“I didn’t say he would use false documents. I said he would actually have twenty-five years on the job. Whatever job. Do you understand? Again, chess. With a very advanced player who can see many moves ahead. They put their pieces into position.”

Marconi checked the vitals on a sleeping patient as he spoke, puffing on his pipe the whole time. I again wondered to what degree Dr. Marconi actually knew anything about medicine.

He said, “In the case of Dr. Tennet, he not only has specialized in treating violent and paranoid patients since the 1980s, but has written multiple prominent books on the subject, and dozens of journal articles. More pertinent to this situation, he has also written extensively on the subject of group paranoia and crowd dynamics in crisis situations. He didn’t have to infiltrate the government. When the ‘outbreak’ hit, they came to him. Do you understand? The pieces are always positioned where They need them.”

“Right, and ‘They’ are dicks.”

“But we can’t stop there. We need to ask the big question: what do They want?”

“To … kill us all?”

“Ha! We should be blessed with an adversary with such uncomplicated ambitions. No, war is never about killing the enemy. War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.”

2 Hours, 40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

John didn’t get within three blocks of the hospital quarantine. There were people everywhere. It was like the afternoon of the Fourth of July, when everybody ambles out to the park in loose groups to find a place to watch fireworks. Only instead of carrying blankets and lawn chairs, everybody was armed to the teeth. From the driver’s seat of the tow truck, John recognized a familiar cowboy hat and denim-wrapped ass walking nearby. John pulled up to where Tightpants Cowboy was on the sidewalk, shouting orders to somebody. John rolled down the window and Tightpants said, “Did Hank send you out here? We’re still four short.”

John said, “Uh, no. Is Falconer around?”

“The detective? He went off on his own. Said he had to follow up on a lead.”

“Shit. What is all this?”

“It’s the end of the world, where you been all week?”

“What?”

“What’s your name again?”

“John. Yours?”

“Jimmy DuPree. Pleased to meet you. We’re makin’ sure the quarantine holds until the air force can blow the shit out of it in about…”

2 Hours, 35 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed

Marconi said, “I mentioned my book earlier. The Babel Threshold.”

“Yeah. I said I hadn’t read it. I usually wait for the movie.”

“Try to focus, please. Do you understand the significance of the title? You know the Tower of Babel, right? You went to Sunday School?”

“Yeah, sure. In ancient times everybody on earth spoke the same language, then they decided to build a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. Then God cursed everybody on the job site to each speak a different language to mess them up.”

“Exactly. ‘And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men buildeth. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down, and there confound their language.’ It’s right there in the text, Mr. Wong—God’s motivation in that story is that he was afraid. He limited our ability to communicate because he was afraid that, operating as one, we would challenge His power.”

“Man, I hope you’re not about to tell me that all of this shit is a curse from God because we built our buildings too tall. Kind of a flat town to impose that lesson on. You’d think he’d take it to Dubai.”

“No. But there is a parallel. Are you familiar with Dunbar’s number?”

“No.”

“You should, it governs every moment of your waking life. It is our Tower of Babel. The restraint that governs human ambition isn’t a lack of a unified language. It’s Dunbar’s number. Named after a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar. He studied primate brains, and their behavior in groups. And he found something that will change the way you think about the world. He found that the larger the primate’s neocortex, the larger the communities it formed. It takes a lot of brain to process all of the relationships in a complex society, you see. When primates find themselves in groups larger than what their brains can handle, the system breaks down. Factions form. Wars break out. Now, and do pay attention, because this is crucial—you can actually look at a primate brain and, knowing nothing else about what species it came from, you can predict how big their tribes are.”

“Does Owen have a watch? Because when you told him fifteen minutes I’m not sure if he’s going to take that as a literal fifteen minutes, or…”

“We’ll deal with him in a moment, but I take your point. The salient issue here is that every primate has a number.” Marconi gestured to the crowd gathering outside the fence. “Including those primates out there. Including you and I. Based on the size of a human’s neocortex, that number is about a hundred and fifty. That’s how many other humans we can recognize before we max out our connections. With some variability among individuals, of course. That is our maximum capacity for sympathy.”

