“How am I supposed to meet anyone?” his sister asks. “How am I supposed to fall in love if we don’t have the Internet?”
His voice comes from beyond the veil: “But they’re all dead. Dead from The Death. We are the only ones left. Perhaps you can settle for some fraternal love, the love of your brother?”
She looks at chunks of dried skin dangling. “If everyone’s dead, brother, then why do we bother guarding the house?”
“We guard the house because when this outbreak is over, there shall be another, and then one after that. The only way to survive is to keep away from people and keep off the Internet. Forever.”
These challenges to his reasoning would have never crossed her lips even a week before, but Caesar Rodney’s sister has grown bold these last few days as her brother’s health has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. It started with a light cough that spiraled into a fit. Now his mobility has been reduced to bed to fireside to dinner table to bed. The fits have become a regular occurrence. After each one, more and more pieces of Caesar Rodney’s face can be seen lodged in the tangles of the veil. The sounds his lungs make are infested with an almost musical discord.
Since that first fit, Caesar Rodney’s sister has taken over the guard duty in her disinterested way. She sits up there for hours on end, leaning on the loaded musket. But all she ever sees is the road up to the mansion, empty and overgrown and full of shadows. The little village in the valley is as still as one of those frozen images back in the abandoned Cloud. Maybe he’s right, she thinks. Maybe there is no one left. And in a few days he’ll be gone too and I’ll be the last human in the universe. All by myself. Then I’ll check the Internet.
But she can’t wait that long. After helping her brother to bed that evening, she lays awake in their shared room, cursing The Death in her mind in rounds. “Brother,” she finally says, “do you think that maybe my online profile has fallen in love, at least?”
She listens to the staggered, gurgling wheeze of his breath.
“We’ll get The Death solved and go back online someday and I’ll find my profile, taken over by a drone. Some low‐level AI that was coded to adjust its programming according to how many likes it gets on posts containing certain word combinations. Accepted a friend request one day and it was an ad drone, programmed to collect as many friends as possible. Profile picture’s some plump little hussy in a low‐cut gown.
“Now they’re writing posts all over each other’s walls because they always hit their feedback criteria just right, the ends of their programming all tangled together. Hard to tell which is which, working on the same equations, breaking down code the exact same way, or whatever it is drones in love do.”
In the quiet that follows, she realizes her brother isn’t asleep. He is moving in that bed, but not answering. She gets up and lights a candle and takes it with her to his bedside. This close, his breath sounds drenched, rattling up from the deep to pop mucus bubbles somewhere behind his teeth. The veil lays gently over his face, moving only slightly as he dies.
It occurs to her then that she hasn’t seen his face in years. Slowly, avoiding even the slightest contact with his flesh, she lifts away the veil. Some strained tendons, some chunks of dried meat, some cartilage and bone. A few tentacles of hair have matted themselves into flat tangles in a dried‐out crust. But there certainly isn’t any face.
She leaves him there like that, makes her way slowly through the house, the pace a person would sink in water if they let loose all their breath and held it. When she gets to the kitchen, she realizes she is holding her breath. Has to take a deep inhale which smells so fresh it shocks her. Been sleeping in that sour room with him for so long.
From behind the bottom back shelf in the pantry, under a loose board, she takes out an old, junky laptop she has kept hidden from him all this time. Even though it’s been a few days since Caesar Rodney has moved more than the length of a room at any one time, his sister is suddenly terrified that he’ll appear in the kitchen doorway behind her, somehow suppressing his wheeze, negotiating the entire house without a noise, to catch her ruining their only chance for survival.
“Well,” she says, “The Death or no The Death” And she presses the laptop’s power button and waits. Swears, then, that she can feel something unraveling in the air. As if the layers of this and a separate, untapped reality have started to mix. She flexes her fingers over the keys, watches the screen come to life.
