More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
isn’t the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so different from themselves? By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it?
I found “Patient Zero” behind the locked door of an abandoned house across town.
it had happened when the boy and his father were “moon fishing,” a term that describes diving for treasure among the sunken ruins of the Three Gorges Reservoir.
that the boy came up crying with a bite mark on his foot. He didn’t know what had happened, the water had been too dark and muddy. His father was never seen again.
“This is your punishment!” she shouted. “This is revenge for Fengdu!” She was referring to the City of Ghosts, whose temples and shrines were dedicated to the underworld. Like Old Dachang, it had been an unlucky obstacle to China’s next Great Leap Forward. It had been evacuated, then demolished, then almost entirely drowned.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “everything’s going to be all right.” That was when I realized that this was not an isolated outbreak.
LHASA, THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF TIBET [The world’s most populous city
Flight 575.
The golden rule was, you couldn’t fool foreign immigration officials until you fooled your shetou first.
how to terminate their existence.
the “Warmbrunn-Knight” report
PALESTINE
one of the Middle East’s most affluent cities,
Arab League
Every shred of intel we had on the PRC, the sudden disappearances, the mass executions, the curfews, the reserve call-ups—everything could easily be explained as standard ChiCom procedure. In fact, it worked so well, we were so convinced that World War III was about to break out in the Taiwan Strait, that we diverted other intel assets from countries where undead outbreaks were just starting to unfold.
The last brushfire war was a debacle and guess who took the fall. We’d been ordered to justify a political agenda, then when that agenda became a political liability, those who’d originally given the order now stood back with the crowd and pointed the finger at us. “Who told us we should go to war in the first place? Who mixed us up in all this mess? The CIA!” We couldn’t defend ourselves without violating national security. We had to just sit there and take it. And what was the result? Brain drain. Why stick around and be the victim of a political witch hunt when you could escape to the
...more
We lost a lot of good men and women, a lot of experience, initiative, and priceless analytical reasoning. All we were left with were the dregs, a bunch of brownnosing, myopic eunuchs.
the copy that was originally hand delivered by Paul Knight himself, the one marked “Eyes Only” for the director…it was found at the bottom of the desk of a clerk in the San Antonio field office of the FBI, three years after the Great Panic.
you had had your own private suspicions? For months before the Israeli declaration; so had the chairman. Everyone in that room had heard something, or suspected something.
the Alpha teams? Yes, sir, and they were extremely successful. Even though their battle record is sealed for the next 140 years, I can say that it remains one of the most outstanding moments in the history of America’s elite warriors. So what went wrong? Nothing, with Phase One, but the Alpha teams were only supposed to be a stopgap measure. Their mission was never to extinguish the threat, only delay it long enough to buy time for Phase Two.
totalitarian regimes—communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism—popular support is a given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone in uniform for any length of time without ever having to worry about the slightest political backlash. In a democracy, the polar opposite is true. Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment. America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings on a backlash like the perception of defeat.
America is a very all-or-nothing society.
This goes to the heart of America’s war weariness. As if the “traditional” horrors weren’t bad enough—the dead, the disfigured, the psychologically destroyed—now you had a whole new breed of difficulties, “The Betrayed.” We were a volunteer army, and look what happened to our volunteers.
Americans are an honest people, we expect a fair deal. I know that a lot of other cultures used to think that was naïve and even childish, but it’s one of our most sacred principles. To see Uncle Sam going back on his word, revoking people’s private lives, revoking their freedom…
Do you understand economics? I mean big-time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don’t, and anyone who says they do is full of shit.
The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. “Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.”
I was the first one to come up with a workable pitch: a vaccine, a real vaccine for rabies. Thank God there is no cure for rabies. A cure would make people buy it only if they thought they were infected. But a vaccine! That’s preventative! People will keep taking that as long as they’re afraid it’s out there!
Was it ever tested on an actual victim? Why? People used to take flu shots all the time, never knowing if it was for the right strain. Why was this any different?
