Quarantine

EPILOGUE

I spent a week travelling from camp to camp, looking for her. Everyone in the camps is—supposedly—registered on a central computer, but I thought she might have been wary; she might not have used her real name.

On that first morning, surveying the debris and carnage, I didn’t believe that help would ever come. No power, no water, no transport; food to last a day at the most—and a million or more corpses rotting in the street. I took it for granted that the whole planet was in the same condition, and we’d all be left to starvation and cholera. When the helicopters started landing in KowloonPark, I almost slit my wrists: I thought it was some kind of miracle, I thought the whole process had begun again.

It seems that the plague didn’t spread beyond the city—or at least, those versions of events where it did haven’t been made real. The world’s population may have smeared—but the eigenstate that was finally chosen confined the damage to New Hong Kong. If there were miracles in London or Moscow, in Calcutta or Beijing, in Sydney or even Darwin, they’ve left no memories, they’ve left no trace. Perhaps the impact was the very least that it could have been, consistent with the last moment of the definite past—the last instant that anyone, anywhere collapsed.

Po-kwai travelled with me at first, but met up with her family on the third day. I think we were both glad to part. I know that, alone, it’s much easier to pretend to be one more innocent, shell-shocked, uncomprehending survivor.

Uncomprehending is a relative term. I doubt I’ll ever know why the smeared human race, after going to such lengths to come into existence, finally touched the infinite space beyond The Bubble—and recoiled. (Perhaps it didn’t; perhaps it was driven back. Perhaps the Bubble Makers intervened… although if Laura’s messenger was any guide, that’s hard to imagine.)

But if smeared humanity couldn’t face what lay beyond The Bubble, for whatever reason, then it had no choice but suicide—collapse into a state from which it would not re-emerge. Smearing is exponential growth, increase without bounds. A single, unique reality was the only stable alternative. There could be no middle ground.

Communications channels are tightly controlled—the geosynchronous satellite serving NHK has been switched into a special mode which only the UN troops can access—so I don’t know what the rest of the world believes went on here. An earthquake? A chemical spill? HV news teams fly overhead, but as yet haven’t been permitted to land; still, with telephoto lenses, they must have made out some of the more exotic corpses before they were buried. No doubt there are new cults springing up even now, with their own perfect explanations for everything that took place.

And no doubt stories have begun to leak out from other survivors who believe they saw the dead walk.

I’m beginning to suspect, though, that however reliable these witnesses might be, on close investigation their claims will come to nothing. I don’t believe that they’re lying, or that they mistook what they saw. Everything happened just as they described it—but it was simply never made real.

I’ve settled down now, in this camp on the old city’s western edge. I have a registration card, I queue for food twice a day, I do exactly what I’m told. Most of the relief workers here are freshly recruited volunteers; they insist that we’ll all be resettled within a year. The experienced ones, though, admit—when pressed—that a decade is more likely. New Hong Kong won’t be rebuilt on the original site until investigators know why the city crumbled, and the answer to that — I hope—will be a long time coming.

I don’t have much to do here to pass the days. I try to get some exercise, but mostly I end up lying on my bunk, thinking it all over one more time.

And last night, this is what I thought:

Maybe smeared humanity reached the edge of The Bubble—and didn’t recoil, after all. Maybe the planet is still smeared. One consciousness per eigenstate, branching out endlessly; the many-worlds model come true. Blood still rains between the skyscrapers of New Hong Kong. Children still conjure up dancing flowers. Every dream, every vision, has been brought to life: Heaven and Hell on Earth.

Every dream, every vision. This one included, mundane as it seems, half-way between infinite happiness and infinite suffering.

So here I am, gazing up into the darkness, unable to decide if I’m staring at infinity, or the backs of my own eyelids.

But I don’t need to know the answer. I just recite to myself, over and over, until I can choose sleep: It all adds up to normality.