by John Barnes
Heather really didn’t like the way Allie nodded at that.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE, WYOMING. 5:12 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
DarwinsActor reminded Zach of the jackass science students back in college, but he still had to listen to the weird little turd of a man explain how they were going to break into the holding bin at the Gillette Municipal Plastics Recycling Facility.
They’d already been over it a few dozen times; this particular Daybreak AG should probably have called itself Team Obsessive Compulsive. Especially me, Zach added to himself. Thank you, Jesus, for letting me see the beam in my own eye, even if it makes me struggle with seeing the mote in his.
DarwinsActor had a hooked nose, one of those vague East Coast accents, a slim, too-hairy little body that made you think maybe he was evolved from a monkey, anyway, and a dab hand at genetically modifying bacteria. He wore an old military-style coat over a torn sweater, a paint-spattered black watch cap, and ripped jeans; all six men in the AG were in bum outfits, sitting in the dark interior of the RV in the freezing predawn of Wyoming October.
Bugs—the other biologist in the team—finally said, “Dar, it’s time, and we all know our parts. Let’s just do it.”
Zach disliked Bugs much less than he disliked DarwinsActor, even though both of them were always trying to put in all that unnecessary evolution crap about how their part of Daybreak would work. DarwinsActor himself had said that they had targeted this facility exactly because it was so badly run that it was practically designed for Daybreak; somehow that never made those bioweenies like DarwinsActor and Bugs realize there had to be an Operator for the universe, too—one Who had designed it for what needed to be done. It was funny how these science guys never thought of anything important; that would need fixing, some day.
But not right now, Zach reminded himself sternly. That’s the beauty of Daybreak. First Daybreak, then everything else.
Zach cleared his throat. “Bugs is right, let’s just get it done.”
ChemEWalker said, “I’m with Bugs and WalksWDLord. That’s a majority. No more talk. Let’s go now.”
Took me a moment to remember WalksWDLord is me, Zach thought. I’ve only seen it typed, mostly.
The six men slipped out of the RV. It made Zach nervous to carry his end of a big plastic tub filled with two-liter pop bottles of black powder. He and ChemEWalker were carrying the first tub; as a precaution, the others gave them a hundred-yard head start. Zach didn’t like thinking about what it was a precaution against. He had plenty of faith in the little microprocessor /RC detonators buried in the black powder in each bottle because he’d built them himself, but he was edgy about the stability of the black powder, even though ChemEWalker was a chemical engineer and a fellow Stewardship Christian.
Lord, help me trust my fellow workers in this great endeavor. Lord, also, steady our hands, and don’t let us trip.
Bugs had said black-powder explosions were cool enough and low pressure enough not to hurt the biotes on their way to their destiny. We all have to trust each other, Zach reminded himself. No AG works without that. No doubt they’re all worried about the radio detonators because WalksWDLord is a crazy Christian.
They stayed on the smooth concrete path; SirWalksALot had scouted it in daylight, and they knew there were no stairs and usually no obstructions. The operator here was too cheap to hire a guard, relying on the distance from town to keep the bums out of the recyclables.
At the holding bin, Zach and ChemEWalker gently set down their tubs in the deep shadow. Surrounded by a chest-high chain-link fence, the concrete tub, the size of a semi trailer, yawned empty; tomorrow it would receive a fresh load of plastic from the city, filling it almost to the top.
The two Christians bowed their heads and held hands. “Lord Jesus,” Zach prayed, “let this be the first step in cleansing Your Earth. Bring off Daybreak and bring us a world fit for our children to grow up in. Let what we do be done according to Your will. Amen.”
ChemEWalker echoed, “Amen.”
Zach pulled out his bolt cutters, took the lock neatly off the chain-link gate, opened it, and descended the short iron ladder into the bin. ChemEWalker began handing him down the two-liter bombs, and Zach placed them using an equilateral triangle of PVC pipe twenty centimeters on a side, to space them roughly an equal distance apart. When he had placed about twenty, the others returned, and after that, the swift, silent work, in all but total darkness except for the pinprick stars above the bin, went very swiftly.
