by Patrick Lee
“The collapse of the world isn’t a failure of Finn’s plan,” Travis said. “It is his plan. He means for it to happen.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Garner said nothing for the next several seconds.
“I won’t pretend I understand his motivation,” Travis said. “Or the motivation of anyone who goes into a conflict zone and tries to make things better for people. Someone like me doesn’t have the first clue, and never will. But I have to think there’s a burn-out rate like no other. I have to think that for everyone in that line of work, there’s a moment that comes sooner or later when you really understand the size of the problem, and the limits of your own capacity to do anything about it. I’m guessing, but I bet it feels more like a cement truck than a last straw. In Finn’s case, if I’m right about the rest of this, then it was even bigger for him. I think he lost hope in a lot more than just Rwanda. I think he was looking at the whole human picture by the time he walked away from that place. Like he wished he could just end the world and start over. And maybe he’s not the only person who’s ever felt that way, at a low moment, but in Finn’s case there was something that set him apart: he was a pillow away from the one person on Earth who could actually make that happen.”
Something changed in Garner’s expression. Travis saw him working it out.
“Oh, Christ . . .” Garner said.
“Finn isn’t stupid,” Travis said. “Neither is Audra. They must have known, even before they submitted that paper to the Independent, that using ELF satellites to sedate conflict zones would be politically toxic. But I doubt that was ever their goal, in the first place. I think the paper was only meant to put the subject out there, get people talking about it, especially the kind of power players who’d be interested in the implied technology. The point was just to get the ball rolling so that someone would actually build ELF satellites, because that was the critical piece of the real plan. So when the paper got rejected, and Audra’s father stepped on it, they must’ve decided to get the ball rolling themselves. There would’ve been lots of reasons for Audra to leave Harvard and take the job with Longbow Aerospace. Re-immerse herself in the design field, make industry contacts to go along with Finn’s political ones, that kind of thing. And at some point she got them to agree to build the satellites she wanted, disguised as comm satellites that didn’t work worth a damn. I guess she faked her death so her role in the project would never come under scrutiny. There’d be a lot she’d have to do over the years, and she wouldn’t want to answer questions about any of it.”
Garner was still thinking it all through. Making the connections Travis had made earlier in the suite. But not all of them. He shook his head. Looked at Travis and waited for him to go on.
“You said that the initial uses of ELF in the fifties, just by accident, triggered suicides, and also bouts of euphoria.”
Garner nodded.
“And in the years after that, when governments tried to weaponize the technology, they dialed in on exactly how to create certain responses, and how to vary the intensity.”
“Yes.”
“So a global network of satellites with that capability could paint the whole world in zones ranging from suicidal to dancing in the streets. Anything the controllers wanted.”
“I suppose.”
“All right. Then it works. You could use the technology to herd people. Like livestock. Entire populations, all at the same time.”
Garner’s eyebrows knitted together, like he agreed with the point but didn’t see its significance.
“Imagine it from any random person’s view,” Travis said. “What would it be like on the receiving end of this technology? One day everything’s fine. The next day, you wake up and you don’t even want to move. You’re miserable lying there, but the thought of getting up makes you miserable too. You don’t even know why, but there it is. Every part of it overwhelms you, and you realize there’s nothing on your horizon that makes you happy. Nothing pulling you forward. It’s not like any sadness you’ve ever felt before. It has no cause. It’s just there. But knowing that doesn’t make it go away. You lie there thinking about that, and you start to get scared. You realize you’re having a serious problem, and you think maybe you better go talk to someone about it. Maybe pretty soon, too, because you don’t know what you’ll do to yourself if this keeps up for any length of time. Now imagine you find out, over the coming hours, that it’s not just you. That it’s happening everywhere, to everyone, all at once. Picture it. Make it as real as you can. Think of the public reaction. People would know something was going on, but they would have no idea what. It’d be the strangest damn thing anyone ever saw. It would make the news, obviously, but how would it be covered? What would they say? What the hell would anyone say, except to wonder what was happening to them, and how anyone was going to fix it?”
Garner looked chilled at the idea. His eyes were far away now, seeing his own version of a day like that, the effect bringing cities to a dead stop.
“Imagine it gets worse the next day,” Travis said. “And the day after that. Until you’re ready to just end it. You no longer even care what’s causing it. No one cares. All that matters is how bad it feels. The papers are calling it Bleak December. That’s all they’ve got. A name. Still no real information. Another day, and it’s worse yet, and right then, when you’re thinking in specific detail of how you’re going to end your life, a friend calls and asks if you’re watching the news. You turn it on, and there it is. The one place where this effect simply isn’t happening. Yuma, Arizona. No one knows why, of course. And no one cares, either. What matters is that it’s true. You can see it even in the background of the coverage. You can see people already arriving there from other places, and it’s obvious from their body language that they’re not sad anymore. They’re better than not sad. They’re euphoric.”
In the dim interior of the car, it was impossible to discern Garner’s skin tone, but Travis imagined it’d gone pale.