Stephen Hopkins :: July 13th 1785
When Stephen Hopkins opens his front door, he has on that same black sunhat he wore all through both meetings of Congress. It’s an essential part of how people remember him. Whether on the street, in Independence Hall, or more likely in one of Philadelphia’s hundred or so pubs, you could always pick out that big black brim swaying drunkenly through the early Revolution.
Standing now on the top landing of his front steps are two identical men. Hopkins tips the floppy brim of his hat. “I thought I was the only one left,” he says. “Just me and them.”
“Mr. Hopkins.”
The other twin points at the sky above the house. “We got reports in Philadelphia that there was smoke coming out of your chimney.”
Hopkins looks the two men over. Tight‐fit tweed three‐pieces, ties and pocket kerchiefs match each other’s perfectly. As do their faces. Perfect matching images. Doesn’t seem like there’s a way to tell them apart. “You guys brothers?”
“Mr. Jefferson sent us.”
“He’s been put at the head of a committee.”
The other twin holds up a briefcase, pats it. “Rebuilding the nation’s database.”
Hopkins seems satisfied enough, steps back so they can enter the foyer. He leaves the hat on and goes strolling down the hall, waving for the twins to follow. “When I heard it was the Internet that was causing it, well, I just shut it down.” Hopkins leads them past a pantry half‐emptied of bottled rum. Then on through a meticulously ordered house. “Haven’t seen a live person since the first outbreak. Seen plenty of dead ones, though.”
“You’ve maintained the place all on your own?”
Hopkins holds up some fingers to wiggle. “It’s amazing how productive one can be without the Internet.” They come into a large den where a fire has been lit. “Bet the Congress was surprised to hear old Stephen Hopkins’ still alive. I was all but dead the last they saw me. That was nine years ago.” He pours some rum, holds the bottle out toward the twins. Both shake their head. “Self torture is best torture, I suppose.”
Hopkins lifts the glass to look at the world through the sugared liquid. “I’d all but quit, you know. Well, not quit but cut back, you could say. Way back. Then The Death came and I figured, what the hell.” He downs the shot, refills it, flops back into a chair. Still that hat sits there on his head. Hopkins holds up his hand so the twins can watch the tremor subside. “Had to drink a barrel of the stuff just to get it steady enough to sign.” Hopkins smiles. “I suppose you guys being here means the plague is over.”
They nod. “The war, too.”
This surprises Hopkins. “How’d it end?”
“The British surrendered.”
“Washington had been off the grid this whole time. The old man popped out of the woods with his army intact, and that was all she wrote.”
Hopkins scoffs. “Oh, I’m sure she’ll write plenty more about it.”
“No contact with England,” one says.
“We’ve had to send a man… in a ship.”
“Information travels like goods now.”
Hopkins hums. “‘Database,’ you said.”
“We’ve set up harddrives,” one twin says.
“Filled the basement of Independence Hall.”
“Had to salvage what we could from the scattered caches of the old Cloud.”
One of the twins pops the briefcase, sets up a thumbcam, connects it to a laptop. Finger‐sized firewire drives line the inside of the case. “Already have a whole room filled with oral
histories and reflections on the Revolution.”
“Just came from John Witherspoon’s.”
“Tell me,” Hopkins says. “How is The Father of the Fathers doing?”
“He made it,” one twin says, “but he’s blind.”
“Blind?” Hopkins considers. “How’s that working out for him?”
A twin shrugs. Then the other. “Well, he can’t see.”
“We don’t think it’s related to The Death, but at the end of it, The Father was blind. Other than that, he’s fine.”
“It’s strange,” says the other twin. “Seems a large number of the Signers managed to survive the outbreaks, proportionally speaking.”
Hopkins sips some rum.
“We’d like to get some impressions, for the archive.” “Impressions?”
“What can you share about the Signing, of the Declaration, the Declaration of Independence?”
“Had to drink a barrel of the stuff to keep my hand steady enough. You said Jefferson sent you?”
They nod.
