Author's Note: This story is set after a worldwide pandemic that is close to, but not quite like the one that took place while it was being written. Imagine it as an alternate world where the virus was a little more serious and lockdowns had to be more intense than they tended to be and people were generally better about abiding by them.
This Is How It Starts (Mg, Mf, MF, inc, prost)
I blame the quarantine. The stay-at-home orders. The lockdowns. If not for that, it might never have been discovered... or maybe it would have, but I might have been left out of it, might never have seen what no man was meant to know.
People complain that the virus changed everything, that it established a New Normal. They have no idea that the subtler contagion that really has the potential to rewrite society was just using the virus and all our social distancing to keep under the radar. If we were in our normal world, where kids went to school, surely somebody would have noticed right away... or maybe nobody would notice the effect enough to take advantage. After all, without the lockdowns, a lot less people would have started baking.
My first encounter with this all was while the virus... the actual virus, the one everybody was paranoid about, the one that had us wearing masks in public, canceling family holidays... all of that looked like it was finally winding down. The new vaccine was out, and--as a grocery worker--I was lucky enough to get one of the first waves of injections and the corresponding card which let me pass lockdown checkpoints, so I could finally visit people without risk of infection or reinfection or becoming a carrier.
So, naturally, I visited my brother. My place isn't that far away from his, but in a lockdown it might as well have been across the country... for months, I'd only seen him and his family from a long distance, or on video chat, and... I missed my nieces and nephew. Them, I'd barely even seen at all aside from a few social media pictures or brief hellos on a screen before rushing off to do something. Maybe my nephew Cameron I saw a little more than the others... when I did get a chance to talk to the kids, he had a habit of taking over the camera, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that I also wanted to see and talk to my nieces. Maybe even more. Don't get me wrong, I love my nephew, but I'd just always connected better with the girls and it felt like I hadn't caught up with them in so long.
Despite this, I didn't rush to his house the moment I was allowed to... my brother Ben had hedged around my coming to visit, even though I offered immediately and he agreed, tepidly, that it was a good idea. Still, when I pushed for a time he kept giving me vague 'I don't know maybe sometime soon' type answers while also significantly downplaying the idea of an extended visit. I thought may
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