Oblivion

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  3:10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  131 Days Until Second Harvest

  “Lunch,” Bradshaw said as he backed through the door of Portia’s lab at NanTech. He held one large greasy white bag, and balanced a drink holder in his left hand. Portia’s giant cup of Surge had spilled twice, and his fingers were sticky. He’d have to wash them before he got any work done at all.

  Not that he was really working. Sometime in the last month, he had gone from being the adviser on fossils to the fetch-and-carry man for Portia Groopman. She didn’t seem to notice and he really didn’t mind. There wasn’t much for a nearly retired professor of archaeology to do anymore, anyway.

  After Leo Cross first got in touch with Bradshaw, a year earlier, the first six months had been heady. Suddenly archaeology had a relevance to modem society—more of a relevance than it usually did. So many archaeologists mouthed the old trope: You won’t understand your present if you don’t understand your past. But few believed it. Bradshaw found it ironic that the thing that discredited him—the alien nanomachines he found fossilized decades ago—were the things on which all of society depended today.

  Now, since his training had again become moot for the moment, he stuck close to Portia, helping in every fashion that he could. He had begun to feel responsible for her.

  Portia’s parents were mostly absent. They felt that since Portia had found a profession she loved, and was making more than enough money, she could take care of herself. And she could. She had always done so, even when her parents’ medical expenses had far surpassed their teachers’ salaries, and caused them to get thrown onto the street. Portia had always found ways to survive.

  But Bradshaw believed people needed to do more than survive. He believed they needed affection and caring and a useful purpose. Portia had affection from her coworkers and a useful purpose. But she didn’t really have anyone to care for her.

  Until him. He saw himself as the grandfather she had never known. Although if he really and truly were her grandfather, he would buy her a house, with a soft comfortable bed, and make her sleep in it once in a while. He was probably the only person who knew that Portia had lied about having an apartment. She slept at NanTech, showered at the health club across the street, and often bought her food from vending machines.

  The least he could do was make certain that she was well fed. He’d actually set the chime on his watch to go off every three hours, and he supplied either a snack or a meal, whichever was necessary.

  This time, he was bringing lunch. He’d found a superb deli two blocks away that made sandwiches of a kind he’d never seen. Stacked with meat, lettuce, tomatoes and whatever other vegetables he wanted, cheeses, and some kind of sauce that was to die for, all on a caraway rye that caught in the teeth and lingered on the tongue. The smell of these sandwiches alone could pull Portia away from her research long enough to eat, and today, he was counting on that.

  She’d been working nonstop all night long. He couldn’t get her to quit and sleep. He’d finally gone home around eleven— he was of no use to anyone if he didn’t sleep—and when he woke up, feeling guilty, at 4 a.m., he called. Portia answered, wide awake. No, she hadn’t slept. No, she didn’t know what time it was. And no, she didn’t care.

  She kept the shades in the lab drawn so that it was perpetual night. The lights made everything look washed out. Portia had her own lab at NanTech—she was that valuable to the company—and it had her usual collection of stuffed animals lining the walls. The computer systems were elaborate and the screens were huge. Much of the actual work was done by computers, with robotic arms that had different tools for the smallest bits of work.

  She was sitting at the main desk, two large computer screens turned toward her. Her hair was mussed, its stylish do so long overgrown that it was ragged. She wasn’t the composed girl he had met half a year before.

  “I got roast beef for you,” he said, coming around the table. “Lots of spicy mustard as usual. Extra cheddar, like usual, and they were saving a beefsteak tomato for you so that you’d get a really thick slice.”

  “Mmm,” she said, not because the food sounded good, but because she had heard his voice and had to respond.

  That response used to fool him, but it didn’t any longer.

  “Lunch,” he said again, coming through the opening between the tables. He was about to set the white bag down on the empty tabletop when she said, “Don’t!”

  He frowned at her.

  “I’ve got the nanoharvesters out, and I don’t want anything near them. Especially anything that smells that good.”

  “The nanoharvesters.” He went to the refrigerator and put the sandwiches inside. His stomach was jumping. She had said she wouldn’t get the alien machines out until she had a prototype. “You had a workable idea, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I made the breakthrough after you crashed,” she said. “This morning, over—what the hell were those things?”

  He thought of the incredibly gooey donuts they’d had this morning: thick whipped icing, cream in the middle, chocolate underneath. “I don’t know what they’re called,” he said. “A Dunkin’ Donuts specialty I’ve loved since I was in grad school.”

  “They had Dunkin’ Donuts then?” she asked, teasing him about his age as she always did. But he could tell her heart wasn’t really into it.

  “You were making the excuses as to why you weren’t going to tell me about the prototype.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “This morning over the Dunkin’ Donuts specialty you love, you wanted to talk about that little incident in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. So I let you.”

  His mood slipped a little. After talking to Portia, he’d been able to put his upset in the back of his mind. Now she reminded him of it.

