Model

The pulse in the radio, the made thing set going and left to run on alone in the empty air, put her in mind of her father, because her father had built things like that, machines out of numbers that ran on after you left the room, and because he was the one, in the end, who had first seen the shape of what was coming, in his numbers, before it came.

She had been small but she remembered him at the table with the screens, late, the blue light on his face. He was a soft man, a little ridiculous, a man who looked wrong in the mountains and wrong in the camouflage Papa put him in, a man whose whole gift was for sitting still and seeing patterns in things that looked to everyone else like noise. He built models of how a sickness moved through people. It was the one subject that could make him and her mother forget to eat, the two of them at the table talking in a language that was half numbers, and Laura had fallen asleep to the sound of it more nights than she could count, the two smartest people she would ever know, murmuring about the end of the world before it knew to come.