Chapter 11

BETHESDA, MARYLAND

Infection Date 16, 1200 GMT (8:00 a.m. Local)

Emma saw her brother Noah enter the observation room and speak to the nurse, Beth, who liked to keep the window glass clear. Noah repeatedly glanced at Emma, who returned to her notes. Maps. Where had that thought come from? And to whom did it occur? Isabel’s ramblings about consciousness remained unresolved concerns. Emma wrote, “Need maps.”

Noah’s voice came over the speakers. “For the record,” he said, “I am Noah Miller, attorney for Dr. Emma Miller. These conversations are subject to attorney-client privilege. Any monitoring or recording of them is a violation of Dr. Miller’s right to due process.”

Nurse Hopkins was gone. Noah’s voice changed. “Emmy, how are you?”

He wanted to talk. She closed her notebook and began digging her nails into its cover. “Fine, Noah. How are you?”

“I’m . . . okay. Thanks.” He cleared his throat. “You look . . . good. I mean, except for your eyes. . .” Emma’s left ear itched. She scratched it. “Emmy, do you know what’s going on? Out in the world?”

Emma was thirsty, so she went to get water and said, “The disease is spreading?”

After a moment, Noah said, “Right,” which seemed to end that line of inquiry. He stared at her before finally extracting papers from his briefcase. “Emmy, I filed a Petition for a writ of habeas corpus on your behalf. Do you know what that is?” She had heard the term before, but she wasn’t sure and said so as she sat. “It gets you a hearing in federal court to rule whether your detention is legal. The judge is outside.”

He rested a hand flat on the glass. “I wish I could give you a big hug, Emmy. But they say you’re still contagious.” The bird alit on the sill of the high window of her hospital room. It was gray, with a red chest. “Emma?” She turned back to her big brother. “The government probably has sufficient public health grounds to keep you here, in isolation.”

Noah seemed to struggle with his next question. “Do you even want to get out?” he asked. His demeanor didn’t strike her as entirely professional.

“Some plans,” she replied, “cannot be accomplished from a hospital room.”

Noah froze, then slowly lowered his hand from the window. “What . . . plans?”

“Continue my research, publish the results, find a man, marry, buy a house, and raise a family.”

Noah sat, slumped onto his elbows, and said, “Emmy, what’s going on?”

She checked the wall clock. “Next seal break, the nurse is going to take my vitals and change my linens.”

“I mean . . . in your head?”

The hearing, her plans, her vitals, her linens. What else? “A bird is building a nest up there.”

“What?”

She repeated the statement. “It’s gone now. But you may see it later.”

“Okay. I understand. It’s all gonna be okay.” Noah wiped tears from his face. “Don’t worry. So, assuming you’re stuck here, I’ll ask the judge for accommodations. What do you want?” She didn’t understand. “We can ask for a phone? A TV? Visitation rights? Time outside on hospital grounds?”

The bird returned with a long piece of straw. Noah called Emma’s name again. “Yes,” she replied, “those all sound good.” He wrote something down.

The observation room door opened. A man in a black robe called Noah “counsellor,” as the room filled. Everyone looked at Emma, then avoided her return gaze, except the female court reporter, who stared. Men in dark suits shook Noah’s hand. Dr. Nielsen stood along the back wall beside a woman in a business suit with limp black hair.

The door into the observation room was unlocked, Emma noted. But the glass in the window was at least an inch thick.

Everyone rose. Noah motioned for Emma to stand, which she did.

“Please be seated,” the man in the robe said. Emma complied. He asked Emma to move her chair directly in front of the window, then said he was a federal district court judge convening an expedited habeas hearing. The court reporter typed while watching Emma. “Would Petitioner,” the judge said, “please state her name?”

The context and the heads that turned her way suggested that meant her. “Dr. Emma Miller.”

The bird arrived with another twig in its beak. Today was a busy day.

“Dr. Miller,” the judge said, “do you understand the nature of this hearing?”

