Looking back to Kens, Gregory saw his eyes were losing focus as 
well. He stood up; the fish-eyes of his friends followed him. They 
dropped their cards (which were less than stellar) on the table and 
stood up with him. Then they started screeching, accompanied by 
the screeches of people all throughout the neighborhood. 


Gregory instinctively clutched his ears as a million questioning 
thoughts ran through his head. What are they doing? Why is 
everybody doing it? Do | hear a bird? What's going on? Are they 
fucking with me? Why can't | be a bird? Are they hypnotized? Who 
are the birds? Wh... How can | become a bird? What, exactly, is a 
bird? Why shouldn't | be a bird? 


Gregory felt his eyes losing focus. 


"This is your captain speaking. We've just, uh, received an order 
from the national government. Stay in the air, at all costs, and try to 
find an uninhabited place to land. Now, uh, we have no idea what's 
going on on the surface, but, if they're making us, uh, stay up here, 
it's probably pretty bad. Now, stay on board, and we're going to 
await further instructions. Thanks for flying Southwest, and we, uh, 
apologize for this inconvenience." 


Sam barricaded the door with the mahogany dining table. He could 
still hear the incessant screaming of not just his former friend 


George, but of the thirty or so other people that had begun to roam 

the area. Was it an overreaction? Possibly. It wasn't like they were 

doing anything other than screaming. All Sam needed was a pair of 
headphones to keep it out. 


| wonder if the birds are alright... 


As Sam realized what he was thinking, he tried to push the thought 
aside to address more important matters. But it stuck there, like it 
was bolted to his mind. 


Hey, don't they sound kind of like birds? 


The second thought then anchored itself into his brain. He tried to 
move it, but Sam just couldn't stop thinking about how the 
screaming outside resembled the call of a wild seagull. A third 
thought arrived that posed the question of whether or not humans 
were just unwinged birds, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, 
until all that was on Sam's mind was birds. 


Sam felt his eyes lose focus. 


Director Browning sat across from twenty-three other suited men at 
the circular table. Usually, it would be up to the O5 Council to make 
this decision; however, the bird meme got spread at one of their 
meetings. In their absence, the Site Director's Executive Committee 
of the Whole was the highest authority in the Foundation. These 
people were the last remnants of the chain of command that had 
managed to avoid the meme. 


"It appears that the meme has somehow been altered to modify the 
brain chemistry of its infectees," lectured Director Frant while 
pointing at a diagram, "which is what's causing this behavior. Now, if 
we look at this diagram..." Frant clicked a button that switched over 
to a different slide, showing another, similarly colored brain. "This is 
the brain of a bird. If we compare these two brains together, one can 
see that they are very, very similar. | submit for your consideration 
that this meme is transforming people, on a mental level, into birds. 
Now..." Frant clicked the button again, showing a picture of a 
crowded street filled with litter and glass from broken windows. "A 


good portion of humanity appears to just be infected. The remainder 
are either hiding in their homes, attempting to escape the area, or 
going on looting sprees." 


Director Browning wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Is the 
Memetics Division working on a countermeme?" 


"I'm afraid there isn't really a Memetics Division anymore," Director 
Frant replied, “aside from us, we have one hundred, maybe two 
hundred, researchers and agents under our command. None of 
them have any training in Memetics whatsoever. At this point, over 
seventy-five percent of America is infected. It's going to be hard to 
recover anybody who can work for us, now." 


"What about the Avian Division?" Browning replied. 


"They're over half of our remaining workforce, and the only ones 
immune to the avian meme, it seems. They're working double shifts 
for us, but even then they can only do so much." 


A silence crept over the room before Director Moose spoke up. 
"What's our plan?" 


"| don't think we have a plan, at this point," said Director Bright while 
he was pinching the bridge of his nose, "over half the world is 
already infected, and | doubt anything we do will help. I'd suggest 
waiting until certain contingency options are available to us before 
we take action." 


"Are you talking about-" began Director Browning, before realizing 
the taboo of talking about /t aloud, "that could take a thousand years 
before it's operational again!" 


Everybody at the table looked down, despondent. Nothing was left 
to do. 


Tim threw the brick through the window of the supermarket. The 
police were too busy fending off the hordes of screeching people, 
and it was pretty obvious that the world was going to shit, so Tim 
wanted to stockpile enough supplies to live comfortably in his 


Nirvana: how YOU can beat the system!" 


Sample 887-2361: A list of things a man named has eaten 
for breakfast. 


Sample 887-4521: Blueprints for a 1:1 scale model of the Tower of 
London, built entirely out of toothpicks. 


