A meme cropped up claiming that Moab had actually gone off the grid two days earlier as most of its residents had fallen victim to an explosively contagious plague that had presumably escaped from a nearby bioweapons facility, and that the president had made the decision to sterilize the whole town with a nuke. The roadblocks on the surrounding highways weren’t there to prevent curiosity-seekers from getting in. They were to stop any infected survivors’ getting out. The call went out for all armed citizens living anywhere near Moab to set up watch posts on hills and rooftops and to report, or shoot, escaping zombies. This and other alternative versions of reality were shouted down by stentorian typists even as they were being embellished on fringe talk radio programs and fervently taken up by upstart networks of true believers.

The president, who’d been on a state visit to the Far East, made an appeal for calm, then canceled his engagements and boarded Air Force One, bound for home—though a leaked document, widely reblogged and reposted, showed a flight plan terminating at the U.S. nuclear command bunker in Colorado Springs.

Temporarily at a loss for anything useful to do, Corvallis reckoned that he could at least make some headway debunking the zombie hypothesis. Over the VPN that connected him to Lyke’s servers, he could search the colossal database in which was recorded every scrap of social media activity that had occurred since the company had first gone online. This was the sort of thing he had got rather good at during his tenure at Corporation 9592, where tracking the actions taken by the game’s millions of players had been essential to making it fun, successful, and profitable. Compared to that, it was a simple matter to run a query that would list all Lyke activity originating from users in Moab, Utah, during the last week.