Nocturne

0: prelude

Blinding sunlight streamed into my small bedroom through the flimsy and ineffective blinds to the east. The repetitive and calming song of the robins and thrushes turned annoying and jarring through my sleepy ears. The unending buzzing of the cicadas made it impossible for me to fall back asleep.

As I cracked my groggy eyes open, I found that 3 of my 4 roommates had once again wandered off on some adventure. What was it this time? A trip to the local mall? My view is that they're just wasting time and money on a temporary island of youth. But from what I could tell, the platonic relationship between Thaddeus, Cynthia, and Ray were as inseparable as the bond between the 3 musketeers. I think Ray was an illusionist, but I didn't really catch what the others did.

As for me, well, I was never really the socialite among us 5. I'm not really close to anyone here. I just found myself sharing an apartment with them due to the ever increasing price of real estate and the comparatively decreasing demand, and thus salary, for computer scientists. As NLP technology progressed, the need for knowledge in obsolete stuff like Go or Ruby decreased as ordinary consumers were able to program computers much more easily.

80 hour work weeks are a pain in the ass. But I digress.

The clock in the living room read 14:23 as I sat down on the beaten up couch with my laptop to watch the latest episode of Ephemeral, one of the hottest seasonal anime, which I downloaded through torrent. Notifications from Reddit and Discord flooded the top right corner of my laptop's screen.

Needless to say, I marked all of them as read, and blocked all notifications. I got some Gatorade from the fridge nearby and put on my Bose headphones. I got into a prone position on the old and discolored leather sofa, and started watching the episode.

The cool red liquid flowed freely from the bottle into my dry mouth as the flashy and upbeat opening played for the nth time.

I was interrupted around halfway into the episode by Aoi. Her long flowing black hair dipped into my field of view. A gentle voice flowed out of her mouth from behind me.

"Hey Lucas, did you see the news?"

"Hmm?"

"Apparently someone in the US is confirmed to have RABV-23 through testing. And, err... officials suspect that it's spread to around 1000 people already. People don't show symptoms until maybe a few hours into the infection? But by then they'd have infected many others."

"It's probably gonna be a while until our stupid politicians actually do something."

"COVID-19 killed around 2% of the population. Hopefully they take it more seriously this time?"

"So, where's this person?"

Blood drained from her delicate face as it turned into the shade of snow. "Seattle. He's quarantined now, but who knows how many people he's infected?"

RABV-23. Apparently it's a new strain of rabies. But people don't actually die from this strain. At least not in the conventional sense. Maybe it's easier if I just think of it as zombification. There are papers on it in NEJM and The Lancet, but I didn't bother reading them.

The location of the first American infection is the large metropolitan city in which I live. How unfortunate. Going off of previous simulations that I've played around with, Seattle won't last for longer than 24 hours. In a month at most, nearly the whole country would fall.

My pondering was interrupted by frantic pounding on a door. I gestured to Aoi that I'd go answer it.

"What are you gonna do if they're rabid? That would mean that many others are too, right?"