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Occasionally, the whole of humanity seems to share a single unexpressed thought. Some worry that occupies us all, but that nobody voices. Something that, collectively, we push out of the global consciousness. The first time I became aware of this, I think, was at the end of the 2019 Coronavirus pandemic. I was just 14 at the time the restrictions began to be lifted, and the vaccination program began to show results.

I remember my parents and teachers showing their relief. Carefully planning holidays and school trips again. Slowly, steadily, on the lookout for a backlash, but with optimism. I also remember their faces two years earlier, at the start, when so much was uncertain. When the possibility was very real that this would get completely out of hand. That this would be their generation’s holocaust.

In the end, everybody was proved wrong. It was serious enough. People died. Life was tough for a few years, but we made it through. It was nothing like the Spanish flu, or the world wars that their grandparents had lived through. And then it was suddenly over.

And in that time, the question that always came back to me, but that nobody seemed to ask out loud, was How long until the next one? If anything, the Coronavirus pandemic had shown us that we were not ready. Our governments failed to anticipate. Failed to plan for the worst. Psychologically, as a population, we hadn’t been ready. There was too much denial, too much eagerness to believe the easy alternatives. Too many people who somehow could not give up what they thought they were entitled to.

It wasn’t just that our governments had been ill-prepared. Something in us, as a species, culturally, was not ready. We were not yet mature enough to reason on a scale that is required to fight a virus. And with the coronavirus, we had been lucky. We all knew in those early days, what the worst possible outcome would look like. We all feared it, if in silence. And then, when things turned out not to be nearly as bad as all that, we pushed that thought back down again, and we never asked ourselves out loud: How long until the next one? How bad will that one be? Are we better prepared now?

It hit thirteen years later. One benefit of it happening again so soon was that the pandemic experience was still relatively fresh in living memory. When the stories began to emerge from Toronto, of a fever not unlike sleeping sickness, most of us recognized the pattern.

It was worrying, but there had been a few false alarms before. Outbreaks that were easily contained. News of the week.

We still fell into some of the old traps. As the disease spread, first to the U.S., and then to South America, it was widely referred to as the Canadian fever. Not surprisingly, something that Canadians objected to. It was a hard pattern to break, however, since there wasn’t much else to call the disease by. It seemed to defy analysis. There were no foreign cells or parasites in the bodies of those who were afflicted. The scientific community eventually settled on pseudo-trypanosomiasis, since late-stage sleeping sickness was the closest thing in symptoms, if not in pathology. Numbness, poor coordination, trouble sleeping, and finally organ failure.

The point of origin was also a source of confusion. The most likely source for a pandemic-level infection would be zoonosis, a jump from another species to humanity. This all but required a reservoir: a mammalian population that occasionally interacts with humans but is largely uncontrolled. Bushmeat is a prime example. Food safety was tightly controlled in Toronto, and there were no reasonable candidates for a reservoir.

Eventually, PTS-2031 was chosen as its official name, but that awkward choice only made it more difficult to stop using the catchier alternative. Eventually the fever became the acceptable, if slightly ominous name.

At the time, I was trying to settle down in the outskirts of Paris,while finishing my dissertation. I had a boyfriend of some five years, and things seemed to be progressing well. We had begun to talk about our future in concrete terms, and living together seemed like a good next step, if we could find a way.

The rules were strict, especially in Paris. It had become close to impossible to own a house, and the waiting lists for rental apartments was close to a decade. However, young couples moving in together could combine their waiting time, which allowed us to cautiously begin applying for some modest options a fair distance from the center.

There was a brief period of a few months, where the Canadian outbreak was in the back of our minds, but in Europe we carried on as usual. Even when the first cases appeared in Wales, we simply seemed to wait. It’s not that we didn’t know what needed to happen. We were locked into our social momentum. Cancelling holidays, and festivals, not showing up to work. These all require a kind of boldness. A kind of stepping into the spotlight. That sort of thing just takes a while. Even though we were all thinking back to the early spring of 2020, when we had gone through the same motions.

The cracks began to show first in the more acceptable places. As cases appeared in Nice, and Narbonne, and then in Paris, my thesis advisor changed our supervision meetings from in-person to video calls. People would call in sick for colds and friends would cancel plans with flimsy explanations. The will was there, but people still felt the need to find social excuses. Nobody said it out loud: I am scared to get sick. I’m worried about the fever.

Then, as cases began to rise, we looked to the government. We needed schools and businesses to be closed. We were waiting. Most of us were ready, but we needed somebody to say it. This is it. Stay at home. Don’t go to work.

I read a study once, on the behavioural patterns of drivers in road tunnel fires. One of the main difficulties, it said, was to get people to leave their cars. Even if they see the smoke, they will roll up their windows and wait patiently. Only when a warning of imminent danger, or a stern instruction comes over the PA system, are people spurred into action. In the paper, the authors suggested that this was due to the relative safety of the car environment, or the reluctance to leave one’s property behind. But I think part of it is a plain fear of standing out. To get out of your car in the middle of the road and to start walking, is simply an odd thing to do. It’s embarrassing. We will sit still and let the flames engulf us, rather than risk making a fool of ourselves.

