Clare Aspen’s San Francisco apartment is like something out of a 2024 millennial’s dream Pinterest board. There’s a gallery wall over her couch. Her kettle is vintage style and pink. There’s a bar cart in the corner （albeit with only a small selection of alcohol that, on closer perusal, all seem to be produced in and around the Bay Area by small distilleries）。 The chopping board has an avocado print. Need I say more.
When pressed, Clare laughs and looks around the apartment as if seeing it for the first time in years. “I suppose it is a bit of a time capsule. I bought this place when I was in my mid-twenties just before everything happened. I haven’t been particularly concerned with interior decoration since,” she adds wryly, an understatement for the ages.
The story of Clare Aspen is now folklore but the basics bear repeating. When the Plague hit the West Coast in 2026, she was living an admirable life of public service as a cop. “Super green, super keen,” she says. “I’m lucky I didn’t get into more trouble early on. I was so eager to do everything right—catch the bad guy! Make a difference! I was a bit much.”
She didn’t move to San Francisco—a city in which, prior to the Plague, only the super-rich had even a hope of affording to live in for much longer—to be a cop earning under $70,000 a year. No, she came to make her fortune. The classic tech dream a million men who had watched The Social Network were determined would be in their own future. Unlike most of the hoodie-clad tech bros who came before her, however, Clare succeeded. Here’s the story in a nutshell.
Girl with engineering degree （summa cum laude, natch） from UT Austin moves to California to be a developer. Girl finds culture in medium-size start-up to be as gross as all the Reddit threads had warned her it would be. Girl perseveres because she is many things but a quitter is not one of them. Girl is one of two women on a team of sixty men, many of whom appear to be sociopathic in their pursuit of wealth. Girl thinks she’s doing pretty well with a hefty salary. Girl has no idea what is coming. Girl is in the right place at the right time and is offered the golden ticket: an IPO. Stock goes public, stock goes up in value quickly. Girl becomes very rich.
So far, so cinematic. Can’t you see Hollywood salivating over the movie rights already? But no! It gets better.
Girl is rich but unfulfilled and decides to quit her （very lucrative） job, cash in her stocks and become a cop. “I still remember my dad shouting down the phone at me when I told him I was going to be a cop. A cop?! I didn’t pay a hundred thousand dollars for you to be a Goddamn cop.” Clare wrote him a check there and then for every penny he spent on her college education and accepted an offer to join the San Francisco Police Department.
If the Plague had never happened, the end of this movie would write itself. She would have met a nice boy, maybe a fellow cop （we all love an office romance） and had a few adorable, rule-abiding children. Her dad would have seen the value of her choices and she’d have lived a long and healthy life with her husband by her side in comfortable obscurity.
But the Plague did happen and this young, plucky cop was there at the airport the day of the Great San Fran Riots. She knows it sounds dramatic but she was lucky to get out alive.
Unfortunately for Clare, and fortunately for the lucky few who managed to travel, some domestic flights were still leaving San Francisco that day. I asked United Airlines and Delta for comments for this article. Both declined to respond, so I am forced to extrapolate from what we know. We know that most international flights were canceled but two scheduled flights to Israel filled only with women left, without clearance to land, both piloted by males who were shot dead by the Israelis on arrival and burned without ceremony. We also know that five domestic flights to Chicago, Miami, New York, Minneapolis and Seattle departed the airport.
One of those flights—the Delta flight to Minneapolis—crashed over New Mexico for unknown reasons but it is thought that the pilot became ill on the flight. The other four flights all arrived safely, but we cannot know why their pilots made those flights as scheduled because they are all dead. Commonly repeated possibilities are that the pilots wanted to ensure people got home to see loved ones, thought they could escape the virus in those other cities or had families themselves in those cities.