The Reset

by Powell, Daniel

  Ben knew his parents through their photographs and writings. Before the Internet went down, he had combed through his father’s blog postings hundreds of times. John Stone was a bright pragmatist with a sharp wit. He was a journalist and a film critic. His mother had been tall and pretty, and she and her husband had chronicled the pregnancy that would produce Ben with hundreds of photographs that they’d posted online.

  The photographs had vanished when things went dark, but Ben retained in his mind the image of his mother holding him as an infant, her cheeks flushed with happiness. He thought of that image often.

  Ben bit his lip, blinking away tears. White had hurt them all—every single person he had ever held dear to him had been irrevocably damaged by the man.

  “Nineteen orphans became nineteen weapons. Calvin’s staff raised them as family. They educated them. They disciplined them. They cared for them when they were sick. By some accounts they loved them, and by some accounts, that affection might even have been genuine.”

  “Accounts? What do you mean?”

  “A single member of Calvin’s staff was away from the ranch on the day of the homecoming. Her name was Patrice Clover, although they called her Ms. Black on the ranch. She’d been off purchasing supplies on the day Karl Trickett came home. February 23, 2038. Super Bowl Sunday. The evening of the big game.”

  He smiled when he heard their names. Ms. Black had been wonderful, a gourmet cook who always had a kind word for the children. He remembered Karl, the class clown whose last name, if he’d ever known it to begin with, had long been forgotten.

  “Karl Trickett,” he whispered.

  Alice nodded. “That’s right. Karl Trickett. The only one of the nineteen to fail the medical portion of his entry exams. He’d gone to work for a company called Nike, right back where it all started, in downtown Portland. Their doctors were the only ones whose suspicion was sufficient to send one of the kids home. And Karl had been crushed, because….”

  “…because he had been in love with a girl,” Ben finished.

  Alice smiled. “The man on the road to Pensacola?”

  Ben just shrugged. He was filling in the blanks now, connecting the events from the other side of the mirror.

  “Her name was Ariel Cook,” Alice continued. “She was an engineer at Boeing, in Seattle. Hers had been among the first detonations. We know that Karl and Ariel had seen each other many times in the weeks after moving in with their host families, taking the train back and forth on the weekend.

  “When Calvin armed the…the weapons, it was hers that destroyed the Space Needle. I can’t, we can’t, ever think of any of the Kids as willful participants in what happened. Certainly more than anyone else, the Kids suffered at the hands of Dr. Calvin.

  “Anyway, Nike sent Karl packing. This was in late January, and Karl was despondent. He’d knocked around Portland for a short time before finally deciding to return to the ranch. It took him a few days to make his way home—he wasn’t in any kind of hurry, of course—and a truck driver delivered him to within four miles of Calvin’s ranch on the very morning of the Reset.

  “That truck driver survived, by the way. He’d outraced the fallout, though the residual contamination probably led to his premature death a couple years later. His name was Kirby Middleton, and he wrote one of the best early histories of what happened in Oregon shortly after the Reset. He was a good man. I spoke with him, briefly, back when the telecom grid was still in place.

  “Ah, but the Homecoming! How I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Calvin saw his protégé walking down that dusty lane on Super Bowl Sunday!” she laughed. “Of course, Karl Tricket’s device might never have been armed if White or his staff had managed to intercept him. Calvin didn’t want to be a martyr. Just what his plans for the world that emerged after the Human Accord had been destroyed were, we’ll never know, but Clover was certain that he’d never planned for his own demise to become any part of the reshuffling.” She scowled. “Which is pretty fucking cowardly, if you ask me.

  “Anyway, Karl had already taken the injection. Things were in motion and poor Karl, as was the case with the rest of the Kids, had become a living, breathing weapon of mass destruction. There was no going back—just a violent chemical reaction to come, and one that had been decades in the making, mind you.”

  “It was all but two, right?” Ben said, leading her.

  “Yup. Two of the weapons never detonated. Patrice Clover had some…interesting theories on that topic.”

  Ben nodded, filing the statement away for future discussion. He shifted gears. “You mentioned injections?”