That’s why we needed the government to tell us to take action. We needed someone to tell us that we, as a whole, as a community, were going to take this seriously. It was now the social norm to treat the fever as the threat we all already knew it to be. The call was made weeks late, when intensive care units in Paris were already at critical levels, and doctors themselves began to get sick. Finally, the plans that had been ready for thirteen years were activated and the country once again locked down.

In many ways a lockdown was easier for us than it had been during the Coronavirus pandemic. I remember my parents complaining about how tired video calls made them. We were better adapted in that sense. We were already fully used to meeting virtually. Screen calls were commonplace and most of us had some kind of smart glass or wearable that made the experience more comfortable and immersive. We never lost our preference for in-person meetings, though. Simply being inside all day, by ourselves, still came as a shock.

The lockdowns were uniformly strict. The problem was that the pathology of the disease was not remotely understood. We had no idea whether the thing was spread by touch or through the air. Should we mask up and meet outside? Or should we disinfect our hands and try in vain to stop touching our faces? Without a clue, the best we could do was to avoid it all. Erect strict barriers and see what worked. The scientists called it an “ablation model.” We would fully lock down, to the maximum extent possible. Then, when the pressure on the ICs eased, there would be local tests, to lift some restrictions and to see what the results were. This way, even without a microscopic understanding of the disease, we could at least begin to comprehend its macroscopic effects. This was, to some extent, how we had built our understanding of the Coronavirus as well, the scientific council ensured us.

I think everybody can pinpoint the moment in the pandemic, our pandemic, when they began to take it seriously. Some point after the announcement of lockdown, sometimes many years in, when they were faced, up close, with the strange truth of the thing. When they realized that what everybody had been saying was true.

My father once told me that during the Coronavirus pandemic, when the vaccine was already available, there were many people who didn’t take it. They were afraid, or other people, often politicians, had told them that the disease was nothing serious. Some of these people became seriously ill, and doctors would report cases of late-stage patients begging for the vaccine as their lungs began to fail. By then of course it was too late.

We saw this in our pandemic as well. The ones who realized on their deathbed that they had been warned, and they had failed to listen. Pride, maybe, or stubbornness. More likely, there were just different people telling them different things, and they picked the wrong ones to listen to. For me, it was early in the pandemic, when I saw the first glimpse of what we were dealing with. The depth of the madness that lay ahead of us.

Mathieu and I had both lost people to the Coronavirus. For me, it was my grandmother. She was quite old already. She died during the height of lockdown, and we could not hold a proper funeral. I never saw her in the final days, but I remember my father’s face when he came home from the one visit he was allowed. I remember the red and blue streaks that the tight protective masks had cut across his face.

For Mathieu, it was his mother. This was rare, she was only in her late-forties, but it did happen, especially in the early days. He spoke often about the fury he felt, throughout his teenage years, for the denialists. The people who would speak on TV and in the newspaper, and say that the world was over-reacting. That restrictions should be lifted. That something so simple as a face mask was an attack on civil liberty. It took him a long time to untangle that anger from his grief. He was still seeing a therapist regularly when I met him.

All this meant that when our pandemic struck, and the government told us that measures were in order, Mathieu and I took it seriously. We stayed at home. We talked over video. We signed up to the voluntary program of food delivery, so that we wouldn’t need to go to the shops. Most days, we avoided going outside altogether. I remember standing in front of my window, watching the people outside, mostly older people, walking together with takeaway coffees. These were the freedoms we had been left with during the Coronavirus pandemic, and people assumed that the same rules would apply this time. This was a new virus with new rules, and the specialists urged us not to make such assumptions, but the older generations felt confident in their experience. We’ve seen this before, we remember it all. Trust us, it’ll be over in two years.

For most people, the lockdown rules seemed to form almost a challenge. They would test how far they could go with them. They would travel across the country by car, reasoning that if they didn’t take public transport, they were minimizing risk, but ignoring the fact that if they did get infected, they would transport the disease from one side of the country to the other. In those early days, few dealt with the spirit of the law, and took any kind of personal responsibility for stopping the spread of the virus. Perhaps it was just too big, too abstract for people to see how their actions made them responsible for the deaths of people they would never meet.

I knew Mathieu had been isolating long before the lockdown came. His mother’s death had left him with a persistent germophobia. He managed it well most of the time, but during periods of stress, or when outbreaks were in the news, he found it helpful to isolate. His therapist had worked with him to turn this into something of a coping mechanism. He would allow himself to isolate when things got bad enough, and then he’d use the respite this gave him to do the work to get back to normal.

The Canadian outbreak was especially bad for him. His doctoral advisor was part of a WHO team sent to Toronto to observe. They kept up their weekly supervision meetings over video, until three meetings in, the disease spread among members of the team. Mathieu’s supervisor was flown to an isolation site, where his condition remained stable, but precarious.

