Reset

by Brian Andrews

  “Hey, baby,” he said, greeting her with a guilty smile. “Sorry I woke you.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, feeling like she’d just shed a hundred-pound ox yoke from her shoulders. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, clutching a coffee mug with both hands.

  “You couldn’t sleep, so you fixed yourself a coffee?” she said, laying on the sarcasm.

  “I could change this out for bourbon, if you like?”

  “I was just teasing. Feel free to caffeinate to your heart’s content. If I must go looking for you in the middle of the night, I much prefer to find you awake and lucid in here as opposed to talking in tongues with imaginary friends in the yard.”

  “Me too.” He pulled out the other kitchen chair and gestured to it.

  She walked to him and took a seat. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you taking your meds?”

  “Yes,” he said with a defensive edge to his voice.

  “I know you don’t like the way they make you feel, but you have to take them, Michael. You can’t skip a dose . . . Do you hear me?”

  “Back off, Joz. I’m taking my meds.”

  “Because the last time—”

  “I know,” he said, cutting her off. “But you can stop henpecking now. I’m not sleepwalking. I’m not hearing voices. I simply couldn’t sleep.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Just a lot on my mind.”

  “Are you thinking about the ultrasound appointment later?”

  He nodded. “That and other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” she said. “What other things?”

  He sighed. “Other things like, What if I can’t be trusted with our daughter? What if the other Michael resurfaces and tries to hurt her and I’m not able to stop him?”

  She reached out, took his hand, and pressed it to her tummy. “That’s your daughter I’m carrying. Pills or no pills, if there’s one thing I know with certainty, it’s that you would never harm our child.”

  “Thank you,” he said, meeting her gaze. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

  “We’re a team and—hey, did you feel that? The baby just kicked.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his face lighting up. “She just did it again . . . and again.”

  “Whoa, she’s really getting busy in there,” Josie said with a chuckle.

  “Maybe she heard my voice and thinks she’s in baby boot camp.”

  Josie winced.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, just feels like she’s using my bladder for a punching bag.”

  “Want me to order her to stand down?” he said with a little grin.

  “If you don’t mind, that would be great,” she said, pressing with both hands on the underside of her belly. “Oh wait, there, she’s just stopped. Thank God.”

  He kept his hand on her tummy for another beat, then sat back in his chair and fixed his gaze on her.

  “What?”

  “Do you know how beautiful you are?”

  She felt her cheeks blush. “You’re just saying that because you have to. I’m a whale. Look at me.”

  “If you’re a whale, then you’re the hottest whale on the planet.”

  “Oh stop . . .”

  He smiled at her; she smiled back, and they lingered in the moment until it faded.

  “Have you thought any more about names?” she said. “Do any of the ones on the short list feel right to you?”

  He nodded. “I think I’m leaning toward Genevieve. At first I didn’t care much for it, but it’s been growing on me. It sounds sophisticated and distinctly feminine.”

  “That’s probably because it means woman of the people. You can’t get any more feminine than that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I looked it up because I’ve been leaning toward it too.”

  He nodded. “So did we just name our baby?”

  “I think so,” she said with a grin.

  Smiling wide, he leaned all the way forward in his chair until his mouth was next to her belly and said, “Hello, baby Genevieve, I can’t wait to meet you.” Then he kissed her tummy once and straightened in his chair.

  “Should we try to go back to bed?” she asked, extending her hand to him.

  “Sure,” he said, taking her fingers in his.

  Neither of them managed to fall back asleep, but she treasured the time spooning together. It felt like it had been ages since they’d snuggled. When her alarm finally went off at seven, they lingered not one, but two presses of the snooze button before dressing and heading to the kitchen for a simple breakfast.

  An hour later, they were in the ultrasound suite at her obstetrician’s office in Watertown—she reclining on the exam table, bare belly exposed, and he sitting in a chair beside her holding her hand.

  “I’m going to apply some gel,” the ultrasound technician said. “I had it in the warmer so it wouldn’t be cold for you.”

  The bottle made a squirting sound as the tech applied a generous amount of the goo in a zigzag pattern across the crown of Josie’s stomach. Then, using the ultrasound probe, she spread it around as she made adjustments to the machine with her other hand. A whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound played on the speakers.

  “That’s your baby’s heartbeat . . . Looks good,” the technician said. “And it appears baby has flipped since your last visit. She’s head down now.”

  “Maybe that’s what she was doing last night,” Josie said.

  “What’s that?” the tech asked.

  “Well, she was very active in the middle of the night. Felt like she was using my bladder as a punching bag, but maybe what I was feeling was her flipping.”

  “Could be,” the tech said, moving the probe around with her right hand and using a trackball and buttons to take and record various measurements on the screen. Josie kept her gaze fixed on the display.

  “Whoa,” Josie said, “she’s moving again.”

  The ultrasound technician stopped moving the probe, and the easy smile she’d been wearing faded.

  “I told you,” Michael said. “She thinks she’s in boot camp. She’s doing her morning calisthenics.”

  “Is something wrong?” Josie asked.

