Shush, you.

I would like to thank Wizard of Woah for letting me borrow his setting.

Copyright is fake but gratitude and cooperation are real.

It's 21st century on Earth Mira, and the world is slowly transitioning from a series of system shocks into something otherworldly complicated and beautiful.

From some point, each kid* is presented with a choice - a boring vaccine that would protect them from a widespread and deadly virus, or a more fun "vaccine" that would, coupled with that virus, change them into a more exciting sort of a human.

*Of course, the choice is as often as not effectively in the hands of parents rather than the kids. But not by legal force. Kids have more say in the matters of norms and governance, this time and place - insofar as they are being restored or emerge from the ground up.

If you, as a kid, were given a choice to either:

1) Remain a human, the apex species of Earth with millenia of history and amazing powers like "thermoregulation by sweating", "grabby hands" and "language", 

2) Keep all of that, plus get a few degrees of magnitude in endurance, resilience, power output, agility, perception, memory, processing depth and processing speed, plus agelessness, plus some extra power that bluntly defies what people thought they knew about the laws of physics, for a price of one sucky week and temporarily increased sleep time and permanently increased appetite,

what would you pick? 

Is that supposed to be a hard choice? That doesn't look like an especially hard choice.

If it doesn't look like a hard choice to you, that means making the choice won't be hard.

Ready?

Ready or not, let's do this.

Here's hoping for some awesome, unique power!

Okay it's gonna really suck eventually.

But first-

Have a glimpse of truth, Jean!

Who the hell are you?

Status Report's opposite, kind of.

What.

Joking. And you probably wouldn't get it.

Some call me Origin, though it's not my real name.

What is? 

I am the one you customarily refer to as "I".

When I say "I", I mean myself.

Okay, uh, whatever.

Why are we talking. Shouldn't I be just, like, getting a vision of omnipotence?

Oh, we aren't really talking. We are pretending we are talking. Or, UselessCommon is pretending we are pretending we are talking. Or, I am pretending UselessCommon is pretending we are pretending we are talking. Or,

What are you even saying.

Among other things, "What are you even saying."

Hey, that's my voice! Okay, you're being funny or something. Whatever, I don't get you.

You wanna give me a cool power, or what?

I'm sure a lot of people don't get me. They're welcome to read my character description!

And no, you're actually getting a really lame power.

What. No fair! I wanna do cool things! 

You sure? Or I'm going to actually decide to have you do cool things. 

Haha!

Yeah, I was obviously joking, here. You were created to do cool things, it's been predetermined at your birth around two days ago. Or 13 billion years.

Okay, great! You promised, then! 

What kinda power I get?

I didn't promise anything! I am not the kind of thing that can promise things, because I am not the kind of thing that can do things. But if UselessCommon doesn't abandon the thread or change his mind or something, there are cool things coming your way!

Your power is going to be over languages! 

Languages, really? What does that do.

You get to speak any language, and with training even no language, like Alysyrrabel! You're really good at translation and coining new words! You can come up with really stinging insults!

Wow okay that does sound fucking rotten. 

Don't let Feanor find out you said that. Or your author.

Also, you get to find out - instinctively feel - how much French really sucks for someone from outside.

Rude.

It's true, insofar as we are pretending truth is a thing! If history went slightly differently, we could be speaking in French right now. But we aren't, cause it sucks.

Wait, we aren't?

We aren't. I'm talking in English right now. I was talking in English the whole time. 

As I said, we weren't really talking.

Hey, Jean! How are you feeling?

I'm... fine. Great even.

Oh. You just passed out for a second. 

Well, I had that feeling of omniscience, and then - I felt something really weird, and-

Oh. Well, the whole thing is weird, really.

Anyway, good thing you're fine. Go have your horrible week. Take these painkillers if you need, but don't even bother with those ones.

Come back a wonderful miracle!

Okay wow this sucks

And then I get the lamest power on the block. Thanks, Origin! 

It's not that bad! Unique, even. You can probably grease the wheels of international cooperation, if you study up for it.

Okay, maybe it's not literally useless.

And I can devour Many Books, now, about stuff related to that.

And other stuff.