Hopkins looks into the eye of the thumbcam. He sloshes some rum toward the outside world. “A few battlefields,” Hopkins says. “I’ve walked around a bit and seen them. Didn’t seem like a war could still be going on with so few men. Thought it was just abandoned, like everything else. How many are there? How many left beside me and you two and Mr. Jefferson, and them?”
“No one’s quite sure.”
“Did you say ‘them’?”
“We can stop the recording if you want to think things through a minute, Mr. Hopkins. Space for information is… rather limited all of a sudden.”
Now Hopkins takes off that hat, and both twins can see why he wears it even inside. Across the high dome of his head, thin wisp‐ing hairs are unable to hide a archipelago of gruesome liver spots. Hopkins scratches at them, reopening several old scabs. The noise is wet, sticky. Nonchalantly, he wipes the blood and puss down his pant leg. “Where did you guys say you come from?”
The twins collect themselves. “The archives.”
Hopkins looks at them suspiciously.
“About that story. We’ve got hours of The Father. Hate to leave you out.”
Hopkins lets a little rum burp escape. “What about them?”
Now the twins stop. “Them?” one asks.
“You said ‘them,’ right?”
Hopkins points toward the ceiling.
“Is there someone in your attic, Mr. Hopkins?”
“No,” he says. “You mean you haven’t seen them? No one else has reported this?”
“Seen who?”
“The space aliens.”
“Mr. Hopkins, why don’t I stop this recording?” “It gets pretty lonely,” the other twin says. “And pretty dark, I bet, out here all by yourself.”
“Don’t do that,” he tells them. “I’ve seen them.” “Space aliens?”
“Unless some country in Europe has flying saucers. Maybe a country in Africa or Asia we haven’t discovered yet.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“How much rum and what else have you been putting in it?”
Hopkins stands, circles to his desk. Opens a drawer, closes it and returns to his chair. “They gave this to me,” he says. And he holds it up for them to see.
“A musket ball?”
“Space aliens gave it to you?”
“Found it after they left.”
“Was it out on one of those battlefields you were talking about?” But the twins can see it’s not made of metal, looks more like glass. “What is it?”
“A few months back,” Hopkins says. “Watched one of their ships streak across the sky. Seen them a few times by then. A few times real good.”
One of the twins is swapping out a harddrive. Writes Stephen Hopkins on it. Writes space aliens. Swaps in a fresh drive and restarts the capture.
“I seen it pretty close up, the ship. But this time, they landed. Over on one of those abandoned plantations.”
“And you saw them?”
“What did they look like, the aliens?”
“Didn’t see them. Just the ship. Never seen them. After they left that night, I found this out in the field where the ship had been.”
Both twins are looking at the orb. “No idea what it does?”
“Doesn’t do anything. Except when one of the ships is around.”
“What does it do, Mr. Hopkins, when a ship is nearby?”
“Spins, makes a ringing noise, and every time it does, I look out the window and there’s one of the ships. Just floating there.”
“The aliens left you a homing marble?”
Hopkins leans forward so he can hold it an inch from one of the twins’ eyes. “Marble is what I thought too.” Hopkins hands it over.
“Gosh, it’s heavy.” And over to the other twin.
“A perfect sphere,” Hopkins says. “More dense than should be possible given its volume. Not like any marble I’ve ever seen a human create.”
The orb is put on the table. Doesn’t roll even a bit from the place where it’s set. “Interesting.”
Hopkins is undoing the top buttons of his shirt. “Looks like you boys got to me just in time.” He struggles now to his feet, takes a wobbling step, falls into the arms of the closest twin.
“It’s his heart,” one tells the other.
They lay Hopkins flat and urge him to relax. But Stephen Hopkins isn’t listening. He’s using what little strength he has left to push the twins away, pointing past them. The twins look to the table where the little orb has begun to spin, never leaving its place, rotating on a perfectly centered axis. As it spins faster and faster, all three go quiet so they can listen to a low, dull ring, hollow and frozen‐sounding, emanating from the spinning object.