  The tech didn’t answer. A beat later, the baby settled down and went still on the screen.

  “Is something wrong?” Josie repeated. “Is the baby okay?”

  The tech kept moving the probe until she found the angle she was looking for and the swooshing sound of the baby’s heart began playing loudly on the machine’s speaker. When the baby’s heart rate appeared in normal range on the screen, Josie saw the young woman visibly relax.

  “What’s going on?” Michael said, his voice taking on a Sergeant’s no-nonsense tone.

  “It’s nothing,” the tech said, forcing a smile. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Well, something happened you’re not telling us,” he said.

  She hesitated. “For an instant there, I thought I saw something, but . . . it happened so fast, I’m not really sure. I’ve never seen one before.”

  “Seen what before?” Josie said.

  “A seizure in utero,” the tech said, frowning. “But it was probably just the baby moving.”

  Josie turned and looked at Michael, and all the color had drained from his face.

  “I should probably get Dr. Young,” the tech said, getting to her feet. “He can watch the playback and talk to you both.”

  Josie’s mouth was cotton; all she could do was nod. When the young woman had left the room, her eyes rimmed with tears. “It’s my fault,” she whispered. “I was so focused on facing the orb and getting you out, I left our daughter completely defenseless.”

  “You can’t blame yourself. How could you know?” Michael said. “How could you know it would do that?”

&
nbsp; Tears were streaming down her cheeks now. “What if our daughter, our little Genevieve, is . . . what if she is . . .”

  “Like me,” Michael said, finishing the sentence she could not bring herself to say aloud.

  They locked eyes.

  “Well, she’s not going to be,” she said, suddenly defiant. “The Army has cordoned off Silo 9. Nobody goes in; nothing gets out. That thing is out of our lives forever.”

  She wiped the tears with the back of her sleeve as her thoughts drifted to Willie Barnes. Was his life a harbinger of things to come? Was that the inevitable fate of the Pitcher family, to battle psychological remnants and alter-ego demons seeded by EVE? No, she thought, steeling herself. They would be fine. Their daughter would be fine.

  “We control our thoughts, not the orb,” she said defiantly.

  “We write our own future,” Michael added, taking her hand.

  “I love you,” she said, smiling at him and meeting his gaze.

  “I love you too.” He put his other hand on her tummy. It was warm and reassuring to the touch. She felt the energy of three connecting them. They were a family, a family bonded together by love and devotion.

  And that was the strongest force in the universe.

  DAY ZERO

  Forty-Five Years in the Future

  DARPA Zero-Day Technology Black Site

  Converted Missile Silo

  Dannemora, New York

  Zero-Day Technology Department Director Damien Howe walked through the security tunnel and counted the green flashes signaling that his identity was being verified via facial-skeletal recognition, subdermal keychain pinger, and transcranial magnetic signature. Fooling one of these state-of-the-art security protocols would be a herculean endeavor, but to fool all three was statistically impossible.

  Or so they told him.

  Green, green, and green.

  Me, me, and me, sang the voice in his head.

  The blast door at the end of the vestibule chimed and whooshed open. He strode down the half flight of stairs into the LCC wearing a smile, but his heart was pounding out of his chest. Today was launch day. A successful launch virtually guaranteed his death. Failure meant days of painstaking diagnostics and tedious recalibrations before they could try again. He prayed for the former.

  “Good morning, Dr. Howe,” said Lucy Chu, walking up to greet him.

  “Good morning, Lucy,” he said. “Everything ready to go?”

  “On time, on target,” she said, using her favorite expression.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Let me grab one last cup of coffee before we start the checklist.”

  She smiled broadly at him and said, “I brewed a fresh pot for the occasion. Vintage Colombian roast from 2020.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “How the hell did you manage that?”

  “The rumors of a secret cryostash in P-freezer are true,” she said sheepishly. “I figured today being launch day . . . well, you know.”

  He savored the aroma as he walked to the coffee station. “Have I ever told you you’re my hero?” he said with a wink.

  Lucy was the program lead and the person most directly responsible for the development of the EVE probe technology, but she was not the brainchild behind the program. No, that distinction belonged to the President. Four days after being sworn in, President Sanchez had secretly paid a visit to DARPA. The meeting had lasted only thirty minutes and taken place inside a SCIF with five people, Howe being one of them. Since that fateful day six years ago, the number of people fully read in to the EVE project had expanded to ten. Only ten. There were ten people on Earth who knew about the plan to save the planet by sending a probe back in time to purposely cause a near-extinction-level event for the human race . . . hence the EVE acronym: Extinction Variable Event.

  Setting the morality of the decision aside, the rationale behind the EVE program was sound—at least in Howe’s mind. The Sixth Extinction was well under way, unstoppable, and undeniable. Unlike the previous five mass extinctions documented in the fossil record over the last half-billion years, this wholesale obliteration of nature and all her vast and diverse progeny was entirely manmade and self-inflicted. President Sanchez had begun the meeting by reading the concluding paragraph from a RAND Corporation report prepared twenty years earlier for the then sitting President.

