That didn’t mean that Chuck couldn’t be an asshole from time to time.
What was really gnawing at him? There was something in the look Chuck had given Damon when he tried to cover for Terek and Irena.
What was the harm in telling something that didn’t even amount to a white lie? He said he was going to school with Terek and Irena. That was true. Irena had been going to Boston University while he was at MIT.
Damon saw it coming a mile away.
The way that cop had looked at Terek when he said he was Ukrainian. Is that Russian? That’s what the cop said, as if he was an alien, which was exactly how America termed anyone from outside—resident aliens.
Terek had told Damon the stories, about how he had tried to apply for jobs, but nobody wanted to hire an immigrant. He and Irena had been struggling to figure out what to do when she graduated last semester. When Irena said she always wanted to see New Orleans, and that she always wanted a job outside, Damon called Grandma Babet and convinced her to get them jobs at the port.
Damon had been wanting to get back to New Orleans, anyway. Babet had raised him after his mother passed, which was another thing that brought him and Terek together.
Last winter, after a late session of playing Slayer online—before Damon had met Terek in person—Terek said he needed a break. Damon joked and prodded, until Terek finally told him that it was the day his mother had passed and he needed some time off.
Terek and Irena’s mother had died of a drug overdose six years before, like Damon’s mother more than twenty years ago. Also like Damon, Terek and Irena knew about quiet fear and shame and anger and desperation. Their father had taken off when they were young, too. They needed help, and Damon was in a position to provide it.
For the past eight months, Damon and Terek had been almost inseparable. Damon was serious about getting Terek into MIT. The kid was the smartest person he had ever met.
Already it felt like Damon had known Terek his whole life, like the guy was a part of him. Damon and Terek would riff off each other’s programming in the way other people might finish sentences for each other. Like a dance. Adding and improving, tweaking and moving. They shared a hidden depth and elegance in thought that nobody else in this car would ever, or could ever, understand.
“You see that?” Terek said.
Damon’s laptop pinged with a message. Their laptops were almost always connected via a USB. They had no outside network connection, but two computers connected, that was a network, right? A network of two.
He opened the message. A screen of numbers of figures that he guessed would look like nonsense to anyone else.
“You see that?” Terek repeated.
Damon did see it. A pattern emerged from the jumble. “The debris almost looks like it’s self-organizing. Is that gravitational?”
“I don’t know. If that’s right, it just took out the Copernicus Sentinel-5P.”
That was a satellite launched a few years ago by the European Space Agency to monitor air pollution levels across the globe. Not a critical asset, but not insubstantial, and now it was probably gone.
Damon wiped his eyes, patted Terek on the back and agreed with his analysis, then shifted in his seat to look back at Mike and Luke.
Helping people, that was Mike’s thing. Chuck’s too, despite his abrasiveness. When that cop questioned Irena and Terek, Damon imagined it escalating. Damon needed to maintain control, to alter the future path before it veered, so he told the cop a slightly stretched version of reality and things came back into line.
Control the future. It was Damon’s new obsession.
The truth was, Irena and Terek’s papers were about to expire, maybe already had. Damon didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know. When Terek made the surprise announcement, right before coming to New Orleans, that he had gotten married, Damon congratulated him, but didn’t pry. Was it a marriage of convenience? For papers? Terek didn’t talk much about Katerina, his wife, but he called her every day. He almost never went out, and sent all his money to her.
What was the harm in covering for Terek? Just a little?
But that look Chuck had given him.
“You okay back there?” Chuck asked. He swiveled the rearview so he could see Damon. “You look like you’re brooding again.”
There it was again.
That look. As if Chuck was saying, “What the hell’s wrong with you? Why are you always attached to that computer? Get some fresh air.” Damon had never had a father in his life, apart from the string of his mother’s abusive boyfriends early on, before she died. Maybe that was it. An aggressive male in authority rubbed Damon the wrong way.
“I got a game for you,” Damon said and sat up. Closed his laptop.
“Lay it on me.” Chuck returned his eyes to the road.
“Let’s say a self-driving car is speeding down a two-lane road and its brakes fail. Should it stay in its lane and hit a pregnant woman, a doctor, and a criminal on a crosswalk? Or swerve and hit a barrier between the lanes, which would kill a family of four, including two children?”
Chuck glanced in the mirror again. “Easy. Stay in my lane, protect my family.”
“I’m not saying it’s your family. In fact, let’s say it’s not your family. Just a family. Any family of four.”
“This is a stupid game.”
“But it’s a real one. We’re designing automated vehicles, and they will have to make decisions like this, in split seconds. Same as real drivers.”
“Still stupid.”
“Humor me.”
Chuck sighed long and hard enough that everyone heard him. “Okay, if those are all the options and info I have? I go straight, take out the pregnant woman, doctor, and criminal.”
“Why?”
“A criminal counts less, the doctor is a person who dedicated their lives to saving other people, and the pregnant lady, that’s a tough one, but she counts the same as the mother and one kid in the car.”
Damon said, “Mike, what about you?”