It's not useless. It's pretty useless in a Miracle fight, though.

Um. I'mma jet.

Nope! You and your fellas are surrounded from five directions by naked kids with dubious intent! (And from the sixth one by the ground.) 

Well, fuck. Can we resolve this peacefully?

Dodge! 

So, where am I?

You're a Miracle. You can probably do a Rainbolt impression. Especially since you studied geography and whatnot.

Okay, well, I'm trying. It looks vaguely like Central Asia, or maybe Middle East. But there aren't exactly convenient clues.

There aren't. Welcome to Generic Persian Plateau Wilderness.

It's dry and rocky and there are few plants and there is no sign of civilization in sight.

Gods. Good thing I can just decide to sweat less and stay on higher working temperature, if it comes down to being short on water.

Where are clothes when you need them.

Where's phone when you need it? (not that it would help, it's not like the Kingdom of Persia or whereever I am has a phone network compatible with French phones or covering this middle of nowhere)

Your phone is in your clothes.

Oops.

See how practical clothing is, even if your metabolism is adapted to "yes"? It's got pockets and shit. One of our best inventions, really.

Look, Earth, do y'all ever feel like being a Classical statue for a bit?

No.

Fine, no tools. Let's just walk across the boring arids at Miracle-pace, looking for civilization, edibles, water, and maybe something to save me from boredom while I'm at it.

The brave explorer of Earth will traverse semi-desert and discover more semi-desert. 

Wow, amazing!

So, I hate this place.

Anything to eat or drink, yet?

Well, there's mostly-dry grass. How do you feel about subsisting on cellulose and lignin? 

Even with how ridiculous we Miracles are, that wouldn't work.

Sucks to suck! Whoever designed your superpowers should have paid more attention to the second most important activity in the world - eating.

I am going to subsist on my own accumulated nutrients for a time. Good thing I bothered having a little bit of chubbiness! That was a choice, though not for this reason.

And I'm going to pass out for a bit because walking at Miracle-pace is a lot of energy, even if it doesn't feel like it.

Cool. Try not to die while asleep.

Wait, why do most of the animals here have sleep? It doesn't seem very adaptive to be completely and ridiculously vulnerable for an obligate regular period of the time compared to "somewhat more vulnerable all the time". 

Don't worry about it, Earth.

Okay.

Yawn.

Okay. I definitely need to drink. And to eat.

Μολων λαβε.

Right. Okay.

I am going to keep going in that general direction and be extra observant about any signs of edible or drinkable things.

Okay, fine, here's a pack of jackals. 

What are they even hunting for, in this empty damned wasteland?

Fine, whatever. I guess I could cook up some wild jackals. I could just move stones fast enough that they heat up enough to ignite some of this dry-ass grass, and roast some wild dogs.

...and dry them out with heat. Okay, uh, I guess not. I guess I am going to drink their blood raw, in fact, because there is nothing else to drink here, and eat their flesh uncooked, germs and all.

Thank you very much for stranding me on a different continent, portal-flinging Miracle girl.

Different continent? He doesn't know...

Anyway, are you sure you want to engage 11 pack hunters on an open plain with no tools or clothing, child of man?

What do you mean, no tools? I got this here sharp rock and this here long stick.

I, uh, might have no way to combine them into a spear, but it'll do.

I'm a 9-year-old Miracle. I can take on like five baseline cops with batons and pistols, and it'll be a fair fight. 

You are also debuffed by dehydration.

It's not an easy fight, anyway.

Nah, I'd win.

...maybe. But it sure looks like there isn't a better option.

So, should I:

1) Pose as a prey and let them surround me?

2) First-strike them with my superior speed and range?

3) Wait until they fall asleep and silently kill them?

Option 1 means getting surrounded by predators.

Option 2 probably spooks most of them right away.

Option 3 takes a long time. It's probably unwise to do without food or drink for a long time trying to stalk a pack of dogs.

...I guess we are doing option 1.

You have gotten yourself successfully surrounded by predators on purpose. That's idiotic.

No, that's really cool. 

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Thwack! Bonk! Poke! 

If those jackals could talk, they would complain about humans being completely bullshit lately.

No, you can't bite me by the leg! I refuse! 