I stared at him. I said, “Wait, really? Like there’s an actual part of our brain that dictates how many people we can tolerate before we start acting like assholes?”

“Congratulations, now you know the single reason why the world is the way it is. You see the problem right away—everything we do requires cooperation in groups larger than a hundred and fifty. Governments. Corporations. Society as a whole. And we are physically incapable of handling it. So every moment of the day we urgently try to separate everyone on earth into two groups—those inside the sphere of sympathy and those outside. Black versus white, liberal versus conservative, Muslim versus Christian, Lakers fan versus Celtics fan. With us, or against us. Infected versus clean.

“We simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes, so that they hold the space of only one individual in our limited available memory slots. And here is the key—those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such. This is why you feel worse about your girlfriend cutting her finger than you do about an earthquake in Afghanistan that kills a hundred thousand people. This is what makes genocide possible. This is what makes it possible for a CEO to sign off on a policy that will poison a river in Malaysia and create ten thousand deformed infants. Because of this limitation in the mental hardware, those Malaysians may as well be ants.”

I stared at the crowd outside and rubbed my forehead. “Or monsters.”

“Now you’re getting it. It’s the same as how that crowd out there doesn’t see us as human. The way the rest of the country won’t see anyone inside city limits as human. The way the rest of the world soon won’t regard anyone in this country as human. The paranoia rippling outward until the whole planet is engulfed. This infection, this parasite that dehumanizes the host but is utterly undetectable, it is perfectly designed to play on this fundamental flaw, this limitation in our hardware. That will be the real infection.”

Marconi emptied his pipe into a bedpan, and pulled out a bag of tobacco.

“Which brings us back to the Tower of Babel. Humans were always destined to be derailed by this limitation in our ability to cooperate. At some specific point, determined by the overall size of the population on the planet and a host of other factors, we will destroy ourselves. That is the Babel Threshold. The point at which the species-wide exhaustion of human sympathy reaches critical mass.”

“And you think this whole thing, starting with me finding a giant alien spider in my bed, was Their plan to trigger that event.”

He nodded. “The parasite’s ability to stay undercover indefinitely, the infected showing absolutely no symptoms … it’s perfection. Anyone can be infected, at any moment, anywhere in the world. If you want to see what the future of life on planet Earth looks like, simply take a glance out that window.”

I found a chair and collapsed into it. There was a harsh knock on the door behind me.

From behind the door, Owen said, “It’s been long enough, doc.”

“Five more minutes won’t change anything, Mr. Barber.”

Lowering my voice, I said, “Wait, you wrote a book about this happening before it happened? Damn, why didn’t you send me a copy?”

“You shouldn’t have needed a book to see this coming. No one should have. This is what They’ve been building toward since civilization began, accelerating as it got closer, like the last sand running from an hourglass. Look at the games children play now. The average child has killed ten thousand men on a video game screen by the time he enters high school. Reinforcing that lesson one button press at a time—the shapes at the other end of your gun are not human. And when news of the infection spread, what did the world immediately call the infected?”

“Zombies.”

“Exactly. Our culture’s most perfect creation—an enemy you are absolutely, morally correct in killing, because they are already dead. Why, you are doing them a favor by smashing in their skulls. We as a species were so primed for this that to get combustion, They only needed the tiniest spark. It actually happened sooner than I expected, but…”

He shrugged as he lit his pipe, as if to say, “Eh, can’t be right every time.”

I said, “Well, you took a long time to say what I pretty much already knew. We’re screwed. I mean, to be clear, we’re rooting for the bombs, right? That’s the only way to satisfy the paranoia, let them blow all this to shit on live TV while the mob out there cheers.”