by J. D. Laird
“Don’t touch that man!” It is her superior officer again. Everyone obeys and takes a step away. “It might be a blown electrical line. Stay back!” He barks this as he storms up the aisle toward the unconscious man. The coattails of his officer’s uniform sway ever so slightly as he walks. The commanding officer kneels down beside the incapacitated analyst and studies him from an arm’s length away.
The door to the large command hall then beeps as someone swipes their security badge. The large metal door swings open and a woman with several bars on her chest fills the doorway. “Somebody tell me what is going on!” She hollers with such a terrifying roar that it freezes everyone in the room.
There is not an airmen among them that doesn’t recognize the woman and the authority she represents. She is a Colonel, and she billows with power and her presence demands respect. Madison’s direct supervisor springs to his feet and salutes. “Sir.” He stammers, sweating even more profusely than previously.
“Captain!” The Colonel barks back. She starts taking strong deliberate steps into the room. The floor beneath her vibrates with importance with each footfall. “You want to tell me why my base just blew a fuse!” The Colonel’s voice is anything but cordial.
Madison’s superior attempts to respond, but just as the words are leaving his lips the Colonel notices the man who is unconscious. “What the hell happened to him?” She jeers.
“I don’t know, sir.” Madison’s supervisor replies, cringing with every word.
“Where’s medical?” She snaps back, making her way down the first row of monitors.
Madison’s superior looks to the man nearest to him, the one who had found the unconscious man to begin with. “We’ve been unable to reach anyone on comm’s, sir.” This man stutters, and his eyes dart back and forth nervously.
“Well you have legs don’t you?” The Colonel gestures to the man’s lower extremities as she passes by another row of monitors.
“Yes, sir.” The man says, springing into action, as if there were dogs on his heels, he bolts out the door.
The Colonel stands in the center of the control room, her hands on her wide hips, staring up at the monitors with their ominous message, “signal lost.” She spins around on her heel with perfect poise and glares at Madison’s direct superior. He is dabbing the sweat off his neck with the back of his hand.
“What do we know?” The Colonel scolds him loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.
The sweating man looks around for help. Everyone knows he is afraid to disappoint or be reprimanded for the honest response of, ‘I don’t know’. To his rescue, Madison’s computer then finishes its startup process. She hurriedly types in her access code and initializes her primary programs. What she finds is unnerving.
“Sir!” She shouts, raising her butt off of her chair just high enough to stand out from the other analysts at their computers. “It’s dark!”
“What is?” Madison’s comment was directed at her supervisor, her commanding officer, but it is the Colonel who responds. “What’s dark, airman?”
“Everything.” Madison replies, her inflection failing as the words leave her lips. “There are no comms, no signals, nothing. Everything is gone…sir.” The last word is barely a whisper.
Madison stares at her monitor dumbfounded. It shows a map of the United States and if she expands it, the world. Normally the outlines of countries and continents are brilliantly lit with little pixelated lights, signifying some form of communication being either sent or received. A love letter from a husband to his wife, a resignation letter from a disgruntled employee to his boss, or a provocative photo of a young girl sent to the subscriber of a scandalous internet site. All of it is transmitted electronically and all of it leave a trace. But now there is nothing. It is as if the entire world has gone mute.
“Sir, we can’t get a hold of anybody!” Another analyst chimes in from across the room. He has a receiver up to his ear. “It appears that all the lines, even the radio have been damaged. All local and federal channels are out.”
“How could this happen?” The Colonel isn’t shouting at anyone in particular any longer, just at the room in general. She is shouting at the ceiling, at the lifeless overhead screens, and at the buzzing keyboards. They all are frantically looking for something to hold onto.
No one responds. Everyone just looks nervously at one another and then back at their individual screens. Each person is an expert in their own field but now each feel woefully incompetent. Madison is fluent in six languages and can make out general phrases in many others. She is a linguistics expert. Her whole life has been spent learning how to understand what other people are trying to tell her. Only now the entire world seems to have gone suddenly silent. Madison feels a deep depression welling up inside of her. It is telling her that all of the studying, all of the hours of practice and self-study had been for nothing. What use was there for a linguist if there was no one left to speak to?
“All the sat’s are down.” The analyst next to her whispers. Madison peers over to him and sees him looking at her.
Madison often catches this particular analyst staring at her, but more often than not ignores it. Sometimes she even sneers back at him. His name is Dale, he has told her a few times even though Madison insists on calling him, Lieutenant Trevers. He had joined her unit not long after Madison had started and the two are about the same age. He worked on the same systems as she did, tracking electronic communications, only his specialty is in the languages of South Asia. He is thin, pale and wears terribly outdated horn-rimmed glasses. Madison often finds working next to him relentlessly tiresome. He is always trying to make conversation and confer with her on one thing or another. Oddly today, however, Madison finds her coworker comforting as he peers over her shoulder at her computer screen.