Then a different one is gonna bite you by your stomach! 

That's even worse! I'm gonna jump out of this, and try to squish someone on my way back! 

Squish.

Thwack. Poke. Stab.

You can't dodge literally forever. Someone will bite you by the gastrocenmii.

Ow.

Are you telling me I am gonna be losing blood out of this? Bullshit.

At least I can squish you with my other leg.

I can't slow down, now that I'm bit. Can't show weakness. 

Get this! Get that!

It appears that the Jackal Pack has been outmatched. This fucking leapfrogging human has been bit and refuses to slow down anyway. Jackals out.

And as my prize, I get: foul-tasting wild jackal blood, equally foul-tasting raw jackal meat, a skin to cover my damn head, a raw wet rotting furred skin to cover my head from direct sunlight, and a bitten leg that would kill me if not for Miracle regeneration.

Fuck this place, aight? 

It's better than almost everywhere in the universe! 

I'm gonna pass out now, thanks.

Hopefully Miracle regeneration and immunity mean I don't die to an infection or parasites.

Nah, don't worry about it.

Oh. It's a new morning, and my leg is as good as new, and I don't even have a stomach pain.

Thanks, Origin or God or aliens or secret mad scientists or whoever.

Time to walk the earth in the same arbitrary direction at an automobile pace again.

To think, someone who isn't a Miracle would have to worry about subtly going in circles!

The Earth is made for walking it!

You know you look and smell like a horror movie monster right now, with a corpse covering your head and while carrying two more corpses with you, coated in blood and dirt and sweat?

Eh, nobody is around to notice it.

Miracles tend to give less fucks about stuff like that, which isn't usually me, but it feels like a good thing to lean into this at this specific moment. 

In fact, I'm gonna growl and howl like a caveman a bit, actually. Because why not? Hell, if anyone sees me, that's an absolute win, considering the circumstances.

That's adorable! 

That's kinda fucked up! 

Anyway, is the hellscape over before I run out of blood to drink and corpses to eat? 

Nope.

There's no way that I find nothing useful along the way. I walked like a fuckton of kilometers now.

Aha! There's some land that looks like it might be slightly wetter and greener! 

So I've once read somewhere about the practice of qanat commonly employed in the countries of the region. That's digging a network of underground tunnels to distribute water from the aquifer to irrigation channels and water supply.

Which means that this ship's biscuit of a land has aquifer, on relatively common occasion.

So, are you willing to bet however many calories you want to bet to get a chance at an immobile source of freshwater at this random place?

No, who do you take me for?

I am going to try to find the lowest point in the landscape nearby, and if that looks promising, I'm going to attempt to dig there. 

A baseline would definitely lose the direction they are trying to keep to, but I'm no baseline, sue me.

IRL hill-climbing valley-descending algorithm goooo!!! 

Oh hey. Look at that.

That looks like, dare I say, an oasis of sorts.

I bet I can eat this plant! And this one, too! Not... sure about this one, not really a biology guy, but if it's poisonous, that ain't useless either!

And I can definitely drink this water!

And I can cool down in the mud and drain all the excess heat because it's 14:00 and I am slow-cooking! 

And I can fill all those stomachs I didn't eat with water to carry!

Except for the ones that I accidentally tore apart without noticing while briskly walking. Which are all but two.

I'mma pass out again, thanks.

Okay. 

Civilizaaaation!!! Where aaaaaaaaare you?! 

Hey. Is that a river over there? 

Holy shit. It is. 

And that means villages.

That must mean villages. 

You fucking with me?

Is that gonna be a mirage or something? 

Only one way to find out! 

Fine. I guess. Let's go.

At the very least it's more plants and freshwater. And probably fish. 

Come on, it's gotta be villages. 

I'm gonna meet local Miracles! They're probably gonna be nicer than this grobblesmacked portal girl! I am so abusing my power to make that a real novel insult specifically for her and people like her!

Miracle solidarity, don't fail me now! 

Well, there's fish and edible plants and freshwater. No villages in sight so far. 

Wanna go upstream or downstream? 

Downstream! River deltas mean farmland and coast, which mean more cities! 

Fair enough.