It was still night-dark when Zach, GreenCop, and SirWalksALot climbed out of the concrete pit, whose bottom was now covered with evenly spaced bombs. DarwinsActor handed him the laptop, and Zach logged into his secret account, clicked a couple of buttons, and said, “The weather stations are all reporting; the bottles are all reporting; they’ve confirmed messages between each other. We’re good to go. Arming now.”
He realized all six men were holding their breath, and he wanted to grumble that he had trusted the biologists to make the organisms, ChemEWalker to make the black powder, and everyone else to carry the tubs and not drop them. But he supposed they were entitled to nervousness too.
The list scrolled by. “They’re all armed and talking to each other. Let’s go.”
He started the computer’s hard drive reformatting on the laptop as they walked back, and left it under the front tire of the RV; when they pulled out, the brief, grinding crushing sound under the tire meant that nobody, ever, could retrieve the codes to disarm the system. “The sweet crunch of commitment,” DarwinsActor said, and for once, Zach didn’t find him irritating at all. Thank you, Lord, he thought, and almost jumped at the coincidence when Bugs said, “Amen.”
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. JAYAPURA, PAPUA PROVINCE, INDONESIA. 9:25 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
The local police called back in about two hours, and Armand Cooper thought that had to be a good sign; if they were in on the riot or had instigated it, they’d have pretended he’d never called them. “We would like you to stay down very low behind furniture,” the police captain said; his English was excellent, with a mild Delhi accent. “We are going to try to put a perimeter between your building and the crowd. We do not think they are serious because, you know, if they were, they would have broken down your door by now, but accidents can happen with such a crowd, you know, and we’d like to make sure it doesn’t.”
“I agree completely,” Cooper said.
The captain laughed. “Good, you are in good spirits. Have you been hurt?”
“No.”
“And you can reach food and water, without showing yourself through the window? We need to make sure you have no snipers before you stand up.”
“It’s dark in here, and shots have been bouncing off the windows,” he said. “I can chance it if there’s a reason, but I don’t think there’s much of one yet.”
“Well, the infrared scopes are cheap and standard now, and a shot upward from a handgun in the street might bounce off, but I would not want to bet the same thing would happen if it were to be a high-powered rifle coming straight through the glass.”
“I’ll trust your expertise.”
Another laugh. “Stay low. Wait for us. Don’t get hurt. We’ll be there soon. And sometime you and I will have lunch and talk about all this and laugh very much.”
“I’ll enjoy that.”
After they rang off, Cooper stretched and smiled. Police service this good could only mean one thing—the captain needed some favor an American consul could do. Maybe a visa to spend a year visiting a sister in LA, maybe a cousin in immigration trouble in New York, it didn’t matter much. Cooper’s father had been on the Board of Public Works in Terre Haute, and he’d often thought that was great preparation for the way things got done in Jayapura. Whatever he wants, he’s getting it.
Shortly, there were a few shots and some angry shouting, followed by some general uproar. Cooper crept over to the window and peeked through, looking down, and saw the cops with t
heir helmets, batons, and shields shoving the crowd back. It was noisy but halfhearted somehow, the mark of a mostly-paid mob. Hunh. More projects for the next week. Find out who paid them and why. Yes indeed, that captain is getting whatever he wants.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. EAGLE, COLORADO. 5:30 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
Jason had slept well when he hadn’t expected to, and that made him hate Super 8 even more. Last night he had expected to be awake all night: too soft a bed, sheets that smelled totally chemical, no sound of wildlife, the couple in the next room watching TV and quarreling. No friendly snores from his buds. No Beth cuddled against him. But here he was, well-rested, seduced by comfort.
He opened the curtains on the big west-facing window, sat cross-legged on the bed, breathed, and meditated. Across the dark parking lot . . . why should there be so many cars? So many ripping-outs of the guts of the mother. So many people who didn’t need to go anywhere going everywhere. So many scars on the planet. His gaze rose steadily upward from the rows of shiny metal and plastic earth-trashers to the dark mountains against the just-lightening sky.
