by Al Macy
Marie shook her head even though she had, in fact, seen it before. Once she and her first husband had sneezed at the same time. During sex. Funny. No big deal.
“Well, Marie, I can tell you that I’ve never seen it. I guess it could happen, I mean we all sneeze all the time. Well not all the time, but you know what I mean, it’s what you’d call a common occurrence. You know, it happens a lot. That we sneeze, I mean. But I think it’s a little surprising that we both sneezed at the same time, even though I’m sure you don’t because nothing surprises you.”
Marie was glad she wasn’t allowed to carry a gun. They drove out of the parking lot and the pain hit. Madge flailed around, but Marie just clenched her teeth and put on the brakes. Well, that was surprising.
* * *
Wunderkind Alex Carter penciled in a change on the schematic diagram in front of him. The change would improve the device’s throughput. He shook his head. How could anybody miss that? He held up the schematic and pointed to the modification.
His twin brother Martin looked up from his soldering, squinted at the paper, and said, “Absolutely. Much better. I wonder why they didn’t think of that.” Both teenagers had long faces and rebellious hair. The jury was out on whether they’d ever grow out of their nerdy looks.
They’d designed and built their workroom, with green laminate counters, high-efficiency task lights, and tools laid out on a pegboard wall. A central table let them sit across from one another and interact while they worked. Their mom made them keep the door closed so the whole house wouldn’t smell of solder.
When Martin glanced back down to his circuit board, the sneeze hit them both. They laughed.
“What are the chances of that?” Alex asked.
“Let’s see.” Martin soldered a capacitor to the circuit board while he talked. “Let’s say you and I sneeze, on average, once every … three days. So, twenty-four times—”
“Aren’t you forgetting something, Einstein?”
“What?” said Martin.
“Sleeping. People tend to not sneeze in their sleep, or hadn’t you noticed?” Alex had one finger on the schematic and another on the parts list. “And you have to assume the sneezes are independent.”
“Yeah, okay. So, three sixteen-hour days comes out to about … 173,000 seconds. Hand me the Tronex cutters.”
“Get them yourself. They’re on your side. And we define simultaneous as …”
“Say, within .1 seconds of one another.” Martin picked up the cutters and snipped the capacitor leads.
Alex released a diode from its packaging. “Okay, so the chance that we’ll sneeze at the same time, for a three-day period is—”
“One chance in 1,730,000.”
The twins continued their soldering and reasoning, and estimated that there was a one in two-hundred-three chance of them both sneezing simultaneously at some point in their lifetimes.
They were identical except for the color of their hair. Both hated being mistaken for the other, so they’d decided, at age five, to implement color coding. Thus Alex’s hair was Alex-Aqua and Martin’s, Martin-Magenta. Their mom wasn’t thrilled about having day-glo kids, but they manipulated her by first suggesting distinctive nose-rings and tattoos.
The system worked perfectly. People could not only tell them apart but also remember their names.
Both kids had IQs among the highest ever measured. At eighteen months of age, Alex could read a newspaper. At age three, Martin could solve difficult math problems. Other children had achieved similar feats—Adam Kirby of England reportedly potty-trained himself at one after reading a book about it—but a set of twins this precocious had never existed.
They had learned many languages as if by magic, and, of course, developed their own, with a unique alphabet. Because of its simplicity, it was an improvement over every other on Earth. Linguists drooled over it, with a “why didn’t we think of this?” attitude, and lobbied to have it adopted worldwide.
For example, since there was a strict one-to-one relationship between phonemes and characters, spelling was never an issue. Every word was spelled the way it sounded. If the world adopted this language, spelling tests would go away.
The twins also had an unmatched aptitude for machines. Given the plan for a complex device, they could quickly understand how it worked and even suggest improvements.
Apart from those things, they were normal teenagers, and their mom raised them intelligently, with the advice, of course, of a board of elite scientists and psychologists.
When the pain gripped the twins, Martin burned his finger with the soldering iron, and Alex dropped a box of resistors.