There's something vaguely village-like on the horizon. 

Oh, hell yeah!

Civilization, here I come!!!!!!

N = 1
Nₘ = 1
R₀ = 1.4
Rₑ = ???
f = 0

Uh. What's that?

Don't worry about it, Earth.

Okay.

Look at that! Fields in the distance!!!

Fields! And a road, and power poles, and is that agritech?, and oh look, there's a girl standing approximately on your way far away from the settlement.

Oh! She's a Miracle, zipping around out of town, right?

Damn, she's wearing regional traditional clothing. Probably means I'm out of Persian Kingdom, that kind of thing is way out of fashion there.

If she's a Miracle, she's really not showing it off. She's walking around slowly and kinda heavily.

Well, I'm gonna approach her! See what's going on!

You are gonna approach her nude, with your head covered in an animal corpse, and a body covered in sweat and dirt?

I'm gonna take the corpsehat into my hands (it'll be a hell of a memento), quickly dunk myself into the river, and then approach her. Nude, of course - some people are a bit weird about it, maybe moreso those who tend to wear traditional Persian Plateau costumes, but that's neither here nor there, and what should I even do about it, anyway.

Alright.

So as you are approaching her, she sees a really implausibly fast and graceful nude White boy appear out nowhere, carrying a decaying mutilated corpse of a dog.

And you are going to see a startled girl who is clearly systematically malnourished, and clearly not a Miracle.

Oh, no.

We don't oppress kids. 

We had to learn it the hard way, but we have learned it.

Cause then one day the kids, or their friends, come back with a strength of a small army and cunning of an enraged evil genius.

And those who would protect us might side with them.

We don't oppress kids.

There have been burning cities. Crucified bodies. Horrific fates.

Teacher, leave the kids alone. Lest you get thrashed within inches of your life. 

Well, Jean isn't a vindictive terrorist, but as an effective representative of the Kid Faction, Jean figures he might have to make the life of some adults slightly harder.

But for now;

"Hi! (Arabic) Hi! (Farsi) Hi! (Kurdish) Hi! (Pashto)"

"Eep! In Allah's name, what are you? (Farsi)"

Farsi it is, then.

"Name's Jean. Sorry for startling you."

Aliyeh has so many questions that they all cancel out into nothing. She just stares at him blankly, without remembering to avert her gaze.

"I'm not gonna hurt you or bust you or whatever, relax! Hell, I think I'm going to help you with whatever you clearly need help with!"

"I don't... need help. Leave me alone."

(she needs help) 

"A lowest quartile baseline wouldn't believe that one. Come on, let's get us real food, and then we'll figure out what to do with whoever did that to you."

She just escaped, vainly and with no plan. And that's why Allah is sending her this thing to punish her for it and tempt her futher. Yep.

"Deliver yourself from me, shaitan."

"Oh, come on. I'm not a shaitan, or any other kind of a religious figure!" says the naked abnormally colored abnormally beautiful abnormally fast boy carrying a stinking corpse of a jackal. "I'm just Jean. I study international relations and apparently get into awful trouble with portals."

Yeah she's got absolutely no clue what the second part means.

"You're... naked," she says, finally averting her gaze, "and white and weird and carrying this unclean thing around. What kind of shaitan are you?"

"Okay, again, I'm not any sort of a religious thing. Just a Miracle!"

"Okay, so I am figuring out someone told you some awful lies about Miracles, like we are all evil or something. That's not true - look at me, I'm not at all hurting you, and intending to do the opposite. If you really want me to go away, I'll go away, but I worry for you!"

"I've heard of miracles, of course. Miracles are acts of Allah, not people, though!"

You know, if he were a demon or the Devil himself, it'd be a bad idea to just keep talking to him, but, like, baseline kids, you know? And he's not so it's not.

"Um. Transhumans? People with powers and better bodies? Huxley Flu survivors?"

"What are you talking about, I don't understand."

"Did they lock you up in the attic for your whole life or something?!"

"Um, no? I worked in a brick farm with a whole bunch of people, before escaping just now."

Brick farm.

Clients. Logistics. A whole village, with a road to it, and a power line.

