When the rumors started, we thought it was a hoax. Typical internet rubbish, drummed up by bored teenagers, Russian operatives or hysterical citizens who saw the imprint of nefarious actors on even the most mundane of inconveniences. We didn't take things seriously until articles started popping up in the New York Times and the Washington Post, around the same time the contagion started making its impact felt in our physical world, with schools and workplaces starting to take precautionary measures. Maybe we would've picked up on it sooner had we been watching the news - I'm sure there were reports on local and then national stations of the developing story. But who watched the news these days anyways?

I worked remotely, as did my wife Emily. We both did what we called "e-mail jobs" - they consisted primarily of sending e-mails asking people to do things and telling other people what things had been done. We were great shuttlers of information back and forth along the information superhighway. They were superficially good jobs, the kind that pay in the low six figures and don't require too much effort but which you'll suddenly wake up and find you've been doing for six years without any real progress in your responsibilities or financial situation.

We were on year five of that timeline, in our early thirties and happily married if professional frustrated, when the contagion began. The origins of it aren't fully known yet. Some say it was unwittingly first unleashed in the Philippines, in those crowded internet cafes where many viral TikTok sounds were birthed. Others maintain it was a more consciously nefarious act, from a bad actor like North Korea or Russia, who had already been maliciously exploiting our internet and device addictions for years. In the end, it didn't really matter - we were all affected equally.

At least, that's what I assume. It's been more than three years since I've interacted with any internet-connected device, meaning it's been three years since I learned what was taking place farther afield than the few miles surrounding the shelter. Theoretically, there could be similar pockets of people out there, doing just what we're doing. In fact, I'm sure there are. But we have no means of long-distance contact, and no will to venture outside the relatively safe haven we've built for ourselves. While I'd like to believe in the goodness of the human spirit, I saw too much of the worst of human nature in the weeks when everything was falling apart, before it settled into the post-internet world we're living in now.

We first started to entertain the possibility that the contagion was, in fact, a real thing, at the start of summer. My mom had called me worriedly a few days before, from her idyllic Nantucket retirement community.

"You're sure this isn't a real thing, honey?" she probed. "I know you're always on the computer, doing important stuff for your work, and I just want you to be safe."

I reassured her I was fine, hung up without a trace of reciprocal worry. But later that week, we got an all-company e-mail from corporate. It was something along the lines of:

Dear employees,

We are always keeping abreast of any global and local health concerns that could affect ourselves or our customers. In light of recent reports, we are recommending that employees wear protective eyewear when conducting any official business, whether on personal devices or company-issued ones. We can recommend several providers of these eye shields (please see attached links below), and we have compiled an FAQ on why they are needed and what they will do for you. As always, we will keep you informed of any developments and continue to evolve our policy to meet your needs.

More intrigued than concerned, I pulled open a few articles from news sites I considered reputable. Their rhetoric had ramped up in recent days. There were now articles describing how, while we didn't know exactly how it worked, it appeared that certain websites now contained some sort of embedded trigger that would create an irreversible mental decline with a few days of encountering it. Healthy people of all ages, genders, races, across the world, were losing the ability to remember their addresses, then their names, were losing their ability to speak in full sentences, then to speak at all, were slipping into vegetative states that meant, if they did not have a caretaker to assist with the basic human functions like eating and going to the bathroom, would slip into as precipitous a physical decline resulting in death.

Having absorbed this with a mounting unease, I then took to Twitter - generally not a platform for reassurance when you have a foreboding that the end of the world is nearing. It did not disappoint. The mood was aggressively alarmed. A sampling:

"this contagion is no joke, people. get ahead of it, go underground, turn off your devices - by the time the liberal media reports it, you'll be a goner" - @quantumleaper

"you thought latest marvel movie was bad? this contagion legit making eyes bleed haha" - @wolverinepack

"my cousin legit can't get up anymore. he's been stuck in the same position for over 20 hours now. we're kinda scared ngl" - @mrchico

I wouldn't trust Twitters on questions of grammar, but I did tend to trust them on being early spotters of meaningful developments. But when I brought it up at dinner that night, Emily reacted to me just as I'd reacted to my mother. Breezy dismissal, quickly redirecting the topic back to our planned weekend getaway to Florida in three weeks.