This had all happened long before the first cases were known in mainland Europe. And I knew he was serious about it. This was why, despite the persistent nagging fear we all felt that we may very well lose someone in the months to come, I could keep myself steady, when Mathieu began skipping words, and making odd lapses in pronunciation. All early symptoms we were told to look out for. And symptoms that would have scared me, if I didn’t know how strictly Mathieu had been isolating. This wasn’t just a matter of social responsibility, it was pathological for him. You’re driving yourself crazy, I told him. It’s all psychosomatic. You’ve been isolated for months. You should know as well as anybody how much damage the brain can do to the body.

He was working on a dissertation about psychosomatic illness. He would often tell me about extreme cases of patients believing that they’d been poisoned or cursed and how this simple, misguided idea was enough to drive them close to death. He didn’t need much convincing. The Canadian outbreak had been preying on his mind for months. He had been perfectly isolated for all that time. This was the only explanation that made any sense.

I managed to calm him down, and to turn it into a joke, but the problem didn’t disappear. He began slurring slightly. The weekend after, we were cooking together. This was a pandemic ritual we had worked out. We would cook the same meal, and then watch a movie together. This was when the little seed of doubt began. He tried to pick something up. I don’t remember what, I think it was a salt shaker. He tried to pick it up and failed. And tried and failed again. And again. He rested both hands on the worktop, and stared ahead. Then he looked at me in the video screen. There wasn’t anything to say. Neither of us could explain it. This was enough to call the authorities, report him as a possible case.

We called the next morning. It was possible to report cases by video call, explicitly so that loved ones could join the call if necessary. He was told to keep isolating and to report his recent contacts. If his symptoms progressed, that was how they put it, to the point where he could no longer take care of himself, he would be picked up and admitted to hospital. There were no known treatments, of course, but he would be sent some mild antidepressants, which would help if the cause was indeed psychosomatic.

I stayed with him throughout those days. We kept a video call going 24 hours a day. I could hear him breathe as he slept, and see the faint outline of his body. Occasionally his father, or some of our friends would join, as if they were visiting his house. But I was there from the moment he woke up, until the moment we went to bed. And I saw the breakdown of his body hour by hour. Every day, there were new symptoms. He would begin to stumble, or drool. He would develop facial ticks and muscle spasms. All the time, the hospital refused to admit him. There was nothing they could do at this point, they said, and the intensive care was full.

One week after his first symptoms, he collapsed as he was walking from the kitchen to the living room. I called an ambulance, and he was taken to the hospital. He was out of shot in the video call, and I could only catch glimpses of the ambulance crew in their heavy protective suits, as they loaded him onto a stretcher and took him away.

He had already slipped into a coma by the time he arrived. I don’t remember the last thing I said to him. I think it was something banal.

We had already discussed what to do, he had already signed the paperwork while he still could. Nobody came back from the coma. By law, there was nothing the doctors could do but keep patients on a respirator for the two or three months it took them to die. This meant that for every patient that hadn’t given explicit permission for euthanasia, and for every family that refused to accept the inevitable, a hospital bed was taken away.

I was not given much time to grieve in peace. Before Mathieu died, I had already had an appointment with a contact tracer: people who tracked the spread of the disease. To help to understand it, and to give any people who might be infected early warning. It was simple and painless. She arranged a video call with me and asked me a series of standard questions. I had filled out a form already, in as much detail as I could, and she simply went over it with me. She looked tired.

After Mathieu died, I received a request for a second appointment. From the start, this was a different story. The first appointment was booked through the website, and there were rigid 15 minute blocks to choose from. The second appointment was made by direct message. We agreed on a starting time, and when the meeting confirmation came through later, I saw that the length of the meeting had been set at two hours and thirty minutes.

There were two people on the call. A man in his fifties did most of the talking. A little overweight, but well groomed. A younger woman spent most of the meeting taking notes. His first question was whether I knew why he’d called me in for a second appointment. It was the sort of question a police officer asks you.

I told him I didn’t know. I could guess, but his attitude made me recalcitrant. The simple truth was that Mathieu was the last person who should have gotten sick. We had both written a detailed record of what we had done day by day for the past weeks. We had both been perfectly isolated. I know that Mathieu even kept his windows closed and masked up when he opened his door to pick up the food delivery.

He tried from several angles to get me to admit to anything I hadn’t written in the report. Many young people broke lockdown to go to parties or to meet with friends. I suppose I can’t blame him for at least investigating the possibility. At first he simply asked me, in a friendly tone whether I had left anything out. Then he reminded me of the penalties I’d face if I lied to them.

The woman occasionally broke in. She wanted to know whether I was properly isolating now. She tried to go over the isolation rules. It was somewhere at this point I began to lose my composure.

I had, I think, made an unconscious decision to present a neutral facade. To be helpful, to provide the details, and to stay detached. There was a huge amount of administrative detail surrounding Mathieu’s death. What kind of funeral we could arrange, if and how his belongings could be collected from his flat. Everything was complicated by the pandemic. His father seemed almost catatonic, and while a few friends offered to help, there wasn’t much they could do, so most of it fell to me.