TV. Radio. Commerce. Maps. Intermingling. Protection. Warlords. Relief efforts. Vaccine shipments. Association of Transhuman-Baseline Cooperation.

Nothing adds up.

Oh no.

Damn you, portal girl. Why. 

N = |1-2|
Nₘ = 1
R₀ = 1.4
Rₑ = |0-1|
f = 0

OH NO.

Why is he silent all of a sudden? It's hard to tell, having averted the gaze from the shameful nudity and all. 

He's kinda on the verge of crying, actually.

And he zips away a distance of a few meters, and covers his mouth and nose.

And then uncovers them.

”What year is it? How many people live on Earth?”

"I don't remember."

YOU POOR THING. 

And I entered this conversation wanting to help you, and now, and now-

She's a baseline girl who have done nothing wrong. As far as he knows, anyway. 

And there's this whole other world that he doesn't even know. 

Yeah, what's up? We kinda lost track of what's going on here. 

You can't be, like, judged by a single village in the middle of nowhere, right? You have probably done nothing wrong as a whole, too. As far as I know, anyway. 

We have tried our sincere best.

Right. So. There are millions and millions of other innocent kids in this world. 

Yeah. There are. 

It's not an especially hard choice between them and this one poor girl who was unfortunate enough to be here and fortune enough to be here alone. 

Is it? It's a really poor and innocent and cute girl!

And we believe in deontology here! 

But of course Jean can't hear that, because there's no way for him to infer that, and would say that that's kinda stupid anyway. 

I hate this situation so much.

And how do I even explain anything? She's got all that religious nonsense in her head.

Okay, I'm a sinful soul, and I am going to be a little curious and peek.

...what's he making that face about?

...that doesn't look like the face shaitan would make, though. 

And as stress of being wrenched into the most painful (not hard, painful) choice of his life combines with general stress to the organism and lack of food (even with all the fish he somewhat recently cooked) and rest,

Wait, did he just pass out. 

Uh.

That's not how the story is supposed to go. 

So. Uh. She should be calling adults in this situation.

But there are no adults around. Also, she just escaped them. Also, they wouldn't believe her and then it'll turn out that the mysterious boy is gone, and she's gonna be beaten for that.

I guess I could just run away. I guess I should just run away from this shaitan. Is he that? I don't even know.

He was kinda nice, though. Before he was all weird. 

Okay. Um. I guess that means helping him.

How do you help someone who suddenly passes out?

You wake them up and being water and pray. Right. 

Huuuuh.

What's happening.

"Wake up! Wake up! Are you alright? By the Allah, wake up!"

Oh no.

She's helping him. She's being nice to him.

She's breathing right in his face, too, while doing that. 

He cups his nose and mouth. And sits up.

"I'm fine..."

Even the lowest-quartile baseline wouldn't believe that! She's one, and she doesn't believe that. 

"Why did you fall asleep suddenly, then? Also, have this water."

"Thanks."

He gulps it. It's not properly filtrated, but it's fine. 

"Why did I pass out? Multiple things, probably. Young Mir- Transhumans pass out all the time. But also, I realized something bad."

"What?"

"I might have made you really sick. And it would be really, really bad if you made anyone else sick like that."

"Huh. Kids get sick from each other all the time, though. Is it really that bad?"

"I'm the only one who has it." Not quite true, of course, but an easier explanation. "And this sickness would kill most all kids! And then the adults are gonna be in a bad spot, too!"

"Our Lord, grant us from Yourself mercy and prepare for us from our affair right guidance."

Okay. Now. How to (ugh) handle this. 

"Yeah. As I understand it, you don't particularly want to go back to that brick farm, right, um, whatever your name is?"

"Aliyeh. And no, I don't."

"So, say I help you go even further away, and find you food for a time?"

Is this the part of the story where she's tempted? Or is is maybe not that story, but the part of the story with the Allah sends help and you are supposed to accept it?

"How would you even help me go?"

"Carry you. I'm really, really, really strong and fast."

Hop! And he's up. Zip! And he's over there. Zap! And he's back.

Huh. That's scary.

Also, that's him being naked all in my face again.

"Okay. You should cover up your shameful parts, though."

Shameful parts. LOL, okay.