* * *
While watching the first episode of Breaking Bad, Louis Corby had had an epiphany. At the end of the show, God spoke directly to him. Louis blinked rapidly, seeing both God and the end credits at the same time. What is happening? He hit the off button, but God remained. High-def God, in extreme closeup. God frowned.
“Go back to school, Louis,” said high-def God.
Louis was a concentration-camp version of his younger brother. He and Jake had started out looking like twins, but a steady diet of mental illness had taken its toll on Louis. He was no stranger to visions and answered right away. “I am in graduate school, Lord. I am studying your word. I—”
“Make methamphetamine, Louis.”
“What, Lord?”
“Louis, I know you heard me.” The supreme being was still frowning.
More blinking. Louis reached over to the desk, picked up the latest printout of his doctoral thesis, and held it inches from the screen. “But Lord, my doctoral thesis—”
“Cast it away, Louis.”
Louis stared at the screen with a slack jaw, but he was a dutiful servant of God. Even though his doctoral thesis, Socio-Economic Factors Contributing to Christian Fundamentalism, was only weeks away from completion, he tossed it into the virtual trash can. He browsed to the university’s course catalog and registered for an undergraduate double major in chemistry and business administration.
With years of manic studying, an emaciated Louis Corby graduated near the top of his class. Three years after that, he was the number one producer and distributor of methamphetamine in Kansas City. He paid off all his student loans and had a fortune in cash. The Lord’s plan worked well for Louis Corby. Thank you, Lord.
On May 22, he was alone, hunched over his laptop, slaving over a new system of pill production when the sneeze and pain hit him. He barely noticed.
CHAPTER THREE
May 22, 2018
Charli organized her thoughts as she and the president entered the White House videoconference room. Secretary of Defense Gordon Guccio was sitting on the table, dangling his feet. His lifestyle was the opposite of Charli’s. She’d once heard him explain that if you don’t move it, it won’t wear out. Donuts, hard liquor, cigarettes. His gut struggled against his shirt like a porpoise in a canvas sling, but he seemed comfortable with that. He did nothing to hide it. Charli liked and respected him.
“Guccio, your mom didn’t teach you that tables aren’t for sitting on?” Charli walked over and slapped his foot.
“Tables? Fugetaboutit. When we was growing up, we couldn’t afford no stinking tables.” Guccio exaggerated his Bronx accent and then switched to a flawless upper-crust dialect, looking wistful. “Ah, had I only been able to attend Andover Academy and MIT.”
“No tables in reform school, huh?” Charli said.
“Andover. Party school!” The president’s chief of staff Maddix Young said this in a singsong voice and mimed the act of drinking beer.
Young was the neatest person in the room, even neater than Charli, with coordinated clothing choices and camera-ready hair. He was also an albino. Without makeup, his pale skin and colorless hair was striking—he looked like an alien creature. He’d confided in Charli that he’d grown tired of having people stare at him on the street, so he laboriously applied makeup each morning. His face paint let him pass
as a normal, pale man with surfer-blond hair.
“What does it take to get you guys to be serious?” Hallstrom asked.
“Hey, she started it.” Guccio pointed at Charli with his whole arm.
For Charli, the best parts of her job, the parts she looked forward to every day, were these inner-circle meetings, which always started with silliness.
“Okay, the official bantering period stops now.” The president stood at the front of the room in a short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar. “Let’s figure out what we know and what we should do. An emergency session of the UN General Assembly has been called, and Maddix will be attending that. He’ll relay anything we come up with in this meeting.
“Dr. Seth McGraw is the head of our SETI program. He’ll be flying out here to be the science lead, but today he’s joining us via satellite from Mountain View, California. Welcome Dr. McGraw.” Hallstrom gestured toward the monitor.
McGraw seemed a little off balance from observing the silliness, as if he thought he’d tuned into the wrong channel. He’d get used to it.