My survival strategy, so far, had been to stay detached and mechanical. Find something to deal with and get it done. It kept me busy and it kept my mind off so many things that were unbearable. How many people were still pushing the lockdown rules. How much I’d lost in Mathieu. And, of course, the question of how he got sick.

And if he could get sick, how anybody else was safe? I think that was the thing I pushed down with the greatest force. It was frightening. I watched his body break down over the course of barely more than a week. I saw him die, from his single worst fear, with no explanation. Most of all, I was scared that the same thing would happen to me.

I’ve often thought this about grief. It’s so difficult to process because so much of it is selfish. The public view of it is all love and kindness. The idea is that you are almost consumed by a selfless pity for the person you lost. The truth is a lot more ugly. You are feeling sorry for yourself. But more than that, you’ve been up close and personal with death. For a large part, it’s not their death that is causing you grief, it’s your own. Another one of those thoughts that people keep to themselves.

So, I suppose it was inevitable that I would crack during the second contact tracing interview. I can’t give you a blow-by-blow account of how it happened. I know I cried. I know I shouted at them. I know I desperately tried to explain to them what Mathieu’s state of mind was. Plenty of people are scared, he said. All the more reason to blow off some steam.

I think I eventually convinced them at least that if Mathieu had broken lockdown, I didn’t know about it. They asked me if there were any indications that Mathieu had any addictions, perhaps a gambling problem, or some sexual proclivities he wouldn’t have told me about.

He smirked as he asked that question. It was his I-told-you-so. His proof that there might be things I hadn’t thought about. There you go, he wanted to say, your precious perfect self-isolating boyfriend was a closet homosexual. And when his unmentionable desires became strong enough, he broke his lockdown. He broke his own rules to pervert himself. To his mind, I was a naive girl, caught up in the romance of a first long-term relationship. To his mind, I could have no idea of how dark and twisted real human behavior was.

When I think back to that moment I try to remind myself that as he was bearing down on me, something far greater was bearing down on him. He had been given, or had taken, the responsibility of making sense. Of taking all these cases of inexplicable transmission, and of showing that what was at work was not some great mystery. It was human nature. It was people giving in to their darker sides, going out to drink, to take drugs and to fuck, and then lying about it. Through their teeth, to the point of killing themselves, and to the point of killing others.

I expect that this attitude led to plenty of successes. This will have endeared him to his superiors who were grasping for a controllable, understandable story. But what of cases like Mathieu? How did he come away from that interview? Could he have done anything but simply conclude that Mathieu had somehow broken the rules, and he didn’t find the evidence this time? People always believe the cynical narrative. The denialists believe that the government is corrupt, the police believe that people are fundamentally flawed, and doctors believe that their patients lie. It’s a comforting thought. To think that we are cool-headed, the realists among the taken-in. If we were really so cool-headed, we would be distrustful of comforting thoughts.

I often wonder about those two contact tracers. Did they get their moment of realization? Did they live long enough into the pandemic to see that they were wrong? Did they accept it? Did they think back to an interview, mine or any one of hundreds that they must have carried out, and did they accept that in the face of the available evidence, they were seduced by a comforting thought?

In 2020, one of the great saving graces of the pandemic was the fact that, because the Coronavirus was airborne, restrictions could be lifted as the summer approached. We were in lockdown during the spring, but after two or three months, when the lockdown began to take its toll, we were allowed some relief. We could meet each other outside. We could spend money in bars and restaurants so long as we sat outside. The virus was still there, but we were allowed to lighten the load, if only for a while. Even then, it seemed odd to me that nobody acknowledged how lucky this made us. How much worse it could have been. If the virus had taken away our summers, would we have managed as well?

In our pandemic, this memory of those careful, but liberating summers in the early twenties became a curse. We were told things were different this time around, but we could not shift the unconscious idea that as summer approached, and we went into the fourth month of strict lockdown, some relief must be on the way.

The ablations slowly smothered those hopes. The south of France showed higher numbers, and more outbreak events, indicating that hot weather and outside life did not help. Any ablation that allowed more people to go to the beach or to meet in parks immediately resulted in higher case rates. In part, this was because the ablations were hard to explain. People were forced to stay inside on hot days, sometimes with the windows closed, and heard that just across the border in the next region, the beaches had opened. It was the only weapon we had, but it required a kind of unfairness that people simply could not stomach. Most people just followed whatever rules were in place in the least restricted regions, which made the data extremely unreliable.

The pattern did emerge in the end. Even in the publicly available data, people began noticing the trend eventually. Why didn’t we acknowledge it then? Why didn’t the governments and the WHO accept it? In part, I suppose, simply because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To some extent we were justified in waiting while the evidence built up. But beyond that, I think people were afraid of what it meant. Of what was coming if this became the basis for our policies. And of what it would cost us if we were wrong.

