Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  “Hello!” Drayer shouted. “Hello!”

  Marcus stared at her as she picked barefoot through the glass to the open windows. He tried to match her bravery. He went after her, yet angled to one side, giving her room.

  They stared outside.

  Squinting in the sunlight, Marcus peered at the ranch house across the field. He couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. Where were Steve and Kym and the rest? Had they wandered off into the mountains? The hot wind smelled like dust and dry grass, a good smell, which heightened his anxiety.

  Drayer’s expression conveyed a sense of being overwhelmed again. He wanted to say something, but what? His head churned with strain and fear.

  The low alpine environment would never be ideal for survival. In summer, it was at its worst with too little water and nothing to forage except a few edible plants, squirrels, and deer. If they were forced to subsist without their intelligence, they were doomed.

  But that was in the future. At the moment, Marcus grappled with another conundrum. Why had Drayer joined with him instead of one of her agents? Because he was different from the others? As the only black man at the array, Marcus was superficially unique. During an interrupt, his dark skin might be an attractant. Maybe the impression they’d made on each other before the solar flares—no matter if arguments were the basis of the impression—had felt like some kind of bond in their animal state.

  And what if we’re territorial? he thought. That could explain why the others were missing. Maybe he’d chased them off. Or maybe he had been driven from the better home in the area because he looked different.

  If so, why would Drayer stay with him?

  She turned to him and repeated the most important question. “What’s happening to us?” she asked.

  Marcus seized on the opportunity to push his emotions aside. “Your brain is an incredibly complicated electrical organ,” he said. “It has a biochemical process that produces as much as twelve watts every second every day.”

  She nodded.

  “Our self-awareness depends on that energy. Our minds are the result of fifty billion neurons working as a single unit. I think we’re taking enough electromagnetic radiation to interrupt some parts of the whole.”

  “Then we’re going to die,” she said. “We’ll start losing our hair and throwing up.”

  “From radiation poisoning? Maybe not. Not inside.” Marcus found his resolve. He turned from the sun-washed landscape and walked toward the control room.

  “Stop,” Drayer said. “I need to find my people.”

  “They’ll come here if they’re…” If they’re alive, he thought, but he didn’t want to keep frightening her. “Help me first.”

  They couldn’t afford to be enemies.

  “Please,” he said. “We need to protect the array. Our friends will come here if they can. We’ll look for them as soon as we can.”

  Drayer grimaced, but she walked after him.

  Inside the control room, they found one of the computers on the floor. Another was missing. Marcus hurried to disconnect the last Mac and hauled it into the electronics room, where he was startled to find more work accomplished than he recalled.

  The missing computer was inside with three cases of canned food and snack bags and Gatorade and Pepsi. Two flashlights. Batteries. A desk fan.

  “I don’t get it,” Drayer said. “Why didn’t we hide in here instead of the office? There’s food. It’s safe.”

  Marcus set the computer on a rack. He switched on one of the flashlights and swept the beam over the narrow room. “This is why,” he said. “No windows. It’s dark. There’s nothing we recognized as useful, just a lot of machines.”

  “Here,” Drayer said. She passed one of the plastic quart bottles of Gatorade to him, then cracked another for herself.

  The sugar smell of the drink made him dizzy with thirst. Marcus coughed as he gulped it, spilling some on his chest. He didn’t stop until the bottle was half empty. Then he capped it and walked back into the control room, realizing there was another reason why they might have left this part of the station during the interrupt. The control room was a dead end. They’d have nowhere to retreat in a fight.

  “Let’s get one of the generators and as much fuel as we can carry,” he said. “We also need to punch an exhaust line through the wall. We can look for everyone while we’re outside.”

  “Maybe one of us should stay in here,” she said.

  “Come with me. Please. I’m scared as hell,” he said, admitting his own vulnerability.

  It was the right thing to say.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  They studied each other. Warily, he compared her to Janet. At thirty-four, Janet was younger than Drayer, almost too young to be the mother of a seventeen-year-old. She could be fickle, even cold, whereas Drayer was more mature, more deliberate.

  “I need to be able to trust someone,” she said. “I want to trust you.”

  “You can.”

  Drayer hesitated for a beat. Marcus had to fight to meet her stare. Then she said, “You swear you can get the array working?”

  “We can.”

  She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

  As they ventured into the sunlight, neither Marcus nor Drayer looked at each other. They stared at the landscape. Nothing moved except the wind, which murmured through the array, lifting dust and bits of grass and leaves. The debris flashed and swirled. Long clouds warped the sky. Three hundred yards away, the shed with the generator sat beside the residential home. The windows were empty eyes.

  Unnerved, Marcus thought, Is anyone waiting there?

  At the base of the nearest dish, the low weeds rustled like a hand or a snake.

  “Watch out!” Marcus said. He jumped back.

  Drayer jumped with him—but the noise was two small lizards, moving clumsily.

  “Sorry,” Marcus said. “I’m sorry.”

  Cold-blooded life must be affected much harder than we are, he thought. Humans were adept at shifting from hot to cold and back again. Lizards couldn’t regulate as much energy.

