So! They want me to tell you a little about the history of the Q, from my perspective. I told them it was probably a bad idea to let me do this, but here we are. No one can say I didn’t warn you.

All right, they told me to start at the beginning, which I think you all already know, but whatever. They said they want to hear my version of events. So here we go.

There was a virus, and it was bad. Death, sadness, et cetera.

I’m probably supposed to tell you some science stuff here, but I slept through those classes. You have the internet out there, don’t you? You can look it up.

Anyway, this virus started in Austin, Texas, which I hear was a pretty nice place back in the day. It quickly spread to Houston and Dallas and some other places I forgot. The US government, which had dealt with two major pandemics in the past twenty years, was like, “Yo, we got this, we got this.”

They built a massive quarantine zone around Austin and started shuttling all the sick people over there. Everyone without symptoms went to a separate quarantine zone.

Problem was, a lot of people couldn’t get out of the Austin quarantine zone, even if they weren’t sick yet. Some people, like my parents, didn’t have a car and couldn’t catch one of the buses because there weren’t nearly enough. You had to, like, fight to the death to get on one of those buses, and my parents weren’t about that life.

Your history classes will probably teach you that it was just the unlucky people or the stupid ones who stuck around and caught the virus, but that’s a load of shit. It was mostly just the poor people.

Wait, Hadley is holding up a piece of paper telling me I can’t say “shit.” Well, fu…dge. I’ll try to clean up the language, kids.

Right, so we have this quarantine zone with all the sick people, and it’s a real bummer in there, because it turns out that the virus has a 40 percent mortality rate.

On the upside, the president of the United States has become a damn hero for containing the virus before it spread outside of Texas and killed half the world’s population. Good for him, I guess.

Meanwhile, the 60 percent who lived and were still in the Q were like, “Hey, are we getting out of here or what?”

Spoiler alert: they did not get out.

Because, bad news—this virus does not provide long-term immunity to people who get infected with it. Which meant everyone inside the Q kept getting sick, over and over, and no one could develop an effective vaccine because the virus kept mutating. On the plus side, the mortality rate kept getting better, so people weren’t dropping dead left and right anymore.

People started to try to escape the Q, which did not go great for them. President Howard was like, “Yo, that’s not cool,” and built a huge-ass wall around the whole Q to keep us all in.