“We’re not assuming this is extraterrestrial, right?” Guccio looked from the president to the image of McGraw on the monitor.
“Certainly not.” Hallstrom crossed his arms. “That’s one possibility, but—”
“And we might even—” said Young.
The president held up his hands, palms out. “Hold on, guys. Let’s get a little further into it before we start interrupting each other. Charli, have you found Jake Corby?”
“No, that looks like it’s going to take some time and effort. Can you tell me why he’s so important?”
Hallstrom raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t you worked with Jake before?”
Charli frowned. “On part of one case. I agree he’s smart, but why is he so important?”
“He’s more than smart. He was the world’s top hostage negotiator, but that’s not why I want him. I want him because he’s an insightful problem-solver.”
“Well, I’m working on it.” Nothing but dead ends so far. “How much effort do we put into locating him?”
“Top priority. I want this guy on the team. It would be like Jake to want to disappear, and he had, or has, the smarts and resources to do it well.” A grin flashed onto Hallstrom’s face. “You’ve probably heard some of the stories about him.”
“Not really.”
“Tell the one about the prize patrol,” Young said, and the others smiled or laughed.
“Right.” Hallstrom paused as if taking a moment to assemble the story. “This was a sting that Jake thought up, and it’s since been used around the country. We’d been having trouble rounding up some suspected terrorists and federal criminals on the most-wanted list. Jake said, ‘Why not have them come to us?’ Everyone looked at him like ‘Who’s this guy?’”
“This was when he’d just started with the service,” Guccio said.
“Right. So Jake described his plan. We’d send out notices to the last-known addresses of the criminals we were trying to round up, telling them they’d won a huge TV or some-such, and where to go to claim the prize. It worked perfectly. We set up news vans and cameras outside a theater in case the perp was suspicious when checking things out. We had the bad guys register in the lobby at a table with balloons, and when they walked into the theater itself with their arms up in a Yippee-I’m-going-to-Hollywood gesture, bang, we snapped the cuffs on them. It was easy, safe, and brilliant.”
“And funny,” Guccio said with his one-pack-a-day baritone. “I laugh every time I watch the recordings. They’re on YouTube now.”
Hallstrom continued. “Those are the kinds of ideas that Jake would come up with. And he’d do it time and time again. So top priority on finding him.”
Guccio looked over at Charli. “But if you find him, be prepared for an occasional lack of tact.”
“Oh, right,” Hallstrom said. “I forgot about that. Corby doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and if he thinks someone is acting stupid or callous he’ll say it, even when he shouldn’t.”
“Got it. Clever guy, speaks his mind, find him.” Charli used her little ruler to underline the words “Top Priority” in her notes. She wrote in all caps, and each letter rested precisely on its line in her spiral notebook. When she was young, her father had been concerned about the neatness thing. He wanted to contact a psychologist about her obsession with coloring within the lines. Her grandmother, Marie, convinced him it was nothing to be worried about.
Charli wore only enough makeup to correct what she saw as imperfections in her face. To make her eyebrows perfectly symmetrical, for example, or to cover up some freckles. She preferred tight slacks or pencil skirts because they didn’t “flop around.”
Hallstrom sat down. “Thanks for your patience, Dr. McGraw. We’ll get the meeting started with an introduction from Charli. She’s in charge of this. What have we got?”
“Well, not much, but it’s still early.” Charli spread her notes out, insuring that the pages lined up with one another. “As I said in the cabinet meeting, nothing normal can account for this. Every person on the planet sneezed and then, soon after, was gripped with pain. The level of pain varied from person to person, and most weren’t incapacitated.”
“What about indirect results? Accidents caused by the sneeze or the pain.” The president rubbed the elbow that had smashed against the cabinet room’s table when the pain had hit him.
“Well, that’s another incomprehensible thing. You’d think, with everyone unexpectedly wracked with pain, there would be accidents. People would lose control of their cars, a bomb defuser might cut the red wire instead of the green wire, or a surgeon might cut an artery.” Charli had expected to hear of several plane crashes that resulted from the sudden pain. Some people, like the Secretary of Labor, had been momentarily incapacitated.
