This place had been more important, once, Hassan told us as we followed him over the beige and orange carpets, through the hallways of empty offices and wide windows that overlooked a meadow. By the time he’d taken over as Director General of the Predictive Intelligence Bureau three years ago, the organization had been past its prime. The world had wrung most of the progress it could out of the Farsight—the actual machine was on the main floor in a spot of honor by a memorial fountain for the Taceovirus victims—and was plateauing on autopilot. Networked computers around the world dialed into the Farsight for near-constant access to its predictive tech, making the initial machine a relic. The facility was mostly used for boring administrative stuff, with the Farsight occasionally fired up to compare probability discrepancies between computers for governmental business, which meant a lot of time for Yusuf to continue his research on nested universes.

Until the plague hit.

We rounded a corner to a wide carpeted area that was once probably a few conference rooms split with folding walls, now filled with six long barrack-style rows of thin cots separated by a few flimsy screens. Close to a hundred people crammed in the space—families with two kids to a bed and their parents on a nest of blankets and clothes on the floor. Single women trying to carve a slice of privacy out of the crowd by rigging up a tent of sheets around their bed. Couples sitting on the floor and eating what must’ve been freeze-dried provisions out of pouches, with everything they owned spilling out of backpacks next to them. What hit me first was the sound of the place—a low din of a crowded mag-train station with coughing, kids screaming, and low radios playing jangly upbeat tunes that seemed out of place.

Refugees, Hassan told us, of the Taceovirus that wiped out a third of the world’s population, with no treatment still in sight. New pockets were still popping up all over disparate parts of the world. There was some evidence to suggest the virus was manmade to silence political dissidents in the wake of the Second American Civil War—the virus literally attacked the vocal cords before killing nearly all of the infected—but no definite proof just yet. And it kept mutating.

The Farsight had solved all of humanity’s problems except for humanity, which still had a knack for wanting to kill itself.

The United Commonwealth had closed its borders to the rest of the world and the only way for the non-infected to find asylum in the safe haven of the island was to head to Dover on the coast and quarantine for weeks before they boarded a mag-train to one of the temporary housing facilities like this one.