Next slide?

As everyone here certainly knows, it has been an exciting year in the field—very exciting, indeed. Excavations of several newly discovered human settlements in the North American West, dating from the first century of the Quarantine Period, have begun to bear fruit. Much of this work is still in its infancy. Yet I think it’s no overstatement to say that what we’ve uncovered in the last twelve months alone has signaled a truly radical reconceptualizing of the period.

Our understanding of the early Quarantine Period has long presupposed that no human inhabitants remained in North America between the Equatorial Isthmus and the Hudson Frontier Line following the year zero. The disruption to the continent’s biological and social infrastructures was believed to have been so complete as to render the continent incapable of supporting human life, let alone any kind of organized culture.

We now know—and once again, the last year has been extraordinary—that this view of the Quarantine Period is incomplete. Indeed, there were survivors. Just how many, we may never know. But based on the findings of the last year, we now think it possible, indeed very likely, that they numbered in the tens of thousands, living in a number of communities throughout the Intermountain West and the Southern Plains.

The size and configuration of these settlements varied considerably, from a mountaintop village housing just a few hundred inhabitants to a city-sized compound in the hills of central Texas. But all give evidence of human habitation well after the continent was thought to have been depopulated. These communities also share a number of distinctive traits, most significantly a culture that was both classically survivalist and, paradoxically, deeply attentive to the social practice of being human. Within these protected enclaves, the men and women who survived the Great Catastrophe, and generations of their descendants, went about their lives, as men and women do. They married and had children. They formed governments and engaged in trade. They built schools and places of worship. They kept records of their experience—I am speaking, of course, about the documents known to everyone in this room, indeed to people throughout the settled territories, as “The Book of Sara” and “The Book of Auntie”—and, perhaps, even sought contact with others like themselves, beyond the walls of these isolated islands of humanity.

Using “The Book of Twelves” as a road map, research teams on the ground have identified three such settlements, all named within those writings. These include Kerrville, Texas; Roswell, New Mexico, the site of what has been called the “Roswell Massacre”; and the community we know as First Colony, in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California.

May I have the next image, please?

The photograph we see here provides an aerial view of the layout of the First Colony site, which might, for our purposes today, be considered a “typical” human settlement of the Quarantine Period. Situated on an arid plateau two thousand meters above the Los Angeles coastal formation, and guarded to the west by a granite ridge rising an additional fifteen hundred meters, the settlement presents itself very like a walled medieval city—roughly five square kilometers, irregularly shaped, with high ramparts defining the outer perimeter. These steel-and-concrete fortifications, which stood twenty meters high, appear to have been constructed right around the time of the Great Catastrophe. This conforms to “The Book of Twelves,” which asserts that First Colony was constructed to house children evacuated from the eastern coastal city of Philadelphia. Beyond these fortifications, the terrain now presents a mixture of alpine forest and high desert chaparral, but soil samples taken both within and outside the walls indicate that the mountainside was decimated by fire as recently as fifty years ago, and during the first century of the Quarantine Period, the terrain was almost entirely denuded.

The entire settlement seems to have been surrounded by banks of high-pressure sodium vapor lamps. These were powered, we believe, by a stack of proton exchange membrane fuel cells, connected by a buried cable to an array of wind-powered turbines, also dating from the pre-Q period, located forty-two kilometers to the north, in the San Gorgonio Pass. Seismic activity has substantially altered the northern slope of the mountain, and we have yet to locate the power trunk connecting First Colony to its primary energy source. But we hope this will happen in due course.

Inside the walls, we find several discrete zones of human activity, arranged in a ringlike formation and leading to a central core. The outer ring, which has received the most extensive excavation, seems to have served as a staging platform for defense. From these areas we have recovered a range of artifacts, including, at the lowest levels, a variety of conventional firearms of the pre-Q period, yielding at the upper levels to more homemade weaponry, such as knives, longbows, and crossbows. Though more primitive, these armaments were surprisingly sophisticated in their design and manufacture, with arrow points honed to a width of just fifty microns—sufficient, we believe, to pierce the crystalline-silicate breastplate of an infected human.

Moving farther in, we find discrete regions for sanitation, agriculture, livestock, commerce, and housing. Structures in the eastern and northern quadrants of the interior appear also to have served as domiciles, perhaps for married couples or families. The exposed foundation we see near the center seems to have been some kind of school dating from the pre-Q period but converted by the citizens of First Colony to perform a variety of civic functions. We believe that this building, the most substantial structure on the site, could have been employed as a final refuge in the event that the colony’s outer defenses were penetrated. But in daily life, it seems to have served as a kind of communal nursery or hospital.