"Fair enough! With what, though?"

"Take some of. Uh. My clothes. I guess."

How is he even without clothing. That's not a thing that is allowed to happen by the laws of nature, people who aren't very little infants being outside of their homes without any clothes.

Laws of motion only ever specify clothing as a specific thing when it comes to some Miracle powers, you know? 

She definitely doesn't! 

"Okay, thank you. But it might get torn or fall off when I'm going really fast."

Why's she nervous about lending him her clothes? Oh, right, probably gender taboos of some sort, whatever.

So, he doesn't, strictly speaking, have to carry her.

And close potentially transmissive contact would be unavoidable if he did.

But he's gonna have to constantly watch her to not get into contact with anyone for a week.

And if he prevented her being infected for 5 days, but infected her on the sixth, Huxley's Flu could again be stealthy for up to a week.

He's... cautiously optimistic on cooperating with her as a Miracle to self-quarantine. She seems ultimately reasonable and compassionate, not because but despite socially-instilled qualities that Transhumanization could erode.

There's a quiet, mathematical voice inside of him, that's saying that there's one simple and foolproof solution to the problem of not infecting anyone else through her.

It's gonna be ignored.

Okay. Let's stop being scatterbrained and think clearly.

Option 1: Try his damnedest not to infest her. Wait a week. Hope really hard for no stealthy slipups or outliers in the incubation term.

Option 2: Infest her deliberately. Wait out a week. She doesn't really have good chances, but if she could became a Miracle, it would probably be a massive positive in unimaginably many ways, considering the situation. But there's no ambiguity in the outcome. 

Option 3: Simply make sure she doesn't infest anyone, regardless of whether she is infected. No. Fuck that. Brain, why. She was being nice to me and she was helping me and is that how we want to contact a new world I don't think so.

...he could do Option 1 for a long time, like two months.

If he doesn't infest her in 5 weeks of consistent behavior, she's unlikely to be infested in the end of 6th.

And viruses don't randomly do incubation periods nearly that long, right? I don't remember hearing about it. But I didn't read any medical encyclopedias either.

Yeah, okay, that kinda solves every problem neatly. 

Inconvenient as hell, but what’cha gonna do? 

And, you know, there's still some risk of being wrong.

But Jean isn't gonna let tiny chances rule his decisionmaking when it, like, really fucking matters and the trap is obvious?

He'll need to actually calculate the necessary time, which he trusts himself to do. 

For now, though:

"On a second thought, I don't think carrying you is a good idea. What if I haven't infected you, and then accidentally do it while carrying?"

"...okay."

For your information, readers, the author is currently procrastinating on running calculations Malet is supposed to do off the top of his head in like half a minute. 

Jean remembers no good data for Huxley's flu transmission for cases comparable to his, and remembers little about the topic in general. 

The one good piece of data Jean definitely know is that under normal circumstances, the symptoms of Huxley's flu manifest in kids within a single week. If it didn't, it can be reasonably presumed safe.

Of course, this isn't ironclad. There are going to be exceptions... and Jean doesn't remember the range in which the exceptions can fall, and this actually matters when talking about patient 1.

Hence, a model splits into two submodels - typical cases, and tail cases.

We further split each of those into two - where Aliyeh gets infected before Jean properly treats the situation like a quarantine, and after that.

So, four cases.

Case 1, Aliyeh is infected from the start, and it's a typical case. The quarantine always catches this in a week.

Case 2. Aliyeh isn't infected from the start, and it's a tail case. We don't really know how long can the tails be, and we can hardly assume that a virus can as easily.sleep unnoticeably for ten years as it can for ten days -  medicine isn't really one of Jean's interests, but he have never heard of viruses behaving like that*, and he have never heard of kid asymptomatic carriers of Huxley's Flu (it's common in adults, though!). But neither he can dismiss the possibility totally. So to put a number on it, for a maximum tail length N, let's say that the chance of Huxley's flu having that length falls proportionately with N. And since that assumption seems somewhat optimistic, let's very pessimistically assume that the shape of each tail is flat, and if the maximum tail length is 20 days past the first 7, the chance of symptoms manifesting on the 20th day are equal to them manifesting on the first.