They run to the window just in time to not be sure, a flashing of light with something trailing off behind, but what? As one twin looks longer, searching the sky for odd motions, the other turns back. But the room is empty; Stephen Hopkins is gone. “They must have taken him.”
William Whipple :: November 28th 1785
A few hours after William Whipple collapses, Rush and Doc Bartlett have the corpse laid out on the kitchen table. Doc Bartlett convinced Rush that his leeches and bleeders would not be necessary. The stuff sits on the counter beside some rotted bread. Makes a horrific little row of items, kill jar and straps, razors, worn leather bag containing who knows what, then that bread with the ants all over it. Each doctor wears a white apron that’s not white any longer, long gloves covered in blood and body filth. Single magnifying optical held tight over their left eye by a thin leather strap. They’ve taken off Whipple’s clothes, cut a slit down the center of the body, pealed back and pinned the skin to the table. And there at the center, like some jewel they’ve mined out, a multi‐colored crystal formation, about the size of a human fist.
“Beautiful,” Doc Bartlett says, and Rush has to agree. Layers of semi‐transparent shades peek from inside the crystal’s surface, shifting tones and hues as the men circle the table above it. Until now, neither doctor believed the scattered tales that it was crystals causing The Death. Or The Death causing crystals. Under M’Kean’s executive guidance, the nation’s remaining men of science had pieced together a reasonable scenario based on wi‐fi and cellular signals and a thickening of the blood. But when Doc Bartlett lifts out the lungs to lay like saddlebags from the body’s cracked‐open sternum, he and Rush can see that the circulatory system has not been damaged.
“So they were right,” Doc Bartlett ruminates on it. “Crystals in the stomach. But how could the Internet cause something like this?”
Rush repeats something he’s repeated a hundred times. “The wavelengths created by the…” but he trails off, taps his scalpel blade on the surface of the crystal. “Never did have much use for the Internet, myself.”
Doc Bartlett wants to say, You seemed to have a pretty high opinion of the Internet when you wanted to replace George Washington for
going off the grid. But he just nods. “Looks like… with a few cuts, we could maybe free the crystal.” Which is exactly what he begins to do.
Three years since the last verified case of The Death. Everyone had begun to think the long global nightmare was finally over. Now a squad of Continental veterans guard the front gates of Whipple’s farm. Farther down the road, more wait in reserve. They have orders not to let anyone on or off Whipple’s property for three full days. That’s the mandatory quarantine for anyone coming into contact with a body killed by The Death. Seventy‐five percent of the population is dead. Three in four. At least by the best estimates Congress can gather. Two outbreaks behind them, and the thing neither doctor wants to ask out loud is: Can the human race survive a third?
Rush clicks on a laptop, a few firewire cables snaking back to a harddrive filled with medical data. There’s a scar where the modem has been yanked out, looks like one of Rush’s surgeries. Onscreen, a slideshow cycles through all known crystalline formation patterns. None of the diagrams come close to matching the thing Bartlett’s just then lifting from Whipple’s torso.
“Do you suppose we should be touching it?” Rush has been stepping backward, toward the doorway that leads from the room. “I’m going to check the house,” he says, “see if there’s any evidence of Internet access.”
Alone in the room, Doc Bartlett turns to the body on the table, recalls that morning, long ago, when they set off on horseback for the Second Congress. Whipple and Doc Bartlett and Mat Thornton. Two thirds of that New Hampshire delegation is here in this room, one alive and one dead. Doc Bartlett addresses the body, “You’re not a slave trader anymore, Will. All they’ll remember now is a shipper and patriot. A Signer of the Declaration.” Doc Bart‐lett wonders, then, if a man could live with this crystal inside him, hypothetically, if a surgeon were to go in and clear pathways for the blood. Is there some way for the human body to be carved into coexistence with this thing?
Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America Page 5