  “Part of the sheer audacity of Calvin’s plan, if you ask me. The Kids,” her brow wrinkled at the thought of it, “didn’t lead easy lives on the ranch. From the time that they were toddlers, they had undergone a series of operations. Month after month, year after year, they suffered through rigorous, invasive surgery. I can’t imagine how life must have been for them—always mending through some form of post-operative recovery.” She shook her head.

  “The kids became, for all intents and purposes, the vessels for Calvin’s biological weapons. You had to understand how far ahead of his time he was. When the corporations bailed out the United States Government after Eurasia’s attempt at the Great Takeover, they ramped up security. They privatized the military and built the foundations for the economic and social sectors that shaped life throughout the two decades prior to the Reset. The Human Accord sensed the shift in public dissidence, but they were still unprepared for the waves of terror attacks that would follow. A group calling itself the Refinement Movement popped a dirty bomb on Universal Studios, down in California. Just like that, about a tenth of the U.S. entertainment sector vanished. The holes in corporate media’s programming lineups were ancillary to the horrific burns, the widespread cancer, and the staggering level of suffering for the people of Los Angeles. The American people complained bitterly that their favorite shows had vanished. Can you believe that? Years ago, Brian and I had heard that the Hollywood sign still glows a sickly green from a dozen miles away.

  “Universal was bad, and so were the biological weapons leaked through Pfizer and the cyber warfare that took down Microsoft and about a fifth of the world’s data matrix. The Human Accord bolstered security, drawing itself even further away from the general population. Landing a gig in the primary economy was almost like winning the lottery—not quite as rare, but it was approaching that kind of exclusivity. You actually took the entry exams at St. Joe?”

  Ben nodded.

  “What did you think?”

  “They were very…thorough. They took their time in vetting their employees.”

  “Where did you go to school?” she said.

  “Central Catholic,” he lied. “Small private school.”

  “You must have done very well to make it onto step one so early in your life. The St. Joe Company was a powerful political entity. It was a Fortune Twenty company—in control of the criminal justice system in the American South. We’re talking everything from petty larceny to capital punishment—doled out by a largely autonomous company that specialized in commercial development, but had also built the majority of the country’s prisons. What did you do for them?”

  “Like I said, I was only there for a short time before the Reset. I was going to work in environmental affairs, though. That was the plan.”

  Alice snorted at the idea of it.

  “Environmental affairs! St. Joe was the biggest developer in America, Ben. I’d love to hear how they interpreted the phrase ‘environmental affairs’! At any rate, the tests, the vetting, the skyrocketing costs of education in this country—those were the first lines of defense for the companies that dominated the economy and controlled the standard of living. It was the haves and the have-nots, and the end result was the great repositioning of wealth in the 21st Century.

  “And you know what? Mostly, the corporations were successful in stopping the attacks! There was a
political movement called Occupy Wall Street that had some traction for a short time, but the Human Accord’s policies never allowed it to take root in the minds of the American people, and direct attacks on the world’s dominant economic forces dwindled. That’s not to say that peace reigned, or anything sappy like that. To the contrary, a major backlash festered and corporate resistance slipped underground. The billions of people toiling in the secondary and tertiary and black economies, to say nothing of the indigent and the illiterate—channeled their hatred toward the economic powers that held them mired in place.

  “I never read anything about Calvin’s connection to an organized resistance group. But what was crystal clear shortly after the Reset is that Calvin wanted to obliterate the status quo. He believed in a basic democracy based on majority rule, not on the legacy-dominated system that had emerged in the first quarter of the new century. The ends don’t justify the means here—that’s the absolute last thing I’m saying—but his ideals really weren’t so awful.”

  Ben sighed. “And yet, those ideals fucked us over for good and for all, Alice. They ruined everything!”

  Alice nodded, thoughtfully studying him. “You know, I’ll bet your situation probably isn’t all that unique. The more I think about it, the more I can imagine that there are probably scores of folks such as yourself—survivors who immediately went to the mattresses, so to speak, when the bombs fell in earnest. In a way, there’s some hope in that idea. You haven’t been tarnished, at least not completely, by the vicious nature of how it all ended.”

