by John Barnes
The scientists and analysts at Mota Elliptica knew, now, that the fourteen EMPs which had struck since Daybreak were caused by helium-3 pure fusion bombs, wrapped in glass made from melted moonrock, exploding at between sixty and thirty miles above the antenna of any powerful radio transmitter. Because the helium-3 fusion reaction produces an ideal mix of relativistic protons and soft gamma to induce an EMP, even though the bombs were not big by nuclear standards, for about a hundred miles around the point directly under the burst the induced electric currents were strong enough to heat wire fences, power lines, and water pipes red-hot, and sometimes weld railroad tracks or cause arcs in the steel frames of skyscrapers. Hundreds of miles beyond that, the induced current was still strong enough to blow every fuse, throw every circuit breaker, make fire-starting sparks, build up electric charge on metal objects, and cook any chips or transistors that nanoswarm had not already destroyed.
Tonight they were going to try to provoke another one.
As usual on a fire-up night, tempers flared. Arnie turned around to see Ruth Odawa, his chief for math and computation, shouting at Malcolm Cornwall, his meteorologist. “Hey—,” Arnie began, but then his deputy, Trish Eliot, waded in like a den mother separating two angry Cub Scouts.
“All right,” Eliot said. “What’s this about?”
Odawa’s arms were folded. “He keeps calling the EMP device the enemy weapon, and I know it’s because he wants his Army buddies to take over—”
“It’s a nuclear bomb exploding over our country—,” Malcolm said, in a correcting tone suitable for an unruly puppy or a recalcitrant undergrad.
“Does this have anything to do with doing fire-up in twenty-one minutes?” Trish asked. After a moment Odawa and Cornwall both admitted it didn’t, and got back to work.
Once again, Arnie was glad he had promoted Trish to his deputy. Over her strange, goggle-like glasses—her plastic frames had decayed and Trish had made a contraption of coat-hanger wire and leather straps to hold the lenses—she glanced at Arnie and winked.
He winked back. Almost half his scientists were Tempers, loyal to the Temporary National Government at what used to be Athens, Georgia, and the other half were Provis, loyal to the Provisional Constitutional Government at Olympia, Washington. Arnie had played a role in establishing both governments, and so was trusted by neither; but while the country was breaking into Provis and Tempers, Trish had been taking a long, dangerous hike all the way from Riverton, Wyoming, to Pueblo. When she had finally heard about the split, she had simply refused to take a side.
Plus she’d been a Little League coach, which made her perfect for dealing with Arnie’s tech people, who sometimes resembled confused and frustrated children, and often resembled entitled parents.
“Checklist?” she asked Arnie.
“Yeah, it’s time.”
The checklist was an inventory of about three hundred pieces of mail and radiograms that should have been received before running the next experiment. The scribbled notes were pinned to a large bulletin board next to the main analysis chart as they came in. In quick order, Arnie read off the list, and Trish pulled the corresponding note from the board, dropping it into the file. It was how Goddard might have cleared a rocket launch in 1938, but it was the best they could do to ensure that in the still-functioning parts of North America, rails, pipes, and long wires had been grounded; planes would land and drain their tanks within twenty-four hours; precious surviving tech of all kinds would be inside some kind of Faraday cage within seventy-two hours; phones, hams, and telegraphs (in the few places where they still existed) would be unplugged; volunteers would watch the moon; and fire watches were standing by for the inevitable spark-ignited surprises.
They finished the checklist with ten minutes to spare. Meanwhile Cornwall had reviewed weather to make sure the moon observers would mostly have clear skies, Odawa had re-run the predicted outcomes matrix, and Daniels, the Army intelligence officer, had once more reviewed her “unusual activity reports”—the euphemism for “as much as we can find out about where the tribals are and what they are up to.”
The control bunker had begun as a storm shelter; sometime in the twentieth century it had become a fallout shelter. It was about two hundred yards from the house, with a broad firebreak between, because the irreplaceable electrical gear did not belong near irreplaceable paper on the biggest EMP bull’s-eye on the continent.
