Blackout

Oh, of course. Georgia isn’t dead. Or, well, she was dead, but now she’s not, because the CDC is running an underground cloning lab, and the best thing they could think of to clone was a dead journalist who was a pain in their asses when she was alive the first time. And ninety-seven percent memory transfer? That isn’t science fiction, that’s science lying-through-your-teeth. Either she’s not as perfect as she thinks, or there have been a lot of scientific advances that no one’s bothered to share with the rest of us.

And then I think… Kellis-Amberlee in mosquitoes. Someone killing all the people with reservoir conditions. Dr. Wynne trying to kill half the team. That Australian scientist. All that census data. All the things that don’t add up, that never added up, that have been not adding up since before… well, since before Dr. Matras hijacked his daughter’s blog and told the world the dead were walking. All the things that never added up at all. And I think. Well.

Maybe this isn’t so impossible after all. And that scares the pants off me.

Thank God Alisa’s safe with the Masons. And if that’s a sentence that I can write without irony, maybe nothing is impossible anymore.

—From The Kwong Way of Things, the blog of Alaric Kwong, August 6, 2041. Unpublished.

Dear Alaric.

The people I am with, the Masons, say I should send this e-mail and tell you I promise I won’t e-mail again for a while, because I won’t be able to check mail and I don’t want you to feel bad when you send messages that aren’t answered. I can check e-mail again when we get back to Berkeley, but we aren’t there yet.

Mr. Mason is nice, but he stares into space sometimes, and it scares me a little. Ms. Mason isn’t so nice, I don’t think, but she’s trying hard, and I know that should count. Anyway, they said you sent them, and I should go with them, and they had pictures of those people you work with, the cute guy and the dead girl, and so I figured it would be okay. Please don’t be angry. I needed to get out of there before the mosquitoes got in, and I was so scared, and you said you’d send someone.

Thank you for sending the Masons. I’ll see you soon. I love you.

—Taken from an e-mail sent by Alisa Kwong to Alaric Kwong, August 6, 2041.