Luminous and Other Stories by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan [Egan, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Collection, Short Story, Hard Sci-Fi
Published: 2013-07-13T05:00:00+00:00

SILVER FIRE

I was in my office at home, grading papers for Epidemiology 410, when the call came through from John Brecht in Maryland. Realtime, not a polite message to be dealt with whenever I chose. I’d grown into the habit of thinking of Colonel Brecht as “my old boss.” Apparently that had been premature.

He said, “We’ve found a little Silver Fire anomaly which I think might interest you, Claire. A little blip on the autocorrelation transform which just won’t go away. And seeing as you’re on vacation—”

“My students are on vacation. I still have work to do.”

“Oh, I think Columbia can find someone to take over those menial tasks for a week or two.”

I regarded him in silence for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to tell him to find someone else to take over his own menial tasks.

I said, “What exactly are we talking about?”

Brecht smiled. “A faint trail. Hovering on the verge of significance. Your specialty.” A map appeared on the screen; his face shrank to an inset. “It seems to start in North Carolina, around Greensboro, heading west.” The map was peppered with dots marking the locations of recent Silver Fire cases – color-coded by the time elapsed since a notional “day of infection”, the dots themselves positioned wherever the patient had been at the time. Having been told exactly what to look for, I could just make out a vague spectral progression cutting through the scattered blossoms of localized outbreaks: a kind of smudged rainbow trail from red to violet, dissolving into uncertainty just west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Then again … if I squinted, I could discern another structure, about as convincing, sweeping down in an amazingly perfect arc from Kentucky. A few more minutes, and I’d see the hidden face of Groucho Marx. The human brain is far too good at finding patterns; without rigorous statistical tools we’re helpless, animists grasping at meaning in every random puff of air.

I said, “So how do the numbers look?”

“The P value’s borderline,” Brecht conceded. “But I still think it’s worth checking out.”

The visible part of this hypothetical trail spanned at least ten days. Three days after exposure to the virus, the average person was either dead or in intensive care – not driving blithely across the countryside. Maps tracing the precise routes of infection generally looked like random walks with mean free paths five or ten kilometers long; even air travel, at worst, tended to spawn a multitude of scattered small outbreaks. If we’d stumbled on someone who was infectious but asymptomatic, then that was definitely worth checking out.

Brecht said, “As of now, you have full access to the notifications database. I’d offer you our provisional analysis – but I’m sure you can do better with the raw data, yourself.”

“No doubt.”

“Good. Then you can leave tomorrow.”

#

I woke before dawn and packed in ten minutes, while Alex lay cursing me in his sleep. Then I realized I had three hours to kill, and absolutely nothing left to do, so I crawled back into bed.

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