Of course, Corvallis didn’t believe for a moment that a bioweapon plague had actually struck the town. This was clearly the work of trolls. The only open question was whether they were nihilistic trolls who just liked to see the world burn, or motivated trolls with some vested interest in gulling credulous millions into clicking on this or that link. But one of the Miasma’s perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like him—people who had better things they could have been doing—devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn’t even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren’t even humans. By making this database query, Corvallis was marshaling evidence for use in one of those pointless debates. If it really was the case that Moabites had suddenly begun getting sick in large numbers, they’d have posted complaints on social media. They’d have called in sick, canceled social engagements, sympathized with one another, exchanged harebrained home remedies, and searched for certain keywords like “high fever and rash” or what have you. Even if a government conspiracy had later severed the town’s links to the outside world, all prior activity would remain archived in Lyke’s servers, where it could be collated and analyzed by someone like Corvallis who had the requisite privileges.

Not surprisingly, the result of the query was a week’s worth of utterly normal social media traffic from the good people of Moab. Nothing whatsoever about mysterious deadly plagues. So the bioweapon narrative was easy to quash, at least if you were among the small minority of Miasma users who actually cared about logic and evidence.

Less out of curiosity than a mindless, OCD-ish compulsion to organize things, he sorted the results of his search by their time stamps, arranging them so that the most recent postings were at the top of the list. Now he could see every jot and tittle of social media traffic that had come out of Moab, Utah, in the days and hours leading up to the detonation.

Most of the entries now visible on his screen had come in last night, petering off into the wee hours as people went to bed. There was a drunken selfie from a party at 3:12 A.M., then nothing for almost two hours.

The item at the very top of the list—in other words, the last social media post to have made it out of Moab, Utah, before it had been nuked—was from an account owned by a company called Canyonland Adventures. Their profile indicated that they were based in Moab and that they were in the business of running white-water rafting trips down the Colorado River. Historically, their postings had comprised promotions, tidbits of news (the cat in their office had been in an altercation with a dog), photos of happy rafters in beautiful settings, and logistical updates for their customers.