  “We should find hats and sunglasses and wear as much sunscreen as possible,” he said. “My guess is skin cancer and cataracts were always a major problem once we got down from the trees.”

  Drayer froze again. Marcus turned to see what had alarmed her. But she was looking at him. She wanted to get away from him.

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “The jungle would have protected us from most of the ultraviolet. I mean the canopy of leaves and branches.”

  Drayer backed away. Her face was stricken, and Marcus felt a jolt of panic that she would leave him to the wind and the endless white dishes.

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m okay.”

  “There’s no jungle here!”

  “I mean millions of years ago,” he said. “The jungle canopy would have protected us from most of the ultraviolet when we were first evolving into early man. This has happened before. This has always been happening.”

  The sky fluttered, and they both glanced up.

  Drayer’s voice quieted as she reached a decision. “I don’t understand,” she said. “But I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  Her words affected Marcus more strongly than he could have imagined. He nodded.

  They began walking again.

  He wanted to reward her confidence in him. He said, “The sun puts out a lot more than visible light. Some of it is lethal radiation, nuclear radiation, but the sun also emits a constant flow of charged particles called the solar wind.”

  “If it’s constant…”

  “Our sun is unstable. You saw the microflares we were tracking.”

  “Yes.”

  “The flares aren’t the issue. They don’t affect us directly. But in our last readings, the solar wind had quintupled. Earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere are being distorted.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  �
��The ionosphere is our upper atmosphere. It forms a giant bubble around us, but our magnetic field is dozens of times larger than Earth, especially the tail on the night side away from the sun. Right now the whole thing is wobbling. There must be furrows and bumps larger than the planet itself. They collide. That creates shock waves.”

  Drayer said nothing. Maybe she was trying to picture it.

  Marcus grappled with his own thoughts. The atmosphere typically absorbed radiation of the smallest wavelengths such as gamma and X-rays. Now every layer of the sky was oscillating. There might be places on the surface where living things were burned down by invisible death, but he said, “What’s hitting us is mostly intense electrostatic noise and magnetic fluctuations. It’s not lethal radiation, it’s just noise. I don’t mean noise like you can hear. I mean energy bursts.”

  They’d reached the shed, a broad cinder-block cube much like the electronics room inside the station. The doors were locked.

  Marcus looked at the nearest home, but he couldn’t bring himself to investigate. One of the windows was shattered. What if there were more dead bodies inside?

  Six paving stones sat in front of the shed, forming an entrance for the rare times when it rained and the mountains turned to mud. Marcus wrenched one of the stones out of the dirt, then used the stone to bash the lock off the steel door.

  They went in. The air was stale and warm.

  Marcus assessed the four DuroMax 4500-watt generators, which were held to the floor by brackets, not permanently mounted. Each generator was an orange chunk of machinery cradled in black handlebars. He disconnected the power line from one and began loosening the wing nuts that secured the floor brackets.

  “I don’t know enough about the brain to say what’s being inhibited,” he said. “It seems like most of our executive function is gone. Logic. Memory.”

  “Our frontal and temporal lobes.”

  “Yes,” he said, impressed with her again. “The good news is the pulse won’t be consistent over the whole planet, not at first. For all we know, it’s still happening, but we’re in an unaffected area. If we can calculate the safest spots, some of them might be fairly consistent, nodes where magnetic anomalies prevent the shock waves. People might be okay there.”

  “You said ‘Not at first,’” Drayer said, finding the bad news he’d hoped to disguise in the good.

  “I think the shock waves are increasing.”

  “So the safe spots…”

  “There won’t be many of them, and they might not last.”

  Marcus had the generator free. He hefted one end of the machine and gestured for her to take the other side. It weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. Drayer struggled with it, but Marcus stopped her.

  “Let’s leave it for a minute,” he said. “We’d better see how much fuel we have.”

  They walked behind the shed to a dozen steel drums of fuel. Even one was probably too heavy for them to carry, although an old jeep was parked nearby, a 1980s model GMC built before cars were equipped with computers.

  Marcus wondered if Drayer would want to leave if they got the jeep running. Maybe he should hide the key if he found it…

  “Can you hotwire a car?” he asked.

  “What? No.”

  He tentatively put his fingertips on one fuel drum, afraid it held a static charge. But it was okay. Sitting on the bare earth, the drum had dissipated whatever charge it had absorbed into the ground.

  “We’ll have to roll it across the field,” he said. “Let’s move the generator first. I don’t want it damaged if there’s another interrupt.”

  We, I, he thought, noting the difference in his words. Janet had accused him of starting too many of his sentences with I. That needed to change.

  He grunted in discomfort when they lifted the generator, hurting his back. Drayer didn’t complain. They lugged the machine across the field in the dry wind and the heat. Marcus tried to keep to the oblong shadows of the dishes.

  Something moved at the corner of the station.

  “What was that?” Drayer said.

  “A person. I saw him. Let’s put the generator down.”

