Directive 51

by John Barnes

  “So—the signprint of Daybreak. Clearly there. Jumps out of the numbers like a sore thumb, according to Arnie.” She clicked to the slide.

  Browder, to her surprise, nodded. “If I read that right, the variances are tiny, and the connectedness is huge. That’s not a cloud, that’s a boulder.”

  “That’s right,” she said. Both of them reasonable within a minute of each other. Who’d’ve thunk? “That graph measures basically how distinct Daybreak is from everything else in the noosphere, and you can see it’s very distinct. So since it’s definitely there, the next question is, what is it? And the answer is, to quote my favorite book when I was a kid, ‘Something very much like something no one has ever seen before.’ Daybreak has some of the aspects of a religious cult, an artistic movement, a blogweave, a terror network more like the old al-Qaeda or the Japanese Red Army than like the modern il’Alb il-Jihado network, and some unique features all its own.”

  “But that’s just how they communicate, right?” Browder asked. “What are they?”

  “What are they, like—”

  “Engineers or Catholics, old people, women, I guess I’m asking who, what do they have in common other than Daybreak?”

  “Well, it’s a bunch of people who only agree that they hate the Big System, but they literally spend two to four hours a day making and consuming messages of one kind or another to each other about that. You could think of it as a mutual-hypnosis hate-the-Big-System club, maybe. No central office keeps them on message, either, it sort of runs by local consensus. They seem to have no permanent organization any bigger than three-to-twenty-person AGs.”

  “AGs?” Browder asked.

  Crittenden said, “Affinity group. Anarchist idea, goes back to the mid 1970s, sort of like a self-organized exec committee; team of people who are doing something or other they all think is the most important thing to do.”

  “Uh, yeah.” Jim’s resemblance to the Incredible Hulk, gone old and soft with drinking, was especially noticeable when he raised one side of his single, massive brow. “And the Big System is what, the Trilateral Commission? The Catholic Church? The Elders of Zion? The Man?”

  “The totality of plastic and computers, advertising and pornography, pop music and space travel, nuclear power and celebrities, everything that makes money, attracts attention in the media, or just originated after the Civil War. To Daybreakers, the whole freakin’ modern world is all just an avatar of the Big System.”

  Browder’s tone sprayed mockery over them all. “And a pack of romantic loons like that is a threat?”

  Stand your ground, Heather, he’s just a big bully, and you could drop him with one punch. She made a point of sighing. “Future threat—maybe. That’s our territory; if they were trouble right now, we’d be handing them off to the NDI or the FBI.”

  “Which is what I favor doing,” Allie put in, making Browder jump. He tends to forget where the real authority is in the room, Heather thought.

  He was softer but just as sarcastic when he asked, “And—repeating my question—who are these scary-talking weird people?”

  “Well, here in the States, it’s some of everything: greenie granola hippies with windmills on their goat sheds, wannabe mountain-man racist tax resisters, dope-farmer computer hackers, oddball fundamentalists who think bar codes are the Mark of the Beast, ex-Special Forces snake-eating back-to-Jefferson types.”

  Noel Crittenden coughed and tented his hands. “That does not mean they aren’t dangerous, Browder. Who’d’ve thought the Nation of Islam could have worked with the Panthers and the SCLC? Or that de Gaulle could put together the French Resistance out of a dozen factions ranging from royalists to commies? Don’t underrate the power of a common enemy. If I may ask—what do they mean by Daybreak?”

  Heather said, “The event that breaks the Big System, causes it to go down so it never comes up again. They almost always capitalize Daybreak, like the Revolution or the Rapture.”

  Crittenden nodded seriously. “And it’s international?”

  “Dr. Yang reports that over seventy percent of the messages with identifiable locations are outside the US. There’s one mostly Asian cult, geeky engineers in Tokyo and Seoul, who read a lot of Tolkien and think that once the iron all rusts, the elves will come back. They might be the scariest of all; those guys are burned-out, frustrated engineers and technicians—single men in their forties with great salaries whose lives have gone by with no prospect of starting a family, sitting in concrete boxes full of pricey toys in Osaka or Seoul, figuring out where the modern industrial system is vulnerable.