Sample 887-1802: An exhaustive list of every person ever theorized 
to have been William Shakespeare, complete with detailed 
bibliographic citations. This not only includes common theories 
(such as Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford), but also 
impossible theories such as Queen Victoria, Cervantes De Leon, 
and Bram Stoker. 


Researcher: Dr. King 


Sample 887-6667: A schematic of poorly-rendered Chinese 
ideograms, linked by lines and curves, spanning 3 pages. The 
ideograms are names of chemical elements, and the schematic 
depicts the atomic structure of the amygdalin molecule. 


Hey, isn't amygaalin found in... - Dr. 


Shh. - Dr. 


Researcher: Dr. Bridge 


Sample 887-6228: 132 pages, in the style of a journal written in the 
second person, detailing the life of a juvenile Australian saltwater 
crocodile. Begins at its hatching day, ending abruptly as the 
crocodile is eaten by a larger crocodile of the freshwater variety. 


Sample 887-8979: A list of the birth dates of every child with the first 
name of "Matthew" born during a month ending in "y" in the states of 
New York, New Hampshire and New Jersey between the years of 


1936 and 1977. 


Sample 887-3338: Blueprints for a Nintendo 64 game cartridge. 


basement for at least until the whole thing blew over to the point 
where he could get more supplies. As he stepped through the 
window, he picked up a suitcase and went to work, picking up 
canned foods, appliances, and weapons before anybody else could 
get them. 


Tim took a bag of sunflower seeds off of the shelf. / wonder if | could 
feed this to the birds... he thought as he tucked it into his suitcase. 
Suddenly, he realized that he'd thought about feeding the birds 
before he thought about feeding himself. / hate birds. he thought to 
himself, remembering a point in his childhood where a pigeon 
managed to land a shit on his head. For some reason, that memory 
seemed almost appealing now. 


Assuming that the apocalypse was fucking with his head, Tim 
quickly shoved the bag in his suitcase and speed-walked away. 


Tim stumbled upon the jackpot: a hunting rifle, complete with 
ammunition and a manual. As he picked it up, he wondered how he 
could use it to not shoot down the birds. 


Once again, Tim stopped himself at that thought. Why am | thinking 
about birds so much? Because they're cool. Tim ran through a list of 
reasons why birds were cool in his mind. Resisting was futile; every 
time he tried to refute a reason, his mind would come back with a 
greater reason as to why he was wrong. 


Tim felt himself starting to caw like a bird, as he felt a talon pushing 
him far, far back into his mind. 


Dr. Frederick Hoygull, head of the Avian Division and therefore the 
remainder of the Foundation, looked out over what used to be New 
York City. From a distance, it still looked relatively untouched. Once 
you got closer, you could see the broken windows, turned 
dumpsters, and broken streetlights left over from some amount of 
rioting and looting. Then you saw that the people walking the streets 
wore dirty clothes, and did nothing but screech if you got close to 
them. 


Hoygull sat at a distance from the commotion, next to two of his 


associates: Linda Duck (despite the fact that she wasn't a duck), 
and James Crowl. 


"Shouldn't it be more crowded?" questioned Crowl. 


"| think they're all... migrating, for lack of a better word," replied 
Hoygull, "I've sent Eta-4 out to try and figure out where they're 
going. If anything, it looks like they're moving west, for some 
reason." 


"This is bad," commented Duck. She was right. 


Joseon 


Eun Mi suppressed a yawn as she walked along, silently wishing 
she was still in bed. The Great Leader (the second Great Leader, 
which was strange considering the old one seemed sure he'd live 
forever) was generous enough to provide schooling. She only 
wished he would provide it at a more reasonable hour of the day. 
Perhaps noon? Enough time for a young woman (not girl, no matter 
what her mother said) to get beauty sleep. 


At least breakfast had been good. Rice and soup and kimchi. 
Nothing worse than going to school hungry. She just hoped she 
hadn't eaten too much. Her mother's cooking was good, but her 
father would insist that no one wanted a glutton around the house. 
He may have smiled when he said it, but it was still worrying. 


"How's it coming, Joe?" Beth sipped her coffee as she leaned over 
the partition, watching the movement on the big screen. Their offices 
may have been just one room, but the small metal partitions 
between each section helped make it feel more orderly...if a little 
more crowded. 


"Fine, just wish R-445 would stop acting up all the damn time. We 
had to bug the Russians for weeks to get patched in, and now the 
fucking thing just goes down every twenty minutes." 


"According to them, when we bought the feed, we bought the 
maintenance. I'm pretty sure they just wanted it off their hands." She 
smirked at her employee's frustration. She'd told him they didn't 
need the old Russian satellite, but he'd insisted on absolute 
coverage. 


"Well | hope it drops and hits whatever asshole built it." Joe snorted, 
his glasses glinting in the light of the monitors. "At least K-332 is fine 
now." 


