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“I'm going to call Kirsten and see what she can tell me about the attack on her camp,” said the governor. “And yes, I will approve travel plans tonight. We've missed two public appearances, but we should be able to catch up in time for the third. Is that satisfactory to all of you?”

“Yes,” said Chuck.

“Sure,” said Amber.

“Barring a time machine, it'll do,” I said. I smiled quickly. “Pleasure doing business with you.” Then I turned on my heel and marched out of the room, heading back down the hall toward the elevator. I needed to talk to Mat.

Being an Irwin doesn't mean clinging to facts and figures the way being a Newsie does, in part because we don't
need
facts and figures. We have the infected. We have the fences surrounding the brightest, greenest, most interesting parts of the world, and we have the burning desire to be
in
those places, to dig our fingers into the earth and feel the grass beneath our protective footwear. A lot of the time, we can just count on our cardio and let anything more complicated go. Sure, it means we get written off as the brainless jocks of the blog world—there are even betting pools, run by supposedly reputable sites, taking odds on which of us will die next, and how gruesome that death will be. But it doesn't mean we can actually be
stupid
.

An Irwin who doesn't know how to pay attention to their surroundings is an Irwin who is about to be spread in a thin layer across their surroundings. We may not be the deepest thinkers, but in some essential ways, we're the ones who put the most weight on detail. A scuff in the dirt can be a sign that a zombie has passed through recently. A clean spot on the wall can mean that something is missing.

Navigating the poorly considered elevator system meant it took too long for me to get back to our rooms. By the time I reached Mat's door I was vibrating, bouncing onto my toes every few seconds just to burn off some of the extra energy that I didn't need. I knocked. When that didn't get me an instant response, I knocked again. I managed to wait for almost a five count before I knocked the third time, with both hands, hammering out an urgent beat against the wood.

“I'm coming!” Mat sounded less angry than frazzled. That was probably a good thing. Pissing them off when I needed them to help me wasn't the best approach.

Why did I never think of those things when it would actually do me some good?

Mat wrenched the door open and blinked at me. I smiled as sunnily as I could.

“Hallo,” I said. “Mind if I come in? I need your big brain to do some simulations for me.”

Mat blinked again. They were wearing a loose green sweater over black yoga pants, and didn't look like they'd been planning to get out of their unmade hotel bed before our evening team assembly. Really, I was doing them a favor by asking them to help me out. Socialization is important.

“Sure,” they said finally. “Is something up?”

“Only in the abstract sense,” I said, stepping past them and into the hotel room. It was a mess. Eye shadow was smeared on all the pillows, and the bathroom looked like it had been the site of several small, pigmented explosions. I wrinkled my nose. “Have you let the cleaning staff in here at
all
?”

“My mess is nobody's business but my own,” said Mat, almost primly. “As long as I don't live with my mother, nobody gets to tell me I need to make my bed.”

“Ah,” I said, understanding at last. No one gets out of their childhood unscarred. Some just wear their scars on the inside, where no one can see. “Look, I was talking to the governor, and I had a thought. Have you been working on a sim of the attack?”

Mat glanced to the side, suddenly shifty. “What do you mean?”

“Come off it, Mat, we all know you make sims of my best footage and sell them to your buddies.” The mag made my job easier. It also made it a
lot
easier for someone like Mat to create an immersive re-creation of the original experience, complete with stumbles, heavy breathing, and the occasional headlong flight into a tree.

“I don't sell, I trade,” protested Mat. “Where did you think I got you all that choice
Frozen
-print fabric for Christmas?”

Frozen
was the last big Disney movie released before the Rising hit and people started caring more about survival than they did about cartoon princesses. As a result, the merchandise had been somewhat truncated. I had three sundresses made from movie tie-in fabric, thanks to Mat's unexpected holiday generosity. Guilt fueled the
best
presents.

“Doesn't matter,” I said. “I never gave you permission to use my kinesthetic likeness for your shut-in friends. I didn't say anything about it because it wasn't hurting anyone, and because I knew that one day, I was going to need you to do me a favor, and I wanted to have as much leverage as I could when that glorious day arrived.”

Mat gulped. “Leverage?” they asked, nervously.

“Leverage means you do what I want you to do, and nobody gets dangled out a window,” I said. “Is the simulation finished or not?”

“Sure, um, come over here, and don't dangle me out the window.” Mat motioned for me to follow as they walked to the desk, which had been buried under computer equipment. Most of our servers and relays were bunking with Ben. That had confused me before. Now, looking around at the mess, it made perfect sense. Better a slightly cramped living space than a world where our servers were inaccessible due to wadded-up burrito wrappers.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, where I would have a clear view of the screen, but wouldn't really need to
touch
anything. “How sensitive is it?”

“Pretty sensitive,” said Mat, waking up their laptop with a click of the keys and beginning to activate programs. “The default is basically a replay of what actually happened. I'll need a few more days before I can put in the alt mods. You know, ‘what if the player becomes a zombie,' and all that fun stuff.”

“And don't think I don't appreciate the number of times I've become infected on your watch,” I said dryly. “Can you do a run that removes me completely?”

Mat twisted in their seat to blink at me. “Come again?”

“You've rendered the environment, and modeled the behavior of the zombies according to standard infected behavior, yeah?” I shrugged. “So take me out. What happens to the overall sim if there's no player character to find the infected before they reach the governor?”

“I'm not a video-game designer, Ash,” protested Mat. “I work from the data you give me, not by inventing things from whole cloth.”

“Try,” I said.

Mat sighed and turned back to the laptop, tapping for a few moments. Finally, they said, “It's going to be rough, but this is what I have.” They pressed “play.” The sim began.

