It’s sobering to see the human toll of the war.
10
Dead Space
The helicopter descends, landing on the tarmac near a military 737. Give it a different paint job and a few more windows and we could be flying Delta or American Airlines. We follow Colonel Wallace across the tarmac, still dressed in our NASA jumpsuits, much to the interest of the soldiers and aircrew, and climb a set of portable stairs to board the aircraft. Inside, row upon row of empty seats span the cabin.
“Where should we sit?”
“Anywhere you like.”
It seems crazy having an entire plane to ourselves when there are people just a few miles away scratching out an existence on a golf course.
I’m not sure what it says about Su-shun and me, but we opt for the third row back, placing the hard drives between us. The door closes, and the plane taxis. An air force officer provides a safety demonstration, methodically going through a well-honed routine for two passengers and two hundred empty seats.
Colonel Wallace returns from the cockpit after takeoff and sits opposite us, across the aisle. A steward asks if we’re hungry and would like something to eat. I’m not sure what the army has to offer, but sure. We get a couple of cans of soda, and several bags of peanuts and pretzels.
“No beer, huh?”
“No beer.” The steward thinks I’m serious. It’s only about eight in the morning. I’m a scientist, an astronaut. I was trying to make a joke. I really don’t want any alcohol. I smile, but that’s lost on him.
Colonel Wallace messages someone on his smartphone, but I want some answers.
“Why was our Internet access clipped?”
“I—ah.” His loss for words isn’t convincing.
“On the Anchorage. Why were we isolated? Why wasn’t there at least one NASA rep? Why were we only given filtered access to the Internet?”
Wallace puts his phone away, slipping it inside his jacket.
“I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Why are we flying to Washington?”
“I’m sorry—”
“—you’re not at liberty to say,” I reply, cutting him off. There’s bitterness in my voice. “What can you tell us?”
He sighs. “You have to understand. A lot has changed down here. We’re still trying to unravel precisely how the war unfolded, why we didn’t see it coming, and why we were so damn vulnerable. We have more questions than answers, and that leaves a lot of room for doubt and a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories. This world is a very different place than the one you left.”
Unlike commercial airliners, there’s no in-flight entertainment system, no video, no games, not even any magazines or books. I’m so bored, I read the ingredients on the bag of peanuts. Don’t allergies exclude stuff like this from being on planes? The 737 is at least fifteen years old, judging by the upholstery—worn and seriously out of date. Maybe the peanuts are just as old. They sure taste that way.
Who would have thought honey roasted peanuts would have anything other than honey and peanuts, but these little delights contain sucrose, which is a fancy name for sugar, some kind of gum, and lactose—isn’t that from milk? Vegetable oil, not peanut oil, just the ubiquitous “vegetable.” For the love of—why? Peanuts. Just give me goddamn peanuts. Ah, I know I’m in a bad way when even the little things bug the crap out of me.
I gravitate to the window in the row in front of Colonel Wallace and stare out of the plane, watching as America drifts by. Rugged mountains, dead straight roads, and deserts slowly give way to scattered forests and eventually farmland. Towns sit tightly clustered, dotted over the landscape, occasionally merging into cities. Wallace moves forward, sitting opposite me across the aisle, not content for me to be out of sight, hidden by a few empty seats. I shake my head in disbelief, hoping he notices.
We hit turbulence somewhere over Kansas and the day turns to night as a storm envelops us. Lightning crackles through the sky. I tighten my seat belt. Occasionally, I get that familiar feeling of weightlessness, only this time it’s not because I’m in space, it’s because the plane hit an air pocket and fell a few hundred feet, which isn’t as pleasant as being in orbit.
“Is there anything I can get you?” the steward says, probably seeing me turning a little green.
“Do you have any ginger ale?” I ask, hoping it’ll help settle my stomach. He rifles through several trays in the galley before pulling out a can and bringing it to me with a plastic cup full of ice.
