Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  “Our ladies’ luncheon was scheduled to start at noon,” she said, in that sweet-as-pie voice. “But we had an issue in one of the bathrooms. One of the ladies came to us and said, ‘We have to cancel the luncheon.’ I really think it was an angel at work.”

  From Connie, it went to a CNN reporter standing in front of the wreckage. “A hundred and fifty women would have been inside this building when the tornado hit. Instead, it was empty.”

  Gesturing to the main building, the reporter said, “The sanctuary was completely untouched. The tornado continued for another half mile, damaging a grain silo and several other farm-related structures before dissipating. Authorities have so far reported only minor injuries, and no fatalities.”

  The screen was now filled with a close-up of a man I recognized as the Reverend Kenneth L. Neathery Jr., standing outside the church. He had the same beautifully rounded bald head as he did in the website photo, though his eyes were now full of awe.

  “We pray,” he said. “We ask God for his protection. We ask him to watch over us and he has blessed us this day. All we can do is give our thanks. No one was hurt. All this damage and no one was hurt. It’s truly a miracle.”

  The reporter signed off, and the screen went back to the anchor in Atlanta.

  I just stood, rooted, the remote control still in my hand. Had CP&L somehow managed to fool CNN? Gaslight an entire network? I didn’t know how that was even possible.

  Plus, when I switched over to Fox News, the story was there, too, with the breaking-news graphic and DID GOD CALL A PLUMBER?

  Fox’s overhead footage had been shot by a drone, though it looked very much the same as CNN’s: the tornado’s barbed path, the devastation of the former gymnasium, the haphazard debris.

  I began googling Enid, OK tornado, and sure enough, it was on every local website and television station. There were also numerous social media posts—each with thousands of likes and shares—from women who were supposed to have been at the luncheon and were now attesting to God’s grace.

  It was straining credulity to think anyone could have orchestrated all this. With enough resources, could you make a real church gym look like it had been flattened by a tornado? Then hire actors to play Connie Bilson, who had somehow also answered the phone when I called earlier; and Kenneth L. Neathery Jr., who had been featured on the hacked website? Then plant some fishy Facebook posts, Russia-style?

  I didn’t think so. And yet I still wanted some kind of third-party source that Rogers wouldn’t think to manipulate.

  Then I remembered the convenience store I had seen on the satellite footage, the one that was just up the road from the church.

  I called it, and a man answered.

  “Hi,” I said. “This may sound like a strange question, but did a tornado pass your way a few hours ago?”

  “Oh, yeah!” the guy replied enthusiastically. “Saw it coming about a mile off—”

  I hung up.

  This had to be a dream, or a hallucination, or some kind of psychotic break. And yet I could look down at my hand, move it, and it responded. And I could feel the coolness of our granite countertops as I leaned against them for support.

  One of the major weaknesses of many conspiracy theories—from Area 51 to 9/11 as an inside job—is that they require omnicompetence from the people carrying them out, a perfection that simply doesn’t exist when you have large groups of inherently infallible humans trying to work in concert.

  Rogers had asked me if I thought they could control the weather at nine thirty in the morning. To have created all this—hacking dozens of websites, hiring actors, staging a massive disaster, creating a scene legitimate enough to fool a dozen news outlets, thinking down to a level of detail that you would even remember to get a convenience store clerk in on the act? All without a single blemish? And doing it in just seven hours?

  It wasn’t possible.

  This had really happened. There were too many layers—too many real people; too many angles from which I had approached this, trying to prove the falsehood of it, only to be confronted with one long, consistent line of truth.

  I looked outside the window, where a gentle breeze stirred a nearby tree, the meteorological opposite of the tornado that had apparently ripped through Enid, Oklahoma.

  Just like Vanslow DeGange had predicted.

  As if I were some lumbering prehistoric beast, straining for branches only barely within my reach, my brain grasped at this new reality.

  I started with Buck McBride and the improbable series of steps I had taken: that I would swipe that key card; do a reverse image search; find a dead link on a website; talk to the website operator, who’d happened to send a letter with return service requested and then still have the address several years later; and that all of that would lead me to Buck, sequestered in the high-security unit at a mental hospital.

  Then I thought about Buck’s terror when he’d first seen that Praesidium logo. His whispered warnings for me to take my family and run. That neatly written notebook, hidden deep in a storage unit that smelled like it hadn’t been opened for years, beneath a box of sheet music in Hudgins, Virginia.

  Yes, perhaps I could reasonably explain any one of those things as Rogers’ manipulations or Buck’s good acting . . . but all of that? Really?

  Then I remembered what Jenny had said shortly before she’d told me about the video. That Buck had had a “setback” in his treatment. The setback was me. I had gotten him talking about the Praesidium. And once the doctors heard about that from the guard and confronted Buck, he would have known any chance he had of being declared mentally fit to rejoin society was gone—at least for another decade or two.

  He couldn’t handle that. So he committed suicide. He really had been a member of the Praesidium, which wasn’t just a front for CP&L—because him killing his neighbor had nothing to do with CP&L and had happened years before Jenny had ever dreamed of suing the power company.