“Think of Finn’s original plan for conflict zones,” Travis said. “Profile everyone. Weed out the bad. Keep the good. People with just the right attributes for a peaceful society. I think even when he’d decided the whole world was the problem, he still thought that idea was the solution. Just on a bigger scale. A global scale.”
Garner looked at his phone again, the map of northern Chile still on the screen. He backed it out and dragged it until both Chile and the United States were visible in the frame. He drew imaginary lines with his fingertip, tracing routes from all over America toward Yuma. And then a single line: Yuma to Arica.
“You’re saying he wants to kill the world except for a few tens of thousands of people,” Garner said, “and then use them as some kind of seed population to start over, in Arica?”
Travis nodded. “We can stay away from what we’d have to guess about; what we already know is enough. We know ELF can be used to move people around en masse. Push and pull them at will. You could empty a city like Arica of its original residents. Draw them off to their own version of Yuma, up or down the coast. You could kill them once they were there. Turn up the signal until the depression is unbearable. Kill the rest of the world too, outside the United States. And within the U.S., we’ve seen for ourselves what happens. Everyone comes to Yuma, with their cars packed full of whatever they think they might need. They’ve already heard something about flights going out of there, and they’d be happy enough to catch one of them, but what they want more than anything is just to reach Yuma itself. Because then the pain will go away.”
Silence came to the car. They were passing through the suburb now, the two-lane bisecting separate reaches of it. Travis saw an overpass far ahead, where 495 crossed the road.
“And how would Finn select the ones he wanted to keep alive?” Garner said. “Would he do that right on-site in Yuma, as people begin to show up?”
Travis shook his head. “He could’ve done that part years in advance. He’d probably have to. He’d need at least some people w
ith critical knowledge. Scientists, tradespeople, doctors. The rest could come from the profiling, which could be conducted over a span of years on people who probably aren’t even aware of it. Finn’s best attempt at choosing good neighbors. That process is probably already finished.”
Garner was still thinking it all through. Travis could see that he understood it. It was acceptance he was struggling with.
“Once these people are actually down there,” Garner said. “Once they’re in Arica, however many there are, ten thousand, fifty thousand . . . to be self-sustaining, they’d need so many things. I’m sure the city’s existing water supply could be kept running, however it already works. Same for irrigated farming. But what about power? What about manufactured things we take for granted? Everyday items that wear out over time. Even clothing.”
“You could use solar power,” Travis said. “Arica has to be about the best place on Earth for it. And all the panels in the world would be left for the taking. Everything in the world would be left for the taking, at least until things started to decay. But in places like Vegas and Los Angeles, useful objects and materials would last a long time. You could send salvage flights up there for decades, if you had to. But I don’t think you would have to.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what the gathering site at Yuma is for. Think about it. All those cars, packed with the basic necessities people would naturally bring along. Clothing, dishware, in some cases computers or other electronics. All of it neatly stored in a place where it’ll last forever. For years after the settlement of Arica, flights could come up to Yuma and methodically gather that stuff. Take it back down there and store it in the Atacama. For a small enough population, it’d be a thousand years’ worth of everything they’d ever need.”
Travis watched Garner process it. Watched him try to, anyway. The man closed his eyes and rubbed them. Exhaled heavily.
“What else explains Yuma?” Travis said. “What else explains any of this stuff?”
Garner opened his eyes again. Stared at the cross streets going by, each lined with dozens of homes.
“How could anyone actually do it?” Garner said. “All those lives. How could someone sign up for a thing like that?”
“Is it really so hard to believe?” Travis said. “The concept is hardwired right into our culture. We tell little kids in Sunday school a story just like it, and in that story it’s not exactly the bad guy who makes it happen.”
“Christ’s sake,” Garner said. “That’s not meant to be taken literally.”
“No, but you might ask yourself how the story got to be popular in the first place. Don’t you think it just appeals to people, on some level? You look around at the world and all its bullshit. This group hates this group, because of something that happened this many centuries ago, and these other people are suffering for it. I’m not saying I agree, but I can understand the attraction of the idea. The notion of just scraping everything clean and starting all over. And I haven’t seen a tenth of the ugliness Isaac Finn has seen.”
“But Currey,” Garner said. “All the rest of them. I just don’t understand it. Cultured, educated people, trusted to govern. All of them standing up to be counted as part of something that’s . . . objectively evil.”
“We don’t need to look to scripture for an example of that,” Travis said. “We don’t even need to look past living history.”
Garner turned and met his eyes. Travis saw a chill pass through him. Along with acceptance, at last.
The driver tapped the brakes and slowed. “Coming up on the L.I.E., sir. Back to the city?”
“I don’t think so,” Garner said. “Pull off for a minute.”
The driver parked on the shoulder, a hundred yards shy of the first on-ramp. The trailing car followed suit.
Garner took out his cell phone again, but didn’t dial a number. He glanced at Travis. “You’re sure Finn is going to Arica right now?”
