by John Barnes
“You’ll certainly be welcome.” Cam was normally all but expressionless, but even more so now; Heather wondered whether he was displeased to have a backseat driver or relieved that this wouldn’t be his affair much longer.
Garren nodded politely. “Given that this is the room where people will be cleaning up the domestic damage, it seems only reasonable for me to answer any questions you may have.”
“Hernandez, Agriculture.” The heavyset woman’s arms were folded on her chest, and she was glaring over her bifocals. “Are there any limits on the blockade? If it doesn’t comply, they shoot it down, no matter where or what or how?”
“Pilots are allowed some judgment,” Garren said. “If the legendary man in a lawn chair with balloons is out there, they’ll look at him before they shoot. But discretion cuts both ways. They don’t have to ask permission, just exercise judgment, to use tactical nuclear weapons in the interceptions.”
Cameron said, “Ms. Nakayara, FAA?”
The petite woman looked up from her desk. “Why would you use a nuke?”
“Gas, germs, or another nuke could be on that plane,” Garren said, quietly. “And airbursts of tactical nukes don’t produce much fallout. So the safest thing we can do in the circumstances is to, um, sterilize it thoroughly, if it’s someplace where collateral damage is tolerable. For example, if we’d been following Plan Forward Sentry back on September 11, 2001, we would have shot down but not nuked the planes once they were over DC and New York; but we’d have used a nuke on the one over rural Pennsylvania.”
“Good Christ,” Nakayara said, very quietly.
Heather thought she’d never heard anything put better.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. JUST EAST OF BUFFALO.WYOMING. 2:20 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Jason’s parking spot at the truck stop at the junction with I-90 was a jack-pot. To one side of the F-150, he tossed a black egg through a rolled-down window into an open bag of electrician’s tools in the back of a rusty Subaru. El Slobbo Electrico would spread nanoswarm everywhere he went, and if Daybreak was working, he’d be going a lot of places soon.
On the other side of the F-150, there was an elderly Prius that looked like it had last been washed when Bush was president, with junk-food wrappers, parking tickets, unopened mail, eviction orders, and court notices scattered across the back seat, an ode in debris to a freshman year ending at fall midterms.
Hunh. Massachusetts plate, new U of Montana bumper sticker. Probably on her way home. No doubt Little Muffin Dropout was all liberal, going to vote for Pendano, always did her community service at school with a smile, all that shit, and thought all her spiritual talk was making a difference in the world. Muffy, you are about to make the biggest difference you are ever going to make.
“Hey, you like my ride?”
Jason turned. The plump girl with thick glasses and a dozen band buttons on her jacket held a giant mug of coffee and a big container of chicken nuggets.
“Just looking and thinking you were probably cool.”
“If you have some weed, we could chill.”
“We’re both out of luck,” he said, “but I was just thinking, this car needs some serious help, and like, I’d hate to have a cool person get all stranded and stuff.” Jesus, I hope I’m being inarticulate enough to sound trustworthy.
About cars, Jason only knew what he’d picked up from being a gofer and light-holder for Carrie, the girl who kept the commune’s three old beaters running, but he was sure Miss Little Lost Muffin knew even less.
“Oh, man, that would suck to get stuck someplace. Once I got stuck when I was out with this guy drinking at UM, up at Lolo Hot Springs? and it turned out I was just out of gas and the battery was dead? but I like had to call my dad so he could call Triple A to tow the car the next day? but I like didn’t know that like at the time? So we needed to stay warm for the night, and the guy—”
Jason turned and fished in the toolbox for a few wrenches and screwdrivers, and shuffled four black eggs into his hands under the tools. “Well, let’s make sure you don’t get stuck this time. Pop your hood.”
He poked around and hmmed until she became bored and asked if she could turn on the stereo. That took about three minutes.
While she sat in the driver seat, eating her chicken, on the other side of the raised hood, Jason planted two eggs down low on the rear surface of the main generator—ambient heat wasn’t as good as solar, but it would work as long as one side of the egg was about 25 C warmer than the other. It looked like the cooling fan motor would blow the nanoswarm backward and down so that it didn’t build up and stop the engine too soon; he wanted Muffin here to keep rolling for a good long way, because I-90 would take her all the way back to Massachusetts, with bright sun on the south side the whole way, and if he could make this old prehistoric hybrid car scatter nanoswarm all along that highway, he could infect tens of thousands of cars. She was a perfect Patient Zero, and he didn’t want to squander the opportunity.
If I wanted to spread the clap, I’d give it to a slut who was following a band for the summer, he thought. If I wanted to spread flu, I’d cough on a flight attendant with a compromised immune system. And to spread nanoswarm… bright sunlight, badly shielded electrical system with lots of old-fashioned strong electric fields, on a platform traveling along one of the busiest roads on the continent.
He loudly said, “Just want to see what’s up on one passenger-side motor, looks seriously weird,” and crouched down beside the car, cheerfully putting two black eggs above the rear passenger-side wheel, where they would have plenty of sun if she was driving the way he’d guessed, and whirling electromagnetic fields from the motors no matter what, and thus produce a snow of nanoswarm as it ate her fender from inside, not destroying her car, but dropping nanoswarm onto the highway for hundreds of miles.