It wasn’t a simple pattern to spot. One form of analysis is to look for sections of the population where the observed pattern deviates from what is predicted under a baseline. For instance, if we look at congregations of around 50 people, we can take an average of the transmission in such groups as our baseline. If we then observe that the transmission in choir practices is greater than what the baseline predicts, we know that there is something specific about that setting, in this case suggesting that a virus is airborne. For PTB, this approach never yielded anything usable. Transmission rates always agreed with the baseline, there was some minor variability, but none of the hypotheses generated bore fruit, and under ablation, all effects disappeared.

The breakthrough finally came when we began to see how unusual that was. We had hit the population with the worst lockdowns the country had ever seen, and we had varied the restrictions by region, month to month. What the data showed was that whatever the restrictions, whatever the people’s daily activities, and overall health, the rate of transmission remained unaffected.

Across countries, this pattern persisted. The lockdown was having some effect, but the effect was uniform across all sections of the population. Whatever the mechanism of transmission was, it was somehow not affected by the specifics of any particular set of restrictions. Even in the most restrictive, authoritarian countries, where people were literally locked in their houses near an outbreak, forced to communicate only through video calls, the effect on the spread was the same as it would have been under a mild lockdown.

In retrospect, the solution is inescapable, but it was too alien to us then. It wasn’t that it wouldn’t occur to us, it was simply that we wouldn’t entertain it.

The one thing that we kept doing, whatever the restrictions, was to talk to each other. We still met. We saw each other on video calls. We did our best to organize games and parties over the internet. We did it less, so the lockdown seemed to work, but we did it exactly in proportion to how often we would normally meet each other.

This was what we needed to accept. The news called it the video virus. They focused then on screen calls, since that was how the world communicated. Once you accepted the idea, the data began to make sense. Places where wearables were more common, wealthy countries, cities, showed a slight increase in transmission. Poor video quality, from poor wifi, or temporary outages, could be shown to correlate with reduced transmission.

There was no suggestion of any mechanism. We were fully in the dark. But it was the only answer we had, after months of lockdown. We were at the brink, and we needed something. Somehow, we were forced to accept, the virus could be transmitted through digital communication.

So the government began to ablate video calls. In some regions just video, in others any calls. In some areas, people were required to isolate entirely: no human contact for 3 weeks. That was the minimum time required to draw any strong conclusions from an ablation. If you watched the news, you would think it was a disaster. There had been protests since the beginning, but they were largely controlled. Now they flared up. The streets were filled with angry crowds. The harder the restrictions, the worse the backlash. This led to mass outbreaks, of course, which people then used to argue against the restrictions: if the restrictions were working, then why would we see more cases where the restrictions are strongest? It was a point that was easy to counter, but in such cases the question always rings louder than the answer.

If you looked carefully, the effect was crystal clear. You could block out the data by educational attainment, which was a strong proxy for following the restrictions. In short, university educated people, who nearly all followed the restrictions, showed a drop in transmission, once the mechanism of transmission was discovered. In the districts where all contact was strictly eliminated, and enforced by carefully controlling internet traffic, transmission all but disappeared. Even within the lower social and economic classes, who made up the bulk of the protest, this pattern showed clearly: the stronger the restriction in the communication, the lower the transmission.

We had found the solution, but it was too late. In France, we were particularly unfortunate. The next election was already in progress. The RE/LR party, who were in power when the pandemic began, had already won the first round of voting by a small margin, but the “video lockdown” upended the landscape. The far right took over on a promise of a “sound, human approach to the pandemic.”

This meant opening businesses. Allowing travel. They found some fringe science to back up their proposals. There were poorly constructed experiments that purported to show airborne transmission. The new government made mandatory masking a key part of their strategy to open up society. The same measures that had divided society during the Coronavirus pandemic were now hailed as simple common sense. It allowed the older generation the sense of a moral high ground. They knew how this worked. They’d been through it before. It was time people started listening to them. Another comfortable thought.

The “video virus hypothesis” was shut down. The government was already in emergency mode, so they could easily redirect funding, and dictate research.

I had paused my PhD, and was doing data analysis on the pandemic for our department. My job was one of the first to go. I continued on a zero-hour contract, so I could keep access to the computing facilities. We tried to keep in touch with our colleagues abroad, and continue our work outside the channels the government could control. Even in the university, however, there were those on the side of the current policy, who could easily report us for working on electronic transmission, as it was called in the literature.

Still, we finally had a mechanism to investigate. There was a wealth of recordings available, of calls that had likely led to a transmission. Privacy laws meant that we couldn’t use these in France without alerting the government to what we were working on, but there were data leaks from abroad that I could use on my own hardware.

We couldn’t watch the recordings ourselves—some careless scientists had shown very quickly that it was possible to become infected that way—but we could at least run analysis to look for any statistical patterns that might show us what the mechanism of transmission was. If we could find these and filter them, we might at least be able to reclaim face-to-face contact.

Outside, I saw the other half living life as if nothing was wrong. Society had finally split entirely down the middle. It felt like an old cut that never healed, finally tearing loose from its failing stitches and fully opening up. Half of us, locked inside, changing all communication to text messaging and voice-only calls. The rest, out on the street, listening to anybody who was willing to tell them they were right.

