very sophisticated,” he said. “The complete propaganda—brainwashing—campaign makes everyone believe the machine is infallible.”
“It is infallible,” said Syd.
“See. We don’t know that,” cried Heck. “Some people may have slipped through the system.” He pounded on his chest with a single finger. “And I’m going to be one of them. I don’t believe their prediction. I’m not going to die. They can’t sentence me to die before my time. They can’t do it to me. I won’t let them do it.”
Syd attended Heck’s funeral a week and a half later. The machine had been exactly correct. “One hundred percent,” Syd muttered to himself.
Caged in his sole decent suit on the hottest day so far this season, Syd gave his condolences to Heck’s wife and tried to pretend the tears that he wiped from his face were only sweat. In fact, he was sweating despite the funeral home’s powerful air conditioning, and he wondered if he had a temperature. But of course not yet.
If the prediction of the machine was just a kind of mental curse, a sort of juju superstition, then why hadn’t Heck been able to overcome it despite his seemingly intense determination?
The funeral party went back to Heck’s house and Syd sat on the windowsill and drank a cold beer. A guy came over and stood beside him, Syd wishing he would go away.
“Did you know him well?” asked the man.
“Since we were ten. Thirty years,” answered Syd. He didn’t recognize the other man at all—maybe one of the in-laws or a guy from where Heck used to work.
“I met him on the Internet,” said the stranger. “And we only saw one another in person once. He believed, as some of us do, that the whole thing is a colossal scam.”
“A colossal scam?” Syd let out a short, bitter laugh and chugged his beer. “Then why is Hector in a coffin six feet under now?”
The man looked out the window as if seeking the answer out there in the world. “It’s hard,” he said. “Hard to mentally buck the entire system. Hard to suspend belief in everything you’ve been told all your life. The change required is profound.”
“What about bacteria?” demanded Syd. “What about viruses? What about accidents?”
“I said profound,” the man repeated. “Suppose their words weaken your natural immunities—or even cause you to `accidentally’ step in front of a car. We’re social creatures, deeply social, and we very deeply want to run with the herd.” He looked away from Syd and seemed to be contemplating a far-off place, not here and not now.
“And you beat it?” Syd asked then. How old would he say Heck’s Internet friend was?
“Some have, in fact, beaten it,” answered the man. “But when they do, they have to tear themselves away from their lives because the government…”
“Oh, yes,” said Syd. “The government.”
The man nodded. “So even if I could claim to have overcome the percentages, I wouldn’t say anything like that out loud.” He smiled and Syd just stared at him. “But maybe the world isn’t the way they say it is. Your friend had the courage to at least try.”
The stranger gave Syd an intense look almost the way Heck sometimes had, and then he walked across the room to Heck’s widow, taking her hand. A couple of minutes later, Syd saw the man go out the front door.
Two weeks after that, Syd moved out of his house, checking into a cheap motel with cabins in a fairly remote hunting area in the mountains upstate. He wasn’t trying to outrun the ebola, but to protect his wife and kids. He continued to call home a few times a day to give them his love, but they were talking to a dead man and they all knew it.
Syd thought a lot about what Heck and the man from the Internet had said, and he read the Bible left in a drawer by his bed. He wasn’t quite sure why someone had put the book in there. The language was from another time, and he didn’t understand most of what he saw as a relic of the pre-scientific past.
“They had to explain things somehow in the old days,” he said out loud, only to himself. The Bible, religion, it had pretty much faded away from people's lives these days. Useless things generally dropped away by themselves.
Religion, he supposed, was to comfort you when you didn’t know what was going to happen next. When you did know what was going to happen next, what could comfort you then?
National Tragedy Hits Upstate Region
Shinnecock Highlands, New York, July 21, 2023—New York State deaths have added a count of five victims of ebola virus to the national death count of 74, as reported today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. These five deaths are the first reported in this state.
Transmission of the virulent and 100 percent fatal ebolavirus in diverse geographic regions of this country remain unexplained.
“We see no reason for general alarm,” said Dr. Rosemary Clemeth, chief rare disease epidemiologist at the CDC. “While this is a tragedy, the disease in the U.S. has, in an unusual turn, struck down only older adults among the population, those age 40 and older, to date.”
Dr. Clemeth noted the CDC is working hard to find the means of transmission that would explain deaths from ebola in Florida, Mississipi, Minnesota, and now New York State.
“All precautions are being taken,” stated Dr. Clemeth. “But these viruses are thousands of years old and from time to time they both mutate and travel. We have no reason to believe these outbreaks, though tragic, are anything but isolated occurrences.”
A simultaneous but separate bulletin issued by the U.S. Predictive Bureau noted that to date more than 700 predictions of death by ebola hemorrhagic fever have been made by the department.
Individuals listed by the CDC as dead from ebola in New York State are:
Sydney Gaines, age 40
Claire Tousand, age 41
Tigran Yeritsyan, age 40
Jane Littledoe, age 40
Waukus Littledoe, age 40
“All these local and national fatalities were in accord with forecasts by agency testing,” a spokesman for the U.S. Predictive Bureau told The NY Mountain Press. “Seven hundred and eighteen deaths by ebola hemorrhagic fever have been predicted nationally to date, and testing does not indicate a runaway epidemic over the next four to six months.”
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