Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  Their trios were an adaptation to a time when their species’ numbers had grown precariously small. They paired two husbands with each wife in the same manner that they hunted—always in threes—an eternal, instinctive effort to break loose of their limited diversity.

  “Now,” he called, rushing into the street. The Dead Men were caught in a pocket among the cars. Nim did not understand the vehicles, which looked like metal boulders and burned at the touch, but he liked the traps created by the cars’ haphazard arrangement.

  His hunters swarmed the enemy. Somehow the Dead Men knocked them back in a deafening roar of fire and hail. Nim twisted as pain skewered his middle. He fell, his club banging on the street.

  His last thought was that the Dead Men’s weapons were too strong for his group, but killing one Nim was like killing ants.

  There would always be more of him.

  NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

  The room had become too small for Marcus’s fear. There was nowhere to go except deeper into himself, sitting on two blankets he’d folded on the floor.

  His notepad was rumpled and marked with grungy fingerprints because he’d fussed with it dozens of times, first recording everything he knew about the flares, then adding personal information. Like a man in the grip of schizophrenia, Marcus had also written a short list of instructions to himself.

  The electronics room was not entirely safe from the pulse. The most intense spikes penetrated its walls. After he’d regained his senses the first time, the door was open and Rebecca was missing. He’d screamed for her, but he hadn’t run outside.

  What if he had only seconds before this lull in the geomagnetic flux was over?

  He’d shut the door, then wedged paperclips into the lock and stacked most of his supplies against the door, hoping to prevent himself from leaving if he suffered another blackout.

  That decision was its own danger. If the pulse intensified again and remained at a high level, if he lacked the intelligence to pry open the lock, he would die in this room. But what was the alternative?

  “You can’t leave,” Marcus said in the dark, suffocating quiet.

  The notepad was his anchor. It was his last testament. He set it on his lap and studied the words he’d drawn and redrawn in ballpoint until the letters were dense black scars.

  1) DON’T GIVE UP. WAIT.

  2) YOU CAN STILL HELP ROELL.

  3) READ PAGES 5 AND 8.

  His handwriting was jagged on the pages inside. He hadn’t been sure there would be time to complete this record. Once started, he’d also found he had more to say than he expected, drowning in nostalgia and pain.

  He longed for things that had never been—a better relationship with his son—more time together—another chance. Why had work seemed so important while Roell was growing up without him? Nothing mattered more than family, yet he’d let the boy slip away, obsessed with the stars and other marvels he could never touch instead of the small miracle of his son’s life.

  Yesterday he’d wasted his best opportunity to find Roell, choosing to stay here instead. How much of that decision had been cowardice?

  The truth wouldn’t have hurt so badly if his choice amounted to something, but Marcus had not been able to bring the array online. Too many of the processors and signal converters had fried when the pulse came through the room. He had a toolbox and screwdrivers, even a power drill, but not the spare modules he needed to repair the electronics. That equipment was in the assembly shed across the field, and he wouldn’t know if any of the extra modules had survived the pulse until he ran over there and checked.

  If he lived, if he ever spoke to anyone again, he would never admit his first thought. He’d considered taking apart everything in the room—the processors, the shelves, everything. He could strip the ruined hardware for copper and steel, bolting another thin layer of armor to the ceiling. It might preserve him. But for what? His juice and soda wouldn’t last two days. His food wouldn’t last a week.

  Even if he coaxed Kym and Chuck to the wall, he couldn’t push candy or chips through his spy holes. They couldn’t read or use words anymore. He had no way to pantomime Bring me water that they could see, and a hole large enough to show his face would probably allow the pulse inside.

  1) DON’T GIVE UP. WAIT.

  He needed to drink as little as possible without becoming so weak he couldn’t run. If there was another lull, he could sprint outside and refill his bottles. Then he would rush to the assembly shed and gather what he needed. His notepad was crammed with checklists.

  If he could bring the array online again, he might be able to analyze the sun’s activity. He might even predict the course of the storm. Imagine if he could tell the world when it would be safe to find their families! A radio or a cell phone might work if the pulse stopped. More soldiers would come. So he didn’t sleep. He didn’t dare rest his eyes. His body was sluggish with fatigue poisons that caffeine and sugar couldn’t wash away, but if he closed his eyes, he was afraid he’d sleep for hours and miss any hint that Kym and the others had turned normal again. They would yell or cry or there might be footsteps inside the station if he could only wait.

  Despite everything he’d told Rebecca, Marcus had hoped the first interrupts were the peak of the solar max. With luck, the flares would stop again for years or lifetimes. He would be insane to hope for anything else.

  “You’re not insane,” Marcus said. But there were more sinister thoughts inside him now than the prospect of starving to death in this lonely cage.

  After Rebecca’s team had commandeered the station, he’d never had a moment to open the files he’d received from NOAA. Today he’d examined their data closely before his Mac burned out.

  Why are you reading about ice caps and lava beds? Kym had asked.

  “Because solar flares leave nitrates in the ice, and cooling lava records some properties of Earth’s magnetic field,” Marcus said. He was barely aware that his conversation was one-sided. “There are sample cores from Antarctica dating back four hundred thousand years. The ocean beds are even older. Some of the lava fields under the Atlantic show fifty million years of magnetic shifts.”

