She realized this when she interviewed the nurse who had tended João. The nurse had no direct contact with bodily fluids. She had simply touched the chart at the foot of João's bed—the same chart that another nurse had touched, and another, back to the admitting clerk who had typed João's name into the system. The chain of transmission followed paths of human proximity, yes, but not exclusively physical proximity. Two patients who had never met, but who had spoken to the same priest on the same day, both developed symptoms within hours of each other. The priest remained healthy, but everyone he anointed fell ill.
She did not call the WHO. She did not call her lab. She called her mother, in a small house outside Valdivia, where the rain falls gently and the sloths never come down from the trees. baraguirus
"Baraguirus," Lena whispered, coining the name from a Tupi word for "spine." She didn't know then that she had just named the end. She realized this when she interviewed the nurse
Lena understood then. Baraguirus was not a virus. It was a memetic crystal. A self-replicating idea that used human consciousness as its replication machinery. To know of it was to be at risk. To name it was to invite it. And she had named it. She had written the word Baraguirus on a sample tube, on a report, on a dozen emails. She had spread the pattern more efficiently than any cough or touch. The chain of transmission followed paths of human
Lena looked at her hands. The first needle-points were already surfacing from her knuckles. She had known the pattern for twelve days now. She had named it, studied it, loved it in the terrible way that scientists love their discoveries. And now it was in her.
She picked up her phone. The screen was cracked—a small flaw in an otherwise perfect device. She had one call left in her, one chance to do what Kuara had done: not to fight the pattern, but to refuse to recognize it.
"Yes," Lena said, and she let the word Baraguirus die in her throat, unspoken, unnamed, unmourned. "Yes, it is."