“Yes,” she replied. Then, “No,” when asked if she had any questions, and “Yes,” if she consented to Noah representing her. “Very well,” the judge said. Like the others, he snuck peeks at Emma. “Mr. Miller, you may proceed.”

Noah rose and asserted that Emma was being detained without cause. That her confinement was kept secret. That the United States should be required either to show cause for her detention or release her. And, in the event cause is shown, that the conditions of her confinement should be subject to reasonable court-ordered restrictions. He sat.

The judge turned to the other side of the room. “And what says the United States?”

One of the men in suits rose. “Your Honor, the United States does not believe that habeas corpus lies in the matter of Dr. Miller’s detention.”

“Okay,” the judge said, glancing at Emma. “We’re on US soil. Dr. Miller is a US citizen and not an enemy combatant. Just why does habeas not lie in her case?”

“It only applies to persons, sir. We contend Petitioner is no longer a person.”

“Your Honor!” Noah shouted, rising.

But the judge motioned him down. “I’ve got this.” He looked from Emma to the government lawyer. “I don’t know where this is heading, but it’s not going far unless the next words I hear from you are a damned good legal argument.”

“It is the government’s contention, Your Honor, that the person who was Petitioner died in Siberia of severe encephalopathic disease after contracting a newly emerged pathogen, Pandoravirus horribilis.”

“She looks very much alive to me,” the judge said, again glancing at Emma.

“Her body is alive,” the lawyer replied, “but not her mind.”

“Your Honor . . . !” Noah said, again rising and again being told to sit. Sitting and standing somehow seemed integral to the hearing’s procedures.

“She’s walking,” noted the judge, “talking. There’s no brain death here.”

“It’s not her brain that died, but her personhood,” the government lawyer said. “It’s the person that Dr. Miller used to be who was entitled to Constitutional protection.”

“Your Honor,” Noah said, taking to his feet, “this line of reasoning is absurd!”

“I’m inclined to agree,” the judge said. Noah sat again.

“May I present my evidence?” the government lawyer inquired.

Noah was again on his feet. “What evidence, Your Honor? Evidence that my . . . that Petitioner is no longer alive? I move that the court take judicial notice of the fact that Petitioner is currently a living human being.”

A gavel appeared from under the sleeve of the judge’s robe. Long sleeves allowed him to carry it unnoticed. Ask for long sleeves. There’s another one. Out of nowhere. Emma could tell Nurse Hopkins that she’s cold. She wrote that plan down in her notebook.

The government lawyer said, “I’d like to call Dr. Isabel Miller as the government’s expert on the subject of human consciousness.”

The suspended gavel did not fall. “Objections?” he asked Noah.

“I object to this entire line of reasoning! Based on what precedent could the government proceed with an argument that, if successful, would entirely strip my client of all her legal rights! If she’s not a person, Your Honor, does she have any rights? Is this court willing to apply, I don’t know, laws against animal cruelty to protect her?”

“Calm down,” the judge said. He swiveled his chair to face Noah’s adversaries. “The burden of proof you’ve got to clear on this has gone from a preponderance of the evidence to a virtual certainty. You’re on a very short leash. Present your expert.”

Emma only really needed maps of North America. The diminished post-infection world will fragment geographically. Emma looked up when Isabel entered. Her sister stared at Emma even as she was sworn in with her hand on a Bible. Everyone looked back and forth between Emma and Isabel, as happens with identical twins. Maps from the Caribbean to Canada.

“You are,” the government lawyer said to Isabel, “obviously Petitioner’s twin sister. But you are also a research professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, are you not?” Isabel nodded. The judge told her to respond verbally, which she did. “And you published a paper entitled, Self-Ascription Without Qualia: The Inverted Spectrum Issue, is that correct?”

Isabel looked at Noah. “Yes,” she said. “I did publish that thought exercise.”

The lawyer turned to the judge. “I would like to present Dr. Isabel Miller as an expert on the subject of brain sciences generally, and human consciousness specifically.”