“I would swerve the car,” Luke said. He put down his iPad and leaned forward from the third row. “It’s our car. We’re the ones going for a drive, right?”
Damon nodded. “Sort of. You’re not in the car.” Luke was a smart kid.
“But the people in the car, they wanted to go for a drive, so it’s their responsibility. If they didn’t go for the drive, those other people would be fine. And the doctor, don’t they count for more? If she dies, she might not be able to save someone else later in the day.”
Mike smiled at his son. “I agree with Luke.”
“He does make a good point,” Chuck said from the front.
“Okay,” Damon said to Chuck, “what if it was you and me in the car, and a doctor and a criminal on the road. Would you swerve? Kill us and save them?”
“If I knew which one was the criminal?”
“I guess.”
“Then I’d do my best to swerve and hit the criminal.” Chuck caught Damon’s eye in the rearview and smiled.
“Watch the road,” Mike said from the back.
Damon asked, “But it wouldn’t matter what law the criminal broke?”
“A criminal is a criminal,” Chuck replied, his eyes straight ahead.
“A criminal,” Terek said, closing his laptop, “is whoever the state decides is a criminal.”
“Exactly,” Damon said. “One day you go to jail for ten years for a gram of weed, the next day it’s legal. You would opt to kill the person who the law says was a criminal one day but not the next? The day after weed is legal, you wouldn’t kill a guy smoking it, but you would the day before?”
“Hold on, now we’re getting into a lot of hypotheticals.”
“Sure, but it demonstrates a state of mind.”
“What’s the point of this?”
I’ve just demonstrated it.”
“I think we could all agree,” Mike said from the back, “that we would be willing to sacrifice ourselves if it really
came down to it.”
Chuck snorted, “I’m not sure that’s true.”
“Terek jumped in the water to get me.”
“The point is,” Damon said, “that we all make different life and death decisions based on our own moral and societal compasses. At school, we played this game online with people around the world to get an idea of how we should program autonomous vehicles. Overall, people preferred to spare humans over animals.”
“That’s reassuring.” Chuck laughed.
“Younger over older, in general as well, except for Confucianist cultural groups in Asia who showed little preference for those with high status or low.”
“Good to know.”
“The ones people spared the least were dogs, followed by criminals, then cats,” Damon said.
“So people killed criminals before their cats?” Luke said.
“That’s what the results said,” Damon replied.
Luke scrunched his face up and declared, “That’s dumb. That’s wrong.”
“But it seems to be what people think.”
“Okay, okay,” Mike said, holding a hand out. “That’s enough. New topic. I think we get the point.”
“Actually, I don’t think we’ve reached the point at all,” Chuck said.
The car went quiet. Only the sound of the wheels on the road and wind thrumming past.
“And what point is that?” Damon asked.
“The point is,” Chuck said, “that guys like you get to decide who lives and dies in the future. Isn’t that what you’re trying to say? You ask me what I think, but then you take that power from my hands, literally.”
He lifted his hands off the wheel.
“Hey, stop playing around,” Mike said.
Chuck put his hands back down. “What I’m saying is that Damon is making the point that he’s taking power away from people like me, and putting it into his signals and systems. Our lives in the future are going to be in the hands of god-like algorithms that provide food, and decide who gets medicine and who lives and dies on the road. And Damon and Terek are the ones behind the curtain controlling the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. Isn’t that what you’re trying to say, Damon?”
CHAPTER 19
THE ENTRANCE BARRIER to the Cool Springs Estate creaked open.
It was a gated estate, Chuck joked, but more to keep the kids in than to keep anyone out. He left his driver’s side window down as he leaned back in from the keypad. The air outside had cooled down to tolerable from the swelter of daytime.
“You guys are going to love Susie,” he said to Irena.
He seemed almost gleeful that we hadn’t been able to call ahead, that she wasn’t going to get any warning of our arrival. He loved surprise birthday parties, but I knew Susie hated them. She would be up and waiting anyway. She’d been waiting for almost three days. On the same bed of nails I felt I was on.
At least her painful wait would be over.
Chuck swept the Range Rover around the estate roads a little too fast, but it was almost midnight. There wouldn’t be any children out. In fact, there wasn’t anyone out.
The traffic outside of Memphis had slowed to a crawl, and we’d been stuck in two more roadblocks. The seven-hour drive had stretched to fifteen.
After we passed the first roadblock, I sensed a tension between Chuck and Damon, which culminated in the debate about the morals of who to save and who to kill, if it came down to choice. The discussion had wound down, become civil, and eventually devolved into games of I Spy.
We’d had to stop once for gas between Memphis and Nashville, and the gas station attendant had told us cash only. Credit card machines weren’t working anymore.
The second our headlights lit up their cul-de-sac, the door to Chuck’s place swung open. It was a large two-story brick house with manicured bushes out front lit by spotlights. We didn’t need to honk the horn or even get close to knocking on the door.
Susie spilled out the door, ran barefoot across the grass, and jumped into Chuck’s arms as he got out of the truck. “Oh, baby, thank God you’re okay!”