Trish fell into step beside him. “Do we have a full set of programming for this run?”
“Yeah, all the regular stuff and more so. We have five hours of documentaries and news, fifteen hours of music, twenty new Tech Tips episodes, but those are short, of course, and a thing called Obso-Leet! that was Abel Marx’s idea.”
“Obsolete?”
“‘Obso’ as in obsolete, ‘Leet’ as in L-three-three-T. Promoting the coolness of identifying old-time machines and putting them back in service; people don’t necessarily recognize a mechanical adding machine, a grain auger, or a cow pump, let alone know what they’re good for. We also have President Weisbrod and the Natcon Nguyen-Peters each blathering on about what good things the Provis and the Tempers are doing, and why everyone should come to Olympia or Athens. And we have more than a hundred anti-Daybreak messages scattered all through.”
“You know perfectly well,” she said, affecting to be frustrated by his obtuseness, “that what I want to know is—”
“There are also two full episodes each of A Hundred Circling Camps, Orphans Preferred, and Rosie on the Home Front.”
“No spoilers! Don’t tell me what happens in Orphans Preferred!”
“Same thing that happens every time. We reinforce national unity and provoke Daybreak hard enough so they decide to hit us.”
“You sound like you’re sure there’s a ‘they,’ and they think and plan. Have you gone all the way over to the Tempers?”
Arnie kicked at the ground. “Lots of people are asking me that, these days.”
“Yeah, but I’m the one who has to get other people to do what you want. Come on, Arn, as my boss and my friend, what are you thinking? Why are we even putting WTRC on the air, and taking the damage from that, at all anymore? I thought we had established everything we could.”
“Not quite everything. Look, we’ve only got a few minutes till fire-up. Once it’s running, we can talk.”
“Deal, but I’m holding you to it.” She was smiling, and he wasn’t sure whether it was his imagination but she seemed to be walking closer to him than usual.
The electric lights in the control center made the arrays of equipment seem too vivid to be real. Pahludin, the chief engineer, looked up as they came in. “Power’s up everywhere, all running clean and true, so we’re ready to fire up as scheduled.”
Arnie glanced at the clock, showing just a couple of minutes to midnight. “All right, let’er rip on time.”
Mota Elliptica had become the home of West Texas Research Center by a series of locational accidents. The mota itself, an undistinguished patch of Texas plains two miles across and barely a hundred feet above the surrounding emptiness, would have been Oval Bluff or Egg Butte if Anglos had been there first. It looked like nothing much, but it lay in the middle of a powerful, reliable wind stream and offered tough, solid rock to anchor to, so more than a decade before Daybreak, the Department of Energy had built an experimental wind farm there to test a new blade design.
The new blades were not any better as blades, but their sharp, narrow tips drew frequent lightning strikes, so Mota Elliptica was re-purposed for research into an innovative passive charge-dispersal and conductor system (PCDCS) for surge protection. PCDCS was a real success—it had preserved Mota Elliptica’s windmills through countless thunderstorms, and now through five dead-overhead EMPs.
Unfortunately, while the special materials from the surge control project—primarily a fine violet powder that seemed to be a room-temperature superconductor—had worked perfectly, and seemed to be biote-proof, all records had bee
n either electronic or blown up in Washington DC. Chemists using decades-old methods were analyzing the violet powder now, and perhaps in a decade or two they’d be able to make some.
Till then, Mota Elliptica supplied enough power to WTRC to produce freak effects nearby—they broadcast using old-fashioned AM because it was easier for people around the world to make receivers for it, and AM notoriously could be received, if powerful enough and close enough, on drainpipes, lightning rods, and even weathercocks, but at least they knew it was getting through. QSLs had come back to them from Perth, Tierra del Fuego, Diego Garcia, Tashkent, and Kamchatka. WTRC reached the world.