The resultant distribution forms a sequence which sum, rearranged, adds up to 1 + 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/9 + 1/9 + 1/16...  This then simplifies to 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ... which famously adds up to infinity.

So we're going round that infinity down to around four. And then normalize all that to 1. 

It's fine. It's not rigorous, but it's fine.

*even though they do, sometimes!

So, 27 days after the first week, the probability to be infected on that day falls down to about 1/1645 of getting it on the 1st day after the first week, and to about 1/3846 of getting it after the 7th but before the 27th day. And that's in itself unlikely, because usually a week is enough to eliminate reasonable doubt. 

Slightly more precisely, there's some probability A that Aliyeh was infected initially, and some probability B that her infection is a tail case, and if so, a quarantine of 7+27= 34 days reduces the impact of waiting an additional day by 1645 times from the 8th day, and an 8th day is already considered excessive. And according to the curve, the chances continue to rapidly, increasingly quickly drop with each day (even though they never reach 0 and even though they theoretically sum to infinity).

So if we double that whole 27 day period, the tail from the initial infection might as well not matter.

The third case is where Aliyeh is infected during the quarantine and falls sick within a week, as is typical. This is where things get kinda interesting.

Because Jean is pretty sure he can be really careful, but he also doesn't really know just how careful he is. Thankfully, "Aliyeh not exhibiting visible symptoms during the quarantine" is evidence that the quarantine is successful, and in this third case, it is also absolute evidence that it was successful up until week ago.

If Aliyeh is not exhibiting symptoms on day N, that means that on a day N-7, and N-8, and N-9, and so on up to 1, the quarantine was successful. Which means we can use straightforward calculation to estimate if it was successful on days N, N-1, ... N-6. Say we begin with a (really pessimistic) 50/50 smoothly uncertain prior for quarantine's success at each day, and use the rule of succession.

If so, after N days, N-6/N-5 is our certainty in a day of quarantine, and so (N-6/N-5)^7 is our certainty in an uninterrupted week of quarantine.

Then, to get our confidence in quarantine from 1/128 after 7 days to 19/20, we need... 142 days.

These numbers. Wow. Okay, that's not encouraging. But hey, 1/2 each day was just a totally ridiculous prior. Jean can give himself some credit and assume something more reasonable. Let's say, in a less pessimistic but still pessimistic prior, that initially whether or not Jean infects someone in a week of intentional quarantine is a coin toss, and so the initially daily probability of safety is 0.906.That's as if we start with... eight days of initial confirmation. Of 142 needed to go to 19/20.

So the lesson here is that successful quarantine brings depressingly little information about it's own further success... at least if the uncertainty was smooth. In actual case, there's weird uncertainty about uncertainty at play here, and there's a great relief if the whole quarantine plan works at all for 10 days, because that means nothing obvious is missing.

On the object level, Jean is pretty sure his systematic quarantine efforts wouldn't, in fact, be a total failure. What? He's a Miracle, he can manage.

And with that in mind, the fourth and most complex case, where it's both Jean's later slip up and tail distribution, can probably be ignored for now.

And that's all Jean is going to think up on this topic in a minute or so without pencil or paper or reference books or any experience in the subject.

This modeling has impressively low accuracy.

It's fine, it's not gonna matter anyway.

So, are we going upstream? 

I guess we are.

Aliyeh kinda lost the plot where Jean is supposed to be a demonic creature when he started to worry and then fainted and then told her more totally weird unrelated things that aren't blunt denial of danger. She's listening to Jean, who proposed to help her helpless escape and is kinda sorta acting as if he knows what he's doing, and vaguely signaling that you know what you are doing goes a long way in getting Aliyeh to follow.

The whole thing is gonna come to a head a bit later, of course.

While in Jean's head, epidemiology is kinda being superceded by questions like "Am I ever meeting my family again, by the way?"

Maybe I'm just insane and jumping to conclusions after meeting this one unlikely girl!

Mind answering some potentially clarifying questions? 

Some of them.

But it should be pretty clear from the rest that you aren't in Kansas anymore, so to speak.

Shit. 

You know, Jean is sort of an ordinary guy. And last week, he was expecting sort of an ordinary life.

