Now it was an emergency. They showed a map of the world, with the hotspots lighting up in red — Brazil, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Bombay, Paris, Berlin — it was like watching the planet being spraygunned. It was an eruptive plague, they said, and the thing was spreading fast — no, not even spreading, breaking out at the same time in cities far apart, which wasn’t the normal pattern. Ordinarily the Corps would have called for lies and cover-ups, and we’d hear something like the real story only in rumours, so the fact that all this was right out there on the news showed how serious it was — the
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