Most of my colleagues did their best, again and again, to explain the science. To show that whatever the mechanism, this was happening. This was our way to stop it. The video lockdown would be painful, but it would be a way to stop the spread, to ease the pressure on the health system.

But there was no reason to it. I realized this when I spoke to Mathieu’s father. He had a scientific background. A PhD in biochemistry. He had lost both his wife and his son to a pandemic. If anybody knew the cost of ignoring science it would be him. I wanted to set up a call with him. Superficially, to arrange to have some of Mathieu’s belongings sent to him, but also simply to check in. I worried that he would become isolated in the pandemic. I sent him a message, and he replied right away that he’d be happy to pick them up in person.

I was surprised, but not worried. Some people had taken to going outside again, but avoiding face-to-face contact. There was some data to support that this was safe, or at least that the mental health benefits outweighed the risks. I tried to call him to find out if this was what he meant. I could perhaps leave the boxes on the pavement as he approached, I thought. He hung up on the voice call without answering, and called me back with video.

I took the call with my camera off. The software didn’t allow me to turn off his video, so I turned off my screen entirely as the call came through. I caught a brief glimpse of his face before the screen went black. He smiled broadly. It was an entirely congenial smile. It was only in the context of his utter bereavement, that that smile—the last I ever saw of his face—took on its true, grim meaning. He was geared up for an argument. He knew where I stood, and he was ready to tell me all he knew. How silly we all were. I would have been well prepared for the debate. I had processed the data myself. I had read most of the junk science he would have quoted at me. But the best I could do was humor him. At every “I bet you didn’t know” and “Do you really expect me to believe”, I replied impassively and did my best to move the conversation on.

The best I can make of it, is that it’s simply anger. Reason is the mechanism we use to control our anger. It’s the vessel that contains the steam. When anger finally wins, reason needs to give way. It simply loses in all its forms. Not just the reason that tells us to see other people’s points of view, and the reason that tells us what the long-term consequences will be. But also the reason that tells us that we might be wrong. That we should double check. That we should be wary of comfortable thoughts.

I was sure that this would be the breaking point. At least in France. And things did get worse. Hospitals filled up. Patients were left in hallways first, and then in sports halls, schools and conference centres. The saving grace, if you can call it that, was that for the comatose stage, patient care was simple. So long as there was room, nursing staff, volunteers, even family members could take care of the dying. All of them understood the mechanism. All of them had seen it work up close, so there was no danger of them talking to anybody face to face.

It was the time when the mass graves began. At first, these were reserved for the poor, the immigrant communities, and for the left-leaning districts. For a while, the government managed to keep the reality from getting too close to its political base. They will have seen the pictures in the news, but they were spared, for a time, the experience of burying a loved one in a former wheat field, in one of hundreds of small rectangles dug into the earth, in a neat grid.

These were kept out of sight, away from the motorways and train tracks. The government used blue vans with minimal marking to take the comatose patients to improvised care centers, and to take them to the fields a month or two later.

Sooner or later everybody lost someone. Especially les realistes. And then they would have to see the fields with their own eyes. Even then, most of them never saw reason. It was inconceivable to my colleagues, that you could see death at such a scale and not change your view, but again, it made sense to me. After you have let anger take over, losing a loved one is not going to be the thing that rebuilds a broken vessel, and puts the steam back in. Especially if reason would tell you that it’s their own fault that they died. Or worse, yours, for convincing them to follow you. All that is left then is greater anger.

But despite the madness of those days, there was still a tender kind of balance. Half the population followed the rules that became established in countries where a more reasonable government had prevailed. We stopped making video calls, and communicated by email, or voice call when absolutely necessary. The other half lived by whatever rules they deemed sensible. Government advice was vague enough to be unenforceable. However most of them were quickly faced with the consequences. People died and the ones that were left behind, while never admitting they had been wrong, became moderated by a kind of unreasoning fear.

The precise mechanism of transmission was still a mystery. We knew transmission in person was possible, since the disease had spread in many communities where modern technology was shunned. We knew transmission by video call was common, but transmission by voice call was also likely possible. The blind and deaf were as susceptible as anybody else.

This happened primarily in cases where patients had had long, repeated voice calls over several weeks. I remember one case that was often cited, of two elderly women in Germany strictly isolating. Their communication logs and health trackers were analysed by the government, showing that they hadn’t left the house, and had made only voice calls. One had had a conversation with someone making a food delivery. This was of course strictly forbidden, but the driver did not take the regulations seriously. She, perhaps, was afraid of a confrontation if she didn’t engage in conversation, or perhaps her desire to be polite simply overrode her better judgement. In any case, the fever was transmitted through an in-person conversation, and she eventually passed it on to her friend by voice call, before symptoms manifested.

On the other hand, air and touch could more or less be fully ruled out. There were countries like Japan and Norway, where train journeys were allowed on the strict condition of total silence, and full face cover. Where these rules were followed strictly, there was zero transmission.