Then he closed it up, told her to get it looked at in “B-town,” and declined again the offer to get wasted and listen to some tunes before he went. She insisted on giving him something in trade, which turned out to be a plastic sandwich bag of weed. He waved at her as she drove away.
Once she was gone, he added a black egg to the baggie and left it in the sun on top of a transformer box by a lamppost. I don’t really care who picks that up or why, as long as they put it in their car.
He checked his cheapo plaztatic Wal-Mart watch; it showed a series of upside-down u’s, and when he pushed the reset button, it died completely. He dropped it in the back of the nearest pickup.
Backing out, he thought:
Little Muffin had a car
I gave it nanospawn.
And everywhere that Muffin drove,
The Big System was gone.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. YUMA. ARIZONA. ABOUT 3:00 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Ysabel Roth’s parents had been service-oriented pacifists, raising her in a dozen countries while they bounced all over the world working for justice and development. She’d just kind of naturally gravitated into taking care of the world, doing two years’ service in Mexico right after college. Last year waiting tables at The Green Mother had been less dramatic, but she’d still seen a lot of life.
She yawned, stretched, and rubbed her face. Not nearly as much life as I’m about to see; life never involved a Stinger missile before.
The TV-control thing, linked to the launcher on the roof, showed a big white blimp, which Aaron had said was technically not a blimp but an aerostat. He had nice eyes and such a comforting, technically competent manner that she listened to him explaining tech stuff just to enjoy the sound of his voice. Apparently a blimp had a motor and went somewhere, and an aerostat was just tied to the ground by a long rope. But this aerostat did have a motor, Aaron had made a point of that, and she had nodded and liked the way he pushed his hair back off his face, and the motor put out infrared radiation. It made her sick that people would put radiation into the sky like that, but it would allow the Stinger to home in on it.
It was kind of like a video
game, right down to little red letters she couldn’t read because she’d never picked up much Farsi.
Aaron had driven off that morning in a beat-up old Ford Hybridstar, loaded with all her stuff. He’d promised to set it into her room so it was all there when she arrived at the commune in Mexico. To stay here for two days, Ysabel had picked up an air mattress, two cups, a tea ball, and an old teakettle at the Salvation Army, and liberated a few sandwiches and some tea from The Green Mother.
She felt ashamed; Miriam always had been nice to her, even advancing her her first month’s rent for this place.
Well, after Daybreak, things would be better for local businesses, anyway. Meanwhile, Ysabel really needed the tea.
Other than her tea, all she had left was her purse and the cell phone she’d bought at a convenience store three weeks ago, to allow time for them to overwrite the surveillance video.
The kettle whistled; she made her tea; while it steeped, she contemplated the screen. She put the crosshairs on the motor, which turned a generator, which powered a radar thing, which shot radiation into Mexico to keep Mexicans out of the United States.
The idea that someone would keep out peasants, especially with radiation, made her sick. Ysabel loved peasants; she had learned wisdom and truth from peasants everywhere. One supercilious snot-chick at school had said that Ysabel had never met a peasant who wasn’t a great person in wonderful harmony with the whole Earth.
The thing was, it was true. Che had loved peasants, and so had all the great Latin American poets and writers, and for that matter fucking Jesus had loved peasants. Peasants were just, you know, lovable.
Aaron had that Che-Jesus-Latin-American-poet look about him, big wet brown eyes, curly black beard and hair in a mad scraggle, soft sensitive lips and expressive eyebrows…
Ysabel wanted to just talk with Aaron about her love for peasants. She loved faces with real character shaped by troubles, and simple faith in simple stories, and everything about the peasants. She loved their work ethic. She loved their gentle way with children—even when they hit them, it was totally different from some dad in the suburbs mindlessly pouring out rage on a little kid; you could feel the love. She liked the blunt, open sense of humor and the earthiness of the peasant women.
Daybreak was, really, truly, just the beginning of an America with acoustic folk and no country, deep faith and no religion, peasants and no rednecks.
Surely, for that, one little Stinger fired at military property was okay. You had to be practical, ends and means, omelets and eggs, all that stuff she’d had in college.
She smiled. Dad had once told her that instead of playing violent video games, she should be learning something practical.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OFF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND. CALIFORNIA. ABOUT 2:00 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
“Forty-eight seconds,” Tracy Barbour said, as the black balloon tumbled upward and away, rising quickly and disappearing into the bright blue afternoon sky. “Beat that.”
“If you’ll take the helm.”
“Just what I was hoping you’d say. And how ’bout a beer for each of us? We’re down to our last two tanks of hydrogen; only about a hundred balloons to go. We won’t be drunk before we finish launching.”
Grady made his way to the cooler, his mind already on the next few months of loafing from port to port while they saw what shape the new world would take.
