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share of the glory; or to the contrary, she would be a purely political appointee, endlessly dogging their work with demands for her particular special interest group. Instead, Carol was a middle-aged starting-to-turn grandmotherly apple-shaped woman, who would be bring them fresh-cooked chocolate-chip cookies and spiced apple cider, never interfering with their work. They could work with this woman.

  “I was wondering when you would get here. Anyway welcome to Portland. We are a small metropolis as far as cities go, but we run a fairly tight ship, and all of us are actually happy whenever you high-up federals take an interest in our city. So we can we start by making sure you are all happy with your accommodations and have no travel problems?”

  Dr. Wells’ team smiled and relaxed. The meeting began.

  “Carol, if you have a moment.”

  “Of course, Dr. Wells.” More than an hour-and-a-half had elapsed and the two teams had already begun to merge harmoniously.

  “We are both of us public health professionals driven by the same mission and many of our people were even at the same university together, I don’t think there’s much need for formality.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I think I can just spell out what the game rules are. We’re fielding a new Big Data application for the first time; billions at stake, lots more interest in Washington that we’ve let on.”

  “Right.”

  “If you think you’re willing to hand over the keys, so to speak, maybe you have friends and connections here in the Portland County, I think we can be in and out of this outbreak in hours. We’ll get all our names on the monograph, and more importantly, of course, there’s always the chance we’ll see a wildcat mutation on the H4 or H7 lines, some kind of crazy megaflu erupting—you know how fast these influenza variants rotate. What do you say about a little off-the-books data sharing with other Portland agencies?”

  Carol took a deep breath. She sort of suspected something along these lines would be coming.

  “Well Dr. Wells, you know the safety and health of my people is my first priority.”

  “Yes, naturally.”

  “But you know, we’re Portland, not Silicon Valley. Not everyone here has a job from Google, and in fact, I think a lot of us like things this way.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll do my best to see who is willing to work with you gentlemen, but I can’t make absolute promises at this time.”

  “Well thank you, Carol. I have full confidence in you.”

  And she smiled, but Dr. Wells was lying. Already his hackers were attempting to side-channel Carol’s access codes, and they were planning on sucking up whatever data they could, however irrelevant or unnecessary.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  “I sense a deep and negative vibration has moved into our local ether,” said Kirsten Maddy, who was paying one of her increasingly less common visits to Beacon Rock, now that she had become ever more absorbed in entomology. She had even begun to wear clothes.

  “Yes,” said Lacey, without looking up from her seed sifting.

  “Perhaps we should trance and attempt to better distance-reads its manifestation.”

  “No, I think its nature is already understood.”

  “Yes?”

  “We have been invaded by a minor balrog, whose evil draws its strength from the deadlands to the east, industry, factories, and metal-working. But although he senses our presence, he has not yet committed to a course of action, and we could discourage him from his efforts rather than extinguish life, however malformed and hellborn.”

  “Lacey, you remain committed to the moral law?”

  “Well, of course we are all still followers of the path. Violence begets violence, and evil can only give birth to evil. How we can ever grow humanity to her highest flowering if we follow the path of ashura?”

  “Then let us pray…”

  Unfortunately, the prayers of the Portland Reiki players had no efficacy this time. In the airfields located outside the city proper, McDonald-Douglas-11 helicopters whirled into action. They were small, white craft, scout ships emblazoned with the shooting blue sun rays of the CDC leapt into the sky.

  “CADUCEUS 1, CADUCEUS 1, do you read?”

  “Roger CADUCEUS LEAD, five-by-five.”

  “Wasn’t there some kind of movie like this once?”

  “Did Susan Collin watch Battle Royale?”

  Well of course everything could be spelled out blow-by-blow. But of course Caduceus-2 and -3 were lost in the great attack on Beacon Rock, where Mr. Bubbles was a boy after all and brought down an entire CDC helicopter all by his eighty-kilogram self flying through the sky, and a 4X-ketamine dart meant for the other bears, the less trained ones, actually hit Abigail, causing her to foam in the mouth as the anesthetic reacted uncontrollably with all that psilobyn in her system. In any case the battle lines had been drawn. Lacey, who from three hundred meters away and two hundred meters in the sky on her outcropping, saw it all happening, saw the cycle of vengeance begin. And if things were a movie, you would almost say that a frame skipped; that Caduceus-3 stuttered in the air because Lacey had pointed her outstretched fingers at the craft, full of nurse practitioners and public health professionals.