When Dan woke the computer, he was surprised at how fast the diagram of Olympia’s virus was branching. Ten days in and it already looked like the MRI of an overactive brain, synapses firing like crazy. He’d modeled other open-loop systems—the tide of handguns that wash into then out of hot spots—but none were as dynamic as this. He snapped his fingers to take a screen grab: a depiction of what the computer model thought the virus looked like out in the wild at that very moment.