The meeting comes to an end after four other presentations and it’s a sign of the times that it feels like a brief respite in the rest of my day. My job is now a very intricate game of Jenga. It’s not technically the responsibility of the Intelligence Services to make sure that the country, in its current awful form, functions, and yet the civil service has been decimated and I’m alive and competent, so I do. The questions that arrive on my desk make my head hurt. How do we make sure we have enough electricians to maintain hospitals, nursing homes, schools, public streetlights? Conscription is the obvious answer. Failing that, massive advertising for high school graduates and a hastily arranged apprenticeship program. But how do we make sure the people entering that program have the necessary aptitude? Test them for it. But who will compile the test, and administer it, when surviving and female electricians are working sixty-hour weeks to keep the country’s lights on and electrical systems functioning? They’ll have to work seventy-hour weeks then. But how do we train new electricians when 92 percent of electricians have died? But, but, but. Every answer causes another problem. It’s an unanswerable riddle. By comparison, a civil war seems positively easy to deal with.
ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST ON MARCH 14, 2026
“I found the cause of the Plague”
by Maria Ferreira
Like much of the world, I’ve been intrigued by Amanda Maclean for months. I’ve talked at length about her in my articles. She is one of the central figures of the Plague; it is a position she neither sought nor wanted, yet she has carried its responsibility with grace.
Amanda reached out to me for an interview to coincide with her announcement to the world of the source of the Plague. She has published the paper—co-authored, she stresses, with the virologists Dr. Sadie Saunders and Dr. Kenneth McCafferty of the University of Glasgow—setting out the science but wants the world to understand, in layman’s terms, how the Plague came to be. I obviously couldn’t meet with Amanda as commercial flights are still not operating the world over. I spoke with Amanda over Skype.
I asked how Amanda found the source of the virus, and to take us back to the beginning. “Euan Fraser, Patient Zero, is from the Isle of Bute, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. I was searching for any clues in the various interviews members of the Bute community had given and there wasn’t much. I knew I had to speak to his wife and, after some inquiries with local people, found her address.”
Was Heather happy to talk? “Once Heather understood what I was trying to do, yes. She’s a lovely woman, truly. She told me that Euan had engaged in some illegal importing activity with another man.”
I pushed Amanda to tell me who this other man was but she insisted she was not at liberty to say anything else about him. “Heather showed me the building where the goods were stored and there were four boxes of the last batch Euan and the other man had imported. I took them back to Glasgow and worked with Sadie and Kenneth at the University of Glasgow to identify them and the possible connection with the Plague.”
Prior to Amanda’s work, the question had been asked, “Where did the Plague come from?” but it was secondary to the far bigger questions that are still being asked today. “How many more men will die before we find a vaccine? When will we find a vaccine? Is this the end of humanity?” Amanda found this oversight of the Plague’s origin troubling, although she acknowledges the challenging diplomatic relationship between the Independent Republic of Scotland and the rest of Europe, and its hostile relationship with the United Kingdom, made cooperation impossible in the search for the cause.
Fortunately, Amanda was able to find the origins of the Plague herself. “The boxes contained golden snub-nosed monkeys.”
At my baffled expression, Amanda thankfully takes pity on me. “No, I didn’t know that they were important either. They’re a highly sought-after trafficked animal. Very cute by all accounts, when they’re not causing plagues.” But how did a monkey cause the Plague?
Amanda grimaces. “Bad luck, primarily. It’s relatively common for an animal pathogen to progress into a pathogen that can also be transmitted to humans. The problem is when that pathogen manages to undergo a sequence of what we call secondary transmission long enough to allow it to spread between humans. For example, rabies can only be transmitted naturally from animals to humans. Humans can’t give it to one another. The next stage up from that is something like Ebola, which we think is spread by bats but only goes through a few cycles of secondary transmission between humans, which is why the world has experienced numerous small Ebola outbreaks but has never, despite its high mortality rate, faced an urgent threat from Ebola. The next level, the level of the Plague, is a disease that undergoes long sequences of transmission between humans even without the need for the animal. Combined with the Plague’s remarkably easy transmission between humans, quick mutation process, ability to survive for thirty-eight hours outside of a host and its high mortality rate, it’s a disaster like no other.”