ALONG THE ENDLESS RIVER
Prologue

In the 14th Century, the Black Death descended upon Europe with frightening speed and efficiency. It has been linked to a singular fleet of Genoese merchant ships, which docked in Messina in November 1347 AD. Within three years, the plague these sailors carried with them from their voyage through the Black Sea had swept through Europe, reaching as far as Iceland and Greenland. Over the next decade and a half, the Black Death claimed as many as 100 million victims, representing as much as 60% of the population of Europe, the epicenter of human society on the planet at the time.

As devastating as the plague was, in theory it could have been far, far worse. The bubonic plague had a fatality estimated between 40-50% within 4 days of infection. And, population densities in Europe were a fraction of what they are today. The transfer and infestation timetable of the plague was also limited by state of transportation at that time in human history. So, it is reasonable to conclude that if a new zoonotic bacterial infection with a similar gestation period and higher fatality rate were to be introduced into the modern world, with modern global transportation and population mega-centers- then 60% of the population being lost to such a plague would be the absolute low end of the band of possibilities.

This has been the fabric of nightmares since the advancement of modern medicine and our expanded understanding of the microscopic threats all around us. Time after time, families of the modern world have huddled around their television sets and watched images of people in airports wearing surgical masks, teams in haz-mat suits descending on dusty villages in some far off place. It’s the specter of history that makes us hold our children a little tighter as these images flash on our screens. That fear which may be beyond all other waking fears we have as humans of the modern age. The fear lies in our knowledge that despite all of our progress and technology, despite our incredible advancements in preserving human life and the amazing developments in dispersion of information amongst our species- we are all ultimately at the whim of the natural world around us. And what is this mother of all fears? That the whim of the natural world may very well be to, one day, make us all simply disappear.