The judge asked Noah if he had any objections. He did not. Still no bird outside.

“Dr. Miller,” said the government lawyer, whose standing time now greatly exceeded Noah’s, “in your paper, what are qualia, as used in its title?”

“Qualia are sense data.”

“Like when you look at an apple and see that it’s red, am I correct? The qualia in that observation is the color of the apple?”

“Quale is the singular,” she replied, pronouncing it “kwah-lee” and spelling it for the court reporter. “Quali-a is the plural. But yes. Qualia are the way things seem to us. One quale would be the red color we see on an apple, the example I used in my paper.”

“And the Inverted Spectrum Issue you discuss argues that there’s no way to know whether, when you see red and I see red that we’re actually sensing the same color?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Noah said, standing. “He’s leading his witness.”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor, but these concepts are difficult. If you’ll give me a little leeway . . .”

“I’ll allow it,” the judge replied, “if only to get to the point more quickly.”

Noah’s opponent remained on his feet. “In your paper you say that, from birth, we’re taught to call the color that we see on a red apple red. But another person might see blue and learn to call that color red. Isn’t that your Inverted Spectrum Issue?”

“As coined by the philosopher John Locke,” Isabel replied, “not me.”

“Very well. And what was Mr. Locke purporting to teach us?”

“It’s an armchair argument. It’s a variation of qualia inversion arguments used to illustrate that, even if two people’s senses are different, if one person sees the apple as red, and another sees it as blue, neither would ever know or behave any differently.”

“And what,” the government lawyer asked, “does that in turn tell us?”

“It suggests that qualia—sensory perceptions—are epi-functional. They are not of the physical world. They are only subjective mental states because they cannot be objectively described and agreed upon by multiple independent observers.”

Noah bobbed up to object. The judge said to his opponent, “Let’s get on with this.”

“In your paper,” the government lawyer continued, “what do epi-functional qualia and the Inverted Spectrum Issue tell us about consciousness?”

Isabel looked at Noah. “It merely poses questions meant to stimulate debate.”

The government lawyer turned to the judge. “I request that I be allowed to treat Dr. Miller as hostile.” Noah bounded to his feet, shouting that Isabel was his witness, and an expert not a fact witness. His opponent rebutted, “She is the sister of Petitioner and her counsel. She’s clearly anticipating the thrust of my questions and obfuscating.”

“I’ll allow it,” the judge said to the sinking Noah. “Overruled.”

“Dr. Miller,” the lawyer said, raising a sheaf of papers, “when you used the term ‘philosopher’s zombie’ in your paper, were you referring to someone like Petitioner?”

“It was a thought exercise!”

The judge said, “Please answer the question, Dr. Miller.”

Isabel explained the paper, which Emma had read. “Asking about a philosopher’s zombie is like asking: ‘What if we had no moon?’ It’s contrafactual, useful only in parsing concepts. If we had no moon, there would be no lunar tides. No lunar tides, no sea creatures laying eggs on beaches. With no reason to go ashore, there would be no amphibians, no land creatures, no mammals, no humans. That sort of conjecture.”

“And I’m sure,” the government lawyer said, “if one day the moon disappeared, some scientists would be asked questions to which they raise similar objection.”

The judge said, “I’m going to instruct you again to answer the question, Dr. Miller. Would the court reporter please read it back?”

The woman read: “When you used the term ‘philosopher’s zombie’ in your paper,” she glanced at Emma, “were you referring to someone like Petitioner?”

“No!” Isabel replied. “Of course not, because philosophers’ zombies don’t exist.”

The judge asked Isabel directly, “Then what was the point of your paper?”

“The point, Your Honor, was to explore why consciousness emerged. What adaptive significance or evolutionary advantage does consciousness confer upon humans?”