  Four bombs had gone off the day before in a home just outside Coeur d’Alene, killing a husband and wife. The neighbors were closed-lipped about what happened, but a few folks from the town said there had been a lot of suspicious activity lately, and a lot of outsiders coming into Northern Idaho. There was talk, the locals said, of an attempt to overthrow the government, and a specific group, which the husband and wife belonged to, was involved.

  The bombing of the IRS building in Memphis was just a first step in that plan, many believed.

  The antigovernment group’s leader, Vivian Hartlein, was a grandmotherly type who had lost her daughter and her grandchildren in the alien attack on California. She’d sounded reasonable enough, and had even laughed at the idea of overthrowing the government. But she had said, in the interview Bradshaw had watched, that she didn’t understand why so many people had “swallowed the story of an alien attack.”

  This was the beginning of something, Bradshaw knew. And he only hoped it would fade away before the aliens returned.

  “Earth to Edwin,” Portia said.

  He looked at her.

  “Still thinking about the idiots?”

  “I guess,” he said. “I’ve seen too many of them in my lifetime.”

  “Yeah, well, they never really hurt anyone except themselves.”

  “Spoken like a true twenty-year-old,” he said.

  She looked at him, somewhat hurt. She always commented on his age, but he never commented on hers. And never in such a derogatory way.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was in Oklahoma City on business during the bombing. I saw what idiots like that can do, and I’ve never forgotten it.”

  “What bombing?” she asked.

  He felt a small stab to the heart. Of course she wouldn’t know. She hadn’t even been born yet, and her education was anything but formal.

  “Never mind,” he said. “What do you have?”

  “A prototype,” she said. “I was about to test it. Want to watch?”

  He’d watched two other tests of her prototypes. They had consisted of a small Portia-made nanomachine on one side of the big computer screen—the machine was blown up to a hundred times life-size, of course—and an alien nano
harvester on the other. Theoretically, the Portia-made machine was supposed to demolish the alien machine, but in both cases nothing happened.

  And Bradshaw had had to calm Portia down afterward and get her back to work. It wasn’t that she was angry so much as extremely frustrated. This was the first time she’d ever had to make more than one attempt at solving a nanotechnology problem that she’d put this much time into.

  The troubles of prodigies, he’d thought more than once. They never learned patience.

  “All right,” he said. “But after the test, you eat.”

  “Yes, Gramps.” She kicked out a chair beside her, and he sat on it.

  The alien nanoharvester was already on the screen. Its strange shape and eerie markings looked more alien every time he saw them.

  Portia bent over the microscope part of her computer and, using an extremely tiny tool that looked like a miniature tweezers, placed something on the slide.

  A round, gray nanomachine appeared on the edge of the computer screen. The Portia-made machine was a lot more aesthetically pleasing, with its precise and sensible design, and Bradshaw was starting to ruminate on the differences between species, when suddenly Portia’s nanomachine began to move.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, but she sounded pleased.

  It seemed to slide across the screen like a magnet heading for steel, and attached itself to the alien nanoharvester. Portia’s machine quivered and Bradshaw suddenly realized that this looked like sex to him, sex between two incompatible insects—like a ladybug trying to mount an ant.

  The thought gave him shudders.

  “Oh, God,” Portia said.

  Finally her nanomachine stopped quivering. She looked at some numerical specs that had been running on the other screen, and let out a whoop.

  The sound made Bradshaw jump.

  “Edwin!” she said. “We did it!”

  He smiled at the “we.” He hadn’t had anything to do with it, as evidenced by the fact that he didn’t know how she knew she’d succeeded.

  “Well,” he said a bit cautiously, “I know you got your nanomachine to attack, but how do we know that it killed the alien machine?”

  “Edwin,” she said, sounding disappointed in him. “I showed you how the power grids worked last time ”

  She had, too. He had understood the theory. One of the few breakthroughs she had been able to make on the alien nanoharvesters was to read their energy signature. She had shown him how, but he hadn’t understood it then. He certainly didn’t understand it now.

  “My machine drained the energy from theirs. Look!” She pointed to the information running down the other screen. “That’s all mine. And see the spike? That’s where it absorbed the energy from the alien machine.”

  She clapped her hands together like a child in front of a surprise birthday cake. Bradshaw grinned.

  “This is so wonderful. I conquered the molecular atomic attraction problem last night, but I just guessed on the energy signatures. And bingo, bango, bongo, we’ve got it!”

  “Do we tell Leo?” Bradshaw asked.

  “Not until we repeat this experiment half a dozen times,” she said, leaning forward.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve made a breakthrough,” he said. “You deserve lunch ”

  She waved a hand at him. “No time.”

  “No time for passing out from hunger either.” He tugged at her arm. She didn’t move. “Come with me, or I’ll bring the sandwiches over here and contaminate your nanoharvesters.”

  She stood instantly. “You don’t play fair, Edwin.”

  He grinned. “I want our resident girl genius to continue wowing the troops.”

  “There aren’t any troops,” she said.

  “There’s me.”

  “Do I wow you, Gramps?”

  “All the time,” he said, clapping her on the shoulder. “All the damn time.”