Who thought it was going to go that far? You know how many disease scares there used to be. Jesus, you’d think the Black Death was sweeping the globe every three months or so…ebola, SARS, avian flu.
We never lied, you understand? They told us it was rabies, so we made a vaccine for rabies. We said it had been tested in Europe, and the drugs it was based on had been tested in Europe. Technically, we never lied.
Who was going to blow the whistle? The medical profession? We made sure it was a prescription drug so doctors stood just as much to lose as us. Who else? The FDA who let it pass? The congressmen who all voted for its acceptance? The surgeon general? The White House? This was a win-win situation! Everyone got to be heroes, everyone got to make money. Six months after Phalanx hit the market, you started getting all these cheaper, knockoff brands, all solid sellers as well as the other ancillary stuff like home air purifiers.
started setting up these dummy companies, you know, with plans to build manufacturing facilities all over the country. The shares from these dumbos sold almost as much as the real stuff. It wasn’t even the idea of safety anymore, it was the idea of the idea of safety!
Your drug didn’t protect people at all. It protected them from their fears. That’s all I was selling. Hell, because of Phalanx, the biomed sector started to recover, which, in turn, jump-started the stock market, which then gave the impression of a recovery, which then restored consumer confidence to stimulate an actual recovery!
When the outbreaks became more serious, and the press finally reported that there was no wonder drug? Pre-fucking-cisely! That’s the alpha cunt who should be shot, what’s her name, who first broke that story! Look what she did! Pulled the fuckin’ rug right out from under us all! She caused the spiral! She caused the Great Panic!
you take no personal responsibility? For what? For making a little fuckin’ cash…well,
All I did was what any of us are ever supposed to do. I chased my dream, and I got my slice. You wanna blame someone, blame whoever first called it rabies, or who knew it wasn’t rabies and gave us the green light anyway. Shit, you wanna blame someone, why not start with all the sheep who forked over their greenbacks without bothering to do a little responsible research. I never held a gun to their heads. They made the choice themselves. They’re the bad guys,...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Of course we got our copy of the Knight-WarnJews report, what do you think we are, the CIA? We read it three months before the Israelis went public. Before the Pentagon started making noise, it was my job to personally brief the president, who in turn even devoted an entire meeting to discussing its message. Which was? Drop everything, focus all our efforts, typical alarmist crap.
What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment.
Given how low a priority the national security adviser thought this was, I think we actually gave it some pretty healthy table time.
We produced an educational video for state and local law enforcement about what to do in case of an outbreak. The Department of Health and Human Services had a page on its website for how citizens should respond to infected family members. And hey, what about pushing Phalanx right through the FDA? But Phalanx didn’t work. Yeah, and do you know how long it would have taken to invent one that did?
Look at what we’ve put into research during and after the war, and we still don’t have a cure or a vaccine. We knew Phalanx was a placebo, and we were grateful for it. It calmed people down and let us do our job.
So you never really tried to solve the problem. Oh, c’mon. Can you ever “solve” poverty? Can you ever “solve” crime? Can you ever “solve” disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives.
All you can do is just build a roof that you hope won’t leak, or at least won’t leak on the people who are gonna vote for you.
in politics, you focus on the needs of your power base. Keep them happy, and they keep you in office.
When have cops not asked for more men, better gear, more training hours, or “community outreach program funds”? Those pussies are almost as bad as soldiers, always whining about never having “what they need,” but do they have to risk their jobs by raising taxes?
The “media”? You mean those networks that are owned by some of the largest corporations in the world, corporations that would have taken a nosedive if another panic hit the stock market?
you never actually instigated a cover-up? We didn’t have to; they covered it up themselves. They had as much, or more, to lose than we did.
the whole thing was pretty much old news after a few months. It had become “manageable.” People were learning to live with it and they were already hungry for something different. Big news is big business, and you gotta stay fresh if you want to stay successful.
there were alternative media outlets. Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody!
TROY, MONTANA, USA [This neighborhood is, according to the brochure, the “New Community” for the “New America.”
