May I have the first slide please?

Since our return to North America, thirty-six months ago, a great deal has been learned about the state of the continent both before and during the Quarantine Period. These two images represent two very different North Americas. The contrast could not be more vivid. On the top we see a reconstruction of the continent as it stood in the final years of the American Imperial Period. Cities of millions dominated both coasts. Unsustainable agricultural practices had decimated virtually all of the continent’s interior plains. Heavy industry, powered by fossil fuels, had rendered vast swaths of land virtually uninhabitable, the soil and water fouled by heavy metals and chemical by-products. Though some wilderness remained, primarily in the alpine regions of the Appalachian uplift, the northern Pacific coast, and the Intermountain West, there is little doubt that the image represents a continent, and a culture, consuming itself.

On the bottom we see North America as it now stands. Airship reconnaissance, conducted from floating platforms situated beyond the two-hundred-mile quarantine line, has revealed a pristine wilderness stunning in its organic diversity. Virgin forests now rise where once stood huge cities and poisonous industrial complexes. Gone are the tamed fields of the continent’s interior plains, replaced by grasslands of incomparable biological richness. Most significantly, a majority of the great coastal metropolises, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Miami, New Orleans, and Houston, have all but disappeared, subsumed by rising sea levels. Nature, as is its wont, has reclaimed the land, wiping away the leavings of the imperialistic power that once radiated from its shores.

Powerful images, indeed—but hardly unexpected. It is at ground level that our most startling findings have occurred.

Next slide?

These mummified remains, one male, one female, were recovered twenty-three months ago in an arid basin at the foot of Southern California’s San Jacinto Mountains. Their monstrous appearance is inarguable. Note the elongation of the bones, particularly those of the hands and feet, which have taken on a clawlike aspect; the softening of the facial support structure, creating an almost fetal blandness, devoid of personality; the massive jaws and radically altered dentition. Yet, surprisingly, genetic testing indicates that they are, in fact, human beings—a paramutational counterpart of our species, endowed with the physiological attributes of nature’s most fearsome predators. Excavated at a depth of just under two meters, these remains were found in the midst of many others, suggesting a mass die-off of some kind, probably occurring at or near the end of the first century A.V.—the same time frame to which carbon dating has attributed the writing of “The Book of Twelves.”

Are these the “virals” that our forebears warned us of? And if they are, how did these dramatic changes come about? To this there appears to be an answer.

Next slide?

On the left we see the EU-1 strain of the GC virus, taken from the body of the so-called “frozen man,” a polar researcher who succumbed to the infection a millennium ago. This virus, we believe, was the primary biological agent of the Great Catastrophe, a microorganism of such robustness and lethality that it was able to kill its human host within hours and virtually wiped out the world’s population in fewer than eighteen months.

I draw your attention now to the virus on the right, which was extracted from thymus tissue of one of the two corpses found in the Los Angeles basin. We now believe this to be a precursor to the EU-1 strain. Whereas the virus on the left contains a considerable quantity of genetic material from an avian source—more specifically, Corvus corax, known as the common raven—the one on the right does not. In its stead we find genetic material linking it to an altogether different species. Though our teams have yet to identify this organism’s genetic author, it bears some resemblance to Rhinolophus philippinnensis, or the large-eared horsehoe bat. We are calling this virus NA-1, or North America–1.

In other words, the Great Catastrophe was caused not by a single virus but by two: one in North America and a second, descendant strain that subsequently appeared elsewhere in the world. From this fact, researchers have built a tentative chronology of the epidemic. The virus first emerged in North America, infiltrating the human population from an unknown vector, though in all likelihood a species of bat; at some later point, the NA-1 virus changed, acquiring avian DNA; this new, second strain, far more aggressive and lethal, subsequently made its way from North America to the rest of the world. Why the EU-1 strain failed to bring about the physical changes caused by NA-1 we can only speculate. Perhaps in some instances it did. But by and large, the consensus of opinion is that it simply killed its victims too quickly.

What does this mean for us? Put succinctly, the “virals” of “The Book of Twelves” are not fiction. They are not, as some have claimed, a mere literary device, a metaphor for the predatory rapaciousness of North American culture in the B.V. period. They existed. They were real. “The Book of Twelves” describes these beings as a manifestation of an almighty deity’s displeasure with mankind. That is a matter for each of us to weigh in the privacy of his or her own conscience. So, too, is the story of the man known as Zero and the twelve criminals who acted as the original vectors of infection. Speaking for myself, the jury is still out. But in the meantime, we know who and what the virals were: ordinary men and women, infected with a disease.

But what of humanity? What of the story of Amy and her followers? I turn now to the matter of survivors.