“So,” the government lawyer asked, still on his feet, “all humans are conscious?” Isabel stumbled in various attempts to reply. “You say a philosopher’s zombie is ‘someone behaviorally indistinguishable from a human, but who lacks any phenomenal experience.’ They act like us, but there’s no one inside them who forms impressions about the events they witness. These ‘p-zombies,’ as you call them, ‘can fool even the sharpest mental detector’ like the Turing Test and the Brainy Turing Test, correct?”

Isabel was acting strange. It was a perfectly straightforward question. Even Emma knew the answer. “But it’s completely theoretical! P-zombies don’t exist!”

“Did you write those words I just read? Yes or no?”

The bird returned with a twig that had a green leaf still attached. That’s curious.

“Yes,” Isabel said. “It’s just a variation of the Other Minds problem, which . . .”

“Thank you,” interrupted the lawyer.

“What Other Minds problem?” the judge asked.

“That’s another thought exercise. How can we know that other people aren’t . . . aren’t zombies? We can’t. For all you know, Your Honor, all the other people on Earth are just acting out parts meant solely to fool you into thinking they’re sentient just like you. But when you round the corner, all the automatons pretending to be fellow humans, now out of your sight, go into hibernation or whatever, waiting for their next performance just to fool you. That obviously could never be literally true. It’s just idea play.”

“As is,” the government lawyer asked, “a ‘Zombie Earth’? An earth,” he referred again to her paper, “‘filled with people who look human, but lack consciousness’?” He flipped pages to a blue Post-it note. Would Post-its be helpful? There it was again. Where did that come from? “This Zombie Earth is filled with, quote, ‘insentient beings whose complex behaviors are similar to humans, including speech, but—critically—are not accompanied by conscious experience of any sort.’ Do I have that right?” Emma decided she didn’t need Post-it Notes. She remembered everything she’d written in her notebooks.

Isabel was hunched forward, staring at the floor. “Yes, but . . .”

“And you concluded that other creatures,” the lawyer interrupted, “like apes and dolphins and artificially intelligent computers, cannot necessarily be expected to achieve consciousness as they climb the evolutionary ladder because consciousness is a trait unique to human beings?” The question hung in the room. The judge directed Isabel to answer.

“Evolution,” Isabel replied, “survival of the fittest, for instance—is concerned only with behavior, not subjective states of mind. If behavior isn’t influenced by consciousness, if you can imagine creatures who behave indistinguishably from humans but are not conscious, then evolution is indifferent to consciousness and consciousness therefore wouldn’t be expected to emerge naturally via evolution. That’s the point of my paper.”

The government lawyer was reading and stroking his chin. “And these ‘philosophers’ zombies’ have no inner life? They don’t dream. They don’t feel pain. They don’t even see, because there is no they in there to do the seeing. Am I correct?”

Noah asked for a recess. The judge denied his request and instructed Isabel to answer. She rocked back and forth, hands pinned between her knees, and said, “Yes!”

“In your research here at the NIH, have you inquired whether Petitioner dreams? Feels pain? Sees? Has an inner-life?” Isabel didn’t answer. “Dr. Miller, we have hours of recordings of your interviews of Petitioner and conversations in this very room with Dr. Henry Rosenbaum, who is available to be called. And I remind you that you are under oath. Did you inquire whether Petitioner dreams, experiences pain, and sees in the same way as you and I do? Whether she has an inner-life? Whether she is conscious?”

Isabel swallowed repeatedly and licked her lips. “Yes.”

“And what was your professional conclusion?”

Isabel’s chin sank. She still hides behind her hair. “There is some doubt whether her consciousness is intact.”

“Come now. You were much more definitive when you . . .”

“I was upset!”

“And that’s understandable. You and your sister were close.”

“Are close,” Isabel corrected.

“I have a recording in which you say,” the lawyer pulled out other papers, “‘My God, Hank,’—that’s Dr. Rosenbaum—‘she’s gone. There’s nothing left of her in there. That [expletive] disease destroyed her. Killed her. My Emmy.’ Are those your words?”