The clock counted down to midnight. The tape whirred to life inside its positive-pressurized argon-and-ammonia chamber, the most nanoswarm-and biote-proof containment they had been able to devise so far. The monitor speaker came alive with the voice of Chris Manckiewicz: “People of Earth, this is WTRC, the radio voice of the Reconstruction Research Center, broadcasting from West Texas Research Center at Mota Elliptica—”
Manckiewicz introduced short messages from Graham Weisbrod, the President of the United States if you thought the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia, Washington, was legitimate. Then Cameron Nguyen-Peters, the Natcon of the Temporary National Government in Athens, Georgia, the man in charge of restoring true Constitutional government if you leaned that way, delivered a message exactly as long. The order had been settled by coin flip and would be reversed on the next cycle through the programming.
If everything worked, a flash in Mare Fecunditatis on the moon sometime in the next four days should be followed, 73 to 85 hours later, by an EMP directly over Mota Elliptica. By then the complete loop of programming would have played at least eleven times.
“How’s signal strength?” Arnie asked.
Pahludin grinned. “Daybreakers in Panama are picking us up on their dental fillings. Our planet is hearing us, Arnie; if there was anyone to listen on Mars, they’d hear us too.” The men fist-bumped, and Arnie and Trish handed out chilled pre-Daybreak beers for a toast before the first-shift running crew took over.
As they walked back to the house, Arnie decided that Trish Eliot was definitely walking close to him. Have to think what to do about that, but maybe not tonight. Kind of built funny, big butt and small top, a little frog-faced. Arnie knew that was unfair. It wasn’t Trish’s fault that his last girlfriend had been Allison Sok Banh, who pretty much defined “head-turner,” was far out of his league, and dumped him to become the First Lady in Olympia.
But if it weren’t for Trish, I’d be so lonely here—
The farmhouse had probably been the spiffiest thing in the county when the newspaper landing on its porch said GARFIELD ASSASSINATED. In the century and a half since then it had been a successful farmhouse, then a failed hotel, then a boarded-up derelict advertised as a “fixer-upper Victorian.” Probably no previous owner would recognize it now, with its steel shutters, faced with mirrors, covering every window; mirror-covered roof; silver-painted walls; and carefully rounded-off corners and edges. In the gray-blue moonlight it looked like a just-beginning-to-melt tin model of Auntie Em’s house.
Trish had begun as his senior electrostatics engineer because she had a mostly completed doctorate in physics and a willingness to try, and he had a desperate need and a minuscule applicant pool. Her great gift for dealing with people—a gift Arnie felt he totally lacked—had proved more important than her adequate talent for explaining weird electric effects.
The warmth of her body close beside him in the cool summer night was distracting. “Pahludin was a great choice for your radio chief,” she said, quietly. “One of the few of them that doesn’t resent you.”
“Are the techies still saying a real scientist should be in charge?”
“All except Odawa. She says a real mathematician should be.” Trish shrugged. “You know, before the next experiment, I wish you’d take three days or so, and spend some blackboard time, and just let the technical people know what you do and why you’re in charge. Half of them think it’s nepotism because you were Heather’s protégé, and the other half think it’s because Heather can’t tell one guy who works with numbers from another.”
“What do you think?” Arnie asked.
“I think you’re a pretty good boss. And a statistical semiotician is probably the closest thing Heather has to a cryptographer. I’m guessing you’re part of Heather trying to keep the PCG and TNG from going to war, by settling one of the big questions between them. The Provis want it all to be a big accident that’s over now except for the moon gun, so they can reconstruct after Daybreak. The Tempers want it to be Fu Manchu or Doctor No sitting on a mountain someplace giving orders so they can have a war with Daybreak. The Provis would be more comfortable in a reconstruction, and the Tempers would be more comfortable in a war. Like the guy with a hammer sees a nail, and the guy with the wrench sees a bolt.”
“What do you see?”
“That you’re the only guy who doesn’t know what it is and wants to find that out before he reaches into the toolbox.” Her hand slipped around his biceps, light as a toilet-paper noose, and he didn’t shake it off. “And I want to be on your side. Can you tell me what this experiment is about?”