The getaway never materialized. Things escalated quickly in those three weeks so that by the time we might have been digging our toes into the sand on a St. Petersburg beach, we were instead covering our screens with heavy black drapes and still averting our eyes whenever we walked past them. That was the latest in a long line of several measures we'd taken. It started with ordering the silly protective eyewear, which were being hawked in every pharmacy and then every store, no matter what they sold - from fast food restaurants to electronics stores, you could walk in and buy a protective eyeshield of varying quality. Some were cheap, plastic things that touted dubious claims of protections, while others were more robust, had a heft that promised to shield you from the evils that lurked everywhere in the virtual world.

We bought the cheap plastic ones a first, almost as a lark, still pretending that it wasn't a big deal. But a few days later, as case counts started to rise, we ordered a higher-quality pair that came with medical-grade assurances. We'd also began strictly limiting the websites we visited. Outside of work-related sites, which we got near-daily e-mails assuring us were 100% safe, we limited ourselves to an ever-diminishing set of sites: major news organizations, our personal e-mail, financial portals, a handful of miscellaneous and harmless seeming sites like the library's e-book catalog. But it became stressful even to be on those - the fear of a momentary lapse in judgment, a mistakenly clicked link directing you to a site that within milliseconds would have hatched a destructive tumor in your brain, hovered over our online lives.

And so gradually we reduced our time spent online, with work eventually dorpping off as the global economy, so dependent on our internet superhighway, ground to a screeching halt. While it was technically quite safe to be outside, it seemed precarious - and as more and more people retreated to who knows where, the city emptied out and emboldened people to take advantage of the lack of oversight. Broken-into shops, graffitied walls, closed businesses hollowed out the city to a shell of itself.

It was one week after our derailed Florida plans that we left the city, and it's now been almost three years since then. We drove upstate to Emily's friend's farm, who'd generously extended an invitation to a handful of people, almost all of whom took her up on it around the same time we did. We learned how to do the things that as self-respecting adults our great-grandparents would've expected of us. Make real physical things like chairs and tables, plant and grow food, mend the bodies and souls of each other as we grappled with and came to love the immediate scope of world that our lives encompassed.

When the rumors started, we thought it was a hoax. Typical internet rubbish, drummed up by bored teenagers, Russian operatives or hysterical citizens who saw the imprint of nefarious actors on even the most mundane of inconveniences. We didn't take things seriously until articles started popping up in the New York Times and the Washington Post, around the same time the contagion started making its impact felt in our physical world, with schools and workplaces starting to take precautionary measures. Maybe we would've picked up on it sooner had we been watching the news - I'm sure there were reports on local and then national stations of the developing story. But who watched the news these days anyways?

I worked remotely, as did my wife Emily. We both did what we called "e-mail jobs" - they consisted primarily of sending e-mails asking people to do things and telling other people what things had been done. We were great shuttlers of information back and forth along the information superhighway. They were superficially good jobs, the kind that pay in the low six figures and don't require too much effort but which you'll suddenly wake up and find you've been doing for six years without any real progress in your responsibilities or financial situation.

We were on year five of that timeline, in our early thirties and happily married if professional frustrated, when the contagion began. The origins of it aren't fully known yet. Some say it was unwittingly first unleashed in the Philippines, in those crowded internet cafes where many viral TikTok sounds were birthed. Others maintain it was a more consciously nefarious act, from a bad actor like North Korea or Russia, who had already been maliciously exploiting our internet and device addictions for years. In the end, it didn't really matter - we were all affected equally.

At least, that's what I assume. It's been more than three years since I've interacted with any internet-connected device, meaning it's been three years since I learned what was taking place farther afield than the few miles surrounding the shelter. Theoretically, there could be similar pockets of people out there, doing just what we're doing. In fact, I'm sure there are. But we have no means of long-distance contact, and no will to venture outside the relatively safe haven we've built for ourselves. While I'd like to believe in the goodness of the human spirit, I saw too much of the worst of human nature in the weeks when everything was falling apart, before it settled into the post-internet world we're living in now.

We first started to entertain the possibility that the contagion was, in fact, a real thing, at the start of summer. My mom had called me worriedly a few days before, from her idyllic Nantucket retirement community.

"You're sure this isn't a real thing, honey?" she probed. "I know you're always on the computer, doing important stuff for your work, and I just want you to be safe."