  “And plenty of others—young Islamic fundamentalist men, stuck sitting on their asses in perpetual unemployment, who want the good stuff they’d have had in 1400. Hindu fundamentalists, ditto except they mean 1400 B.C.

  “What scares me the most is that they’re not all loser-nuts; far from it, there are a lot more dissatisfied successes. People with serious tech skills who aren’t finding happiness in a big paycheck, who sit in comfortable apartments beating off to American porn on the web and insisting that life should have a meaning.”

  Crittenden made a face. “ ‘Whenever some damn idiot starts wanting life to have meaning, he finishes by helping other people to meaningless deaths.’ ”

  Graham grinned. “Source?”

  “Me, of course. In my first textbook. Out of print now.” Crittenden’s smile stayed on when he turned from Graham’s not-at-all-subtle flattery back to Heather.

  Thanks, Graham! This could be worse. She explained, “Meaning-of-life stuff accounts for the usual-suspects component of Daybreak, too. French poets who think any words that resonate must be true. German performance artists who want to overthrow the tyranny of words and live in a world of pure action. Popomos looking for something to replace the Revolution. Back-to-peasantry long-bearded Tolstoy wannabes.

  “The really big innovation with the ‘Daybreak’ crowd is that they don’t talk about purpose, plan, or program anymore. It’s Daybreak for Daybreak’s sake. They often say, ‘The point is, there’s no point.’ ”

  “Why do it if there’s no point?” Browder snarled, now more angry than amused.

  “The Daybreakers would say, ‘Why do it if there is a point?’ The idea is that they’d all like to blow up all the Wal-Marts, so why worry about which reason—”

  The door opened, and Arnie came in. “Heather,” he said, “something big.”

  “Um, Arnie, I’ll call you when it’s time to—”

  “Lenny Plekhanov had some extra time and people this morning and they got a breakthrough on the keys for Daybreak, so we caught up with one—”

  “Arnie, we’re—”

  Arnie stopped leaning forward, stopped gesticulating, and stood as still as if he were at attention; that stopped Heather when nothing else would have. In a perfectly normal conversational voice, not moving a muscle, he said, “Heather. Secretary Weisbrod. I’m sorry, but it’s urgent. Daybreak started today, at midnight, GMT. There are at least nine hundred AGs reporting they’ve started their actions, which means maybe seven thousand people doing some kind of sabotage or other for Daybreak just here in the States, right now. That’s just what I’ve been able to attach an ID to. I’m guessing there are maybe as many as twenty thousand. Probably three or four times that overseas. Up to a hundred thousand participants worldwide.”

  They all sat, stunned, and it was Crittenden who broke the silence. He stared out the window at the trees, red and gold in the autumn morning sun, as if somewhere in the wild colors, there were a puzzle to be solved. “A group of saboteurs the size of a medium-sized national army—”

  Browder snorted. “With no point and no plan. And many of them seem to be people who couldn’t get a job delivering Domino’s.”

  Crittenden speared Browder with his over-the-reading-glasses stare. The heavy, rumpled man sat back, as if startled; Heather thought, I’m glad I never had a late paper with that guy.

  The old professor’s mouth crooked sard
onically. “You haven’t been listening. Engineers, technicians, applied scientists—dissatisfied successes, in Heather’s useful phrase. And if that’s ten percent of their movement, that’s all they need; a pizza-delivery boy can carry a bomb if someone builds it for him.” He glanced back at Heather. “You had me once you said they were leaderless and programless. Daybreak sounds far too much like nihilism or futurism, back around 1900.”

  Browder shrugged ostentatiously. “The world lived through that.”

