Kate awoke in the Hotel Rosario suite to find herself reaching through the fog in her head, groping aimlessly for her cellphone, which was creeping along the tabletop slowly from the vibrate option,and also loudly playing “Beautiful Girls” by Sean Kingston, which she had tired of weeks before, but never got around to changing it.

“Kate, are you alright? I saw the news…”
“I’m fine, mom,” Kate felt her eyebrows float upward. “What did you see on the news?”
“They said a comet hit in Puno and people everywhere are sick. That’s where you are, right?”
Kate fought the urge to correct her mother, “Yeah, we are fine, that was yesterday. We are about 120 miles from there…” She couldn’t help herself. She had to squeeze the right word in. “People who got close to the meteorite got really sick, but it’s probably not from the meteorite itself. Are you going to breakfast with dad?”
“Well, I just worry about you, dear. We are getting ready to leave for breakfast. We canceled on going to the beach this weekend after I saw our horoscopes.”
Kate’s green eyes gave an automatic derisive roll as she made a squeaking noise that her mother knew only so well as the sign that Kate was politely disapproving, and she was likely imagining her mother wearing a tinfoil hat and wearing wetsuits to stave off radiation. She promised to call back that evening, and as she hung up the phone remembered Obi Wan saying, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”

Over some mixed fruit and marraqueta, the discussion heated up, with lots of talk about the possibility that the meteorite was a space pod carrying not an infant Superman, but a payload of alien germs and DNA. Things were just getting way too geeky, but then Dr Ramm, their Biology professor, suddenly gave some insight that made it all seem much less scifi: Nematodes, common earthworms, apparently are into germ warfare, just as much as humans are.