“Well, let’s call him Christopher, then. Crash is a terrible name. It makes me think of disasters. Anyway, no video calls with him, or anyone, until your schoolwork is done.”

In a tone of pure outrage: “What?”

“No video calls until—”

“I heard you!”

“You asked what did I—”

“Mom! You are the worst! Everyone video calls or Snapchats all day because we do our work together. I have to get help, Mom, because do you want me to fail? God. Plus, this is the only way I have to see anyone, since you shut down the whole country.”

I’d gotten stuck on the part about everyone doing the work together. Was that a bad thing? Maybe they were honing collaborative skills that would serve them well in the future. If, on the other hand, they were crowdsourcing a couple of nerds to do all the heavy lifting while the Gnashes and Crashes coasted around doing who knows what . . . drinking virtual beer while virtually propositioning innocent fifteen-year-olds . . . I considered how to best approach this. “Rorie,” I said brightly, “what if we—”

Oh. Rorie had hung up.

—

AT EIGHT FORTY-FIVE, the room started to fill with people from various divisions, all of them wearing antiviral respirator masks fitted with microphones. These special microphone masks were distributed to medical professionals, government organizations, certain media outlets, and essential businesspeople but had also become a hot commodity on the black market, further propagating the centuries-old American tradition of silencing the poor. In addition to the microphones, they boasted an impregnated layer of graphene foam and zinc oxide nanoparticles that in theory trapped and deactivated the protein envelope of the virus. They cost about eight hundred dollars each.

Once everyone got their personal mike turned on, or silenced—depending on whether or not they had speaking privileges—the meeting commenced. We began by checking in with various field offices. First: Des Moines. Everyone signed in to the chat room in time to see Ashok Tamboli, one of the medical epidemiologists from my team, walking toward us inside a field hospital. He wore a full Tyvek suit and a respirator and appeared to be holding a fistful of blood tubes, which he shifted to the side of his hand in order to give us a wave. One of the bigwigs requested a virtual tour of the tent hospital, so another of the med epis, a woman named Christiane Blackwell, was suited up and carrying a camera around.

The tented room in which she stood spanned acres. Constructed of durable polyethylene stretched over stainless steel beams, the interior had been laid out in a neat grid. Color-coded military-issue cots lined the rows, stretching so far into the distance you couldn’t see the most remote ones. Every cot had a thin half wall behind it, from which protruded oxygen and IV tubing.