"What, Pyongyang let you tap in? That's odd of them." The North 
Koreans were infamously secret, and that even applied to their 
weather satellites. They'd tried for weeks to get something above 
the 38th parallel, but in the end, given it up as a bad job. Thelmann 
System's stated goal of having a total coverage weather prediction 
system would have to do without North Korea for now. 


"Well, if you must know Mrs. Thelmann..." He grinned up at his 
boss. "They didn't. | hacked in. They're using absolutely ancient 
systems over there." 


Beth was more than a little appalled. "Joe! Christ, do you want some 
sort of international incident?!" Sure, she knew Joe was obsessive 
about the project, that's why she had him in on it. But electronic 
espionage was the kind of deep shit that could get every other 
country they had eyes in pulling out as fast as possible. 


"Aww, c'mon-" Joe's wheedling tone, usually amusing, was suddenly 
grating on her nerves. 


"No. Switch it over and disconnect now. We're going to have to 
scrub that data and hope they don't realize we're in." She growled, 
rubbing her forehead. "And start seriously thinking about how you're 
going to apologize for this shit." 


Joe switched over the screen, sulking quietly... Before his voice 
came back suddenly dry. "Hey, boss." 


"What the hell is it now-" 


"Look at this." Glancing up, mouth open to rebuke him, Beth's 
tongue stilled. Over the Korean Peninsula, a massive swirl of air 
pressure had just developed. Enough to make even the harshest of 
hurricanes and typhoons seem like a breeze. 


"What in God's name-" 
Eun Mi's reverie about her near constantly shifting weight was 


interrupted by the wind. Sweeping around her as she walked down 
the road, magnified by the buildings, it tore at her clothes and 


yanked at her body. She felt herself dragged a few inches just by the 
force. Shrieking in surprise, she struggled into a nearby alleyway, 
looking up. The clouds above were a swirling, angry mass. 


What was happening? In all her life in the city, she had never seen 
such weather- She heard screams and yelling ahead, as another 
gust of wind ripped along. The wind was a piercing wail through the 
buildings as it built in force, and she clung to the side of the 
alleyway, afraid of being blown away by the gale. 


"God, what the fuck is going on- Why the fuck hasn't someone 
called the UN?! We need to make sure they've got rescue teams 
moving in as soon as it clears!" Beth was frantically trying to contact 
the South Korean government. Meanwhile, the apocalyptic storm 
was behaving erratically, hovering above the country, as if readying 
to strike. 


"| can't figure out where the hell it came from! None of our data for 
the last few weeks showed anything like this-" 


"Keep looking! Storms don't just show up out of nowhere-...oh shit." 
Beth felt her phone drop from nerveless fingers as the massive 
storm paused...and then settled down over the country. 


Eun Mi's hands were going numb from strain, gripping the concrete 
edge of the building she was huddled near so hard that her fingers 
bled. Tears were streaming down her cheeks and being whipped off 
into the air as the wind increased, howling and roaring like some 
mighty beast. The few other pedestrians she could see were yelling 
and screaming. One man attempted to dash across the street and 
was lifted off by the wind. 


And then, the aching pressure in her hand faded, as the building she 
was gripping simply seemed to turn see-through, and then vanish. 
The wind picked up Eun Mi, and she could see the other buildings 
fading away as well. The ground beneath her was turning immaterial 
as well, vanishing from sight. Her scream of shock was short lived. 
The sudden loss of mass as millions of tons created such a vacuum 
that she, and the other citizens of Pyongyang, were suddenly and 


harshly yanked towards the ground. Eun Mi was killed near instantly 
by the shift, her neck snapping under the pressure of the change in 
velocity. 


"...day five of the rescue effort, and more bodies are being 
recovered from the ocean. Initial estimates put the death toll in the 
million range, with increases occurring constantly. The UN released 
a statement about the recent North Korean Incident, claiming that 
they believed it was 'an act of nature’. The recent leak of classified 
documents from the Japanese Diet pointing towards a theft from 
what is referred to as ‘The Foundation’ suggests a different story..." 


Jot It Down 


Today | messed up Dr. Smiley’s office. He yelled a lot 
and started going “bang, bang”, but he didn’t get me: 
he’s so funny when he’s loud. Then | went to the 
cafeteria and the cooks gave me something tasty. They 
always give me something tasty when | make my cute 
face. 


Slept today. Woke up to eat, then slept some more. 


Woken up by lots of loud banging outside today. 
Everyone was running around, saying that some Big 
Thing was going on. | hid under Dr. Boring’s desk until 
they were quiet. Big Things are so stupid: They make 
lots of noise and wake me up. Someone should put the 
Big Things outside in the rain and not give them any 
dinner. That will make them quiet.