“Thanks.” If anything, this interlude is a break in the boredom. “Do you have anything to read?”
He looks to Wallace, who shakes his head. The steward ignores him. “There’s a couple of magazines from before the war.”
“Let me have a look,” the colonel says. The steward hands him a copy of Teen Vogue, along with The New Yorker. Not exactly grunt reading material, but whatever. I guess it takes all sorts to serve in the army. Wallace flicks through the magazines, examining each page, although I’m not sure what he’s looking for. “Fine.” He hands them back to the steward, even though he could hand them directly to me since I’m sitting opposite him on the aisle now.
“There are a few crosswords you might find interesting.” He hands the magazines to me along with a pen.
“Well, that’s something, I guess.”
For the next half an hour, I sit there skimming through the magazines. There are a few interesting articles, but mainly because the idea of obsessing over the influence of Spanish fashion on the New York runway is so astonishingly divorced from reality, I find it fascinating. (And people think I’m crazy for staring at rocks on Mars for hours on end?) Teen Vogue has an article on the political challenges surrounding climate change, immediately followed by a Does-he-really-care quiz. The contrast is surprising, but if it cross-pollinates the interests of teenagers, awesome.
I don’t find any crosswords. Both magazines have a Word Search. I haven’t seen one of these puzzles since I was a kid. They’re a matrix of letters jumbled together, forming a square on the page with words hidden in the noise. Something like this is ideal for a pattern-matching rock monkey like me, only someone’s beaten me to them. One of the puzzles has ten clues; the other has fifteen. With a few more hours before we reach D.C., I start doodling in the margin of the magazine. Out of utter boredom, I count the circled words. Twelve and seventeen. Hmmm. On both puzzles, someone’s found two extra words. Ever the researcher, I match the words against the clues, ticking them off as I verify each one. Once a scientist, always a scientist.
“Huh?” I say softly to myself. Both of the Word Searches have the same extra two words—SPACE, DEAD. I find myself wondering about the mental stability of whoever found DEAD SPACE twice in two different puzzles. Although . . . This is an army transport. I guess whoever bought these magazines was flying halfway around the world to kill someone, so it’s not entirely morbid for them to be thinking about death. But space?
What are the odds? Four letters and five. It’s not exactly improbable. If these words contained seven or eight letters, we’d be in the territory of the mythical infinite monkeys typing out Shakespeare on an infinite number of typewriters. Nah, this is one of those coincidences that happen from time to time. Contrary to what people think, lightning strikes two, three, four, even dozens of times in the same place.
“Oh, I found another one.” The steward holds out a copy of Time magazine. He offers it to Wallace, but the colonel’s busy looking at something on his phone and simply waves his hand toward me.
“Thanks,” I say, exchanging magazines.
Call me paranoid, but I immediately flip to the back to see if there are any puzzles. None. There are a bunch of articles on a wide range of topics, with everything from Mexican trade agreements to the rise of the urban farms dotting rooftops in California. Then I see it. Someone’s run a black pen over four letters spanning four lines, accentuating each character to form the word dead. By itself, that’s pretty macabre, but like the
Word Searches, dead cuts through the word space.
undue
ascends
space
abundance
Dead space.
I’m left feeling uneasy, but I don’t know why. I shove the magazine in the seat pocket and shift over to stare out the window.
Hours crawl by and suddenly we’re banking, circling over Washington, D.C.
The plane tilts. With the sun setting, dark shadows stretch across the land. Su-shun and I are glued to the windows, looking at the devastation to the nation’s capital.
From the air, I can see collapsed buildings, crumpled stadiums surrounding football fields, fallen bridges, flattened houses, cars and trucks tossed like toys.
War is never what it seems. On TV, it’s a reporter standing in front of ruins with the sound of gunfire in the distance, rattling off shots like fireworks. In the movies, it’s gritty and dirty, but always personal—a small band of warriors, everyone knows each other. They fight for honor—all the clichés.