“Can you imagine any place he’d rather go, with the cylinder? Now that he thinks the loose ends are tied off, he’s free to go see what’s there, on the other side—the end result of his dream.”
Garner considered it for a few seconds. Then he opened the phone and dialed. While it rang, he switched it to speakerphone.
“Who are you calling?” Travis said.
“A lieutenant general I know in the Air Force. Heads up the Reserve Command.”
“You trust him?”
“He used to rat me out for cutting class, but we’re better since then.”
The line clicked open and a man said, “This is Garner.”
“So’s this,” Garner said.
The man on the phone said, “Rich, how are you?”
“I’m good, Scott. But I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I’m on Long Island, just east of the Army depot at Rockport. Williston Air Force Base is out here somewhere, isn’t it?”
“About twenty miles further east.”
Garner looked at the driver and nodded. The guy put the car in gear and pulled out. He accelerated to pass the westbound on-ramp and put on his blinker to take the next one.
“I need a lift,” Garner said. “For myself and seven friends. What’s the fastest thing they have stationed at Williston?”
“The fastest transport?”
“The fastest anything.”
“I know they’ve got a wing of Strike Eagles. Those’ll go Mach two without breaking a sweat. They could ferry one passenger per plane, if you swap out the weapon systems officer.”
“We don’t anticipate any dogfights,” Garner said. “We just need to win a race. And I need you to keep this in the back channels, Scott. All the way. No one learns about this who isn’t flying the planes, clearing them, or waving them off the aprons.”
“What the hell’s going on, Rich?”
“Nothing good. Keep your communications off the primary channels. Use something secure. But make damn sure you don’t use the Longbow satellites. We have reason not to trust them.”
“Those would be no good anyway, tonight,” Scott said. “I’ll find a different option.”
Garner cocked his head. “Why are the Longbows no good tonight?”
“Don’t know. It’s the strangest thing. The whole constellation, forty-eight satellites in all, went into some kind of standby mode about three hours ago. No one can get access.”
Garner turned to Travis, and in the glow of the freeway’s overhead lights, the man’s expression went cold.
“Holy shit,” Garner said.
Chapter Forty-Three
They were in the air thirty minutes later. Travis’s F–15E was the third off the runway. Its wheels left the ground and a second later Travis felt like he was lying on his back, and that he weighed about five hundred pounds. There were four green-screen displays in front of him, left to right in a row. They were full of visual data and numbers, most of which he couldn’t make sense of. One he could: altitude. That number was climbing rapidly.
The fighter leveled off at thirty thousand feet. Travis looked to his left and right, and saw the southern coastline of Long Island passing far below. A continuous vein of light reached west to the bright sprawl of New York City, then snaked away down the seaboard into the hazy summer darkness.
Travis saw the light-points of the first two jets’ engines ahead. A moment later his plane caught up and settled into a line beside them. Over the next three minutes the remaining five aircraft joined the formation, and then Travis felt the lying-on-his-back sensation again, not because of a climb but simply due to acceleration. All eight fighters were ramping up to nearly their maximum cruise speed, which was more than three times as fast as whatever kind of private jet Finn was traveling in. Travis had already done the math. Even with Finn’s ninety-minute head start, the eight of them were going to beat him to Arica by almost four hours. It was enough to make Travis regret the fifteen years he hadn’t been a taxpayer.
The force pushing h
im into his seatback receded as the jet’s speed topped out. He stared at the coastline again, already falling far behind. He looked at Manhattan and thought of Paige and Bethany, huddling in the darkened ruins of the place. It was hard to imagine that they could be holding on to even a strand of hope.
Travis watched the black nothingness of the Atlantic for a long time. He felt tiredness steal over him. He closed his eyes for what seemed to be a minute or two, and woke to the sound of the jet’s engines whining, their power level rising and falling from one second to the next. He looked up, and through the instrument glare on the curved canopy, he saw the shape of a massive four-engine aircraft above and just ahead of the F–15E. He saw a refueling boom coming down, little airfoils near its tip keeping it roughly stable.
Travis leaned a few inches to the side, looked past the front seat and saw the pilot’s hand making feather adjustments on the stick, steady but tense.
“How many times do you have to do something like this before you’re comfortable at it?” Travis said.
“I’ll let you know if I ever get there,” the pilot said.
It didn’t sound like sarcasm. Travis decided not to distract the guy with any more questions.
They reached Arica half an hour before sunrise. From above, the city was a broad crescent of light hugging an inward curve of the sea. Travis could get no sense of the desert except its emptiness—the landscape was black and formless under the deep red sky.
The fighters touched down, offloaded their passengers and were gone again within a few minutes.
A number of airport security officials, as well as local and Chilean federal police, were waiting. Garner spoke to them alone for ten minutes, while Travis sat aside with the agents. He watched Garner make his case. No doubt it was a fairly big deal to land in someone’s country and ask permission to personally detain the passenger of an incoming private jet—and to request that it all be kept secret. Travis wondered how many people of lesser clout than a former American president could’ve pulled it off.