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CHAPTER ONE
QUALCOMM INSTITUTE, UC SAN DIEGO
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
January 7
“Have you seen the numbers coming out of London? The death rate is becoming exponential.”
Dr. Estrada was staring at his own double screen, a cup of lukewarm xocolatl near his hand. He rubbed his nose and looked over at his research assistant, Illari Chaska, who was staring at her laptop screen with alarm in her eyes.
“What’s going exponential?” he asked in confusion.
“The outbreak in London. Haven’t you been following it on Twitter?”
Dr. Estrada lifted the cup to his lips and winced as the tepid drink reached his tongue. He set it down again. “I thought the outbreak was in Spain?”
She ran her fingers through her long, dark hair, the silver rings she wore sparkling under the overhead lights. Her oval face was tight with concern. “That’s where it started, but the cases are spiking worldwide. London, Madrid, New York. Thousands are dying. It’s become a pandemic.”
Dr. Estrada wrinkled his nose. “I wonder if it started in a biolab. You know they’re always working on scary stuff.”
Illari shook her head. “The WHO hasn’t determined its origin yet, but it started spreading from cruise ships right around Christmas and New Year’s. Ten cases. A hundred cases. A thousand cases. Like I said, exponential.”
“That’s terrible,” Dr. Estrada said. If it was growing that fast, it could end up being bigger than the Spanish flu. That should horrify anyone. “Any cases in California yet?”
“Not sure. There’s not a single article about it on the CDC’s website.”
“Then how do you know all of this?”
Illari smirked. “I’m Gen Z. We know things.”
That was true. When Dr. Estrada was in college, there’d been no internet, no smartphones. Quite the difference from the research center they sat in now. He gazed around at the wall full of monitor screens showing the LiDAR data he’d been collecting on Maya ruins in Guatemala. None of this would have been possible back then, but here was proof that the impossible could become possible.
The Qualcomm Institute was a joint partnership between the university and one of the biggest tech companies in the world—nearly every cell phone on the planet had some piece of hardware that Qualcomm had designed. The servers in the building were the true breakthrough, though. They were state-of-the-art, running multicore processors custom designed to crunch terabytes of data quickly. Data that the LiDAR technology had produced from his flights over the jungles in the Yucatán—primarily Guatemala.
Grad students like Illari were archaeologists and computer scientists rolled into one. That was the new generation. A group of engineers were making a virtual reality system that would enable users to visit the newly discovered Maya ruins with a headset in an air-conditioned room, something he hadn’t thought possible when he was Illari’s age.
Dr. Estrada leaned back in his office chair with a creak and folded his arms. “Exponential growth means quarantine measures. Our trip to Belize might get canceled.”
His cell phone rang in his pocket, the ringtone a clip from “Smooth” by Santana. Illari shook her head at the “old-man” music and went back to her laptop. The caller ID showed a San Diego area code but no name.
“Estrada,” he said, answering the call. Glancing at Illari’s monitor, he saw some charts and graphs with data from a website that was unfamiliar to him.
“Is this Dr. Estrada from UC San Diego?” asked a male voice.
“Yes, who is this?” he asked. He switched over to a browser and tapped into the search bar to look for information about the pandemic. Very few articles came up.
“This is Special Agent Foster from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. San Diego field office.”
Dr. Estrada’s heart clenched with fear. Abandoning his search, he sat up straighter. Sweat began to tingle across his body. Illari looked over her shoulder, brushing her brown hair from her face, and gave him a questioning look.
“Um . . . yes? What can I do for you, Agent Foster?”
Illari’s eyes widened with surprise, her nostrils flaring slightly. He gave her a bewildered shrug, trying to play it off, but he was filled with the same kind of dread he’d felt upon seeing a patrol car’s lights in his rearview mirror on the freeway a few weeks ago. Except this was worse. Much worse. He’d done something foolish, and he was about to pay for it. His stomach turned sour, and his armpits began to leak sweat.
“Dr. Estrada, do I understand correctly that you do research on ancient ruins? Maya specifically.”
“Y-yes. Yes, I do, sir. Am I in any trouble?”