Divided by Infinity

2.

I woke in a hospital bed.

I lay there passively for more than an hour, by the digital clock on the bedstand, cresting waves of sleep and wondering at the silence, until I was visited by Candice.

Her name was written on her lapel tag. Candice was a nurse, with a throaty Jamaican accent and wide, sad eyes.

“You’re awake,” she said, barely glancing at me.

My head hurt. My mouth tasted of ashes and quicklime. I needed to pee, but there was a catheter in the way.

“I think I want to see a doctor,” I managed.

“Prob’ly you do,” Candice agreed. “And prob’ly you should. But our last resident went home yesterday. I can take the catheter out, if that’s what you want.”

“There are no doctors?”

“Home with their families like everybody else.” She fluffed my pillow. “Only us pathetic lonelyhearts left, Mr. Keller. You been unconscious ten days.”

Later she wheeled me down the corridor—though I insisted I could have walked—to a lounge with a tall plateglass window, where the ward’s remaining patients had gathered to talk and weep and watch the fires that burned fitfully through the downtown core.

Soziere’s curse. We become—or we make ourselves—less “likely.” But it’s not our own unlikeliness we perceive; instead, we see the world growing strange around us.

The lights are out all over the city. The hospital, fortunately, has its own generator. I tried to call Deirdre from a hospital phone, but there was no dial tone, just a crackling hiss, like the last groove in an LP record.

The previous week’s newspapers, stacked by the door of the hospital lounge, were dwindling broadsheets containing nothing but stark outlines of the impending gamma-ray disaster.

The extraterrestrial warning had been timely. Timely, though we read it far too late. Apparently it not only identified the threatening binary neutron stars—which were spiraling at last into gaudy destruction, about to emit a burst of radiation brighter than a billion galaxies—but provided a calculable time scale.

A countdown, in other words, which had already closed in on its ultimate zero. Too close to home, a black hole was about to be born.

None of us would survive that last flash of annihilating fire.

Or, at least, if we did, we would all become extremely unlikely.

I remember a spot of blue luminescence roughly the size of a dinner plate at arm’s length, suspended above the burning city: Cherenkov radiation. Gamma rays fractured molecules in the upper atmosphere, loading the air with nitric oxides the color of dry blood. The sky was frying like a bad picture tube.

The hard, ionizing radiation would arrive within hours. Cosmic rays striking the wounded atmosphere would trigger particle cascades, washing the crust of the Earth with what the papers called “high-energy muons.”

I was tired of the ward lounge, the incessant weeping and periodic shouting.

Candice took me aside. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “what I told the others. I been into the medicine cupboard. If you don’t want to wait, there are pills you can take.”

The air smelled suddenly of burning plastic. Static electricity drew bright blue sparks from metal shelves and gurney carts. Surely this would be the end: the irrevocable death, the utter annihilation, if there can ever be an end.

I told Candice a nightcap might be a good idea, and she smiled wanly and brought me the pills.