The EMTs wheeled Richard Forthrast out on a gurney and maneuvered him at reckless speed out the door and in the direction of the elevator bank. He was only visible to Corvallis for one, perhaps two seconds, and so it took a little while for Corvallis to process what he had seen. Richard was shirtless, the open-back hospital gown stripped away from him, and electrodes had been stuck to his torso. A tube had been inserted between his teeth and, presumably, down into his windpipe. One of the EMTs was holding a sort of rubber bag, squeezing it in a slow steady rhythm to force air into Richard’s chest.

Corvallis Kawasaki’s first, absurd instinct was to pull his phone out of his pocket and dial Richard’s number. Because what was going on here was obviously weird, obviously a crisis. On both of these counts it was very much a Richard sort of problem. For much of his postcollege life, Corvallis had been in the comfortable habit of knowing that any such matter could automatically be handed off to Dodge, who would be not merely willing but eager to take it on. Why, Dodge would be offended if weird crises were not instantly dumped into his lap. This was now at odds with the intellectual awareness that Dodge was dying or dead.

He closed his laptop, slid it into his bag, stood up, and followed a debris trail of medical wrappers to the elevator lobby, which he reached just in time to glimpse Richard’s gray face and wired-up torso as a pair of doors glided shut on it. He punched the “down” button and waited for the next lift in a very odd state of mind. Nothing was certain yet. Word had not yet gone out on what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Corporation 9592’s stock had not begun to slide. Standing there alone in that lobby, he could convince himself that he had just imagined it, suffered a kind of waking nightmare. If Dodge was about to die, should the world not have been crumbling all about him? Should the streets not have been full of wailing gamers? And yet the elevator lobby was just an elevator lobby, changeless as the stars.

When he reached the ground floor he was able to follow a trail of shocked bystanders—security guards, incoming patients, scrub-wearing medics waiting in line for their lattes—to an exit of the building just in time to see an ambulance peel out. A moment later it turned on its lights and its siren.