I reassured her I was fine, hung up without a trace of reciprocal worry. But later that week, we got an all-company e-mail from corporate. It was something along the lines of:

Dear employees,

We are always keeping abreast of any global and local health concerns that could affect ourselves or our customers. In light of recent reports, we are recommending that employees wear protective eyewear when conducting any official business, whether on personal devices or company-issued ones. We can recommend several providers of these eye shields (please see attached links below), and we have compiled an FAQ on why they are needed and what they will do for you. As always, we will keep you informed of any developments and continue to evolve our policy to meet your needs.

More intrigued than concerned, I pulled open a few articles from news sites I considered reputable. Their rhetoric had ramped up in recent days. There were now articles describing how, while we didn't know exactly how it worked, it appeared that certain websites now contained some sort of embedded trigger that would create an irreversible mental decline with a few days of encountering it. Healthy people of all ages, genders, races, across the world, were losing the ability to remember their addresses, then their names, were losing their ability to speak in full sentences, then to speak at all, were slipping into vegetative states that meant, if they did not have a caretaker to assist with the basic human functions like eating and going to the bathroom, would slip into as precipitous a physical decline resulting in death.

Having absorbed this with a mounting unease, I then took to Twitter - generally not a platform for reassurance when you have a foreboding that the end of the world is nearing. It did not disappoint. The mood was aggressively alarmed. A sampling:

"this contagion is no joke, people. get ahead of it, go underground, turn off your devices - by the time the liberal media reports it, you'll be a goner" - @quantumleaper

"you thought latest marvel movie was bad? this contagion legit making eyes bleed haha" - @wolverinepack

"my cousin legit can't get up anymore. he's been stuck in the same position for over 20 hours now. we're kinda scared ngl" - @mrchico

I wouldn't trust Twitters on questions of grammar, but I did tend to trust them on being early spotters of meaningful developments. But when I brought it up at dinner that night, Emily reacted to me just as I'd reacted to my mother. Breezy dismissal, quickly redirecting the topic back to our planned weekend getaway to Florida in three weeks.

The getaway never materialized. Things escalated quickly in those three weeks so that by the time we might have been digging our toes into the sand on a St. Petersburg beach, we were instead covering our screens with heavy black drapes and still averting our eyes whenever we walked past them. That was the latest in a long line of several measures we'd taken. It started with ordering the silly protective eyewear, which were being hawked in every pharmacy and then every store, no matter what they sold - from fast food restaurants to electronics stores, you could walk in and buy a protective eyeshield of varying quality. Some were cheap, plastic things that touted dubious claims of protections, while others were more robust, had a heft that promised to shield you from the evils that lurked everywhere in the virtual world.

We bought the cheap plastic ones a first, almost as a lark, still pretending that it wasn't a big deal. But a few days later, as case counts started to rise, we ordered a higher-quality pair that came with medical-grade assurances. We'd also began strictly limiting the websites we visited. Outside of work-related sites, which we got near-daily e-mails assuring us were 100% safe, we limited ourselves to an ever-diminishing set of sites: major news organizations, our personal e-mail, financial portals, a handful of miscellaneous and harmless seeming sites like the library's e-book catalog. But it became stressful even to be on those - the fear of a momentary lapse in judgment, a mistakenly clicked link directing you to a site that within milliseconds would have hatched a destructive tumor in your brain, hovered over our online lives.

And so gradually we reduced our time spent online, with work eventually dorpping off as the global economy, so dependent on our internet superhighway, ground to a screeching halt. While it was technically quite safe to be outside, it seemed precarious - and as more and more people retreated to who knows where, the city emptied out and emboldened people to take advantage of the lack of oversight. Broken-into shops, graffitied walls, closed businesses hollowed out the city to a shell of itself.

It was one week after our derailed Florida plans that we left the city, and it's now been almost three years since then. We drove upstate to Emily's friend's farm, who'd generously extended an invitation to a handful of people, almost all of whom took her up on it around the same time we did. We learned how to do the things that as self-respecting adults our great-grandparents would've expected of us. Make real physical things like chairs and tables, plant and grow food, mend the bodies and souls of each other as we grappled with and came to love the immediate scope of world that our lives encompassed.

