Blackout

Joey—

What the fuck do you mean, “Danika was just in touch with you”? Danika hasn’t been in touch with anybody in

years

. She’s still on crazy safari in the crazy jungle, looking for the crazy magical herbal cure to the walking dead. Seriously, that woman is so much crazy crammed into a small space that she’s practically a crazy singularity. Have you been sticking your dick in the crazy singularity? Because that’s how you catch the really

good

social diseases.

My coordinates are attached. They’re good for another four days. Then I’m cutting bait and we’re getting ourselves to higher ground. The floods are coming, my friend. Try to disengage from the crazy long enough to get the fuck out of their way.

—Taken from an e-mail sent by Dr. Shannon Abbey to Dr. Joseph Shoji, August 3, 2041.

I’m not sure which is worse: the fact that Shaun was willing to accept this woman as his dead sister, or the fact that I’m beginning to believe it might be true.

Georgia Mason had a certain way of reacting to things—a kinesthetic language, rather than a verbal one. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could fake without years of practice. If this woman is an imposter, she hasn’t had years… and she moves like Georgia. She has all the little ticks and twitches down cold. When she came out of that elevator dressed, with those sunglasses on… I was ready to call her Georgia and ask what we were going to do next. And that’s not a good thing.

If she’s the real deal, then awesome, the laws of science have been twisted even further away from what they were intended to be. Bully for the laws of science. And if she’s not the real deal…

If she’s not the real deal, I’m pretty sure she’s going to get us all killed.

—From Charming Not Sincere, the blog of Rebecca Atherton, August 3, 2041. Unpublished.