  Which meant that video wasn’t a deepfake at all. It was the result of a series of events that I had tragically set into motion.

  And if Buck McBride had killed himself . . .

  And Vanslow DeGange had actually predicted a tornado . . .

  And the Praesidium wasn’t a front for CP&L . . .

  Did that mean . . . was Jenny really about to have a brainstorm that would radically alter the future of the planet? And if that was true, then the only way to save a billion people, including my own daughters, was to—

  The thought was interrupted by my cell phone.

  Unavailable was calling.

  I managed to answer it with a dry, “Yes.”

  “Are you near a TV?”

  “It’s already on.”

  “And?” Rogers asked. “Do you believe me now?”

  There was no other answer to give him.

  “Yes,” I said, just above a whisper.

  “I know this is hard.”

  “No,” I replied. “You have no idea.”

  CHAPTER 25

  NATE

  Rogers was right. I needed to talk.

  This was too big a mouthful for me to digest on my own.

  He volunteered to come over in an hour. It gave me time to get an early dinner in the girls and then park them back in front of the television.

  I had just succeeded in doing that—turning up the volume so they wouldn’t hear us talking in the kitchen—when I heard a soft knock coming from the back door.

  It felt strange to invite into my home a man who, upon our first meeting, had forcibly kidnapped me. But at this point, my need to understand what I had just witnessed—what I was up against, really—overwhelmed everything else.

  “You’re going to have to keep your voice down,” I said. “The girls are just down the hall.”

  Rogers acknowledged the request. I pointed him toward the kitchen table, then sat across from him.

  “You know, for a while, I didn’t even think DeGange was real,” I said. “I thought maybe he was your ve
rsion of Keyser Söze, this boogeyman you were just making up.”

  “No, he’s real,” Rogers said, pulling out his phone, tapping it a few times, and turning it toward me so I could study it for a few seconds.

  The man in the picture had a mound of curly white hair and a serious visage, one that seemed to suggest not only intelligence but wisdom. His nose was hooked and large for his face, though his most prominent feature was a puffy mole above his right eyebrow.

  “So how does he do it?” I asked after Rogers restowed his phone. “How does he see the future, or whatever you want to call it?”

  “I’ve been watching it for twenty years and I’m still not sure I can describe it,” Rogers said.

  “Please try.”

  “We’ve come to think of Mr. DeGange almost as a different species, one that has evolved a new form of consciousness, or a new sense. Think back hundreds of millions of years to the first organism that, through whatever mutation, had developed the ability to sense light. Even if that organism had been able to talk, would it have been able to describe to other organisms what light was like? In terms they could understand? Of course not. His friends would have had no experience of light. That’s the challenge for Mr. DeGange and people like him.”

  “People like him,” I said. “You mean there are others?”

  “Well, not as powerful as Mr. DeGange. At least not that we’re aware of. But the Praesidium has studied this subject at some length. We have come to believe that, throughout history, there have been human beings who have possessed this mutation, which has been passed to them just like any other genetic trait. We believe that most of the carriers are actually unaware of exactly what they have. They deny it, or assume that little tickle they sometimes feel is something to be ignored. But a few of them have attempted to cultivate it. They were our soothsayers, our oracles, our seers. Depending on their position in society, they have either been embraced or repelled. It tends to be if you were a male of the dominant culture, you were revered as a prophet or you founded a religion. If you were a woman or part of a disenfranchised group, you were persecuted.”

  “The witches of Salem,” I said.

  “Exactly. In Mr. DeGange’s case, he is Romani—a gypsy, as they are sometimes incorrectly called. A marginalized group. There is a strong tradition of what might be called fortune-telling or clairvoyance among the Romani. A lot of that was fraudulent, carnival sideshows and the like. But we believe there were a few people who genuinely had this ability, and because the Romani have been so tightly knit throughout the centuries, they have passed the gene or genes to others within their community, and then been able to recognize it when the gift reveals itself in one of their offspring.”

  “Is that what made Vanslow DeGange more powerful—or however you want to describe it?”

  “That may be part of it,” Rogers said. “Though we have come to believe it’s a combination of factors. Part of it is intelligence. Mr. DeGange has an IQ of a hundred and sixty. As a boy, he could pick up any piece of electronics and almost immediately understand how it worked, and then be able to fix it. He had almost no formal schooling, and yet he taught himself algebra and calculus, mostly by working things out on scrap paper. The Praesidium believes having that kind of intellect amplified his gift.”

  “In other words, a dullard could have these genes and not know what to do with them.”

  “Exactly. The other part is that Mr. DeGange had the occasion to be near some of the world’s brightest scientists as a young man.”

  “At the Manhattan Project.”

  “Yes. He was around people who were pondering the very nature of time and openly speculating about how it might function. One of them was Richard Feynman, who was then bandying about the belief that antimatter is actually just ordinary matter traveling backward through time. Feynman showed that a positron could actually be an electron in reverse. No one has ever proven that experimentally. But no one has disproven it either. It made Mr. DeGange realize that being aware of so-called future events wasn’t actually impossible. In fact, there’s nothing in the laws of physics that forbids it.”