All I want is to wake up to you. To wake up to your tousled hair, your slightly parted lips, the body heat you're emanating from a night spent sleeping side-by-side. I could get up and make us both coffee, bring it to the bed and sit side-by-side sipping quietly. We wouldn't say anything, content in one another's presence. Being there with you, knowing you're in the next room, hearing the sound of the sink as you watch your heads - each a little present in and of itself. There's nothing I'd rather do on Valentine's Day than quarantine with you. Instead, I wake alone, looking forward only to a FaceTime call connecting us across an ocean.

Captive to our screens, fingers flying across keyboard, phone or other device of choice, we are constantly generating thousands of pieces of text at a rate no previous generation comes close to matching. Much of it may fall (far) short of the Strunk & White standards of what is traditionally "correct" writing but that does not mean it is not "good." Of course, it may be bad for other reasons, but what makes writing good in my opinion is its ability to engage and fascinate, to put feelings, experiences, phenomenon into words in a way that is both suprising and relatable. I don't think that requires the most elevated vocabulary or a novel's worth of insight - 140 characters is admittedly short, and an Instagram caption doesn't allow for lengthy exposition, but that doesn't mean that good writing in those media can't be achieved. Not only can it be done, but it matters - good writing will get read, shared and read again - so it is both a writer's duty to create it, and the reader's task to recognize and appreciate it.

Two hours to landing, and he's shoveling down several rows of sushi now, soy sauce stains on his Tommy Bahama shirt. Not the most considerate seatmate, but he's kept to himself throughout the flight. I'm a row behind and diagonal. I can see what he's been watching on his phone for the past two hours and it's nothing more interesting than last season of "Game of Thrones." I'm thankful it's nothing more graphic than that.

I was reluctant to this seat, but needing to get to New York for work with less than twenty-four hours notice made it the only option. The privileged expat community in the Bahamas is small, and my friend Rich offered a spot on his plane already headed that way. Little did I know who my seatmates would be.

I've heard he'll be arrested when we land. I hope he is.

The problem had stumped the mathematic establishment for years. Henry had first heard of it as an undergraduate at MIT, but had only truly begun to work on it after receiving tenure at the university in the mathematics department. It was a complex problem, deemed the Aftbach Conundrum after the 19th-century German professor who had formulated its parameters. While initially intrigued, Henry had increasingly become obsessed with in recent years. There had been a cascading series of events as aspects of his life dropped away, narrowing his focus and attentions from the broader world inward to his now mundane, repetitive routine. His son was grown-up, moved away, with a wife and no grandkids, who visited no more than once a year at most. His beloved wife, passed away from cancer four years ago. No pets, no plants – nothing to take care of or nurture other than his work. Which is why he sat, at 2 a.m. in his study, eyes blurry staring at the piece of paper in his hand. He’d done it, he thought. Solved it. The piece of paper trembling in his hand, as elation and exhaustion shuddered through him.

His eye fluttered open, the sunlight from the window shining into his eyes. It was a dream. And just like that, the solution was gone.

I've never thought I'd be someone who considered ending it all themselves. Not because my life was particularly great, but because it was always something that had happened to me. I was the passive object, not the active, doing subject. I was 27 years old and so far nothing in my life had seemed like a choice I'd made. We've moved around a lot when I was a kid, my mom never able to hold down the same fast-food job for very long. I got used to packing up the car, leaving behind schools (never friends, I didn't make any) and heading to a new town. College wasn't a question, so when I turned 18 I took a job at the same McDonald's my mom was working at at the time. It was right before she'd been diagnosed with cancer, the fast-acting kind that left her dead six months after diagnosis. I'd quit to take care of her, and the measly entirety of our money had been poured into the futile treatment regimen, so that at the end of it I was left without a mom, without a job and without a house. That was how I ended up out on the streets, wandering, begging, scavenging - it's nearly a decade now, a point I won't let it get to. Rather than wait for the next sharp arrow of misery, I've had enough.

She put down the knife, satisified. There were exactly five - apple slices, that is. It was the only way she could eat, in precise and therefore uncontaminated quantities. Each food conveyed a different number to her. Apples screamed five, oranges a scant three (the rest of the fruit discarded), hard-boiled eggs four at a time. Her meals consisted only of the types of food that had clear demarcations, where you could definitely know a finite item had been consumed. Salads were her worst nightmare. Just seeing the uncontained chaos of ingredients, entwining and overlapping with one another, nearly made her scream. So she avoided places she might encounter those demons, or any other inflammatory and anxiety-inducing food amalgamations. That's how her world had shrunk to her small apartment, this meticulously organized kitchen. Picking up one crisp piece of the apple, she bit down, relishing the clean sensation.