Isabel nodded, and was again told to reply verbally. “Yes,” she croaked.

The government lawyer finally took his seat. Emma’s back was growing stiff so she arched it and stretched her shoulders. Noah put his arm around Isabel, who was doubled over and sobbing. She looked up at Emma. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

Everyone turned to Emma. The judge said, “Dr. Miller, have you been following all this?”

She said, “Yes.” Noah mouthed, Your Honor, and Emma said, “Your Honor.”

“And how do you feel about what you’ve heard?”

She didn’t understand. “Could you rephrase the question?” adding, “Your Honor.”

The judge looked at the others. The court reporter for a moment forgot to type.

The judge spoke slowly. “The question before this Court is whether you are a ‘person’ entitled to Constitutional protection. So, do you, Dr. Miller, have . . . feelings?”

Emma said, “Yes.” Isabel grinned. Noah gave her exaggerated nods.

The judge waved off the government lawyer. “What kinds of feelings?” he asked.

“Hunger. Thirst. Occasionally an itch. Stiffness, when sitting or lying in one position too long. Fatigue. Gastrointestinal and urogenital sensations. When it’s cold, a blanket provides warmth. When it’s warm, the nurse lowers the temperature.”

The government lawyer said, “Those are physical sensations, not an inner-life.”

“Do you feel anything more?” the judge inquired.

She had no idea what he meant, and no one gave her any hints. The bird returned to the window sill, this time with a candy wrapper in its beak. A candy wrapper!

“Your plans, Emma!” Noah said loudly over objections. “What about your plans?”

“My plans are to continue epidemiological research, publish the results, find a husband, get married, buy a house and a car, have children, and raise a family.”

Everyone shouted at once. Isabel grinned through tears. Noah gestured wildly. The court reporter inexplicably winked. The judge pounded his gavel. “Order! This has gone far enough. I rule Petitioner is entitled to the rights and protections afforded persons under the US Constitution. I also rule, based on the briefs, that Respondent has shown cause to continue Petitioner’s isolation due to her contagiousness. But Dr. Miller has broken no laws, and the conditions of her confinement must be reasonably related to public safety. Therefore Respondent should consider favorably any accommodations requested.”

“Your Honor, I have a list,” Noah said, handing him what he’d written earlier.

The judge said, “These all seem reasonable.” He passed it to the government lawyer, who argued that all information regarding SED was classified Top Secret, and that Emma should not be allowed to communicate with people outside the NIH. The judge agreed and had the court reporter type the list into the record with that proviso. “And I so rule.” The gavel pounded the desk. On rising, the judge said, “Dr. Miller, thank you for your selfless service to this country. I wish you a speedy recovery.”

“Thank you,” Emma replied. He departed before she got to try smiling.

The observation room emptied save Noah and Isabel, who hugged. “We won!” Isabel said. The bird returned to the windowsill with a proper, sensible twig.

* * * *

Isabel and Noah watched Emma through the now opaque window. Beth and an armed guard, both in full PPE, wheeled into Emma’s room a cart with a smartphone, laptop, and flat-screen television, which Beth hooked up. Beth explained that Emma could only text, call or email other people at the NIH. She waited, then handed Emma the TV remote. Emma made no move to use it and returned to her notebook.

“What does she do all day?” Noah asked Isabel.

“You sure we’re still in the legal cone of silence here?” Isabel asked, looking up at the camera on the ceiling. Noah nodded. “Well, she gets poked, prodded, and scanned all day. We get whatever time is left for interviewing and testing. In between, I end up filling out so many questionnaires I feel like I’m the one they’re studying. The secrecy is so freakish and stupid we can’t talk to each other, but they’ve thrown every discipline we’ve got at this. Biopsychologists, psychobiologists, neuropsychologists, pathologists, disease ecologists, parasitologists, microscopists, molecular geneticists, mammalogists, phylogeneticists.”

“Now you’re just making up words,” Noah said.

