The Last President

by John Barnes

  “Why’d you let her go?” Bernstein asked.

  “Do you think any of us will ever be forgiven, or allowed to come back into Daybreak, after that?” Robert asked. “Will Daybreak ever stop trying to catch us and kill us?”

  Bernstein shuddered. “God, never.”

  “Then we’re all in it together, ain’t we, for good, now?” Robert clapped the shorter, older man around the shoulders. “Walk with me. We have things to talk about.”

  3 DAYS LATER. SOUTH OF MIAMI. 6:00 AM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 29, 2026.

  “Steady, Whorf, but stay alert. The charts are pretty near worthless from Key Biscayne south,” Captain Halleck said. He was comparing the air photo prints taken by the very last reconnaissance planes from USS Bush, two months before, with the old paper charts.

  At the helm, Whorf was bringing Discovery into Biscayne Bay on the last of the high tide, letting it carry them in so that later the receding tide could help pull them back out. Sounding lines brought up so much muck and junk that all they really knew was that about thirty feet below them, thick muddy water became thin watery mud.

  Morning wore on; when the wind shifted, the stench from the land was overpowering. Jorge relieved Whorf at eight. Not quite ready for his bunk, he went forward to see what the scientists were doing. Lisa Reyes, from Stone Lab, was fiddling with a microscope, the sort of thing that might have been a toy for a brainy eight-year-old a few decades ago. Satisfied with the light the mirror sent through the slide, she looked up, shoving stray black curls back under her bandanna. “Take a look, Whorf, and please draw.” She opened her record pad beside the microscope.

  Whorf stretched his shoulder, a little stiff from four hours at the wheel, and flexed his hand. He bent carefully to look without disturbing anything; one eye saw through the scope and the other saw the page. He barely had to compensate for the rise and fall of the gentle sea. Quickly, he copied the dots, whorls, smears, and blobs his left eye saw onto the pad his right eye saw.

  “Beautiful,” she said, as he finished. “Now, do you know what it’s a picture of?”

  “It’s better if I don’t think of words while I draw. But that looks like—hunh. Are those E. coli?”

  “Well, their ancestors were. I suspect Daybreak used them because they could pass through the human gut and spread rapidly.” She tapped the page. “And these?”

  “A filament of pennate diatoms, right?”

  “Right. I’m calling them Phaeodactylum morticomedentis incognans. I think I have the genus right—it’s pretty similar, anyway, to the Phaeodactylum that genetic engineers had been working with for a long time, so there would have been easily available commercial versions for Daybreak to modify. The species name just means ‘unknown dead-stuff-eater.’ The one thing we’ve established in the tanks so far is that coral love them, and that at least partly solves the mystery of what’s not here.”

  Whorf asked, “What’s not here?”

  “Yeah. Right over the horizon, we have a few million decaying bodies, plus hundreds of square miles of fertilized lawns and burned real estate, plus all those artificial materials that decayed—tires and gasoline, plastics and nylon, all that lawn furniture and all the polyester on the old people. All those nutrients lying out in the rain on soft, shifting soil must have washed down here. Biscayne Bay should be pretty much a brackish sewage lagoon, crawling with conventional decay bacteria and buried under algal blooms. Instead, those nutrients are being snaffled up by these diatoms that fast-track it into coral.”

  “You think Daybreak meant to do that?”

  “Well, it sure looks like in the next thousand years, Florida is going to get much bigger, as all those dead people and their stuff turn into coral reefs. Doesn’t that sound like a Daybreaker program?”

  Whorf looked out over the barely-moving green sea. The overpowering reek brought home the realization that there was a thousand-square-mile mausoleum just over the horizon. Almost, he could imagine bony hands reaching out from the land, empty skulls staring out to sea and looking for him. “You sound like you approve.”

  “I don’t approve of people being dead,” Reyes said. “Or the world being a wreck. But I do like seeing things grow.”

  THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 7:15 AM LOCAL SOLAR. FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2026.