“I love you, too,” Chuck managed to say around mouthfuls of kisses.
Damon lifted the back seat forward.
I put Luke out ahead of me and he ran to Chuck and Susie. She knelt to wrap him in her arms and smother him in her long brown hair. She was crying now.
I wiped my face, too. I couldn’t help it. Mine was a happy tear, but one infused with fear. Seeing her drove another spike into my gut. Where was my own wife right now?
“Ah, Susie, this is Irena”—Chuck pointed to her—“and Terek, her younger brother.”
Susie took Luke in her arms and stood. She grunted and whispered, “Boy, Luke, you’re getting heavy.” She stretched out a hand to shake hands with the Ukrainians. “Thank you so much for bringing Chuck home to us. Irena? That’s your name?”
Irena shook her hand and smiled. “I know. Like your old friend from Manhattan. I heard good things about her.”
Ellarose, six now, and Bonham, four, wandered out through the open front door of the house. They were both in their pajamas and half-asleep. Ellarose’s little face lit up when she saw me. A teddy bear in one hand, she screeched, “Uncle Mike!” and ran across the lawn to me.
I bent and scooped her up. Two years younger than Luke, but less than half his weight. Still a waif. I squeezed her. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good. And Uncle Damon!”
She extended one arm to include Damon in the hug.
Bonham wandered across the grass. More lackadaisical. He waved at his dad and me and smiled. Chuck introduced the kids to Irena and Terek, and Susie put down Luke to give Damon a big hug.
She left me for last.
“Mike.” She raised one hand to her mouth.
“I guess you haven’t heard anything?”
“Not yet.” She burst into tears and opened her arms.
I squeezed her tight, as much for her as me.
“Multiple widespread power failures are reported around the country,” said the Fox News anchor, a thirty-something woman with blond hair.
“Are these related to the loss of satellites?” asked a commentator.
The consensus around the table was that nobody knew, but everyone assumed it was. The first stage of a cyberattack, said a rotund, sweaty man in a badly fitting suit. This time not only the East Coast, he said.
It’s the whole country.
The entire world.
“I always said the CyberStorm wasn’t an accident,” Chuck said.
“You did not,” I said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“India and Pakistan didn’t mean to trigger a full-blown Kessler syndrome. They didn’t intentionally wreck all the satellites in orbit.”
“So, all of this is down to more coincidences?”
“Not all the satellites are gone yet,” Damon said.
He and Terek had set up their laptops on the dining room table the instant we walked in the door. He was already logged into the NASA space debris server. Irena and Susie went into the kitchen to get some coffee. I heard them talking, heard Susie laugh.
Chuck had turned on Fox almost as fast as Damon had gotten out his laptop.
“You still think all of this is accidental?” Chuck said to me.
“If not accidental, then unintended.”
“Isn’t that the definition of accidental?”
“You know what I mean.” I settled into a chair, took the TV controller from him, and prepared for another round of whodunnit. “Who thinks it’s the Russians?”
“That would not surprise me,” Terek said from the kitchen table.
He’d only been in the gang a few days, but he was getting into the orbit of Chuck’s circling mind.
“They’ve been hit as bad as we have,” I said. “Or worse.”
Chuck said, “Maybe the Chinese? Their Baidu geopositioning satellites haven’t been wiped out yet.”
“That’s who we blamed
last time,” I said. “Remember? Washington filled with emergency supplies? We thought it was an invasion?”
“You thought.” Chuck smiled as he corrected me. He scratched his chin with his prosthetic hand, and I felt another twinge of guilt. “And we’re—”
“Oh, sorry, Chuck, hold on.” I held up one hand while I turned up the volume.
The TV screen filled with images of airplanes stacked nose-to-nose down a runway.
“This is Heathrow,” said the Fox news anchor. “England has been forced to take in hundreds of international flights as Eastern European countries close their airspaces.” The image switched to a wind-blown, grassy expanse bordered by craggy rock. “And this is Goose Bay, Labrador, in Canada.”
“I bet you she’s there,” Chuck said.
Susie shushed him as she and Irena came in from the kitchen.
“However, Canada closed its own airspace soon after the United States,” the anchor continued. “There are more rumors of aircraft lost at sea, but in the confusion, these may have landed and not been able to report in. With China, India, Russia, and a dozen other countries shutting down their physical and digital borders, little information is getting through…”
Susie deposited a coffee carefully on the table in front of me. “I’m sure Lauren is fine,” she said quietly.
“Sure you’re right,” I replied without enthusiasm.
“Your friend Irena is wonderful, and so is her brother. She was telling me about the fishing trip, I didn’t know—”
“Hold on a sec.”
I turned up the volume again. “The passengers from any aircraft that has landed are being quarantined,” said the anchor. “Planes are being directed to central airports, with all passengers being held in Heathrow and Atlanta. These are the only two locations we can confirm.”
“See? Planes landed in America. I’m sure she’s stuck in all that, somewhere,” Susie said. “You want something to eat?”
I shook my head.
“Why would they quarantine passengers from airplanes?” Terek said from the table.
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