Nuclear war, however, is none of that. No heroics. No battlefields or front lines, just a ball of energy radiating like the sun for a brief fraction of a second, devastating everything for miles. One minute, everything’s fine. People were going about their business—running to the grocery store for some milk, dropping off the kids for soccer practice, catching a bus home from work. Then, in a blinding flash, their world was overturned like a wave crashing on the beach, destroying a sandcastle. No one down there stood a chance.
My heart aches to think of the suffering that unfolded around the world on a single day—London, Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, even Chicago back here in the U.S. My hometown wiped out. I forget the exact number of cities struck by the A.I., but the scale of the destruction beyond the thin glass window on the side of our airplane is sobering, leaving me feeling small and vulnerable.
Colonel Wallace provides a running commentary as we circle the capital.
“At first, the assumption was we were at war with the Russians and the Chinese. We figured they’d somehow ganged up on us, but their cities had been laid to waste as well—and by us, apparently!
“Our nuclear arsenal was launched by a bot impersonating the president, meticulously following the chain of command, intercepting calls for clarification and relying on the confusion of the moment and the need for swift, decisive action. Everything checked out. We retaliated, only the strike against Chicago came from one of our own missiles. We lashed out with far more than came in, devastating entire tracts of Russia and China. To their credit, the Russians were the first ones to stop firing back or god only knows if there would be anything left.”
I’m in shock. I don’t know what I expected to see, but the devastation reaches for miles. Buildings, houses, streetlights, trees—torn apart. There’s some construction on the outskirts of the blast zone, but most of the land has been abandoned. It’s easy enough to identify ground zero. Everything points outwards from there. Cars lie overturned. Buses. Semitrailers. Airliners. They’ve been tossed across the countryside. I thought we were circling to land, but we’re not—they’ve brought us in low to survey the damage.
“It could have been worse. Much worse. That was our first clue. We were hit by a Russian SS-35 carrying three 800-kiloton warheads. One hit here, another up the road at Langley. The third was a dud, hitting Andrews Air Force Base but failing to go nuclear.”
He points.
“It was a ground burst. There. At Ronald Reagan Airport. That was the tell. The Russians would have hit us with something in the megaton range, not kiloton, but apparently that was all the A.I. could commandeer in the first strike. If this really was the Russians, they would have gone for an air burst and killed twice as many people, or better yet, an EMP to cripple the entire East Coast, but the A.I. needed that network.”
“How—How many died?” I ask, suddenly realizing I’m breaking his train of thought.
“In the initial blast? A hundred and fifty thousand, maybe. No one really knows. Those bodies we could find couldn’t be identified. There was at least half a million injured.”
“And it could have been worse?” Like me, Su-shun is confused.
“An air burst would have killed close to half a million people and wounded upwards of a million. Instead of exploding a few kilometers up in the air and demolishing the entire city, the bomb detonated less than five hundred feet above the tarmac.”
“Why so low?” Su-shun asks.
“You said that was a clue?” I ask, looking at several warships lying half-sunken on the banks of the Potomac. Sloping decks. Dark gray metal panels. Bent, broken masts. Shattered hulls.
“They struck the airport—not the Pentagon, not the White House. And they struck low.”
“Why?”
“Why indeed?” he replies. “These were our first clues we weren’t dealing with a traditional adversary.
“It wasn’t the airport that was important; it was its location. It’s central to the Pentagon, the Marine Barracks, the Navy Yard, Fort Myer, Fort Lesley McNair, and the Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Hit the airport and you take out 90 percent of our military command-and-control infrastructure. Taking out the White House and Capitol Hill was a bonus, but they weren’t the primary targets. The A.I. was after our subsurface comms, the places from which we could analyze what was happening and mount an offensive. The A.I. wasn’t after the generals; it wanted to kill the enlisted men and women working in the basement, those it feared could expose it as the real threat.”