“Well, kind of. Remember I don’t have the tools to do what I used to do. No web to crawl, no bots to crawl it with if there was one, no ESCARR to analyze the data with if I had that, no big blazing fast supercomputers that could run ESCARR if a copy of it survived. So I did what you do when you have no way to analyze the data you don’t have. I just took a pretty good stab at setting things up to maximally offend Daybreak.”
“And the point of that is—”
“Well, it’s putting together several likely guesses into a complete SWAG. The analysis team thinks the moon gun was built by robots or nanos smuggled onto the Iranian-Chinese expedition of 2019. We’ve confirmed Daybreak existed long ago enough to do that, and we know it infiltrated thousands of organizations and movements well before 2020. The moon gun is less than eighty miles from where the lunar manufacturing experimental module landed, after all.
“We’ve established experimentally that the moon gun shoots at every big stationary radio source eventually, but if there are symbols for Daybreak sucks woven into it with enough frequency, it shoots sooner and uses a more intense EMP. So in the experiment before the last one we sent Daybreak sucks as the common interpretant of all the hundreds of different representema—”
“Uh, slow down, Doctor Yang. All I ever got through was quantum physics and relativity. Explain it so my tiny mind can grasp it.”
He laughed. “Do you have any idea how good it feels to be talking to someone who wants to know? Instead of just demanding ‘Have you proven the liberals in Olympia are all sissies yet, and what should we blow up?’ or ‘Have you proven the nuts in Athens are warmongers yet, and how soon can we start rebuilding the interstates?’”
“Let me see if I do understand, Arnie, without getting into the vocabulary, okay? So two shots ago you broadcast pure news and entertainment, hardly mentioning Daybreak, and the moon gun didn’t fire for almost four days, as if it were conserving its resources—whatever those might be. Last shot you had a shitload of little bitty ‘Hey Daybreak, eat shit’ messages—almost that obvious—and it hit us earlier than it ever had before, like it was scrambling to nail us no matter what the cost. So you’ve proved that whatever controls the moon gun can tell the difference between one message and another, which means it’s either a real smart AI on the moon, or a bunch of smart guys in a cave on Earth with the remote for the moon gun. Right so far?”
“Perfect. So the material we’re broadcasting in tonight’s experiment will look much more anti-Daybreak to a human being, because we aimed much more elaborate versions of Daybreak sucks at known human hot buttons. But an AI will interpret it as much less hostile, because it contains a tiny fraction of the gross count of keywords and triggers that I used last time.”
“For example? If I know you, and I’m starting to, you have an analogy.”
He shrugged. “Sort of. Suppose you were trying to find out if it was me or a clever AI reacting to a racist rant, by how much effort we put into killing you for it. The AI would count every time the words ‘slant’ or ‘slope’ occurred—even if it was slanted news or a ski slope. I’d react to references to laundry, buck teeth, bad driving, and ‘Yankee got five dollars for good time?’ even if they were less numerous and didn’t use the common vulgar terms. And if you checked to see how fast we punched your bigoted nose, that would be different between a racism-detecting AI and a real-life Asian.
“So these last two experiments were calibrations of Daybreak’s response: how does it respond to Daybreak-neutral versus Daybreak-sucks messages? This experiment is to see which response a phrased-for-humans version of Daybreak sucks triggers. If it shoots back hard and fast and damn the expense, probably there are people holding the remote on the moon gun. If it shoots back at its convenience, just normal radio suppression, the moon gun is a robot.”
“And… Heather and the RRC want to know this because…?”
“Well, fighting a smart machine that follows complicated rules, like the Provis think Daybreak is, is different from fighting human leadership, which the Tempers think Daybreak has. Which in turn is different from fighting what I’m afraid Daybreak really is.” He sighed, hoping she’d pick up the hint.
“Sometime soon, I want you to tell me what you’re afraid Daybreak is, and why it frightens a smart, tough guy like you so much. But at least now I know what you’re up to.”