“And they love neuroimaging: CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, EEGs, DCIs. But ironically, we’re waiting on old-fashioned WHO autopsy results to hear the full extent of the damage.”

“Why can’t they diagnose the damage from all those brain scans?”

“You can’t get high enough resolution on scans of a living brain, even with fluorescent microscopy. They’re dissecting brains of Siberian victims one cross-section at a time and overlaying imagery from electron microscopes with 3D electron-micrographs.”

“Whatever that means. So, once you know what the damage is, what do you do?”

“I study the impact on her thoughts, feelings, and moods, although everyone has already concluded that she has thoughts, but no feelings or moods.”

“She’s not right,” Noah said. “Remember when you told me about that Creepy Valley thing? When robots grow so advanced that they’re almost human, but not quite, and that creeps people out? That’s right where she is, in the Creepy Valley.”

“Uncanny Valley,” Isabel corrected.

Noah asked what Emma was writing. “We don’t know. She’s been scribbling away for days. She keeps it covered and with her, but she’s up to about forty pages. And from glimpses it’s filled with text, numbers, charts, graphs. She was always good at mathematical epidemiology. That’s my guess what it is.”

Emma picked up her new phone and typed. “What’s she doing?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know.” Isabel opened the military’s app on her iPad. “Connecting” was quickly replaced by a picture of Captain Ramirez and two young Marines, who turned toward the camera. Isabel said, “Do you have any way of telling who Emma is texting right now?”

“Sure do. Some woman with an NIH phone. A doctor. Amanda Davis, Department of Epidemiology.” He typed on his laptop as he spoke. A new window popped up on Isabel’s iPad containing Emma’s texts. She thanked Ramirez. “Anything for a friend of the Corps,” Ramirez said, drawing chuckles from his Marines before disappearing.

“It looks like she’s finished typing. What did she say?” Noah asked.

Isabel read Emma’s texts aloud. “‘Amanda, you workin on the P. outbreak?’ Amanda replied, ‘Em, that you? Heard you had trouble!!!’ Three exclamation marks. Emma typed, ‘I’m fine. U workin on it?’ Amanda said, ‘Yep. Wuz up?’ Emma asked if they’re still looking for non-human hosts. Amanda said, ‘Yep. Got 4 rodents, 16 birds, 12 insects, a bat, a cat, 3 dogs, but none r’—the letter—‘infected. Prolly only infected ancient humans.’ Emma wrote, ‘It might have last infected hominins in Siberia, not humans.’”

Noah said, “I thought homonyms are two words that sound alike.”

“They are. Hominins are human-like species with which we coexisted. Emma wrote, ‘When P. horribilis was frozen, it could’ve infected Denisovans, or more likely Neanderthals, who were better adapted to the cold.’ Amanda replied, ‘Good point! Had wondered why H. sapiens so far north. Neanderthals makes sense. Pushed out of Europe round then. Where r u?’ Letters. ‘Want lunch?’ Emma answered, ‘They won’t let me out.’ Amanda said, ‘Tell me bout it. Call when you come up for air.’ Emma then replied . . . she said . . . she has ‘plenty of air.’ So, I guess, don’t worry about the air situation.”

The siblings looked at each other, then back at Emma, who had returned to her notebook. Noah said, “Poor thing. She’s still trying to do work like nothing has changed.”

But Emma’s text exchange struck Isabel differently. “She may be onto something.”

Beth arrived, hair wet. “There’s a doctor looking for you.” It turned out to be Brandon, in a lab coat. It took all Isabel’s willpower not to roll her eyes.

“So there she is,” Brandon said, fascinated by Emma as one would be by a rare arrival at a zoo. Noah introduced himself, holding out his hand. Brandon declined to shake it, presumably scared by his crash course on pandemics. He asked, “Can she see us?”

Isabel extinguished the Opaque button on the panel. Emma’s gaze instantly rose to the window. “Now she can.” Noah waved. Emma responded in kind. Isabel pressed the Talk button. “Emma, this is Brandon Plante. I told you about him, remember?”