Dawn among the bones of the Earth, he thought, then tried:
Truth comes at dawn.
No, too Hemingway.
Creation begins in my inner unfogged eyes.
Oh, yeah, needed to remember that. Might be my first line. No! Whoa—prewriting the poem; monkey mind. He watched the slow forming of the light in the air and on the stone and pines, and let it be in his mind, without words.
You had it right there, the statement of everything:
the mountains and the parking lot.
Title, or first line? Let it be whichever it would be. Let it be like the Earth, let it be, just accept. He breathed it all in pairs,
mountains and parking lot,
trees and cars,
plastic and wood,
metal and stone
free elk and cheap plaztatic doublewides
beautiful bears and ugly wires
brave mountain goats and chickenshit tourists in buses
asshole sales directors like my dumb-ass father—
No. Corny, personal, not dichotomous. Besides, Dad sometimes googled Jason, read his poetry, and wrote annoying little notes about how talented he thought Jason was and how happy he was that Jason was keeping up with his writing.
Like I need support from an asshole sales director.
Damn monkey mind.
Shut up, brain, or I’ll stab you with a Q-tip. Not original, joking with himself. Congratulating himself on the jokes. Damn monkey. Damn monkey.
Supposedly you could eliminate monkey mind by paying it some extra attention, rewarding it even; ook ook ook, anybody want a banana with barbiturate?
His felt his mind dash about, demanding his attention, until once again, as lightly as a soap bubble, it rested in the V of indigo between the black mountains, balancing the seductive warmth of the hotel room and the humanity and spirit of the cold hillsides. The crystal of a first line—insistent, an elegant angel of truth, banishing the monkey—started to form in his mind.
Carefully, watching the stacked cardboard boxes in the corner as if they could leap out and attack, he pulled his laptop from his pack. It was in a double Ziploc with a scattering of Drano crystals in the bottom. He held the bag up to the light; the crystals were all still well formed, and the litmus paper was reassuringly blue.
He plugged his laptop in and set it on the little fakewood circular table facing the big window. He breathed reverently and slowly. The disk zummed to life. Software booted up, offered him menus, connected to the wi-fi, faithfully went about its work.
“I’m going to pull kind of a dirty trick on you,” he whispered to his laptop, “but it’s for a good cause and it has to be done. Just the same, I know I’ll miss you, little buddy.”
Silent mighty strength of the eternal mountains.
Little town of Eagle—little settlement, really, use a colonialist word for a colonialist thing, or pocket of people, nothing you could dignify with a grand word like village.
Pointless neon. Vulgar little fakey business fronts. People who ate too much and thought too little.
The blank document was ready. He spoke softly into the microphone, let himself flow into his words, his singing glorious words against the Big System, full of love for all the beautiful good in the world and rage for the fat bastards keeping all the good and gentle people away from it.
When he finished, he read through it twice, treasuring the way it fit so neatly into the sunlight now caressing the tips of the mountains. “Command, post document, anon poet channel,” he said. The screen glowed back with posted. Through Super 8’s wi-fi, words of magic and power found their way from him to the mighty stream of Daybreak.
He pulled on heavy-duty gloves, dampened a rag with Liquid-Plumr, and wiped all over the laptop and the table around it. Then he blasted through all the laptop’s ports with a can of compressed air and wiped its surfaces again. The rag went into a plastic bread bag, which he dropped in the wastebasket. Each glove went back into its own Ziploc; he’d be needing them all day, so he put them in his “dirty” bag—an old laptop case—with his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, pliers, screwdrivers, and tubes of glue.
He wiped his computer with distilled water, then propped up the laptop to dry. He dipped the ends of the power cord into some Liquid-Plumr in a cup, rinsed them in the sink, dried them with toilet paper, and stowed the power cord in a plastic bread bag with more Drano crystals. By then the laptop was dry enough to go into its special home among the Drano crystals in the Ziploc.