  Crittenden shook his head as if Browder were trying to BS through an oral quiz and not convincing anyone. “Better a high card you know in another man’s hand than a joker loose in the deck. The nihilists’ thirty years of bombings and assassinations smoothed the road for Lenin and communism in a dozen different ways. The Futurists . . . well, Marinetti, their founder, was among the first intellectuals to support Mussolini. So before Dr. Yang entered, I was about to say, Heather was absolutely right to bring this to our attention.” He favored Heather with a sardonic smile. “But Dr. Yang’s news has convinced me that we should not be worried. We should be scared. Heather, if there’s anything my office can do to help you determine what we’re dealing with, please call me at once.”

  “I know I can count on all of you,” Heather said.

  Graham was beaming at her, leaning back against the wall just below the poster Heather had given him. She’d found an old magazine in the library with a perfect article title—and the facing page for the article had depicted a robot taking dictation on an old-fashioned steno pad, a typist in a space helmet, and a woman doing her nails in front of what appeared to be some sort of gigantic computer console—all those images surrounding the caption THE SECRETARY OF THE FUTURE!

  She’d had it blown up to poster size as a gag gift; Graham had insisted on hanging it in the conference room to remind everyone how silly it was to spend your life trying to predict the unpredictable.

  Her old teacher dropped her a wink; in that instant, it was like he’d seated her on the couch by his fireplace, handed her a drink, and heard her troubles out—something he’d done often enough in reality.

  Browder was still sitting where Crittenden’s glare had frozen him; with a grudging nod, he said, “Let me see how many resources I can shift to cover the technical side of Daybreak.”

  Allie looked up from her notes and grinned; Graham was already smiling at her; and it was left to Arnie to spoil the mood by saying, “Well, by the way, it’s nice that everyone agrees, but we probably are under attack.”

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WYOMING STATE HIGHWAY 789, NEAR BAGGS, WYOMING. 7:50 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.

  Jason had placed sixteen eggs; the most entertaining one was right on the crotch of the smiling cowgirl on a neon sign over the gate of a roadhouse. Wish I could’ve jumped higher, I could’ve put black-egg nipples on her neon-tube boobs.

  The two-lane road had climbed up into the park-and-pass country, where whenever a car came the other way, both drivers would raise a hand off the wheel in salute, kind of an I know we are both here that always made him feel like he was finally out among the real people. Most of the other cars were SUVs, but after all, he was driving a big old F-150 himself, the only thing they’d been able to find that was cheap, untraceable, and old enough not to rely on as much electronics, so that it stood a chance of finishing the trip.

  Anyway, up here, where you could be coping with ground blizzards, deer and cattle on the road, snowdrifts, washouts, all kinds of whatnot, Jason saw no problem with pickups or even the old SUVs.

  Emily back at the commune said people used their SUVs for evil things like hunting and going to logging jobs. He’d had a lot of good arguments with Emily about that.

  The coolest thing about Daybreak: Almost everyone thought something about the Big System was all right, even positive. But when you put everyone together, you could compromise and agree, hey, we’ll get rid of the thing you hate, if I can get rid of the thing that I hate, and when you were all done, there’d be no Big System left.

  A solar sign in the middle of an old clear cut announced to the saplings and brush that there was NO MESSAGE—DRIVE SAFE. He needed the stepladder this time to leave two more little black eggs.

  He rolled on, glorious coustajam cranked to rattle the windows, the F- 150 tracing the edges of gulches and crossing steep-sided creeks on high truss bridges—almost like flying, with the land coming up and falling away.

  In the last low hills, the small, stunted trees thinned out. The park was all rich browns and grays, dried out and ready for winter, with just streaks of green, gold, and yellow where aspens and cottonwoods revealed creeks. About a dozen pronghorns ran away from the road as the old truck roared by. “Soon, guys,” Jason said. “Soon. Your grandchildren won’t have any idea what an engine means.”

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. SENTANI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, JAYAPURA, PAPUA, INDONESIA. MIDNIGHT, LOCAL TIME. OCTOBER 28 JUST BECOMING OCTOBER 29.