“Didn’t happen?” Hallstrom asked.
“Well, it did, but not to the extent that you might expect, no. It makes no sense. It’s as if there were some kind of divine providence.”
“You heard it here first, folks. Charli the Atheist talking about divine providence.” Young took a sip from his coffee mug.
She put a hand on her chest. “Trust me, I’m as surprised as you are.”
“Sorry I interrupted, Charlotta. Please continue.” The president reached over and touched her forearm. People often found an excuse to touch her.
“Only humans sneezed, and there are no confirmed accounts of anyone who didn’t sneeze. An exception is that some patients in comas did not sneeze. According to a report I got, brain-dead patients did not sneeze. However, I learned about one interesting patient at Providence. The docs were preparing to remove her life support,” Charli looked up, “and she sneezed.”
“Did they still unhook her?” Young asked.
“No, they kept her on support. They’re reevaluating her chances of recovery,” Charli said. “We don’t have a clue as to what caused it, so I’m forced to speculate: Extraterrestrials, paranormals, or some group that has some super advanced technology up its sleeve. That’s all I’ve come up with.”
“What about something religious?” Young was clicking the button on his pen.
Charli turned to him with a little smile, “You mean like God sending down the holy miracle of the sternutation?”
Young stared at her.
Guccio said, “It means sneeze.” When everybody looked at him, he shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? I’m smarter than I look.”
“Yes,” Young said. “Something like that. A lot of people are going to think that way.” Click click click.
“Right.” Charli made a note in her list. “I’m going to put that into the paranormal category.”
“I’m sure the Lutherans are going to be thrilled that you’ve lumped them in with ghost hunters and witch doctors,” Guccio said.
Hallstrom smiled. “So what do we do about this?”
“Wait, there’s one more thing I want to say. Many people have come up to me s
aying ‘Hey Charli, look, you’ve overblown this, it was just something in the air.’ I see that as stupid, since there’s no way that everyone could have sneezed at the same instant.” Charli’s tone was almost pleading at this point. “Is there any way I could be wrong in this?”
Definitive head shakes all around the table. McGraw also shook his head.
“Okay, good.” She relaxed back into her chair. “I’ve also got someone looking into whether there are any secret technologists that could come up with some device to cause this.”
“You mean like Dr. Evil.” Guccio held the back of his pinkie against his lips.
“Right,” she said, “The extraterrestrial angle is what Dr. McGraw will tell you about. I’m looking into paranormal activities, and I’ve set up a meeting with a so-called expert in that field.”
“What kind of expert?” Guccio asked.
“Well, perhaps you’ve heard of Adina Golubkhov? I’d never heard of her, but in paranormal circles, she’s Lady Gaga and the Pope rolled into one. In addition to being psychic, she’s reported to be able to influence people’s emotions. That’s why we selected her.” Charli paused and slid a lock of hair behind her ear. “That’s all I’ve got, and I’ll turn things over to Dr. McGraw, who’s made a fascinating discovery.”
Like many of the best scientists, Seth McGraw had never grown up. That is, he never stopped asking, as children so often do, “Why?” He delighted in every puzzle whether it was a tricky brain teaser or a mystery of astrophysics.
McGraw had unruly hair and a mustache to match. His huge glasses were ten years out of date, and he wore the tweed jacket he’d bought in grad school. “Working on the assumption that extraterrestrials caused this, we looked to see if there was any unusual pattern of signals at the time of the event. If there was a conventional wave or signal that caused this, you’d expect it to be strong. Planet-sized strong. We didn’t find anything like that. And there have been no recent solar flares or unusual sunspots.” He went on to describe other dead-ends they had explored.
Charli cleared her throat. “Hi, Seth. It’s good to see you again.” She had taken a computational physics class from him at MIT. “Tell them about the not-an-asteroid thing.”
