Masks—or the lack of them—weren’t the only clue, however. For obvious reasons, few people wanted to shake hands anymore. Some people elbow-bumped or put their hands together as if in prayer, but most people seemed to be employing a sort of combo head-nod-half-bow thing. Compton liked the head-nod-half-bow; it felt dignified and respectful.

Another clue to the new world: the government had begun distributing colored pins to the population to indicate immunity. They planned to ramp this up once the various vaccines had been distributed, so people would have instant visual reassurance about the lack of infectivity of a stranger in their orbit. The pins contained some kind of glowing biometric sensor activated by your fingerprint to make them harder to fake. Immune people’s pins glowed green.

Between the masks and the big glowing pins and the head bowing, it was all very Star Wars. You almost expected a two-headed person with their eyeballs on stalks to come slithering around the corner of the ER, complaining the pain medicine their primary care doctor had prescribed for their hangnail was not getting the job done and could they please have a script for hydrocodone, like, right now?

Yep. Mostly back to normal.

The opiate-requesting hangnail patient had been a real one—a human version, not a two-headed version—and after a respectful and earnest presentation on Compton’s part about it not being good medical practice to prescribe addictive opioids for minor conditions, the hangnail stormed out, hollering at top volume that she was going to trash Compton on the Press Ganey survey for being such an evil bitch and also on every doctor-rating website on the whole freaking internet. The fact that she referenced the Press Ganey survey by name probably meant Hangnail had received a great deal of them in the past, which in turn probably meant she’d spent an inordinate amount of time in hospital emergency departments.

You were not supposed to reference patients in terms of their diagnoses, on the theory that it dehumanized them. In the privacy of her mind, Compton did so anyway, particularly if the patients in question were ornery. Names were irrelevant in the emergency department, but a diagnosis was not, or so she told herself.