The wrecking yard on Park’s screen, centered on twin rows of flattened cars stacked ten high under a sky tortured by streaks of fast-running cloud and the violent umbers of a doomsday southern California sunset, was photography as Van Gogh might have dreamed it. Thick lashings of color, layered so deep and in such relief, that it seemed you would feel them in ridges and dimples if you ran your fingertips over the screen.

Park’s eye caught on a freeway sign glimpsed over the high barbed wire fence around the yard. No information regarding the next exit ahead, but a list of HDR forums and photo pools. Park ran his finger across the Gateway’s touchpad and watched the cursor flicker from arrow to pointing hand and back. Now tuned to the detail, he started to see wrinkled license plates, alphanumerics exchanged for some of the usual names: Google, eBay, Firefox, Pornocopeia, YouTube, Facebook, Trash. And some not so usual: modblog, tindersnakes, felonyfights, shineyknifecut, riotclitshave.

Not just extra storage, a place to preserve and protect sensitive and valuable information away from the gold farm’s Internet-linked LAN, the travel drive was a clone of Hydo’s own personal machine. A mirror of the dead man’s desktop mythology.

Park maneuvered the cursor over the screen, watching it douse icons on peeling bumper stickers, grease-smudged handbills on the side of an office shack, rocks, an airplane, a decapitated street lamp. All of them stamped with either a domain or a file, revealing it as the morphing hand passed over. Until it crossed a blackened grate of scaling iron set into a cube of graffitied concrete. The graffiti themselves were surprisingly dead to the cursor’s touch, but the grate prompted the transformation into a hand without revealing what was beyond.

Park double clicked. A box appeared, requesting a password.

He chicken-pecked the keys with his forefingers: XORLAR

And a plain file blinked open, one that might be found on any accountant’s computer, filled with Excel spreadsheets.

Labeled each with a name. Last, first, middle initial.

He flipped his finger down on the thin black line along the right edge of the touchpad, watched the thumbnails roll up the screen and stop. Then blinked at something subliminal and slowly dragged his finger up the same line, thumbnails rolling down now, eyes scanning left to right, and lifted his finger: AFRONZO, PARSIFAL, K., JR.

In 2007 the chances of having fatal familial insomnia were one in thirty million. In early 2008 those odds tilted fractionally against the players.

Until that point, virtually all cases of FFI had been restricted to about forty family lines, most of them in Italy. And then, quite suddenly, that was not so. A disease that was thought to be contained exclusively in a bit of genetic code, an inherited protein mutation in which aspartic acid was replaced by asparagine-178 and methionine was present at amino acid 129, inexplicably jumped ship.

The initial, and quite reasonable, theory espoused when these oddball cases emerged was that the sufferers must be unlucky distant relations to one of the FFI families. The fact that the number of new cases utterly defied the odds and rendered this theory all but laughable was circumspectly ignored.

And then there were more.

More people, diverse and dispersed, came stumbling stiff-necked, sweating, squinting from pinprick pupils, into the light. So many, and so widely distributed, that FFI was discarded entirely as a possible suspect in this mystery, and the true culprit was nabbed red-handed.

Mad cow disease.

Or, as it is more prosaically known, bovine spongiform encephalopathy

As enabled by the global expansion of American fast food franchises and the rise of the hamburger.

Already well known as a prion disease with similarities to FFI, BSE was clearly the guilty party. Granted, this was some new mutation of BSE, one almost as communicable as it had been long feared BSE might someday prove to be, but most definitely BSE-related.

And how comforting it was to know what was killing people by stealing their sleep. To have a name to put to the face of misery. To know that these mutated BSE prions, simple proteins that had folded into shapes so baleful and malicious that they spread their geometry to any healthy proteins they came into proximity with, were caused by eating Quarter Pounders.

The fact that several of the infected were avowed vegetarians and vegans seemed to be no impediment to this theory, and the air soon smelled like barbeque. Hairy, shitty barbeque.

PETA and the SPCA lodged protests with the appropriate authorities, but public sentiment was against them. Which is not to say they were without allies. The team-up between animal rights activists and the Cattleman’s Beef Board was one of the more amusing juxtapositions that heralded the rapid tilt of the world into a landscape that was less Dalí and more Hieronymus Bosch. As evidenced by the vision of vast herds of cattle being machine-gunned from above by helicopters, then coated in napalm and set ablaze. An inferno of beefs, not all of them dead. I summon for you the image of a wounded cow, running, in flames.

How shocking when it turned out that no BSE had been found in the dissected brains of the victims.

But the sheep and chicken ranchers made out well.

A fact that was pointed out by some of the more colorful cable commentators as they began to wax, inevitably, conspiratorial. Not that they were taken seriously. Not by anyone but the cattlemen, anyway. But truly, when the first indications of a deadly pandemic appear, how far does one have to search for a conspiracy?

It was clearly the work of The Terrorists.

Which ones was academic. A virtually simultaneous worldwide outbreak of a never before seen prion disease? Could there be any doubt of what we were dealing with? No, there could not; terrorists were at work. Pretty much all the countries of the world were in agreement and joined in pointing their fingers, or more lethal indicators, at one another.

And perhaps they were all right.

A new viral spongiform encephalopathy, exhibiting all the symptoms of fatal familial insomnia. Perhaps it was born in a lab. Twisted into existence by endless manipulations. Applied nucleation creating self-assembling systems, designed materials, refined, until a special grotesque was found, the shape of sleeplessness.

The shape of the sleepless prion, SLP, as it was dubbed, when isolated and revealed. That shape became a familiar thing. Part of the evening news graphic for every SLP-related story. Which meant pretty much every story. As what was not related to SLP?

An icon on protest signs. For. Against. Up. Down. Applied as needed. Defined as desired.

A T-shirt decal, endlessly riffed upon. Twisted and elongated for a Coca-Cola can. Blunted and squared for an MTV name check. Quadrupled in calligraphy over a burning Hindenburg in obtuse tribute to Led Zeppelin.

An endlessly repeated graffito. Black spray-over showing where the edges of a stencil had been. The absent portions of a negative image, applied to every surface. Recalling, somehow poignantly, the similarly sprayed aspect of Andre the Giant. Resonating, I guess, with the looming specter of his death, brought about, as it was, by a mysteriously mutating condition.

The tattooed insignia of an especially virulent strain of ultranationalistic fascism that seemed to manifest globally in much the same way as the disease itself. Spontaneously and without reason.

A spray-painted word on the front doors of homes, informing SL response teams that there was work to be done inside, decapitating the dead so that slides of their brains could be added to the CDC registry, the bodies added to the pyres.

The lone sigil of a thousand suicide notes.

A replacement, in the lexicon of Armageddon, for the number of the beast.