They always had been very green, from their long vacations spent hiking, to the natural fibers they wore, to the family land they’d put in conservation trusts, and of course their wooden boat, so when Tracy had been IMing with a few interesting people some years ago, they had immediately understood the promise of Daybreak, and a world without industry, because of the stories they had heard as children: Tracy’s grandmother had told her about life in a really big, comfortable house with abundant servants; Grady’s great-grandfather had described, in loving detail, how it was to own the whole estuary of a small river and maintain it for waterfowl and fish.
Rich was always better than poor, of course, but after Daybreak, Tracy liked to say, there would just be more point to being rich. Today’s twenty-first-century squalid, poor industrial world, where even the best of family and school meant only that you could afford a nanny and a cleaning service, a world where there was plenty of stuff but the stuff was all crap, and every damn body that wanted it could go anywhere whether they properly appreciated it or not… faugh!
Daybreak would bring back the world where people had a place, and filled it well, and knew they belonged there.
Grady and Tracy had about half a ton of gold in the concealed second hold, but until there was a safe way and place to spend it, they planned to fish and do small trading; hard work, but climbing mountains and sailing long distances is hard work, so it would be nothing they couldn’t handle.
Grady handed her a beer. “Hard work is overrated.”
“Where did that come from?”
“The cooler.”
“No, silly boy, what you just said.”
“Oh, I was just thinking, the trouble with people who do hard work is that they think it entitles them to whatever they want. Every damn rice farmer in Asia wants to be able to buy all the cheap plastic crap his shack can hold—”
“Do they call them shacks?”
“They call them something in Chinese or some language, hon, it’s just an example.”
“I mean, is it something we’d call a shack or is it more like a hut?” That little smile he had loved madly since St. Albans quirked up the corner of her mouth.
He gulped some icy beer and said, “I did have sort of a point.”
“Okay.” She squirmed to sit up straighter and did her best to look very, very serious.
God, he thought, it’s good to be this in love with my wife after fifteen years. “Oh, just that Asian rice farmer—let’s call him Wong—”
“Fong.” The challenging twinkle in her eye meant You are so getting laid tonight.
“Fong it is. Anyway, Fong’s an example of someone who really overrates hard work. See, because he works like a sonofabitch farming rice, and his kids work hard and long making cheap plastic crap in the factory, he thinks he’s entitled to buy all the cheap plastic crap he can stuff into his shack. He doesn’t get that life is hard work, whether it’s picking rice or climbing Everest or managing a company. Hard work doesn’t have anything to do with it; you should work hard wherever you are and shut the fuck up. You see what I mean?”
“No,” she said. “Six minutes.”
“What?”
“Six minutes since you took over launching balloons, and you haven’t launched even one. You’re not even close to beating me.”
He laughed and said, “Now time me on this next one.”
“Go,” she barked.
He lunged for the next balloon and jar. One hundred four more tries, and he never beat her best time, but he was pretty bombed for the last thirty. “What a grand day,” he said, watching the last one sail off toward the California coast. “What a goddam well grand day, with a grand life to follow.”
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. ON I-90 EAST BETWEEN GILLETTE AND SHERIDAN. WYOMING. ABOUT 3:30 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Probably that nice hippie mechanic guy just didn’t realize that some younger girls like interesting older guys, Marshalene decided. He was a good mechanic, though, no question. According to the graphics on the dash, the gas engine had settled right on the peak of the power curve and was purring away in easy perfection, despite being an antique 2012 model, spinning power out to the wheel motors and filling up the batteries. Or maybe it always did that, but she preferred to think hippie mechanic guy did it. Especially if he was thinking about me while he did.
She had finished the chicken from the bucket and was well into the Doritos, her coustajam hookmix cranked up to the top, buzzing the two car windows that weren’t quite tight. Well, it was sad college hadn’t worked out, but right now she had food and tunes and open road ahead
of her, and she was good at accepting what was good and not worrying much.
To her left, in the other lane, she saw a column of trucks drafting; the IBIS wireless system on the interstates, one of Prez Pendano’s big deals that her dad was always complaining about the cost of, let a whole big huge row of trucks work their brakes all together, so they could be almost on each other’s asses, taking turns breaking the wind for each other. It meant sometimes you’d have like five gazillion trucks passing you on the highway.
No worry about passing them because when they were drafting, they were doing like a hundred or better; that didn’t seem fair to Marshalene, but shit, life wasn’t fair. She’d just barely found her groove, living in Missoula, when they threw her out of her apartment and made her go home. The whole world was full of mean people, and like the sticker said, they sucked.
Behind the rear passenger-side motor, where Jason had planted them, the two black eggs were getting steady sunlight from the south, warmth from the motor, and a steady flux of alternating magnetic fields; as programmed, each of them kept resetting and streaming out slightly different versions of nanoswarm every hundred thousand copies or so, which was about every four seconds.
Almost all of the nanoswarm were caught in the slipstream as the air rushed around the spinning wheels, scattered into the wake in the air behind the Prius. The strong southwest wind off the mountains blew them in a thick cloud across the wide median; some landed in the dirt, many on the small, scrawny pine trees or in the brush, but millions of nanoswarm were sucked into the six-mile-long cyberlinked truck convoy, lighting in the engines and on grilles, finding energy sources and metal and beginning to feed and reproduce.