First it was the playground, then it was the classroom, then the hallway and now finally here, the school administration’s office. All the other children in her second-grade class had been picked up by parents - the most eager ones came right at the bell, after-school treat in hand, eager to hear about their precious darlings’ mundane Wednesday learning cursive. The more lackadaisical ones (maybe Little William or Gemma was their third kid, the “bonus” / “mistake” child) floated in fifteen to twenty minutes after dismissal. After the half hour mark, the kids were shuttled back to the classroom, the dwindling herd of first through fifth graders who were still hanging around all clumped together. Around the 5:45pm mark, a second burst of parents, the working ones, burst in, scooping up their children alternately apologetically and warily, half-expecting to be chastised by the nonplussed teacher for daring to work and take care of a kid full-time. 

Taylor was never sure which group her mom would be - the first, second or third (and final) wave. She worked but it was full-time part-time - some weeks she’d be waiting tables at a restaurant and walking dogs on the side, other weeks she’d be taking cleaning and babysitting jobs at the upscale gated community not far from the more run-down set of single-family homes where they lived. Taylor loved when her mom was in the first group, but today had not turned out to be one of those days. 

She was sitting in the school administrator’s office, having been led there when the last of the kids had been picked up, 15 minutes after the 6:30pm cut-off time. It was 7pm now and the two remaining school administrators weren’t sure what to do with her. They’d tried calling her mom, but no answer. “Is there anyone else we can call for you?” they’d asked her. Taylor just shook her head. Her dad lived in another country now, her grandmother and grandfather passed away, no aunts or uncles. It was just her and her mom, which Taylor liked. All the movie outings, dinners at home, trips to the playground - always just the two of them. 

The school administrators were unsure what to do, but couldn’t in good conscience leave Taylor alone. They switched on the television, settled in to watch the local news headlines on the hour. “Breaking news: local woman reported missing. Last whereabouts unknown - please get in contact with the police if you have any information regarding the case.” The picture that flashed up on the TV screen to accompany the headline was the face Taylor saw smiling down at her in the morning, the face that sang her lullabies to sleep, that crinkled in laughter when she made a joke and in worry when she complained of sickness or aches. It was her mom’s face. Taylor looked down at her shoelaces and began to quietly cry.

Other people might have recognized at once the blessing that was your existence, our reunion, but it took me a while. I remember the shock I felt reading that first e-mail you sent me, relating the story, 30 years unknown and then just come to light, of how our mother had to give me up, unable to feed two hungry mouths on her meager waitress' salary once our father left two months before we even arrived. I'd known I was adopted but I hadn't known there'd been a choice, a parallel life-path I could have traveled but that you, my sister, did instead.

The tone of your e-mail was warm, excited, congratulatory - we had both gained a sibling hadn't we? But my reaction was anger, unease, resentment. Why had you been chosen instead of me? Had I cried louder, demanded more, been less cute? The sense of shameful inadequacies I'd combated and thought I had successfully overcome when told of my own adoption resurfaced, voices questioning my ability to be loved by others.

I sat there for five, then ten, then thirty minutes, unsure what to respond, how to respond. My eventual reply was terse and non-committal, confirming the details of my adoption that confirmed I was indeed the discarded twin. Your reply was almost immediate, eager to meet up and finally meet your genomic copy. In a daze, I agreed and immediately regretted doing so.

I had finally come to a point in life where I was comfortable, was settled, thought I knew who I was. To have all of that painstaking progress evaporate in the span of an e-mail was frustrating, to put it lightly. As irrational as it was, it was you I was mad at you, you who I felt was at fault. I didn't see how the turmoil, the identity reevaluation I was experiencing, could be worth it.

And then I met you. And it was stranger and funnier and more joyous than I could ever have imagined. It was a mirror, me staring at me, you staring at you, laughing the same laugh and smiling the same smile. Whatever anger I'd had dissipated, long forgotten and locked away in the era that was before you. Now everything is after you, which makes everything that came before pale in comparison. What initially seemed shattering turned out to be sustaining, an improbable flowering of family that I had at first shunned and then embraced.