Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  Emily had learned she could resent Bugle and wish him the best at the same time. Like her relationship with her sister, nothing was black and white.

  The worldwide disaster couldn’t have a pat storybook ending. Millions of people were dead. The very face of the planet had changed. Some astrophysicists thought they could predict the next spike in solar activity before it happened again—if it happened again—but humankind would be rebuilding for generations.

  Worse, the physicists couldn’t guarantee that the flares were over.

  What if Laura was right? If the pulse returned today… If Emily might have changed P.J., yet sank her time into other research, leaving P.J. to become Neanderthal again…

  “Ready?” Drew asked. The rumbling in the floor had stopped. The light on the keypad turned green.

  “Ready,” Emily said.

  He opened the broad steel door. The hall behind it didn’t fit. The door was five feet across, whereas the hall was three, as if the concrete walls had squeezed in farther than planned. The narrow hall also looked too short. After six feet, it bent to the right.

  They went inside. The air tingled with invisible energy. Emily shivered at the preternatural charge as they reached a four-inch seam in the concrete where a steel disc had partly retracted into the wall. The first baffle was often stuck. They squeezed by.

  The next baffle was fine. Once they’d gone past, Drew hit another keypad. The baffles scraped shut behind them. The electric feeling dissipated.

  A steep row of stairs led into the basement level, where two men occupied a dimly lit floor. Behind them, in an equally dim glassed-in room, a woman sat at a bank of computers. In front of the men was another pane of glass. It shone with light.

  They glanced up as Emily and Drew descended. “We had a breakthrough sooner than expected,” one man said. “I was sure you’d want to see it.”

  Emily nodded. She was too nervous for small talk.

  Construction had been under way for three weeks before the initial tests began. Unseen in the floors above, ROMEO engineers had installed a bevy of flux compression and magnetohydrodynamic generators. The power required was the real reason for the Navy destroyer berthed at the Long Beach docks. Emily’s labs, Camp Ninety, and the Marines aboveground were important, but they were also a cover for ROMEO’s new Phoenix Project.

  The dimly lit floor was packed with easels, folding desks, recording equipment, and odd things like toy balls and handfuls of dirt.

  The project director tried to intercept Emily at the base of the stairs. “Dr. Flint, if you’ll look at our memory cards…” he said.

  “I know.” Emily dodged past him into the clutter. She and Drew had been included in the meetings to set their agenda, and she’d already noticed her own face among the photos clipped to the easels.

  She walked to the bright window.

  Beneath the generators, beneath an insulating layer packed with coupling antennae and conductive materials, the engineers had run lights, air ducts, and plumbing for a thirty-by-twenty-foot shelter. On three sides, it was a heavily shielded cage. In the wall facing the observation floor, they’d erected a screen of triple-pane glass with microphones embedded in M-string.

  ROMEO had been able to mimic the electromagnetic noise of the pulse.

  Inside, Marcus had noticed the activity among his captors. He stood at the glass, his dark eyes smoldering with Nim. He was calm. His posture was lopsided, affected by his bad foot, but he looked as if he could wait for eternity, studying them for any weakness or opening.

  After Roell’s death, he’d wanted atonement. He’d volunteered himself for the project. More than anything, he’d yearned for the Neanderthal mind and a lasting connection with everyone like himself.

  Emily glanced at the easels. Roell’s photo was there, too, and P.J., and less provocative images of things like water, hills, animals, and plants. Through a smaller set of baffles, the linguists could give Marcus objects such as the toy balls and color swatches. The amount of information they’d prepared might have dumbfounded anyone else. Marcus had soaked up this knowledge in a twentieth of ROMEO’s most radical projections, memorizing and reiterating every test.

  Emily’s gaze connected with Marcus’s eyes through the glass. At her side, Drew offered his hand. She clenched it tight, letting his love for her keep her grounded despite the ungodly tension.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  Marcus cocked his head.

  “We were friends,” Emily said as their computer programs attempted to translate. Inside his cage, a speaker sang in a man’s voice. Then he replied. The speakers on the observation floor uttered one word for him.

  “Nnnmh,” Marcus said. “Yes.”

  The two cousin species were learning to communicate.

  © 2013 REFLECTIONS PHOTOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeff Carlson is the international best-selling author of Plague Year and The Frozen Sky. To date, his work has been translated into fifteen languages worldwide.

  Readers can find free fiction, videos, contests, and more on his website at www.jverse.com, including special art galleries with nanotech schematics and images from the Voyager 1, Galileo, and Cassini spacecraft.

  Jeff welcomes email at jeff@jverse.com.

  He is also on Facebook and Twitter at www.facebook.com/PlagueYear and @authorjcarlson.

  Reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere are always appreciated.