Patterns are always made by something(s). But what? When cameras in space were pointed at the Earth’s edge, its atmosphere appeared as thin and transparent as a soap bubble that hadn’t popped. At least not yet. Not like the atmosphere of Red Marble Earth. Still, the Black Marble that was the Earth at night was dotted by city lights as well as forest fires, and flames of burning gas large enough to be seen from space….

Hard to believe that smudges of light large enough to cover the East Coast could be the result of individuals oblivious to the monumental patterns they were creating: a mother turning on a bedside lamp to read to her children; a man triggering the light in his garage; a janitor switching on lights in an empty office; a couple in the back of a cab, their faces ghostly in the glow of their phones…. Individual actions cluster into systems, systems—automatic headlights, dusk-to-dawn streetlamps—clusters of systems coalesce into structures—cities at night—structures shape the behavior of individuals who read to children, emptied wastepaper baskets, used phones….
During the day, the Earth was as blue as a snow globe. When some giant hand shook it to create weather, violent storms could pirouette across its surface, serene and silent from the vantage of the satellites, but thundering down on the millions of creatures beneath them.

Watching satellite views of hurricanes reminded Gabe of the prairie she grew up on, the land so flat that her family could watch a rainstorm slide along the horizon as though it were a distant freight train. They used to stand out in the yard and watch tornadoes from afar: the sky would darken as the wind picked up, the fluffy white castles that had drifted by earlier replaced by something closer to the vortex of a hypnotist’s spiral. Distance reduced sheets of rain to silence, the all-too-real thunder and lightning storming down on people like them, they knew.

But not them.

And they would watch those storms with an odd mix of detachment and dread, like watching a natural disaster on the weather channel except knowing that if the winds twitched, force could add to force to turn the spectacle their way.

Watching viruses mutate was a lot like that, she thought, moving her mouse to wake up her computer and activate her World Flu Radar app. The last pandemic had burned itself out. But whole evolutionary trees of viruses were still out there, still mutating within bats, rabbits, birds, cooking up new versions of Ebola, SARS, Marburg, Nipah, and would reemerge when (not if) their mutations combined in ways that would let one live in a nasal passage here, or on a doorknob there.

Health officials still warned local governments to keep their populations vigilant for dead birds. But of course, once people stopped dying, no one bothered.