“The sats are down.” He repeats again, as he points at something on her monitor. It is a small alert window in the bottom lefthand corner. Madison opens it and another window pops up in the center of her screen. “Warning! All satellite communication lost.” The words are red and two exclamation points stand in the corners of the window for emphasis. Madison puzzles over the words.
By this time medics have arrived. They examine the analyst that had been found unconscious. They remove him from his station for fear of possible electrocution and another analyst has already taken his place. The whole room has grown alive with energy as people shout various ideas and theories to one another as new problems in each of the departments arise. Madison’s superior is jumping from station to station, conferring with each of the airman as he gathers information. He is making a checklist of issues in his head. The Colonel watches it all. She stands still and motionless in the center of the room, like the eye of a hurricane or the center of a top, while chaos whirls around her. Her very presence keeps everything from losing its equilibrium and toppling over.
“How is that possible?” Madison leans in to her coworker, still puzzling over the words on her screen. “How could all the satellites be down?”
“It means that whatever hit us, hit a hell of a lot more besides.” Lt. Trevers says, a southern twang seeping through. He returns his attention to his own monitor and starts fiddling with his keyboard. “It means that we’re not the only ones in the dark.”
3 Gabriel
As Gabriel creeps into the hallway he keeps his flashlight pointed ahead of him in one hand and places the other against the moist wall of the basement to help keep him oriented. He is grateful for the flashlight and its strong steady beam. It illuminates the basement floor, pointing out every crack in the cement and every puddle where stray water has accumulated. It has become a regular part of his toolkit, that flashlight. When he had first started working in the building he had inherited a more antique model, handed down by his predecessor after he was removed from the position. Gabriel had never found out why his predecessor has been fired, but assumed it was for asking for too much too often. More tools, more supplies, more time or more
money. Gabriel had been sure not to make the same mistake.
Perhaps as a result, some of the people who worked above Gabriel had taken a liking to him. Last Christmas a woman who worked in what Gabriel thought was an accounting firm had gotten him a present. It was the flashlight, a newer model that shines so bright you can supposedly see it from twenty-thousand feet away. Gabriel had nothing to give the woman in exchange. Instead he promised to swing by and fix the woman’s office chair for her. He had remembered her saying how she hated the chair for the way it squeaked every time she sat down in it. It was a project Gabriel had never gotten around to. The building manager was always giving him other projects and Gabriel never had the spare time. Gabriel made a promise that once the building was up and running again he would go see the woman and fix the chair for her.
By the time Gabriel is halfway down the basement hallway, pains of immense hunger hit him like a punch to the gut. Gabriel hadn’t noticed before, but suddenly he feels nauseated by the lack of food. His stomach feels empty. He tries to remember the last time he had eaten. It had been breakfast, eggs and toast. The “most important meal of the day”, Gabriel muses to himself. At least that’s what the Public Service Announcements had told him. His mouth is also dry as well, Gabriel notices. He smacks his lips and rolls his tongue around in his mouth, trying to pull out moisture. When had he last had a drink of water? Gabriel thought it had been recently. The government made sure everyone was well aware of the dangers of dehydration, especially since the past summer had been so warm. The hottest on record. Every hour there were advertisements on the radio and television reminding people to drink. Gabriel is sure that he had drank something but can’t remember when.
Beyond being hungry despite eating, thirsty despite drinking, and using the restroom in his only pair of overalls, Gabriel biggest concern is that he has fallen asleep without remembering it. Gabriel never slept at work, for the same reason that he never complained about having too much to do for too little pay. He needed his job.
The sound of a loud drip near Gabriel’s head just then startles him and a large droplet of water splashes against his hand. Gabriel’s whole body jumps before he is able to steady himself again against the wall. He feels the droplet pool in the crook of his wrist and debates taking a sip of it to calm his thirst. Ultimately he thinks better of it, the image of all the rust that runs through the pipes present in his head. He shakes the drop off and hears it burst as it hits the floor.
As the building lay sleeping, Gabriel reflects on how old the entire structure and all of its parts are. Everything in the basement seems to be rusted over, especially the boiler. Perhaps it had broken, Gabriel realizes. Perhaps it had leaked an invisible gas, one he could not smell, but one that had caused him to become drowsy without realizing it. He was all alone in the basement, trapped in a tight space, circulating his own breaths. It would have been easy to pass out and no one would have even bothered to look for him. Unless something broke most people didn’t even know that he existed.
Gabriel found himself in front of the elevator. He presses the “up” button and isn’t surprised when it doesn’t light up. At least it confirms what Gabriel suspected, that power to the whole building had gone out and not just to the basement level. The emergency stairway is through a door nearby.
Shining the flashlight on the steps, Gabriel makes his way spryly up a flight of stairs. The idea of getting out of the dark basement and knowing it is only a few steps away suddenly fills Gabriel with energy that overcomes what is becoming a crushing feeling of hunger. His stomach roars so violently when Gabriel makes it onto the first landing his whole body shivers. A side effect of the invisible gas, Gabriel tells himself, though he doesn’t know for sure.