  Roger Jackson had been followed for ten days, ever since walking northeast out of Pale Bluff, the last secure town on the frontier with the Lost Quarter. He was used to the shadow extending beyond the tree, the flicker of motion at the corner of his eye that wasn’t a feral dog, the creak of a low branch in still air. He felt their eyes on him as he walked the empty streets of burned-out towns along the Wabash, and crossed the big bridge into the ruins of Terre Haute. When he walked along the brushy overgrown trail that followed the Tippecanoe they were still there.

  He had seen no one till the sentries challenged him at the skull-festooned outer gate. After almost an hour of too many sentries, skulls, and pompous Shakespearo-Tolkienesque greetings, he now stood before Lord Robert and his . . . lordlings? flunkies? Flunklings, Roger decided.

  Lord Robert smiled. “The door is closed, and everyone in here is past that ritual ceremony bullshit, ’kay? Let’s deal. So Daybreak is your enemy. It ain’t ours but it’s not exactly our friend either, and we don’t want it to own us like it does the tribes, got me? We’ve been using your James Hendrix’s pamphlet about turning off the seizures, and we want whatever else you know.”

  Roger said, “You don’t need to trade for any of that information, and you won’t even if we go to war with you later. We want people to free themselves.”

  Lord Robert tightened his lips and bared his teeth. “We’ve broke with Daybreak, and put all our necks in the noose. We’d like to ally with the biggest thug on the block.”

  Roger made himself speak calmly. “Lord Robert, as long as we are being truthful, we know you, you personally, tortured our agent Steve Ecco to death. You’re asking us to forgive a lot.”

  “Yeah, it’s a lot to forgive.” In the warm, flicking lantern light, Lord Robert’s face was as innocent of lines as a little boy’s. “But you need allies too.”

  After a long silence, Roger Jackson said, “What did you have in mind?” He felt slightly sick.

  4 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 1:00 PM LOCAL SOLAR TIME. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2026.

  Roger Jackson crouched comfortably in the slave shack where they had hidden him from view, trying not to listen to Lord Robert’s speech to the people of Castle Earthstone outside in the main yard. He’s not much of a speaker, but then supposedly Moses wasn’t either.

  So far it had been an hour-long bragalogue on the career of Lord Robert, Mighty in Battle. Quite a promotion for Robert Cheranko, electric company lineman less than two years ago, to Lord Robert, Torturer and Slayer of the Tied Up and Helpless.

  The slave shack in which Roger was concealed was a lean-to against the main wall. Clean rugs and blankets were laid carefully over the pea-gravel floor; the fire pan from an old outdoor grill was embedded in one corner, with a chimney-duct making a Z shape across the ceiling to the high corner above the door. Probably fairly efficient, he thought. He smiled at himself for that; you could make an engineering student into a scout but you couldn’t make him not be an engineering student.

  When Lord Robert finished bragging about what a brave guy he was, he revealed that he was also the true interpreter of the True Daybreak of Lord Karl, which had been perverted by the Council of Daybreak. True Daybreak was opposed to poverty, misery, slavery, and forced infanticide.

  I notice rape is still okay, though, Roger thought.

  In a few sentences, Lord Robert freed all the slaves, granted them rights to marry and raise children, and commanded a cleanup for the boneyard of dead slaves and exposed newborns, with proper graves, a memorial, and freedom for everyone to pray and leave flowers.

  Of cours
e “for the duration of this emergency, my officers and I will still need your complete loyalty—”

  The roar of applause made Roger wonder if Robert had arranged for claques. Probably; he thought of everything else. Still, around here, a plain old feudal tyranny is reform.

  He watched through a crack in the shed as the crowd’s passion and joy mounted; at the height of it, Lord Robert raised the Castle Earthstone spirit stick into the air, and the crowd shrieked with pure ecstasy.

  “I free you! Follow the True Daybreak!” Robert smashed the spirit stick across his thigh, breaking it in half.

  A Daybreak seizure struck two thousand people in the courtyard simultaneously, the soldiers as helpless as the slaves. Ignoring the thrashing, writhing bodies at their feet, Lord Robert’s officers walked quickly to positions in the courtyard, and stood waiting for the first ones to come out of the seizure.