Down below, the interstate has been reopened on one side, with the freeway being reduced to a narrow road packed with traffic. Most of the bridges have been leveled. The Pentagon is rubble. Thousands of trees within Arlington Cemetery lie flattened in a radial pattern, all pointing away from the blast.
“An air burst kills more people. A ground burst kills the right people, taking out our ability to figure out what the hell just happened. Destroys buildings. Crushes bunkers. Fractures communication lines. We had fallout scattered from here to Baltimore. What a fucking mess.”
“Where were you?” I ask, knowing that for everyone in our generation, this will be the defining question. Where were you when war broke out? How did you survive?
“I was on deployment in Sudan.”
“And the president?”
“He was killed by debris. The White House was leveled. Capitol Building survived. Just. The dome collapsed, along with most of the roof, but the walls are still standing.” He points. “They’re rebuilding it.”
In some areas, Washington, D.C., looks more like an open-pit mine than a city. Buildings have collapsed into the streets, burying them in debris. Roads run in neat lines from the suburbs, disappearing into the chaos of rubble.
“The fireball covered two and a half square miles, while the blast wave destroyed almost everything within thirty square miles. People sustained third-degree burns as far away as Fort Lincoln.”
The Washington Monument is still standing but far from being intact; entire sections of the obelisk have fallen away from the fascia, lying crumbled at its base. The massive monolith, though, is defiant.
Our plane turns toward Andrews Air Force Base and we secure our seat belts in preparation for landing. The wheels touch with a thump and a skid. After taxiing, we dismount down a set of stairs rolled up to the side of the craft. Several Hummers await us. Su-shun holds the package of hard drives in front of him as he climbs in, but he’s no longer carrying them—he’s clinging to them, like someone adrift in the sea holding on to flotsam. There’s not much conversation beyond pleasantries within the vehicle. We’re both in shock.
The outer suburbs are chaotic—makeshift repairs cover broken roofs, tarpaulins have been stretched over collapsed garages. We drive past burnt-out cars, boarded-up shops, abandoned gas stations, and empty malls. This isn’t the result of just the blast: there’s been civil unrest.
I’m shocked by the amount of homeless people I see on what should be affluent suburban st
reets. Dust is everywhere, piled up in the gutters. Litter blows across the streets. It’s almost half an hour into the drive before I realize our convoy is alone; there are no other vehicles on the streets. No cars. No buses. No trucks. No motorcycles.
The sun has set by the time we roll up to a hotel on the outskirts of the city. Most of the windows are boarded up. Graffiti adorns the wood.
I feel uneasy around the colonel. He’s friendly enough, but he’s not my friend. He’s doing a job, one that has been clearly defined for him by someone else.
As the lead Hummer pulls up, a crowd forms. From what I can tell, they appear to be protestors along with several news crews.
“We need to get you inside the lobby before things get ugly.”
“Ugly?” I stop myself from saying anything else, but why would things get ugly? Why would anyone protest against astronauts returning from Mars?
“Don’t worry,” Wallace says. “We’ve got the hotel in lockdown. No one’s going to hurt you. There are cameras everywhere. No dead space.”
My eyes go wide at the use of the phrase “dead space.” I’m not sure where to look, but I desperately don’t want him to notice my sense of alarm, as I’m not sure what all this means.
We climb out of the Hummer and several young soldiers usher us quickly along the pavement and into the lobby while Colonel Wallace cuts off the media.
The doors close behind us. Su-shun and I are left alone in the lobby as the soldiers rejoin Wallace. We can see them through the cracks in the boards covering the windows. The glass has been replaced some time ago. I wonder if these boards have been put up in preparation for our arrival to shield the hotel from prying eyes. Camera flashes go off outside. Dozens of microphones are thrust in front of the colonel. He speaks at length with the reporters.
“What’s going on, Liz?” Su-shun asks, placing the hard drives on a comfortable lounge chair set to one side within the vast, empty, lonely lobby.
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