He hesitates before pushing on the door that leads off the landing to the outside. A warning is posted to the inside of the door in bright red letters that read, “Warning! This is not an exit. Opening this door will sound an alarm.” Gabriel knows that the alarm was most likely disabled when the power went out but he hesitates anyway. As the same part of him that made him never ask a question of his superiors or never complain when he was asked to do something he wasn’t qualified for, makes him hesitate at opening the door for fear of calling attention to himself. Fear of disappointing those that had the power to take away the job he so desperately needed.
Gabriel flicks off his flashlight and pushes on the bar that extends across the door and feels the locking mechanism cave in. A stream of light from the outside pours in through the cracks as the hinges screech and the door opens. As Gabriel makes his way into the light he feels grateful when there is no blaring sound to accompany the light that fills the stairway. No alarm sounds.
4 Madison
There had been no warning before the power had gone out, and for eight hours straight Madison and the other analysts worked to figure out what had happened. The only one who got any break during this time was the man who had been found unresponsive at his station when the generator initially took over. It had been determined that he was unconscious and nothing that the medics did was able to wake him. They reported that his vitals were stable and he seemed to be in a “deep sleep” before getting a stretcher and taking him out of the room. The coincidence that the man should fall unconscious at the same time that the power went out was too great. People whispered, he had been the only one to have been on vacation leave recently in the control room. As they worked there were reports of other people who also seemed to be sleeping in the base. Each was found unresponsive after the dim lights came on. All of them had recently been outside the base.
It was just one of many mysteries Madison and her colleagues were frantically working to solve. But answers were getting harder and harder to come by.
What they did know is that they didn’t know much. Every hour Madison’s superior would give a report to the whole team, summarizing what was found out during the last hour. They knew that the satellites were no longer broadcasting a signal. They knew that they weren’t able to contact anyone and that no one was able to contact them. Even the airmen’s personal cellphones appeared to be effected. They also knew that the structural integrity of the facility was intact. This was something that worried Madison the most.
The military facility was one of several throughout the country, possibly the world. It was built to monitor communications across the globe, intercept them and determine the threat level of the communiqué. They received and reviewed everything. Phone calls, emails, social media postings and even outdated fax transmissions. Not just in the United States but all around the world. Everything passed through the base’s filter of analysts. Each analyst was watching and listening for the next great threat to the country.
In order to ensure the secrecy of the base, and protect it from public knowledge, the base had been built into a mountain range outside of a rural area in New Mexico. It was buried under thousands of pounds of rock with only one point of entry in or out. The base was entirely self-contained. They had their own well water, processed their own waste, and even generated their own electricity. The only contact they had with the outside world was the occasional opportunity to take leave. That, and the hundreds of thousands of communications the analysts seeded through each day. But today there was nothing. Not even a whisper. It was as if the entire world had decided to just stop talking to one another.
After eight hours of staring at blank world map, Madison’s monitor shuts off suddenly. It had been happening to others as well. One-by-one monitors began turning off without notice. Someone had said it might be a delayed effect from the initial attack that had knocked out the base’s primary power. They had started calling the event an “attack” around hour five.
Madison volunteers to go to the server room to investigate the cause of the ongoing shutdowns. She is dismissed and is glad to rub away the tiredness from her eyes that comes from staring at a computer screen for hours on end. Her legs nearly buckle under her from stiffness when she rises from her chair,
forcing her to steady herself against her darkened monitor. By the time she is nearly to the door of the control room, she can already feel the headache that has developed from staring at the screen starting to recede. Then someone taps her on her shoulder.
She spins around and nearly falls over when she sees Lt. Trevers, less formerly known as Dale, standing behind her. “Sorry.” He says. He tries to help Madison with her balance but she pushes him away.
“What do you want?” She scolds. The only thing Madison wants is a moment alone and is eager for the prospect of some silence in what she envisions will be a still server room.
“Um?” Lt. Trevers hesitates. He adjusts his glasses, pushing them up the bridge of his nose. “Captain asked me to tag along. Seeing as we work in the same department and all.”
Madison sneers but Lt. Trevers just shrugs his shoulders. Madison is quite certain that he had asked their superior to come. A chance for the two of them to spend some alone time together perhaps. Madison knows what that means and she isn’t interested. However, instead of chewing the man’s ear off she says, “Well, come on then.” As she marches out of the room refueled by her annoyance, Lt. Trevers struggles to keep up with her.
5 Gabriel
The sunlight from outside warms Gabriel’s skin and fills him with energy as he steps out of the stairwell and into an alleyway. For a moment he is even able to ignore the stabbing pains of hunger in his gut. The air is just starting to get crisp as Fall is approaching, but Gabriel now feels a warm breeze of Summer as it brushes up against his overalls. The smells of a city carry in the breeze and fill his nostrils. With his ears, he picks up on the sounds of distant birds chirping merrily.