The showers in Maggie’s house are another amazing example of what you can achieve if you have enough money and don’t care how much of it you spend. The showers in the Oakland apartments were bare-bones, consisting of air locks, computer-controlled water sprays, and simple blood test panels. Using them was like getting scrubbed down by industrial robots that didn’t give a damn whether you were comfortable with the process. They didn’t quite perform involuntary enemas, but God, they came close. Maggie’s place, on the other hand… When her parents set her up with a place of her own, they took “spare no expense” seriously. Some of the bells and whistles she had were things I’d seen only in magazines and in articles about people with more money than sense.

The entire bathroom was decorated in pre-Rising tile, with genuine porcelain fixtures, the kind that can get broken or splinter, thus becoming infection risks and requiring full replacement. It was easy to miss at first glance that the room was divided into two sections, since the main section contained the toilet, a full-sized sink, and an antique claw-footed bathtub. All you had to do to get inside was open the door—no blood tests required. If you were the sort of person who could ignore the heavy curtain covering one wall, you could pretend that it really was a pre-Rising bathroom, and that all that zombie nonsense had never actually happened.

I closed the bathroom door and crossed to the sink, where I emptied my pockets into one of the mesh baskets Maggie keeps for exactly that purpose. Once I was sure I wouldn’t accidentally sanitize my press pass orsomething, I stripped, tossing my clothes—shoes and all—into the bathroom hamper. As soon as I activated the shower, a chute in the bottom of the hamper would open and send my clothes for automatic sterilization. No human hands would touch them until they were certified infection-free. I glanced at my reflection and scowled. I looked exhausted, and I was starting to develop bags under my eyes. Good thing I wasn’t doing the Irwin circuit anymore. An Irwin who looks tired is an Irwin who’s losing merchandising points with every frame of footage he posts.

Pulling back the curtain revealed the hermetically sealed air lock door separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom. There was a testing panel to one side. I pressed my hand against it, feeling the needles bite into the base of my palm. The light over the shower began flashing between red and green. I cleared my throat, and said, “Shaun Mason, guest, requesting standard decontamination protocols.”