Baseline Resilience

Nanoplague spares one paramedic. Why? Baseline Red zones bloom

across the city, block by block. At Station 46, Luis tapes a dying flashlight to his

chest and walks into the shimmering streetlights. The swarm is elegant cruelty—gray dust

that learns whatever it touches and edits it into faster versions of itself. Luis doesn’t bring

a weapon; he brings names, kneeling beside strangers and saying them aloud like

he already knows them. “You were eight on a red bike,” he tells a trembling

teacher as her veins sparkle with crawling silver; “you hate olives, you cried at the

comet, you saved a dog named Luna in 2009”. Monitors spike as if the dust itself