full-blown cure for hot infection within the year. Five years on, we all know that was bullshit, but I could have told you that day one. They also neglected to mention that “suppressing” symptoms meant having your skin turn black with sinews as the infection crawled along your nervous system like razor wire. Hell, they announced the origin of most Latents before even showing one to the public. All in all, it was a much sloppier job than the

99 Vector. Cold means death, torpor, and casualty transformation. Negative meant immunity or lab error. On negative results, you usually see the list of anatomical identifiers repeat until the results land Hot or the annotation “subject moved to sampling” appears. No one knows what Unclassifiable means. Disconcertingly, in the three instances of Unclassifiable results, no one posts from that IP address for the remainder of the experiments. If I had to guess, I’d say Aberrants. Lastly, there’s the Asymptomatic result. That translates to what we know as latency. There are a few hundred scattered throughout the test that turned Latent naturally. Scrolling down the list, you can see the scientist try the same variable again and again on different subjects, hoping for repeatable results, striking out, and returning to wild repeating in identical batches of a few thousand — but there is always a callback code to some anatomical element further up the row. We assume that’s whatever part they pulled out of those poor Immune bastards and injected to see if it had the secret sauce. IT1 had to be done in a laboratory conditions under a microscope. After all, if you test positive in the blood stream, there’s no way anyone is getting close enough to do more experiments. We also know these tests had to be done on humans; the Blight just kills animals outright. So you need to realize that these experiments were done on living, uninfected humans. All over the world. For months. That’s what makes the results of IT2 so chilling. IT2 was “Infection Test Two.” It listed a wider range of results: Hot, Cold, Negative, Unclassifiable, and Asymptomatic. Hot means

100 supposed to do? Sit on a potential cure out of spite? Supressin exists now, and no amount of moral dilemma can argue away the lives it can save. That’s the beauty of inherited war crimes: the new government can condemn its own profits... so long as it follows through on old atrocities. Immune Informants I guess we should be thankful that Immune marrow only needs to make contact with the Blight. Once it does, all infection in the body mysteriously enters the torpor phase early. Unlike a transplant, the hematopoietic stem cells used don’t need an allogeneic graft. If they did, each dose of Supressin would require matching three loci on the HLA gene between host and recipient, making the treatment essentially useless. But that’s where the lucky breaks end. PBSC (Peripheral Blood Stem Cells) don’t work, and cultures have not been effective in the production of Supressin K-7864. Simple blood donations won’t do. For reasons science has yet to understand, the cells must be harvested surgically from the red bone marrow located in the epiphysis of the long bones. This places the average recovery time per donation at 20 days, assuming the marrow is only pulled from a single large bone like the hip. So, even without the need to match doses to the user, the sole substance capable of holding back the Blight exists in maybe 1% of the population, and it can only be extracted once a month in a painful procedure. This makes an Immune’s bone marrow one of the rarest and highly sought materials on Earth. Basically, the invention of Supressin created an ivory trade, but one that poaches humans. The Recession government requires all Immune citizens to sign-up for medical conscription. This means forgoing all access to the outside world and moving into a specialized, guarded facility where marrow is harvested at a renewable pace. The “Immune conjecture. It’s not until entry K-7864 that the Asymptomatic results become repeatable. Using a combination of antibiotics and bone marrow from the Immune, every entry after K-7864 ends up Asymptomatic. They repeat variable K-7864 over two hundred times before they’re satisfied. That’s when they discovered Supressin... on they eleventh letter of the alphabet, after cycling through 9,999 subjects for A–J. That’s 107,854 victims later, plus another two hundred and one innocent saps treated to the joy of Blight coursing through their veins. The DHQS is going to say that wasn’t the methodology. They’ll make up some bullshit about repeated test subjects, volunteers, or computer simulations. But the excuses change every time, depending on who in the administration answers and the current political climate. You know what doesn’t change? 107,854. The number stays the same. No one knew what to do with the Blight. Science wasn’t working. Rather than abandon faith in rationality, some people doubled down. They threw off the trappings of ethics and collectively decided to throw human lives at the Blight until it flinched. At the time, it must have seemed the only alternative was the apocalypse. Maybe that would be preferable. 107,854 people at least... all for a drug that does nothing besides mass-produce Typhoid Mary’s. K-7864 has a lot more lives to save before its moral accounts balance. MedIcal ConscrIptIon Supressin K-7864 may have been discovered through mass murder, but who can you blame for it? It was an international program. Everyone responsible in the Hunter administration was dead, imprisoned, or disappeared by the time the truth got out. Those that merely “followed orders” aren’t keen to come forward. Even if the public had the means of finding all of them, there are likely so many complicit that we wouldn’t want to know. What is the Recession