  Lord Robert walked directly from the rostrum to Roger. “You’ll want to get going before they revive.” His slight smile was barely a twitch. “Tell that fat bitch in Pueblo that we’ll keep talking with you. Central heat, clean sheets, and antibiotics would kind of put the fun back into being a lord, you know?”

  3 DAYS LATER. PORT ST. JOE, FLORIDA. 10:15 AM CENTRAL TIME. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2026.

  Whorf held his voice low and even. “Doctor Reyes, don’t move.”

  “Hmm?” she asked, intent on lowering her sampling jar into the pond.

  The cobra reared fractionally higher, intent on her leg. Whorf said, “Don’t—”

  A black-powder pistol roared beside Whorf; the cobra’s head vanished and the body thrashed in the grass. Reyes jumped. Ihor said, “Sorry if I startled you.”

  Reyes was staring at the writhing body in the brush. “Startle all you want.”

  “Good shot,” Whorf said.

  “Just had to be careful, ’cause I was only going to get one shot. Do we got—have—to worry about a . . . wife?”

  “Mate. Maybe,” Reyes said. “But everything I know about cobras I got from Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. I don’t want to stay here, anyway.”

  They watched the brush and their feet all the way back to the crumbling pavement, where Pembrooke, their local guide, arrived huffing and panting. Running in the heat had turned him an even deeper brick red than his normal sunburn, in contrast to his white mustache, eyebrows, and soaking-wet wisps of hair slipping out from under his straw hat. “I heard a shot.” He bent over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath.

  Reyes said, “You said people had seen cobras near that pond? Ihor just shot one that was getting ready to strike me.”

  “You’re sure you got it?”

  Ihor nodded. “These big pistols take the head right off. It was maybe a meter, maybe more—look, he’s got it!”

  An eagle rose from the thicket back by the pond, something black and writhing in its talons.

  Pembrooke nodded. “All fresh and wiggly, yum yum.”

  Whorf asked, “What are cobras doing in Florida?”

  Pembrooke grimaced. “Back before, idiot collectors and dumbasses who wanted a scary pet smuggled them in. Now with Daybreak they’ve gotten loose. Officially.”

  Reyes nodded. “But unofficially?”

  “Well, walk with me.” On their way back to his house, they walked slowly because of the heat. “Since March, I’ve had eleven dead cobras brought in; Fish and Wildlife doesn’t send me a paycheck anymore but people are used to me being the guy for invasive species. Now, the mayor used to sell used cars, and the city council’s all his cousins, and the big local business was always tourism, so they want me to tell everybody we got two escaped pets out there making babies. But the old print encyclopedia I have says there’s ten to thirty in a litter, they don’t roam far from where they’re hatched, and they’re kind of shy—people would go months or years before finding out they had a pair under the house. Now I’ve seen eleven dead—twelve counting what that eagle was carrying off—and we’ve had two hundred and nine sightings, as much as forty miles apart. And three of my dead ones didn’t have that spectacle pattern on the hood; based on more old paper encyclopedia research, those were Chinese cobras.

  “So the official position, I guess, must be that we’ve got one multispecies litter of exhibitionist cobras who decided to go on tour.”

  “What do you think?” Reyes asked.

  “I would think it was Daybreak making it hard to restart civilization, except it doesn’t make sense to me that a bunch of save-Mother-Earth types would introduce invasive species.”

  Whorf shrugged. “They used giant H-bombs. Their moon gun is probably the highest tech still working in the solar system. And Daybreak itself was coordinated and maybe created on the Internet. They aren’t environmentalists, at least not as we used to know them, and if they’re back-to- nature it’s not necessarily nature’s idea of nature.”

  Reyes frowned, looking at her wristwatch. “Based on what we’ve seen all along the Florida coast, we need to assemble a report on the possibility that Daybreak is trying to re-shape the environment to make it more human-hostile. Unfortunately most of the supporting material belongs to Mister Pembrooke, who will need to keep it here for further research, so Whorf, you copy drawings, and Ihor, you copy text. We’ll need to be getting back aboard when the tide turns, in six hours.”

  “On the other hand,” Pembrooke said, “your working conditions include a fresh boiled crab lunch and nearly unlimited lemonade—warm, though, I’m afraid.”