  “So there’s scientific grounding for this.”

  “Absolutely. How are you with physics?”

  “We’ve met,” I said. “Barely.”

  “Okay. In that case, a brief history of the human understanding of time. According to the ancients, from Copernicus to Newton, time was absolute, and it only flowed in one direction. It never occurred to them the cosmos might behave otherwise. Then Einstein came along and said, no, time is relative, and the universe shows no particular preference for which direction it goes. The fact that we only perceive time moving in one direction seems to be an accident of the human senses. It may be peculiar to our species or to life on Earth generally. Another revelation Einstein had was that space and time are actually the same thing. They’re both part of a four-dimensional continuum he referred to as space-time. Everything in the universe exists somewhere in space-time. Are you with me so far?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I know, it gets difficult. Think of it like this: Omaha, Nebraska, is a place, right? Even if you can’t see it right now, even if you’re not there, you know it exists. There are people there, having the experience of Omaha. You can believe that, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. In that same way, next Tuesday is a place that exists. You can’t see it or touch it. But it’s still out there, being experienced, much in the same way Omaha is out there.”

  “So next Tuesday already exists.”

  “Exactly.”

  I stopped and juggled this in my mind for a moment or two. “But if next Tuesday already exists, then there’s no free will.”

  “Not for you, my friend. You can’t change next Tuesday any more than you can change last Tuesday.”

  I shook my head as I struggled with the concept. “So we’re basically these little monkeys hurtling through the universe, thinking we’re in charge, when we’re actually just . . . ants marching to some predestined plan?”

  “Free will is another accident of the human senses.”

  “But how can that be? I make a thousand decisions every day. Whether to go left or right. Whether to feed my daughters oatmeal or pancakes. Whether to offer you a drink or smash the glass on the floor. And I could change my mind at the last second. It’s all very much in my control.”

  “That’s what you believe, yes. It might even be what you need to believe to stay sane. It’s really just an illusion, in the same way that you need to have the illusion time only moves in one direction, because the alternative is too much for your limited human brain to handle. In reality, whether you go left or right—even if you change your mind at the very last moment and do the opposite of what you thought you were going to do—it was all preordained.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, but wait,” I said. “If free will doesn’t exist, then what’s the point of the Praesidium? Why do you guys go through all this effort when everything—good and bad—is basically inevitable anyway?”

  “This is perhaps the greatest aspect of Vanslow DeGange’s gift. Because he is aware of next Tuesday—he can visit it, in a manner of speaking—he can change it. He understands how to manipulate the future. Remember, he’s the one organism who sees the light. Everyone else is bumbling around in the dark.”

  “So Vanslow DeGange has free will, and the rest of us do not.”

  “That’s oversimplifying it a bit. But, yes, that’s essentially correct. Remember how I told you about the currents? They’re flowing around us all the time, moving both forward and backward. Mr. DeGange can sense them. And the more he concentrates on a subject, the more he’s able to get in touch with them. And the more he understands and anticipates how certain actions will divert the currents and change the outcome.”

  “Like how killing Kennedy will stop a nuclear conflict.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which brings us to me killing
my wife,” I said.

  Rogers looked down at the table, where there was truly nothing to see. He held his gaze there for a moment, then brought his eyes back to mine.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, like he really meant it. “I know it’s difficult for you to accept, but this is all predestined. This conversation. Everything I’m doing. Everything you’re doing. I’m telling you, as sure as I’m sitting here, it’s all leading up to nine forty-seven on Friday evening, when you will do what you were always meant to do.”

  “And I’m telling you, as sure as I’m sitting here, that’s not happening.”

  “I know you believe that right now. You’re going to keep believing it right up until the final minute. But in the end, you’re going to do it.”

  “There has to be some other way, some other intervention that will work,” I said. “Tell Mr. DeGange to get back in touch with the currents and shift them in some other direction.”

  Rogers started shaking his head before I was even finished.

  “Remember when I was telling you about the genocide in Rwanda? How it had a certain momentum to it that couldn’t be stopped? That’s the case with a lot of future events. They have this broad impetus to them. But every now and then, everything squeezes down to a particular choke point.

  “I know you think I just popped into your life with this idea on a random day, but Mr. DeGange began focusing on climate change many years ago. It had a ton of momentum already, obviously. Humanity has been using fossil fuels for energy for a long, long time now. That’s a lot of smokestacks and exhaust pipes. But Mr. DeGange kept focusing on it, and reading everything he could about it, and getting in touch with the currents, and he eventually realized there was a choke point. And the choke point is your wife.”

  “No. There’s another one,” I said. “The problem here isn’t truly Jenny. It’s this dangerous gas, this sodium hexafluoride. What if instead of killing Jenny, the Praesidium used its money and influence to stop the power companies from using sodium hexafluoride?”

  He let out a chortle.