  . . . and so it is with morbid truculence that this committee concludes that global ecological collapse is not only well under way but irrevocable. The data collected, aggregated, and analyzed in this report is proof that the extinction of terrestrial and oceanic species is accelerating at an exponential rate. As of the date of this publication, fifty percent of Earth’s documented vertebrate species are confirmed to be extinct. Within two decades, the mass-extinction event will be complete with an estimated ten percent of the world’s vertebrate species remaining. Insect, invertebrate, fungi, and plant species’ extinction rates will be lower but will also follow an accelerating downward trajectory as irreversible climate change continues to degrade every ecosystem on the planet. In tandem with this ecological catastrophe, a global economic collapse will occur, prompting famine, conflict, disease, and misery the likes of which have not been witnessed since the Middle Ages. Without a global and coordinated effort to salvage what remains of the global ecosystem, the future carrying capacity for the planet will be in the range of one to two billion people.

  The predictions made in the report had come to fruition, and now the world—once vibrant, diverse, and alive—was barren and burning. Recovery was impossible. Prevention was the only option.

  Howe poured the priceless Colombian brew into his favorite mug, inhaled deeply, and took a sip. “Ahhhh, heaven,” he mumbled and walked over to the mission-commander workstation.

  None of the other five people in the room were talking, and all eyes were fixed on him.

  “All right, everybody, I’m not one for speeches,” he said, scanning the room. “So let’s get on with it. Comms, will you please patch in the President?”

  A beat later, a high-resolution holographic projection of the situation room materialized in the designated conference holospace. President Sanchez and three others—her Secretary of Defense, her husband, and her Chief of Staff—sat in the virtual conference room.

  “Madame President,” Howe said, nodding at her.

  “Director Howe,” the President answered. “How is everyone doing today?”

  “Good spirits,” he said, then added, “and maybe a tad nervous.”

  This garnered polite laughter from both rooms.

  “Okay, Dr. Howe, it’s your show,” she said.

  “Request permission to commence the prelaunch checklist.”

  “Permission granted. Commence prelaunch checklist.”

  “Very well,” he said, and from memory he began the callout procedure to the operational specialists in the room.

  “Telemetry?”

  “Go launch,” came the response.

  “Containment?”

  “Go launch.”

  “Program?”

  “Go launch.”

  “Timekeeper?”

  “Go launch.”

  “Safety?”

  “Go launch.”

  “EVE?”

  “Go launch.”

  “Checklist complete,” Howe said and turned to look at the President. “Any last-minute questions, Madame President?”

  “I know we’ve talked about this before, Dr. Howe,” the President said, “but can you remind me how we’re ensuring the probe will end up when and where we want? How do you make sure that the probe doesn’t end up in outer space, at the bottom of the ocean, or trapped inside a mountain?”

  “We’ve run millions of computer simulations to identify the optimal date in history and geographic coordinates to target. But quantum time travel is, by its very nature, unpredictable,” Howe replied. “The slightest fluctuation in the earth’s gravity, magnetic field, background radiation—even the temperature in the containment
facility—will impact the outcome. Moreover, the farther back in time we target, the greater the cumulative impact of fluctuating variables will be.”

  She nodded. “So if I hear you correctly, Doctor, you’re saying we’re at the point in the process now where all we can do is cross our fingers and hope for the best?”

  He crossed his fingers and held them up for her to see. “Yes, Madame President, that about sums it up . . . Any other questions?”

  “Just one,” she said. “How quickly will we know if it worked?”

  He chuckled. “That is the question that’s kept me up at night for the past six years. Dr. Chu, would you like to answer this one?”

  Lucy Chu nodded and said, “Within one nanosecond after the launch of the probe, we will know if the mission was a success. In other words, if we’re all still here breathing, then we know the mission failed, because this reality cannot exist if EVE completes its mission.”

  “That’s what I thought,” President Sanchez said, “but I wanted to hear it from the smartest people on the planet just to be sure.”

  Howe glanced around the room at the faces he was, in all probability, looking at for the very last time. A profound wave of emotion washed over him as his mind went to his wife and children, who knew nothing of what their father was about to do. He’d said his goodbyes in the regular fashion this morning on the way out the door; only he’d held each hug a little bit longer before letting go.

  “If anyone has any last words or prayers, speak them now, or forever hold your peace,” he said, his tone more fatalistic than he had intended. He paused, and when no one spoke, he looked at the President. “Madame President, on your order.”

  She took a deep breath, grabbed her husband’s hand, and said, “May God have mercy on my soul . . . Dr. Howe, launch the EVE probe.”

  “Yes, Madame President,” he acknowledged and walked to the primary launch console. He looked at Dr. Chu, who was standing at the secondary launch console, and nodded. They each inserted their respective launch keys into the glowing red slots. It was an ancient and unsophisticated safeguard yet beautifully effective and poetic. “On my mark. In three . . . two . . . one . . . launch.”

  They both turned their keys, and the video feed showed the EVE probe disappear from the containment field in the silo.