  “And I suddenly realized I really should stay and help,” Reyes said. “We all make sacrifices.”

  2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 9:00 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2026.

  When Heather carried the big, flat object, draped in cloth, into what had once been the judge’s chambers, there were three knots of people around the big table.

  At one corner, the scouts lounged in their Walmart/mountain-man mixture of deerskin shirts, heavy jeans, slouch hats, and knee-high moccasin boots. Larry and Debbie Mensche, father and daughter, sat on the table; Dan Samson leaned back in a chair with his feet almost on Larry, and Freddie Pranger and Roger Jackson draped themselves sideways over the arms of the chairs.

  Conveniently near the luxury of the coffee urn, Quattro, Bambi, Nancy Teirson, Sally Overhaus, and Bret Duquesne, the aviators, stood in leather jackets, scarves, coveralls, soft moccasins, and confident wide stances, with their leather helmets under their arms or dangling by straps from their hands. Bret was explaining something complex about the southern route to Mobile Bay.

  At the far end of the table from the scouts were Heather’s wizards: Ruth Odawa and her academic group of codebreakers, and analysts like Chris Manckiewicz and Jason Nemarec, and librarians and archivists like Leslie Antonowicz. In old, worn suit jackets, pullover shirts, and rumpled pants, they looked like a shabby faculty club that shopped at Salvation Army. They were mostly scribbling and muttering to each other, making lists and notes, starting sentences that other people finished. All of them were constantly checking everything with James, who sat at the center of the group. The way Arnie Yang used to, Heather thought, with a pang. James had grown to be a close friend and he was quite possibly better at the Chief of Intel job than Arnie had been—at least he wasn’t a traitor—but the lack of Arnie still felt like a missing limb. How many times did I stop him from explaining something that we’re only realizing now we needed to know? How many clues to our situation was he holding in his head, how many insights were there because our best analyst had been all the way inside Daybreak, and how much irreplaceable knowledge went through the trap in the scaffold and out of our reach forever? We were always so crazy to do something, anything, that we wouldn’t listen to him. It’s a miracle he ever got to tell us anything besides “I told you so.”

  She had let Arnie himself talk her into hanging him, and though his reasoning had seemed right at the time, and emotionally it had
made sense to execute the biggest traitor they’d ever caught, she and James had concluded later that it might have been Daybreak they had been talking to, and that it was protecting itself by eliminating the most valuable witness they had in custody.

  James was in Arnie’s spot; she just had to hope that neither he nor she would ever be in his situation.

  She looked around again: scouts, aviators, wizards. Like characters from too many different movies.

  Carefully, she lifted the three-by-six-foot chart onto the table, gently because she wasn’t completely confident of every thumbtack and drop of glue. “Only James and General Phat have seen this before, though it’s not officially secret. Some of you will recognize this as a grandchild, or maybe a cousin, of a critical path chart,” she said. “I started it in March, when the RRC moved into Pueblo. Up here at the top is where we started from: May 2025. Here we are today in February, and down there at the bottom where it says DONE is where we’re going: the day when a fully Constitutional elected government takes over, on January 20, 2027.

  “These ribbons running the length of the chart are the critical paths, the connected series of things that need to be done by a certain date. Green ribbons are clear sailing, nothing blocking the path; yellow ribbons are ones where there’s trouble, which usually means they end at a red card that names the trouble; red ribbons are ribbons that continue on beyond a red card, the roads we can’t get to right now.”

  “There are no green ribbons touching DONE,” Quattro Larsen observed.

  “Yet,” Heather said, quietly.

  “Nineteen red cards,” Leslie Antonowicz said, counting. “And none of them is trivial. SECURE BORDER OF LOST QUARTER. DISRUPT OTHER TRIBAL-HELD AREAS. EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL CONSENSUS CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT. GRAYSON RENOUNCES TITLE NCCC. WEISBROD RENOUNCES TITLE ACTING PRESIDENT. MANBROOKSTAT JOINS AS NEW STATE. And I hate to point this out but a lot of the worst things happening aren’t on here.”