  June 5, 2018

  8:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  131 Days Until Second Harvest

  Leo Cross’s security bracelet bumped against his wrist. The plastic itched, and he wasn’t used to wearing anything on his right side. His wrist’puter was on his left, and it had taken him years to get used to that. But the bracelet was a small price to pay to be here now.

  He was in Britt’s main lab, surrounded by nearly twenty scientists. A dozen more sat in a special viewing room, with a few special guests. Britt had used her guest pass to invite Mickelson. She had brought Cross into the main area as an adviser.

  Hayes and Shane were on the floor, looking as uncomfortable as Cross was. It was all he could do to keep from standing beside them. He was dodging scurrying people, doing his best to stay out of the way.

  This wasn’t his kind of science. His kind of science involved digging and thinking and a few computerized tools. But Britt’s involved computers everywhere, large screens that relayed information, and smaller equipment for telemetry. Speakers stood on one side of the room, wired into even more computer hardware, to amplify any ambient noise, although no one really expected there to be any.

  They were going on-line with a probe, launched five days ago on an intercept course with the tenth planet. The probe was outfitted with equipment that would send all sorts of information back to Earth, from simple things that Cross would have thought of like visual and audio scans, to more complicated things such as devices that measured temperatures and surface composition. There would be infrared scans, and energy scans, and all sorts of other things that no one had bothered to tell him.

  What he did know was that this was only the first of five probes. The second probe was launched three days ago, and would come on-line tomorrow. The next one would be launched in two days, with the remaining probes launched in rather quick succession.

  The hope was that all of the probes would land on the tenth planet. The predicted best-case scenario was that one of them would get through.

  Cross knew that Britt was worried that none of them would get through, that the aliens would have some sort of orbital defense of the planet. Cross doubted it, though. Never before had those creatures been attacked, at least not by humans.

  Britt was moving from screen to screen, completely focused on getting everything ready. She lingered near the audio area, leaning toward the mathematical readouts. Cross took a step closer. He had seen the trials on this equipment and knew enough to recognize wave patterns and the Fourier Scale, but some of the other work looked completely unfamiliar to him. The physics of sound never interested him very much, not until now, when it suddenly became important.

  Another scientist moved past him. Cross had long ago stopped looking at little name badges attached to the lapels. There were just too many people here he didn’t know. Early on, Britt had tried to introduce him, but he must have gotten that blank overloaded look, because she soon stopped.

  “Coming on-line now,” said the middle-aged redheaded guy up front with a starburst tattoo on his right cheek.

  Cross looked at the screen directly before him, just like the others did. Numbers and figures ran across the screens.

  “Put the telemetry on One,” Britt said. “I want visuals onscreen only.”

  She had warned Cross she would do that. There were particular scientists trained to read the telemetry. Everyone else found it annoying and distracting.

  “No sound except the probe itself,” said one of the women.

  “Readings near the probe are exactly what we expect in space,” said someone else.

  “Visuals coming on-line now,” said the redhead.

  Cross felt the muscles in his back tighten. The screens went blank for a moment, then filled with the blackness of space. Blackness and stars. He wondered how many other aliens were out there, how many other cultures existed on how many distant worlds, worlds he couldn’t even see, not with the help of probes or oversized telescopes.

  He had never expected, in all his years, to learn that aliens existed. And even if they had, he wouldn’t hav
e expected them to be so hostile.

  So far the probe showed nothing new. But Cross didn’t expect it. It was a miracle to get the information back. Ultimately, though, he wanted images of the tenth planet. He wanted to know what the surface looked like, what else the aliens had built besides spaceships and nanoharvesters. He wanted to know as much about them as he did about the ancient cultures he’d been studying his whole life.

  The blackness of space was taunting him.

  All over the world, in war rooms just like this, scientists were looking at these images, and wanting more.

  Suddenly science had become the key to everything. And humans had to work together to solve scientific puzzles that five years ago they hadn’t even known existed.

  More scientists were linked now than ever. More information was being shared than ever before. For the first time in its existence, the Earth was united in a common goal.

  8

  June 15, 2018

  6:02 Universal Time

  121 Days Until Second Harvest

  The command center inside the International Space Station was a pile of ancient computers held together by buckets and bolts. Every time Gail Banks entered it, she half expected to see a pan beneath the so-called ceiling, collecting water drippings, like the house of her childhood. Badly constructed roof, walls that were falling apart, and parts that never should have been glued together. The station was like that, and as more and more modules were built on, no one thought to move the command center. Occasionally one of the countries that worked on the station sent up new computer equipment and it was cobbled onto the rest. The result was a hacker’s paradise, which made a by-the-book woman like Banks want to pull her hair out.

  Especially at a time like this.

  She needed to launch three hundred missiles, and she only had enough equipment in the command center to handle a hundred at a time. She was relying on the shuttles to provide backup. Fortunately, though, her ISS team was a prepared group of hackers, and they had managed to jury-rig something. She wasn’t happy with it, but it would do.

  Her staff was scattered at the various posts. They were top-notch, well trained and ready. She’d already briefed the backup shuttle pilots and the mission control folks back home.