A mosquito-borne plague. Death comes fast. The mortality rate is 100%.

Soon, society is breaking down. I never expected the end of civilization could happen so quietly, but there just aren't enough people left to hold things together. The cities are going to die.

I try to organize a group to flee somewhere and start a farm, but there's nowhere to go to create a nucleus for a new civilization: mosquitos are absolutely everywhere. Even the desert has enough. This isn't malaria; one bite and you're doomed.

We have to fight off squads of men covered in anti-mosquito suits. They're soldiers of some local cult leader or warlord trying to keep order his way, without anyone's consent. It isn't working.

We defeat them at last, but feel no sense of victory. What's the point? We're doomed. The way it looks now, the die-back will be massive. Probably not total--somewhere SOMEONE will turn out to be immune, and have kids, and build again... but all we've achieved will be lost, and the odds we'll survive to see the rebirth are approximately... zero.

Then two friends come by--Belle and her husband Adolfo. They say "We've found a cure! It contains fruit pectin, citrus rind, and cornsilk."

Someone else comments "It was a short plague, as these things go--only two or three years till the cure. Modern research is good for something! Took generations in the past, sometimes, to figure out something effective..." Wow. This person's already relegated the disaster around us to the past, as if we've already spread the knowledge and implemented the cure!

But he could be right. Maybe it happened as fast as the news spread. It's sure a low-tech treatment.

And was it really only two or three years? Seems like we've been fighting this plague... forever.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• Plague: I've had headaches and neckache and night sweats for a month. Dream says it IS more than allergies. But apparently it has a cure....
• Mosquito-spread: I practice nonviolence. No meat, no killing--not even insects. But maybe I need to make an exception and swat mosquitos. They don't just drink your blood. Every medical authority has denied the rumor mosquitos can occasionally pass on HIV. But the dream hints, disturbingly, that it might just be true.
• Belle: she lined up my first art show! Nagged me till I did it. So is the dream also hinting "Showing your art heals you"? Or just "My advice was good last time, so take this seriously!"
• ACTION: Take the prescription literally: buy organic oranges and eat them peels and all, eat apples for pectin, and corn on the cob, or cornsilk. See what happens.

A MONTH LATER

I tried the dream-prescription. It worked. Who knows why, but it worked.

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