by John Barnes
“Daybreak grew in our Internet,” Leslie said, “but the seed it grew from was… extraterrestrial? It was planted here?”
“It was friendly soil,” James said. “I keep going back to what Arnie Yang said about it, that he thought Daybreak had grown from human self-hatred, from the way that so many people were unhappy, back before, with things about ordinary modern life, whether it was the way the Third World got screwed, or how ugly all the parking lots were, or how bad they felt for the animals being crowded out, or the way that media got in everywhere and undercut their religion. But he always wondered how it managed to cross over from the people who hated tech to the people who lived to make tech. Now, I guess we know.”
Tang nodded. “I think we know a lot more. I’m guessing this is the root of the Fermi Paradox.”
Jamayu Rollings coughed and said, “Some of us may not be nerdy enough to know what that is.”
“Sorry to admit I’m one of them,” James said.
“You had company,” Ihor added. “Mister Rezakhani had to explain it to me.”
Leslie said, “The Fermi Paradox was in one of the more recent NASA documentaries we had for the schools, back before. The physicist Fermi pointed out that there were probably a lot of habitable worlds—and it turns out he underestimated by a lot—and no reason to suppose intelligent life wouldn’t grow on all of them given enough time, there were billions of years of time available, times billions of livable planets, and technological progress is so rapid once it starts that on the geological time scale, basically all intelligent species should be leaping from the caves to the stars. So why hadn’t dozens or hundreds or thousands of intelligent species in our own galaxy made the leap and come to visit us? As he put it, where was everybody?
“Well, that only became more mysterious in 2021 when the Priestly Space Telescope started finding all those planets with free oxygen in the atmosphere and in the habitable zone; just from what you could find close by, they were estimating that the galaxy contained maybe seven billion planets with life, and even if intelligence and technology were both incredibly rare, there still should have been thousands of species that could have visited us by now. So we were back to Fermi’s question, where was everyone? And I’m starting to see what Mister Tang is getting at.”
He nodded. “Suppose Daybreak is not an Earth problem, but a galactic one. Perhaps it started on one world, somewhere, once, but by now, it may have existed for billions of years.
“Suppose there is Daybreak throughout the galaxy, with listening posts everywhere, and probably industrial plants attached to asteroids or perhaps small airless moons, places where civilizations would not notice if they looked. And they wouldn’t be looking for very long, because Daybreak would find them and collapse their civilization while they were still just struggling off the planet. Maybe Daybreak was once a weapon, or it might have been created by a civilization that was much more environmentally conscious than ours, or maybe all life in the galaxy really is one and Daybreak evolved, somehow, as the way that life protects itself against the disaster of intelligent technological species. So when Daybreak notices a civilization that has risen as far as radio… it knows there will soon be networked computers… .”
“And it gets into covert contact, finds its way in like a hacker breaking into a secure system, and shuts it down,” Whorf said, quietly.
Ihor cleared his throat. “Chinese and Americans are clever, and can even be devious, but they have mostly been happy nations with big successes. Now, nations like Ukraine and Iran, because we have lived by our wits, and done what we had to, or we would not be here, we understand more about treachery.
“Doctor Rezakhani and I were jamming about this too. Maybe Daybreak is just like Galactic Greenpeace and shuts down high-tech civilizations. But what if it is a softening-up weapon and in another hundred years the alien invasion ships will show up to hand out blankets and beads and herd us onto reservations, while they turn this planet into a resort. Or maybe they plan to harvest all the protein on the surface, and they didn’t want us crapping all that protein up with chemicals. Whatever it is, we know three things about Daybreak: one, it’s bigger than we thought, maybe bigger than we can imagine. Two, it’s not our friend. And three, we’ve already lost almost everything we had to fight it with.”
James nodded. “And all this is assuming it has anything we would understand as a purpose at all. Maybe it has something instead of purpose; you know, a colony of ants doesn’t do things for reasons and an oak tree doesn’t grow from ambition.”
“But whatever it was,” Jamayu Rollings said, “it has just kicked our butt, and it is fairly likely that sometime not far in the future it will come back to do it again. So we should either get ready to be kicked some more, or get ready to kick back.”
“And voila,” Rezakhani, “we present these ideas to the headmaster of a school, and the former leader of a spy organization—”
“And the complete dupe who was fooled by Daybreak itself, and lost the war with it in his home country,” James said. “And though I suppose I am more experienced, I don’t feel one bit smarter.”
“Well,” Leslie said, “We are who we have to work with.”
• • •
Afterward, as they took their first-ever walk on a beach, agreeing that they would try to do this daily if they could, James said, “I suppose the program is obvious. Start steering the governments of the world toward re-unions and mergers, and give them as much truth as they can handle. Rebuild tech to get around the nanospawn and biote barriers. Produce a bunch of smart young people who will have the brains, training, and energy to do that; maybe we can get Patrick and Ntale down here, it’d be a better place for them than Pueblo. Keep going till whatever zapped us with Daybreak shows up, if it ever does, and then do whatever we can to take our own destiny back.”
Leslie took his hand and leaned against him. When they had walked a little way in a closer embrace than he’d ever felt from her before, he said, “Are we ready to, um, take things to the next level?”
“You already have,” she said. “And I love that we have something to defend.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AND A POSSIBLY NEEDED ALIBI FOR THE COPY EDITOR
First of all, I want to begin by saying that Luann Reed-Siegel has done an absolutely brilliant job in copyediting a very difficult manuscript.
The difficulty of the manuscript is only partly a matter of its sloppy author; a problem throughout this series so far has been how to mix the more conventional Chicago style with the peculiar style variously called Federal, Federal Security, and Defense/Security that is used within the American federal government. Because public servants in the United States are required to be extremely mindful of the requirements of the Constitution (which I hope most of you will see has a great deal to do with the story and how things unfold), it has long been customary in Federal documents to capitalize nouns when they refer to Federal and Constitutional functions (as I just did there) and not when they refer to other matters, in effect supplying tiny warnings to public officials when they are in areas where they may have important legal responsibilities.
Thus the President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and the Vice President presides over the Senate, but the president and vice president sometimes order a pizza in and spend the evening watching the Three Stooges (who, curiously, have no Federal function).
Similarly, the United States has an army and a navy but the Constitution governs the relationship between the rest of the government and the Army and Navy. This can result in apparently inconsistent, yet correct, capitalization on the same page or within a single sentence, and I just wanted it clearly stated that Luann Reed-Siegel has in fact done an excellent job with it, and that since I reviewed and approved it, any errors remaining are entirely my fault.
ACE BOOKS BY JOHN BARNES
Directive 51
Daybreak Zero
The Last President
Copyright
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-56084-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, John, 1957–
The Last President / John Barnes. — First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-937007-15-7
1. United States. President—Fiction. 2. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A677L37 2013
813'.54—dc23
2013010547
FIRST EDITION: September 2013
Cover illustration © Craig White.
Cover design by Judith Lagerman.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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