Page 35 - Tales Apocalyptic and Dystopian

Desynthesis

The judge had begun drumming his fingers. “Can’t we move this
along a little faster?”
The prosecutor winced and shivered. “I’m just trying to lay a
foundation for the testimony to come, Your Honor. Now, Mr. Finch,
please tell the court what else you saw from your vantage point.”
“I thought I might be able to determine the epicenter, based on
treating the visible transition of normal to blasted areas as the
movement of disease vectors.”
“And why was that a possibility?”
“I reasoned that if the source had come from the horizon, then the
progress of the epidemic, as I called it then, would be more or less
linear from some point on the compass. On the contrary, it was
radiating out from a specific part of the city. Since I still thought I
was witnessing merely one of a series of chemical weapons in
operation, it did not occur to me that I was looking at the one and
only point of origin.”
“But you did note that location mentally?”
“Yes. About a week later, when some rudimentary lines of
communication had temporarily been re-established by the
government, I began jotting down dates and places on a crude map,
first of our country and then of the world. It took me until just a few
days ago to confirm a growing suspicion: the entire planet had been
infected from here. My agency was, for all practical purposes,
disbanded, but I managed to get a couple of agents to work with me
on this. We notified our superiors—you, Your Honor, because no
one else could be found—and set out to investigate the epicenter.”
“For the record, just where was that?”
“In the industrial park, where a lot of high-tech companies had set
up shop to develop new products. As most of the structures were
relatively new, and therefore contained a high percentage of synthetic
building materials, the entire neighborhood was in a shambles. It
would have been impossible to learn anything without informants:
every kind of electronic data medium had become, as you know,
metallic pulp. Luckily for our enquiry, many of the employees had
been stranded at their place of business and were attempting to eke
out an existence in a kind of shantytown made of wood scraps and
bits of scavenged concrete and iron. I interviewed many of them.

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