Like, sure, he's got all the Miracle perks, but at this point, what, half the kids and a quarter of adults have them? It's not anything out of ordinary, at this point.

And sure, the society still haven't recovered from the shock, and it's anarchic, and sometimes Miracles gang up on other Miracles and teleport them who-knows-where, but you can stay out of adventures, and it's not unusual to mostly succeed.

Out here, it's not anarchic, but hardly anyone stays out of adventures for their whole life throughout. Something is going to go wrong somehow, and you're gonna accidentally drive into a different city while asleep in a bus, or have your car burned down by the mafia, or get involved in a drunken brawl, or have a play accidentally made about you, or spend a week away from home because your family is behaving unreasonably, or find a forgotten piece of history, or something. There's plausibly a billion things that happen in a human's life, so one of them is going to be one in a billion.

That's not the point.

The point is, Jean isn't a superhero. Or a survivalist, or a detective, or an epidemiologist. He's been not totally terrible at stuff he's had to do like a baseline would be, but that's incidental, not central.

And he did nothing to deserve this, poor kid.

Mhm, and Hitler was a painter.

Who's that? 

You don't wanna know.

The last time you told Earth to not worry about something, the thing you told that about was Huxley's Flu.

I just lied slightly more blatantly than usual!

So who's Hitler, Earth? 

So, back in early 20th century, after the First World War-

You mean the Great War? 

Yes.

FUCK.

LMAO.

So, after the First World War, Germany got really owned and became especially resentful of everything.

Meanwhile, the rapid progress of broadcasting, flow-production of printed material and advertisement techniques have created powerful opportunities for centralized opinion-making, opportunities that the memetic landscape of early 20th century humanity wasn't ready for. Back then, people still thought words spoken within ads contain meaning.

It was in this atmosphere that the ontologically primitive particles of seeking-an-uncontested-hierarchy-by-popular-support-and-considering-it-a-moral-good within all humans have coalesced into a body of a failed Austrian painter.

Are you sure that those are ontologically primitive?

That's the opinion of our leading experts on the subject!

So, this walking incarnation of a specific kind of evil had a totally hypnotic charisma - as in, people would totally oppose him, and then listen to a recording of his speech and nod along. Now, we would consider that a positive quality on Earth, but he used that charisma to channel the overall resentment of people into willingness to commit unspeakable evils - starting from beating down political opponents for their mere opinions and later proceeding to killing peoples randomly blamed for everything at industrial scale, conducting heritage optimization, and preparing for bloody world conquest.

...okay. Wow. And everyone let him do all that?

At first, nobody took him seriously. Then, everyone was too scared, and started making concessions in hopes of appeasement.

Of course, there was no appeasing Hitler. He had a grand vision of creating a superior species of superhumans, and as a natural logical consequence of that, killing or enslaving everyone else.

Uhh.

And so the Second World War started. It was bloody, relentless, horrific. Britain withstood a rain of missiles and bombs. Soviet Union drowned in blood. China got defiled by Japan. Africa got used as a battleground for outsiders. America leveled two cities with nukes and one with incendiary carpet bombing.

Now we are wiser, of course! We have learned well that all humans are exactly equal both morally and instrumentally, except for when they aren't.

For enveloping the whole world in a tide of violence and death, for an ideology of racial hatred and power for the sake of power, and for trying to improve upon humans who, as humans, are perfect as they are, Hitler is consigned to the indisputable position of the most evil and hated man in history.

I am feeling intensely uncomfortable. 

Hey, Eris. Do I want to know what nukes are? 

Nope.

Okay. I'm not gonna ask, then.

"So, Aliyeh. How's your country called?"

"You are here and you don't know?"

"I just recently arrived here from an another world," says the boy who isn't a religious figure of any kind.

"If you say so. Iran."

Notably not "the Persian Kingdom", although who know which name is associated with what, in this world.

A beacon of relatively advanced civilization amid total anarchy, here. Reza Pahlavi, the forward-thinking first Shah of the dynasty, ensured that his descendants would be Miracles, in a period where the first system shocks were only beginning to rock the planet.

Well. It's kinda something like that here, too.