  He looked down at his empty left hand, remembering the feel of Rebecca’s fingers interlocked with his own when they first ventured outside. I don’t understand, she’d protested.

  “The pulse isn’t going to stop,” he said.

  Marcus was not a fatalist. He had always been pragmatic, making the most of observable data, but there was no way to fight the sun. What if Rebecca had sensed his despair, shared it, and realized what might happen between them if they were trapped in this room forever? Starvation. Madness.

  Could that be why she’d run outside?

  For decades, NOAA’s Paleoclimatology Program and the National Snow and Ice Data Center had gathered information from ice scientists and biologists everywhere in the world. Many of the contributing studies were focused on global warming or marine habitats. Others were more interested in the ancient pollens, dust, and insects preserved by glaciers and polar ice.

  In the frantic hours before the pulse, all of this data had been reconsidered by specialists equipped with new theories posed by astronomers like Marcus.

  Contamination disguised a lot of the clues they’d sought. Even the deepest ice was subjected to thermal heat, churn, exposure, and recompression. Throughout the past decade, as laser spectrometry allowed for ever more precise analysis, many researchers had doubted their own findings or were ridiculed or ignored—but the ice didn’t lie. The ice didn’t care about publishing, funding, or politics.

  Nitrates filled the ice from prehistory all the way through its oldest layers. The story told on the ocean floors was even more uncompromising.

  Some rocks, like basalt, were slightly magnetic. In 1963, a geophysicist named Lawrence Morley noted that although rocks on the planet’s surface appeared to have been randomly magnetized, this was an illusion caused by erosion. Beneath the oceans were lava beds preserved from
upheaval or decay, which, as they cooled, had been magnetized in lines consistent with the direction of Earth’s magnetic field.

  Modern-day equipment had found hundreds of anomalies in the basalt. There were subtle distortions caused by geomagnetic storms much like cold and heat affected the growth rings in trees.

  These distortions weren’t well-documented. It wasn’t a mystery that had been glamorous enough to draw young minds, much less a lot of money, and yet NOAA had cobbled together a preliminary model and sent it out before communications ended. Other people would have this data, too. For all the good it did them, the human race had come close to recognizing the peril before it struck.

  “Maybe now we know what happened to the dinosaurs,” Marcus said. “But some of us will survive.”

  Not you. Not in this place.

  “We can adapt,” he said.

  Cold-blooded life forms, especially large ones, would be especially vulnerable to the pulse, and no one had fully explained why the giant reptiles disappeared so abruptly.

  There were competing theories about the dinosaurs’ extinction; the Chicxulub meteor strike; years of darkness brought on by worldwide volcanic eruptions; the rise of small mammals who fed on dinosaur eggs. What they knew for certain was that at the end of the Cretaceous period, the only species to move forward were small birds, small mammals, burrowing reptiles like lizards and snakes, and creatures able to hide underwater like frogs, turtles, sharks, and fish.

  That would mean the sun had been calm for eons while the dinosaurs ruled supreme, and perhaps that it had flared on and off again for thousands of years more.

  Rapid climate change was only the beginning of what the pulse would do to Earth. As the warming oceans filled the atmosphere with rain, geomagnetic stresses would cause volcanic activity on a massive scale, adding ash and smoke to the swelling cloud cover. Plummeting temperatures would have doomed the great reptiles even as the cold enabled fur-bearing mammals.

  Then the Earth had warmed again. Some mammals returned to the ocean. Why? To escape a new period of flares? Dolphins, whales, and seals were land animals that had evolved back into the water, losing their hair in the cases of the dolphins and whales, growing flippers over their five-fingered hands, yet never quite escaping the surface due to the lungs they’d developed in the open air.

  Regular pulses might also explain why early humans appeared to have been stuck in a series of evolutionary ruts despite having a skull capacity equal to that of modern man.

  As someone who was fascinated with history, anthropology, and the rise and fall of civilizations, Marcus knew this was the big question. Why had Homo sapiens taken so long to become what they were today?

  For uncounted millennia, men had been brutes with the most simple tools and societies. Then in the space of four thousand years, they’d built empires and cities and wrapped the entire world in electrical grids, highways, agriculture, shipping lanes, and aircraft. They’d begun to understand the stars and the cosmos.

  Too late.

  Ignoring his thirst, restlessly adjusting his blanket on the floor, Marcus felt a sad, bitter irony.

  He might die in this room, but his race would carry on. In fact, he believed the inconstant sun had pushed humankind in ways they barely realized. They owed their intelligence to sudden variations in Earth’s climate, unknowingly responding to a cycle much larger than their own lives.

  The geological record showed that Africa, the cradle of life, had been a lush jungle for two hundred million years. In that unchanging environment, the first crude primates had been a viable but static part of the biosphere.

  Then something happened. The jungle became grasslands, which became desert, which grew into savannahs again. Huge lakes covered the land, then disappeared in more droughts until another volcanic apocalypse cooled the planet and Africa was swept by monsoons and new forests.

