Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

“I thought they’d never leave,” Rhonda said by way of apology. She assessed the structural integrity of one of the thin plastic chairs, chose a marginally newer one next to it, and gingerly sat. “I suppose the doctor told y’all that I’d invited her to sit in on our conversation.”

“Is Mr. Sparks not coming?” Dr. Fraelich asked.

“Oh, this isn’t a town council meeting, hon,” Rhonda said.

The doctor smiled tightly. “The inner circle, then? The Star Chamber?”

“Call it the executive board,” the Reverend said.

The doctor glanced at Deke. “I didn’t know the town had one,” she said.

Rhonda chuckled. “Neither does Mr. Sparks. Don’t tell him, it’ll hurt his feelings.” She folded her hands on the table. “So. You speak their language, Doctor, and you’ve already had a run-in with the field team. What do you think they’re planning?”

“Run-in?” Deke asked.

“This morning, Eric Preisswerk and his team came to my office and started going through my records,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Everything they could get their hands on, paper or electronic.”

“That can’t be legal,” the reverend said. “Those are private medical records.”

“I don’t think they’re worried about lawsuits at the moment,” Rhonda said. To the doctor she said, “So will they find a link?”

The doctor shook her head. “I can’t believe they’d find something new. For thirteen years we’ve looked at all the usual causes and vectors-viral, bacteriological, toxicological-and come up with nothing.”

“So why is Preisswerk doing it?”

“I’ve known Eric for several years. He’s got to look for a standard link because that’s his job, but what he’s really working on is the quantum transmission theory.”

“This teleportation stuff?” Deke said. “But he was putting Rainy down about it.”

“Eric was being cautious because he was in public.”

“And because his boss was right there,” Rhonda said.

The doctor picked up the coffee cup again and pinched off a bit of Styrofoam. “Eric told me the CDC is taking the theory more seriously now. Ecuador is making them take it seriously.”

“So is TDS contagious or not?” the reverend asked. “If they think we can spread it, then they’re going to crack down.”

“It’s not that simple,” Dr. Fraelich said. “If the theory’s correct, and I don’t believe it is, then TDS is transmittable, but not in the way we normally think. Instead it’s-well, it’s too complicated to explain.”

“I think you better try,” Rhonda said.

“Tell them what you told me, Marla,” Deke said. “About quantum calculation, parallel universes.”

Dr. Fraelich exchanged a look with Deke-the doctor wasn’t enjoying this. She exhaled heavily. “Imagine that next to our universe there are millions of other universes. Trillions. Now imagine that in just one of them, some bacteria or virus figures out how to transmit its genetic instructions to the universe next door.”

“How?” the reverend asked.

“If a cell is isolated from measuring events, then-never mind, let’s just say it’s theoretically possible. The point is, the probability of that happening is very, very low, almost impossible, but not quite. Given enough alternate universes, it’s practically inevitable that one of them learns the trick.” Everyone regarded her blankly. The doctor smiled in frustration. “Okay, think of how land animals that evolved in one place end up on other continents, like new world monkeys migrating from Africa to South America. It’s too far for them to swim, obviously. But say a hurricane picks up a tree on the shore where a couple of monkeys are hanging on, and the tree gets blown into the right current, and somehow the monkeys run aground on an island before they die of starvation or thirst. Then a thousand years later it happens again, to their descendants, and they get blown to the next island, and the next. Eventually we get marmosets in South America.”

“Come on now,” the reverend said. “A hurricane, a tree, and not one but two monkeys…”

“Adam and Eve,” Deke said, a smile in his voice.

“Or just one pregnant female monkey,” Rhonda said.

“And then it happens again and again?” the reverend said.

“But that chain of events only has to happen once,” the doctor said. “Once in ten million years. We know it happened, or something equally improbable, because the monkeys weren’t there forty million years ago, and then they were.

“Now imagine what you could do with trillions of universes and millions of years. Just once, one virus has to figure out how to get to the next universe. Once that happens, the viruses ripple across many universes. The way quantum mechanics works, you’ll have a nearly infinite number of universes in which this has happened, and a nearly infinite number where this has never happened. We just happened to be in the haves.”

“I don’t believe this,” the reverend said. “That all this could happen by chance.”

The doctor bristled. “I’m not going to argue with you about whether this is an act of God.”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing,” the reverend said.

Rhonda rapped the table with the underside of one of her rings. “Ladies. It doesn’t matter whether God did it, or a virus, or quantum Santa Claus.”

“Of course it matters!” the reverend exclaimed.

“Elsa, hear me out. It doesn’t matter what we think, it only matters what the government thinks, and what the public thinks. Because that’s what’s going to decide whether they quarantine us again.” She looked around the table. “You saw what I saw. Doctor, your friend Preisswerk bailed out when he was asked about the quarantine. Obviously they’ve talked about it. And if public opinion turns, then sooner or later they’ll have to isolate us. That’s what I’d do in their shoes.”

The reverend made a disgusted noise. “Of course you would.”

“Yes I would. Elsa, the only reason they dropped the quarantine last time is because it stopped spreading, and because the babies hadn’t started arriving. Now it’s started again, and they know those people will start breeding too. We’re not disease victims anymore, we’re a race-three races-and from another universe, of all things.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the reverend said. “We are not aliens.”

“Of course not,” Rhonda said, and thought, Of course we are. “But think of this from the government’s point of view. Even if a quarantine won’t protect a single citizen, the public will demand that we be locked up. They’re already nervous-did you see that interview with those yahoos in Knoxville? They’ve already started talking about ‘those people’ in Switchcreek. Pretty soon they’ll be running to Wal-Mart for pitchforks and torches.”

“We’ve gone down this road before,” the reverend said. “Putting a fence around us didn’t make any difference last time, and it won’t this time. The government has to make it clear that it’s not contagious. We are not a risk.”

Dr. Fraelich shook her head. “You’re not listening to me. It may not be contagious in the usual sense, but it’s still transmittable . Look, imagine all the universes lined up in parallel lines.” She set out her hands, palms apart. “The virus travels from one universe to the next one. Nothing would stop the virus from crossing back into our universe from a different point. We have to assume that we are infecting nearby universes. The more of those we infect, the more likely that the infection spreads back to us.”

“If this quantum theory is true,” Deke said.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” Rhonda said again. “If the government thinks it’s true, or if they feel they have to act like it’s true, then they’re going to try to fence us in. Our job is to figure out how to stop that from happening.”