A lot can change in a month. San Lazaro was a modern, attractive city, popular for its West Coast location and diverse population of 1 million. It was also the epicenter of a cybernetic tech revolution that had impacted virtually everyone on the planet. The winter of 2050 seemed like any other in recent times, when another strain of avian flu emerged in Europe and Asia, starting yet another pandemic. Within a couple of weeks, the virus had reached the coastal cities of the United States. When the first cases emerged, state and local governments immediately enacted quarantine and isolation rules to contain the virus and, having practiced this many times by then, local residents stocked up and hunkered down for the eventual vaccine or cure. Elite teams of scientists around the country and world were already hard at work modifying a vaccine from the pandemic a few years earlier, promising a new one within months.