It was a strange new reality, but we accepted it, ultimately, with remarkable flexibility. We wrote to each other. Occasionally risked a voice call. In some cases, even a face-to-face meeting or video calls became acceptable risks. Some people risked creating isolation bubbles. Within this bubble, the idea went, it was safe to communicate in whatever way so long as everybody was careful outside the bubble. This was sound in theory, but it turned out to be dangerous in practice. People rarely thought this through with any discipline. One common failure was people keeping a work bubble and a personal bubble. If enough people did this, the amount of overlap still allowed for a complete social graph to form, and the virus spread as much as ever.

Nevertheless, this small amount of understanding allowed us to rebuild a working society. It was a strange reflection of what we had once had, but there was something to build on. Slowly, the reactionary sentiment died down. They were always there, but they never again gained such a hold over society. Their government remained in power for their full term, but only by instituting the restrictions that were in place everywhere else in the world. We had finally reached something close to acceptance.

This world was not without its challenges. When my brother-in-law caught the virus, my sister and his two daughters were forced to break all communication. He locked himself in a room, and wore a pillow cover over his head whenever he came out. My sister would see him, but could not speak with him. It was, she once said, like he was already dead, and his ghost still lingered.

They could not be intimate in any way in those final moment. Sex, or even a prolonged hug turned out to be as dangerous as a video call. In the early days, it had been something of a joke that people could now have safe sex with paper bags or “face condoms” over their heads. Of course, plenty of people were willing to try, and we quickly realized that for the purposes of transmission, physical touch was as much communication as anything else.

What happened to my sister was relatively rare, however. As people began to find ways to work within the restrictions, the case rate finally dropped. For the first time in the pandemic, the pressure on the ICs dropped, and hospital beds were left empty again. That was when the first mutation emerged.

I was lucky. My colleagues and I had considered the possibilities of mutation, and knew what the consequences might be. One of them sent me a five-word message. Even before I read it, the style of the message told me what had happened. It said MUTATION TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION TAKE PRECAUTION. It was written like that, in all capitals with no punctuation, like an old telegraph message. One more way to reduce information content to the absolute minimum.

I had read the scenarios. I had helped with some of the data analysis. I could understand from a simple message what was coming. But we had failed to communicate this possibility properly to the general population. And now it was too late to warn them.

I shut down all communication. I remember closing my windows and putting in ear plugs, and playing white noise on my headphones. I closed all curtains but one. Through the remaining window I couldn’t see any people. Just a sunlit, silver Birch, gently swaying in the wind.

I tried to focus my thoughts. I was alone. I needed a safe way to get more information. To communicate. To figure out what had happened, and what was still possible.

Over time, through simple messages, my colleagues and I managed to assemble a collection of resources that were safe to read.

We pieced together the following history of the mutation. We still don’t know whether mutation is an accurate name for it. We only have macro-level data to work with. But the fact is, that in June 2033, in Nusantara, the pattern of transmission radically changed. Initial data from the Indonesian outbreak team shows that voice calls quickly became a clear and serious risk. More worryingly, there was a super-spreader event caused by a newsletter. It was written by a religious guru. Newsletters were a common replacement for sermons. They were often long. They were read carefully by a large number of people. In this case, the correlation was crystal clear. More than three quarters of people who had received the sermon had become infected, and since the Guru preached strict isolation, all of them were otherwise low-risk.

Evidence quickly accumulated: PTS-Beta could be transmitted by written text. It needed to be a long text, and it needed to be read carefully, but it was possible. For voice-calls, transmission was now highly likely, and for video calls, even ones lasting a few seconds, it was almost certain.

The median incubation time of PTS-Beta appeared to be around 14 days. This meant that it was impossible to predict, anywhere in the world, who had already been infected. People needed to be informed urgently, but if the message was too long, there would be a serious risk of transmission through the message itself.

In the end, most governments narrowed it down to about a hundred words, and used various tricks like simple automated rephrasing tools. Some governments blanked out 10% of the letters in the message in the hope that this would limit possible transmission. I expect this just served to make it look more menacing and less trustworthy.

This was, perhaps, simply too much to ask of people. From one small paragraph, they were asked, not just to understand what had happened, but also the implications. It required them immediately to fully isolate. To override all instincts to reach out to family, to check for extra information online. To cease all communication.

The challenge that everybody had to solve for themselves was to reconstruct a full set of reasonable restrictions from just the minimal information they had been given. In principle, the message contained all the information. It was possible, in theory, for everybody to work out what the implications would be for their situation. In practice, I don’t know whether I would have made all the right decisions if I hadn’t worked on exactly this scenario in detail.

Almost everybody searched for more information online. Most responsible news organizations had blacked out their website and most of the archive up to the time of mutation, repeating only the short government message. What was left was self-published content. This ranged from well-meaning but overlong explainers to down-right misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Before long, the very worst-case scenario proved to be true. Transmission of Beta was cumulative. Each message written by an infectious person added to the viral load. Infection could happen from carefully reading one long sermon from a single source, but also from several shorter paragraphs from a handful of different sources. If you read enough, from enough different people over a short amount of time, whatever natural resistance you had was overwhelmed.