The first few seconds of footage were pristine and photo-realistic, thanks to Mat having simply rotoscoped the recording from my mag. Video-game design has come a long way in the last twenty years. There's still a great deal of artistry to it, but thanks to increasingly sensitive and intuitive tools, actual artistic ability has come to matter less and less. Blame it on an ever-hungry, ever-expanding market that no longer has any other way to get out of the house.

“All right, now normally, this is where the player—ah, you—would encounter the first infected,” said Mat. “Since the zombie grabbed your hair, the view would jerk, and then we'd go into the fight sequence.”

“Obviously, that's not going to happen,” I said.

“No, because the zombie doesn't know you're there,” agreed Mat. “Let me see if I can move the camera.” They tapped something out. The screen shifted, swinging around to face the zombie that initially attacked me. His real face was gone, replaced by the slack, faintly greenish iconography that had defined the video-game undead since long before we'd met the real thing. That was actually soothing. The man who'd tried to eat me had already been robbed of his humanity. He didn't deserve to lose his dignity at the same time.

“We're going to cut to wireframes in a moment, as the AI tries to extrapolate what the zombies would do in the absence of a target,” cautioned Mat.

“That's fine,” I said, and sure enough, a few seconds later, the zombie's face vanished, replaced by a green grid. There was no footage to overwrite. “Just stay on them, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Mat. They were starting to sound interested, like this was becoming a worthwhile experiment. In a way, I suppose it was: It was demonstrating the limits of the software. “The program knows where all the zombies and all the living people are, so that shouldn't be a problem.”

Our wireframe zombie shambled through the disturbingly well-rendered rose garden. As it passed, more zombies appeared, unearthing themselves one and two at a time. “Some of them took longer to dig their way out because they were buried deeper, right?” I asked.

“Right,” said Mat. “It was like a timed release system. The deeper a zombie was buried, the longer it took for the smell of people and the sound of moaning to work its way down to them. So they didn't exhume themselves as fast.”

“Meaning no one could accurately predict how many zombies were going to come out of the bushes.” The zombies were almost to the last tier of rosebushes between them and the governor. I sat up straighter. “Can you run the sim with the zombies
not
moaning?”

“What?”

“They didn't start the moan until I goaded them into it. I've heard about this. Some strains of the virus don't trigger the moan response as early. I can't tell if that means the zombies are more self-confident or if they're just better hunters, but either way, they're better at sneaking up when they're not broadcasting their position all the time.” Which would make this a more successful viral strain, and probably cause it to spread more rapidly through certain populations. Swell. That was going to make my job a
lot
harder, and a lot more dangerous.

If I was right, which I might not be. I was a professional zombie-botherer, not a virologist or research epidemiologist. Those were career paths I'd considered, back before it had become obvious just how isolated my little quirks were going to leave me in our supposedly “modern” Ireland, but they weren't things I'd pursued. As a scientist, I would have been trapped. The government would
never
have allowed me to leave, no matter how perverse I turned out to be. And I had very much wanted to go, even before my parents had had me committed.

“God, I hope I'm wrong,” I murmured.

Mat looked up from adjusting the sim. “What?” they asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing. Woolgathering again. I'll have enough for a sweater soon. Can you run the sim without me, and without the moan?”

“You know, I'm not a custom lab,” Mat said, and resumed typing. “All right: Try this.”

They hit a key. The sim rewound a few seconds—not going back to the beginning by a long shot, but pulling the figures away from that last rank of bushes—before starting again. This time, the zombies pressed through the roses and spilled into the open area where the onlookers, and the governor, were gathered. The small, computer-generated figures opened their mouths in a moan once they had their hands on their first victims, and not a second before. The people screamed and scattered, following rigid mathematical lines that were nothing like a real crowd in a state of panic, but were close enough to make my point.

“Five,” I said. The zombies were grabbing and grappling with almost everyone. There were enough humans that some of them were getting away. There were enough newly infected zombies that some of them were giving chase. It was not a good situation for the living.

“Four,” I said. The zombies that had stayed behind to deal with their initial targets were beginning to feed. In the presence of so many options, this meant more than a few people were bitten and then flung aside as the dead went after the remaining living. In a state of plenty, a mob will seek to expand.

“Three,” I said. The models of the governor's security staff were shooting at the zombies, but they were distracted by their attempts to get the governor to safety. Professional security workers are required to keep excellent life insurance, since it's generally accepted that they'll die early, and the government doesn't want to take care of their families. That doesn't make them suicidal. It does mean that they're usually willing to put the well-being of their charges ahead of their own, since death is an outcome everyone in their line of work has long since accepted as inevitable.

“Two,” I said. The zombies were everywhere. The security staff couldn't reach any of the exits. They stopped retreating and started calling their shots a little better, thinning out the mob. Maybe that would have been enough to save them, had they already been dealing with the full extent of the outbreak. But there were zombies who had been buried deeper than the others. That hadn't made sense to me at first. Why put a potential asset in the field, only to keep it out of the action? Because it wasn't really being kept out of the action, of course. It was just on a delayed trigger.

“One,” I said, and the last of the infected came lurching out of the rose garden, overwhelming the survivors in a matter of seconds. The security team went down. The governor went down. Mat looked away. The graphics might not be great, but they were good enough to get their point across, and no one wanted to watch that. Not even me.

And yet I didn't turn. “We were the wild card,” I said. “We fucked everything up for whoever did this. Everyone was supposed to die. You can stop the playback now. I know what I needed to know.”

Mat hit the space bar. The image froze. Mat hit the space bar twice more, and the picture was replaced with a collage of adorable kittens. Finally, Mat turned back to me. “What did you need to know?”