  All of this occurred in two hundred thousand years, a very short period by evolutionary standards. The pressure to adapt had been unimaginable. Humanity’s ancestors were those who could change. The survivors became problem solvers, tool users, and omnivores. Everyone else had died.

  Using mitochondrial DNA, biologists thought they could trace every living person to a single female in 140,000 B.C. Doing the same with Y chromosome DNA, they found a single male between 60,000 and 90,000 B.C.

  Repeated extinction events like the Toba supervolcano had lowered the human population to a few thousand individuals worldwide. From them, only one family line had persisted. One. That was how close Homo sapiens had come to annihilation, and it had happened at least twice.

  Everything that made them great—their creativity, their initiative, and their persistence—stemmed from the need to outwit the next disaster.

  They were a heroic species.

  Most of them were doomed. Whatever was left of humankind would need to dig into the Earth, deep down, building new cities beneath the surface. They would be forced to give up the sky and everything else they considered their birthright.

  “But someone might find your notes,” Marcus said. “You can still help.”

  He wanted to recopy the messiest parts. He also hoped to miniaturize his handwriting in order to shrink the most important parts to no more than one page, which he would fold into a waterproof case meant to contain flash drives.

  “You might find your notes,” he whispered.

  He’d tried to shy away from it, but this scenario seemed more and more likely, so he reached for his pen and read out loud in the shadows.

  “Your name is Marcus Washington Carver Wolsinger.”

  Constant exposure would cause neurological damage like Alzheimer’s disease. It would disrupt his memory, leaving only fragments of his past. He needed some way to hold on to himself, so he wrote his own history.

  His voice was soft and trembling:

  “You were born on July 21, 1969, a day after a spacecraft called Apollo 11 brought a man named Neil Armstrong to the moon. He was the first human being to land on another world. None of your professional accomplishments meant as much to your mom, Marilyn. Even twenty years later when she was dying of cancer she liked to brag to you, to her nurses, to other patients, that you had been a moon baby. She made you feel special. She wanted to name you Apollo or Armstrong or Rocket, but your father said those were white names. His name was Ed, which he hated. He wasn’t so proud of you for getting into MIT. He wanted you tougher, better at sports. He made you waste your afternoons throwing balls and running with balls, but he raised you well enough with your sister Korba in Atlanta, Georgia, which is very, very far from here. Too far to walk.”

  He choked up. He wasn’t close to his family. He dutifully traded Christmas cards with Korba, and she’d flown out to visit last summer, but he hadn’t seen his father for years and he regretted every minute of it. Worse, he couldn’t deny that he’d hurt his own son as badly as his father had wronged him. He should have been more accepting.

  He blamed Janet for Roell’s attitude. She’d bought Roell his iPhone. She let him follow all of the latest hip hop, even the dirty stuff, often sharing downloads and CDs with her son.

  Marcus disapproved. He was also jealous. He was still mystified by her. Janet had grown up in the inner city streets of west L.A., underprivileged and undereducated, yet she’d risen to become a full-time paralegal.

  Nevertheless, she’d responded to something in Roell’s posturing. She’d encouraged it. Roell’s belligerence appealed to her even when it amounted to nothing more than immature, illogical stubbornness.

  Janet was probably dead. Uncontrolled fires must have roasted entire cities alive, and San Francisco had already had its share of brutes and killers before people lost the ability to reason…

  She might have been here with him and had some chance at survival if he’d been a better husband.

  Survival. No one was going to live to a ripe old age if they were taking as much UV as he suspected. People might have another fifteen, twenty years, then slow
and ugly deaths. That matched what he knew of fossil records. In the distant past, no one had grown old. There would be no doctors, no dentists, no optometrists, no police. Even for those lucky few who didn’t develop skin cancer or cataracts, what kind of life would it be?

  His mother had eaten a bottle of pills and he’d hated her for it. The doctors had said she had a good chance, but she’d refused to lose her hair or suffer through the cure.

  He’d hated Janet for quitting, too.

  He wouldn’t give up. He’d never quit in his life, not on his scholarships, not on his Ph.D., and not on his son. But the thought was with him now. Sooner or later, he would drink the last of his water. Then he would have to go outside.

  Would there be waking moments of confusion? That was why he’d written his messages to himself. He would tie the waterproof case to his waist.

  What if he removed it in his animal state? Maybe he could carve enough information into his arms to remind himself. There was a box cutter in the tool kit. He could rub ink into his wounds, chancing infection but forcing the cuts to scar.

  Or he could open his wrists with it.

  Alone in the room, Marcus wept.

  NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

  An hour later, Marcus heard shouting outside. He leapt to his feet. Then he had to kneel again, grabbing for a wire rack as his head spun. It was so hot. His stomach rolled, but there wasn’t enough moisture in his system to vomit.

  Retching, he climbed the rack and pressed himself against a spy hole.

  “Kymmie!” he yelled. “Kym!”

  He couldn’t see anyone. He moved to the next hole. A familiar shape scampered through the white dishes. It was Chuck. One of Rebecca’s soldiers ran with him, calling ahead to someone else in a wary tone. Chuck looked over his shoulder once before they passed from view.