With everything he was keeping closed up tight in the pack, he took it down to set it into a closed plastic trash can in the passenger seat’s foot well. He pulled out his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, duct tape, and protective gloves, set them on the passenger seat, and sealed on the can’s lid with duct tape.
Wearing the gloves, he hauled down his boxes of egg cartons. His clothes from the day before, and the contents of all the wastebaskets, went into a garbage bag, which he discreetly emptied into the open bed of an old pickup in the parking lot, adding it to the heap of construction junk, rusty tools, and old pop cans. He turned the bag inside out and left it blowing around in the parking lot.
After checkout, he plunged right into the Big System’s comfort trap, just this once: the free Continental breakfast of plaztatic corporate bagels, probably-made-from-petroleum cream cheese, grease-and-sugar doughnuts, and the inexcusably transported, chilled, and probably-crawling-with-pesticides orange juice, and plenty of corporate coffee. What the hell, it came with the room.
All around him were loser biz guys: goopy bags of lard and fascism, empty heads poking out above neckties, men like his dad and brother, eyes dead and shoulders drooping, stuffing in plaztatic petroleum pastry, engrossed in little grunty conversations over their USA Todays, about Game Seven of the World Series, about the upcoming election, about ten billion reasons to rape the mountains and scar the land.
Daybreak begins today.
Wake-up call for all the fat bastards of the world.
He got on the road half an hour late, but what the hell, it was a freedom mission, and there might as well be a little freedom in it. The old truck had a stereo thing that Elton had set up, along with a special flash drive just for this trip, one to be left somewhere and picked up by some poor stupid fuck when Jason was done. The flash held hours of awesome coustajam and ambvo, to keep Jason feeling good all day, and if it died, that would warn him that the nanospawn was beginning to eat into the truck itself.
He had another poetic flash; that little flash drive was like the canary in the coal mine. You could enjoy the music, but its real purpose was to let him know what was really going on, by when it died. “Silicon Canary”—definitely a poem title. Maybe a band name—some of the coustajam bands were pretty aware, maybe one of them should call itself that.
The mountains in the early-morning light were glorious. The truck’s heater worked well enough
to keep him warm in the crisp morning, Marty Beelman’s amazing “Mount Elbert Jam”—Aaron Copland beatjected onto acoustic guitar and spirit drums—boomed from the speakers, and the sky was that deep blue that he was sure they did not have anywhere else in the world anymore. But you will, he thought. You will.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OVER THE WESTERN PACIFIC, JUST NORTH OF THE EQUATOR, ABOUT 650 KILOMETERS SOUTH OF THE ISLAND OF KUSAIE. JUST PAST THE MIDNIGHT TERMINATOR, SO IT IS 12:40 A.M. LOCAL TIME. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29.
They had taken the bag off Samuelson’s head and roughly scrubbed him with a wet towel, so he only stank slightly of vomit; he was in a T-shirt and a pair of underwear, tied by the ankles to his bed in the private cabin, sitting upright.
After an interminable time, the door opened. Two of the young men came in. They dragged in a man in a suit; Samuelson recognized Taylor, one of the Secret Service special agents, more by his build than by his bruised and battered face.
“This man can do you no harm,” Samuelson said. “Let me clean him up. We cannot escape, and—”
One of the men backhanded him across his face. Then they turned to Taylor; he was breathing but seemed unconscious. One of the men drew a box cutter and slit the Secret Service man’s throat, an arc of arterial blood spraying onto the walls of the compartment, staining the American flag and the pictures of past presidents.
Samuelson could do nothing but watch the man die, and at that, he’s probably lucky. Yet he had to ask. “Why? Why did you do this?”
He had not expected an answer, but in perfect, almost-accentless English, the leader of the group said, “Because we can, and because we want you to know we can.”
They left Samuelson with the corpse, propped up so that he seemed to be looking at Samuelson from the depths of sleep or stupor. The vice president thought about looking away, curling up, doing something not to see, but he would still smell the blood no matter what, he would still know the broken body was there; he preferred to know with his eyes open.