  The ground crew weren’t happy. Guns pointed at them made their unhappiness irrelevant. One or two of them had tried to explain that you couldn’t use auto body paint on an airplane and expect it to look like anything, but the small man with the big mustache and the rage in his eyes had caressed the pistol on his hip, and now they were working fast, painting out the Lion Airways insignia on the 737.

  They worked from ladders and scissor lifts, using mops, long-handled brushes, even brooms. The drums of white paint stood open all over the hangar, emitting clouds of strong fumes, enough to make men sick. The mustached man said to vomit if they had to but keep working.

  He walked over to look at the three captured Americans; the dark-skinned, short man was dead or unconscious, not surprising after the beating they’d given him. He flipped the motionless man over with his boot toe; the open eyes were dried and dull.

  The tall white man and the skinny woman lay huddled against each other. In one of your stupid movies, he thought, you would fall in love, overpower all of us, and escape to save the world, but here in reality, you cling to each other like a refugee child clings to a stuffed animal. It is pleasant to see that expression in an American’s eyes instead of a refugee child’s.

  He could see no gain in separating the man and the woman, so he returned to shouting at the impromptu paint crew. Already, the Lion Airways insignia was more than half covered; they were at least a half hour ahead of schedule.

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. GILLETTE, WYOMING. JUST BEFORE 9:00 A.M. MST. OCTOBER 28.

  Zach coasted up to the next recycling cart on his mud-spattered single-speed pink girl’s bicycle. He still rode awkwardly with his large bags of plastic bottles; he hoped people would think it was because he was drunk. He threw the lid back and glanced around. The first ten seconds was the highest risk—it wouldn’t look like a real bum stealing plastic. One more look around; surely it looked realistic for a bum stealing recyclable plastic to be paranoid?

  Zach didn’t know much about being homeless, and even less about being a drunk. The cheap whiskey he’d poured all over his clothes was all the liquor he’d ever bought in his life.

  His heart was pounding. Oh, well . . . Step One, here we go. Zach dumped his front left bag into the recycling cart—whoever heard of a bum putting plastic bottles into the trash? He mixed them thoroughly with the bottles that were already there, stirring with the yardstick he carried. Wonder if this looks like I’m looking for something?

  Step Two was less conspicuous. He scrounged in the recycling cart, looking like any other bum as he filled up his bag, not worrying about happening to take back a few of the bottles he had just deposited there.

  He hoped Step Three would look weird enough. He pulled out a Dad’s Root Beer two-liter bottle with a wadded paper napkin inside and uncapped it, retching at the smell. No question, Bugs and DarwinsActor had known their stuff; the inside of the bottle smelled like a fart from a sick cat, and the clear surface was already spotted with cloudy slime. From his coat pocket, he drew a whiskey bottle filled with a
mix of beef broth, molasses, and fine-chopped plastic bottles, swirled it, and splashed about a teaspoon into the plastic bottle, taking care to soak the infected napkin.

  He carefully left the Dad’s bottle on the top of the heap in the recycling cart; holes would form within an hour, and the solution would drizzle down through the cart.

  If anyone in authority asked about the care he took of that special Dad’s bottle, he would explain that it was demonic and he had to sacrifice his whiskey to it and send it away before it destroyed all his plastic.

  That made him laugh to himself in a convincingly weird way. So close to the truth, no one would believe it.

  “Hey, shithead!”

  Zach turned around slowly. Scrawny, red-skinned old white man. Bad leg, visible cataract, about six flannel shirts. “This here block is mine,” the man said. “You don’t take no plastic from it.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was your territory. In fact, let me give you a couple bottles from my bag.” Zach handed him two seed bottles; he had more than he would need and was supposed to improvise with some of them.

  “That’s real nice a-you,” the man said, “ ’Preciate it.” As he went to tuck the bottle into the huge bag he carried, he caught a whiff, and said, “These smell awful, where’d you get them?”

  “Some kids’ party house I think. Think they maybe pissed in ’em. They’re still money.”

  “Yeah.” The old man reached out and tapped his shoulder in what was probably intended as a friendly gesture. “Got any money? Want to come in and drink or something?”