  Whoever they’d spotted should be friendly. The only people in the area were Marcus’s staff and Drayer’s agents—but too many aspects of their lives had changed. A cold, disconnected calm filtered through Marcus as he walked toward the station, analyzing every detail.

  There was no one at the corner.

  Marcus glanced back at the generator. He didn’t want to carry it inside until he was sure they weren’t walking into an ambush.

  “Go,” Drayer said, taking the initiative. They had no weapons, much less a gun. Nevertheless, they approached the door the way Marcus had seen federal agents assaulting bad guys on TV, covering each other. He watched the windows while she went to the door. Then she stood ready until he joined her.

  Inside, Marcus picked up one of the boxy game consoles on the floor. I can throw it if I have to, he thought, liking its corners and light weight.

  Drayer grabbed three Coke cans for missiles. Marcus took another.

  They wavered between moving down the hall or heading into the control room. Drayer probably wanted to avoid the office. It would always remind her of what had happened. In any case, Marcus’s goal was to protect his electronics.

  A man coughed in the control room.

  Marcus signaled Drayer. He raised his clumsy weapon, ready to protect her. Then they went through the door together.

  Steve Church sat at a desk like a crumpled shadow.

  “Steve!” Marcus said. “Steve?”

  Steve didn’t lift his gaze from the desktop. His thin hair was curled with sweat. He gripped his armrests like he thought he’d float away. Dirt smudged one cheek.

  “He’s hurt,” Drayer said as Steve mumbled, “They did this to us. We found them.”

  Marcus shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “We never should have been looking in the first place. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  Steve looked up, wide-eyed, ignoring Drayer. His tone was victorious. “I can show you,” he said. “Where are the computers? Did they take them?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “We found them! Sentient life in Ursa Major. They did this to us. There was a carrier wave. The signal… I can still hear it. Like music.”

  “Goddard detected similar microflares in a lot of places,” Marcus said. “That’s it. There was no artificial signal.”

  “They did this to the sun to blind us.”

  Could he be right? Marcus wondered for a split second. But… no. No. Steve’s ravings were delusional paranoia. Even if they’d discovered an extraterrestrial signal before the first interrupts, Steve wouldn’t have any memory of it. Worse, Steve seemed to think aliens were stealing things right here in the station or among the array.

  “Come with me,” Marcus said, although he immediately regretted the words. He couldn’t replace the computers if Steve smashed them for some reason. “We’re bringing a generator and some fuel into the building. You can help.”

  Drayer looked at Marcus and frowned. She clearly shared his concern.

  “Let’s get you something to drink,” Marcus said to Steve, setting his hand on his friend’s shoulder. He turned to Drayer. “Can you get him something to drink?”

  She didn’t move, and he saw the question in her eyes. If it came down to it, who would he choose—his colleague, who was deranged, or the woman he barely knew, yet had slept with? The trust they’d forged was so tenuous.

  “Please, Rebecca,” Marcus said, using her given name for the first time.

  Drayer nodded. She went to the electronics room, fetching Gatorade and several snack bags. Marcus sat beside Steve as they devoured the nuts and chips. Drayer kept her distance.

  In that quiet moment, Marcus tried to think ahead. The electronics room would be a very temporary shelter even if they had unlimited food and water. He and Steve might be able t
o rig a portable Faraday cage on the jeep. They would need metal and a welding torch… Maybe they could find their way into caves or a bomb shelter. Then what?

  Marcus realized he was making himself feel as demented as Steve.

  Get up, he thought. Get moving.

  He left his chair. “We can eat when we’re done,” he said. “Rebecca? Steve? Come on.”

  They returned outside. Marcus held one of Steve’s arms and Drayer held the other as Steve tottered between them, unhappy and distracted. Dusk was settling over the mountains.

  “It’ll be dark in an hour,” Drayer said.

  “They did this to us,” Steve muttered as Drayer added, “The sun will be on the other side of the world. We should be safe.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think so,” Marcus said. “You have to realize, the initial shock waves are larger than the distance between us and the moon. Then our magnetic field echoes and pulses. It’s everywhere.”

  They reached the generator. Marcus guided Steve to one side of it. Before he lifted the other end, he glanced at Drayer. He wished he could console her, but she deserved the truth.

  “Nighttime won’t be any safer than the day,” he said.

  LOS ANGELES

  Twilight darkened the city as Emily completed her preparations to leave DNAllied. Sitting on the tile near a barricaded door, she checked her laptop again, memorizing the numbers displayed on its screen. It was June 14. The summer solstice was eight days away. Daylight in southern California would average nearly fifteen hours for the next two weeks with sunrise at 5:45 and sunset a few minutes after 8:00 p.m.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said mostly to herself.

  “You should wait,” Ray said. “The Army will come. The police. Somebody.”

  “Help me.”

  “No.”

  Ray wouldn’t meet her eyes in the white gleam of the laptop, which Emily closed to reduce its light. She didn’t want to attract attention from outside, where distant flames cast an orange-red glow against the nearest buildings. Worse, another fire burned just a hundred yards down the street—a small fire tended by human shapes.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Ray said. “Your family…”