Emma said, “He’s the guy who keeps his socks on during sex.”

Isabel hit the Mute button. Beth clamped both hands over her mouth, her eyes wide. Noah wasn’t about to say anything. Emma returned to her notebook.

“That apartment in Palo Alto was freezing,” Brandon said to Isabel.

“Well-I’m-outa-here,” Noah declared, clapping Brandon on the back, intentionally breaching his self-isolation. Beth followed, but turned at the door, held up one hand to point and the other to hide it, and mouthed, “That him?” Isabel gave her a single nod.

In so doing, Isabel felt a little less of a failure. She had had a boyfriend, who was good looking and a PhD, in addition to his innumerable faults. When the door closed, Isabel said to Brandon, by way of explanation, “Sisters talk.”

“What did you tell her about our break-up?” Again with the break-up thing! Isabel tilted her head in reproach. “Because I’m still trying to . . .”

“This isn’t the place for that. They record everything. Now, like I told you, sooner or later there’s gonna be a knock on the door and somebody saying, ‘Come with me,’ and you’re gonna be asked for all the conclusions you’ve drawn in the last ten seconds. There’s a particularly intimidating son-of-a-bitch named General Browner who’ll be very interested in your analysis of crowd violence. You need to come up with something to say.”

Brandon couldn’t take his eyes off Emma, who was using her homemade straight edge to draw what appeared to be x and y axes. “She looks just like you except for her eyes, and hair.” Emma’s bangs had grown to cover half her face—poorly groomed, like the demented relative you kept locked from view.

“Looking alike is kind of the deal with identical twins,” Isabel responded, finally waving at Brandon to break the spell Emma had cast over him. “But she has a little scar on her chin from when we went bungee jumping.”

“You went bungee jumping?”

“No. I didn’t jump. But Emma cut her chin, sort of validating that decision. So . . . shouldn’t you be doing whatever it is you do?” She instantly regretted her phrasing.

He cast her an aggrieved look. “I’ve got an assistant and three techs doing the data entry for some SIDE modeling on the video out of Harbin, and on a new video we just got in from a bridge along the road to Changchun. You should swing by my office.”

“You’ve got an office?”

“Yes,” he said. “And on that point, where the hell is yours? Nobody knows.”

Isabel declined to tell him about her table in the cafeteria. “And you’ve got staff?”

“I asked. They have resources, Izzy. You maybe should try being more assertive.” The old criticism hit Isabel with undiminished force. He probably thought she’d be a full professor now if only she’d just thought to ask for tenure.

“I haven’t heard about any new video,” she mumbled. “Where’d you get it?”

“General Browner. But he told me not to tell anybody.”

The middle school pain receptors all fired at once. Her ex-boyfriend now got invitations that she didn’t . . . from her friends. Isabel knew the military was listening and she should have told him ixnay on the easontray, but she didn’t. “What does the video show?” she asked. “I mean, if you can say,” then instantly felt guilty for setting him up.

“It’s just like Harbin.” She made a slashing motion across her throat. “It’s okay. Our working group is Hank, you, and me. We can talk. I think the crowd violence has something to do with the numbers. The crowd gets more unstable the larger it grows.”

Isabel was skeptical, but then again far from objective. “I’d guess it’s more the density, not the absolute size. Emma gets nervous in crowded elevators like she never used to before. And what the hell is SIDE modeling?”

“Social Identity Model of Deindividualization Effects,” he replied. “You’d have heard of it if you’d read my last paper.” Despite her fervent attempts to keep her face neutral, Brandon said, “What? You think it’s junk science?” He huffed, shook his head, stormed out of the room, and slammed the door.

Emma was staring at Isabel. She probably wasn’t judging her, but it sure felt like she was. Emma wrote something in her notebook. Is that about me? Isabel wondered, craning her neck to see. Something like, She’s still a disaster with men?