Milliseconds. someone, somewhere is monitoring every single sneeze. gotta use all that state surveillance for something. there are 7 billion people on Earth. a sneeze takes about half a second to a second and is a sudden loud noise that shouldn't be hard to identify.

how often do people sneeze? if you google that phrase you get a fucking research paper that states:

"In this study the daily number of sneezes and of nose blowing were recorded in diary-cards over a 14 day period by 80 hospital employees and medical students". But that report is ancient history. 2002. 13 years ago. the era of the Pentium 4. no iPhone for another 5 years. no tablets. that is not the current era.

We've advanced by leaps and bounds in our sneeze tracking since then. we can hear every one. I guarantee it.

so, how many are there to hear?

there are about 86 400 seconds in a day, if you divide by 4 (four sneezes per person per day, which is the number the above paper recorded in healthy people who had to self-report and might have forgotten - and which doesn't count sick people who might be sneezing quite a bit more often) you get about 1 sneeze every 21600 seconds per person. so 1/21600 sneezes per second per person, multiplied by 7 billion people means:

Worldwide, there are 324,074 people sneezing at this very second. If every single one of them stopped, if the number of sneezes recorded and surveilled, carefully catalogued, dropped to zero....

We would know within miliseconds. $100 trillion says so.

This is our defense. This is what we work for. Call it the world's immune system. Guardians of the sneeze.

within 72 hours you'd have an actionable report. within weeks, we would have a root cause. within months, a ten thousand page report leading up to the lack of sneezing.

If you give it a year we can make it a hundred thousand pages.

The center for disease control would have "patient 0", the first person not to sneeze...well, I guess that's everyone, but you get the picture. patients 0-7,294,601,760. On a CD, on your desk. Monday morning. we will not sleep.

As for how long it would take for us to know? Milliseconds. This is why we exist. This is why we collect. This is why we collate. This is why we copy. This is why we needed to borrow your stapler. We take the world's pulse. And blood pressure. And sneeze rate.

And if ever any of these stop. We will be watching. Humanity can have no greater calling.

if not us, then who? The Russians? Do you have any idea how cold it is there?

Trusting them with our sneezes would be like trusting Elvis with a prescription drug pad. They do not share our sneeze rate.