I think that’s the main mistake people made. Most understood that they needed to limit exposure to long text. To communicate only the essentials in brief missives. But few realized the possibility of cumulative exposure. Most governments didn’t warn people, and those that did, rarely explained the principle very well.

I often find myself wondering what it would take for a population to be truly robust. Did we go wrong somewhere? Could we have responded appropriately, en masse? Is there something anywhere in our history that we could have done differently, to prepare ourselves?

We have always survived crises by looking to authority. This is how it was in the early days of the pandemic. We look for the government directive. Trust the experts. We have ideals, on some level, about making up your own mind from the available information, but the reality is that we are easily seduced. It would require every single one of us to make that single correct, difficult choice without hesitation.

I imagine a tunnel fire where at the first sign of smoke, each driver abandons their car and walks calmly to the nearest exit. It’s perfectly possible. Simple even. All that is required is reason. The ability to reason from the individual to the collective and back again. We have that capacity, and yet every scenario I can imagine where we all use it individually, correctly, seems laughable. Inhuman.

These days I spend a lot of time thinking. I try to go for short walks. I leave my glasses at home and wear earplugs. It should be quite safe. I can see other people, occasionally, in the distance, but I think most people don’t take the risk of going out. Maybe there aren’t many people left. I see a lot of blue vans.

Inside, I read old books, and watch movies. Anything made before the pandemic. The media companies appear to be thriving, so I imagine many other people are doing the same. Apart from the occasional outage, the internet is still up.

The food delivery has stalled for the past three days. There was a short message today, on a piece of paper that said FOOD SHORTA_E TEMP_RA_Y. I thought this might happen, and built up a small reserve. It’s bland, but it’ll see me through a few more days. The water is still running. I’m doing my best to collect as much of it as I can in bottles and pots.

Yesterday I received a document from a colleague. The message just said DANGE_OUS IM_ORTANT. The attachment contained two files, in old, simple file formats. One, a small text file was called READ.txt, the other was called DONTREAD.pdf.

I didn’t open either, before running them through analysis. The text file was short, so I thought it safe to read without protection. It said

It could have been less verbose. The periods were certainly unnecessary, but the message was clear.

I’ve worked out a system for reading potentially compromised texts. I assume that whatever is being transmitted must have an information content comparable to a biological virus. Taking porcine circovirus as a baseline, and a safety factor of three, I’ll assume an information content of 1 kilobyte. That’s about a short story, if encoded straight. In addition, however, the text is a severely noisy channel, since the original meaning must also be conveyed. My colleagues have assembled a dataset of compromised text on our shared server. Comparison to pre-pandemic material shows that the difference may lie in word choice, misspellings, as well as unusual conceptual associations. It’s most likely a combination of these. A conservative estimate suggests that the relative entropy of infected text compared to the baseline is about a quarter bit. This suggests I can read 4 kilobytes of infected text before risking infection. I’ve lowered this to half a kilobyte for an additional safety factor. I can add some corruption and rephrasing for additional protection, but the Indonesian data suggests this is less effective than one would guess. Most of the payload seems to be encoded in the semantics.

The recovery rate is a more difficult question. How long should I wait before I can read another half kilobyte? Is it even safe to assume some mechanism of recovery of infection? I’ve settled on two days, based on not much at all. Short messages from my colleagues seem to suggest that they are following similar rules. The official advice from the government is still to avoid all but official communication. This seems unworkable to me. I expect everybody is making their own rules.

I’ve read the introduction and the conclusion so far. It seems to be a highly theoretical, abstract approach. It suggests that any system with self replicating components, no matter how complex, is susceptible to malignant self-replication. This by itself is not new: the idea that concepts like religion or jokes propagate through a population in a similar way to a virus, has been around for decades at least.

What this paper seems to show, however, is that there are critical thresholds of emergence. Once an environment reaches a certain level of connectedness and computational complexity, it can also support self-replicating units of greater validity and complexity. Moverover this doesn’t happen gradually, but at critical points of emergence. Like a lightning strike or a fracture in a steel beam. The pressure mounts gently, step by step, and suddenly there is a catastrophic failure.

I remember they used critical emergence points to explain how AI capabilities came about when I was still a student. I wonder if there is a connection. Perhaps it’s all self replicating structures in a computational environment. Us, AI, the virus.

The rest of the paper is filled with theoretical computer science and category theory. It will take me a while to read up on the necessary background, but I can do this from safe material. I should be careful of the formulae and figures too, since their information content is more difficult to estimate. Remember that even sexcan be a vector. This thing communicates over any medium it can. In tww days,I will see if i can read more.

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I dropped a spoon three times in a row yesterday.Today I had trouble dressng. I need to keep this short. Most of the above was written inside the incubation time it should not be considered safe

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quicly. i havee locked this away, under clearwarnings maybe some time in the futre. maybe we make it troug and we can make this safe to read again

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my love and good luck