  “But I’ve had to struggle in the Reset’s aftermath,” Ben shot back. “Since coming topside I’ve wandered this hell, searching for answers that simply do not exist. Do you know how frustrating it is to be alone like that? To not know if anyone I’d ever known from before was still alive? I’ve met a handful of souls in all those years of walking—empty building after empty street after empty town—and nobody had much to say about the Reset. Even Benedict was unsure of his answers. If there are others like us, where are they? Why don’t we see them?”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be seen. Maybe it’s better to stay hidden. I wouldn’t have left my home in Atlanta if I hadn’t been forced out. The time I had left there was very short. Roan’s scouts were getting more and more brazen on a daily basis. I’d let the place go to seed after Brian died, hoping it would blend in with the others.” She shook her head. “It didn’t matter. His thugs pushed into Buckhead, and I heard them at night—racing up and down the streets on their dirt bikes, tromping from house to house, searching for hideouts and burning buildings in their wake.”

  She sighed heavily. “There was a good man, his name was Killingsly, who lived in our neighborhood. We didn’t know him before the Reset, but we struck up a friendship in the years afterward…after things settled down some. Killingsly helped me through some very tough times, right after Brian was murdered. I went to see him a few months ago. His home was just two streets over, and we’d carved a kind of path through the rubble. I found, him, butchered, in the claw-foot bathtub he’d always been so proud of. Killingsly had been an antiques trader. That bathtub had been a gift from his first wife.

  “I was bringing him food on the day that I found him. When I called out in the usual way and didn’t receive an answer, I knew something was wrong. I hid, biding my time and watching his house. When night fell, I snuck inside and found him. They had taken everything, Ben. He,” she shook her head at the memory, “he didn’t even have a tongue. Roan’s men are the worst kind of animals. I had to leave Atlanta...”

  She’d mentioned Roan’s name once or twice before, and he wanted to push further into her story, to learn more about the journey that had delivered her to the orchard, but he also needed closure on what Alice knew of the Kids. “I’m so sorry for the things that happened to you, Alice. So sorry. I can’t imagine what it was like. But I’ve got to know…why did the Kids have so many operations? What was Calvin doing to them?”

  “He was building an arsenal. Molecular computing. It was all the rage back then. We had smart roads synced to cars, ensuring that every vehicle traveled at an optimal rate of speed. No more traffic accidents! No more gridlock—no more road rage! Nanotechnology that administered medicine, just at the precise instant the host became ill. Calvin took things a step further. He fashioned, from their own tissue, from their own cellular materials, weapons with the capability to wipe whole cities from the face of the Earth. Fission, Ben. We’re talking nuclear fission.

  “And he needed a way to arm them—to trigger a chemical reaction. It was as much a feat of psychological immensity as it was a biological achievement. I hate to use such complimentary language in describing what he did, but it’s true. He conditioned the children to take shots every single day. He scared them—let them believe that they’d die if they didn’t follow the protocol. The shots were placebos, of course. For almost two decades, the kids took them without pause. They trusted him and they had to, if Calvin’s plan would work.”

  Ben was on the verge of vomiting. How many shots had he taken throughout the years? Thousands and thousands. The lie hurt, and he felt sick with betrayal. “How do you know all of this?”

  “Clover came forward almost immediately. She went straight to the press. In the days before the Human Accord responded to the attacks—before our misfortune became a global firestorm—Clover sang like a canary. There was still the matter, you see, of two undetonated weapons. Two young people, bouncing around out there with the power to erase tens of millions of lives.

  “This is really when the second wave of the Reset kicked in. Paranoia! Man, paranoia was the order of the day! Foreign governments leveled accusations. Corporate executives went into hiding. Things unraveled pretty quickly. HA’s decimated leadership struck at targets in Pakistan, Iraq, Australia, China…the list goes on and on. The attacks were disorganized and poorly rationalized, but in a nation gripped in the frenzy of blood lust, they delivered the desired effects.

  “D.C. had been obliterated. The President, figurehead that he had become, died in the Miami attacks. Seventeen major U.S. cities—I’m counting Bend, Oregon, in that number, mind you—had simply vanished, along with three quarters of the country’s total population. Atlanta, oddly enough, survived. Back when the grid was up, speculation mostly centered on the idea that one of the undetonated nukes was there. That was based purely on the population profile of the cities that were hit.”

  Coraline, Ben thought. Oh, my dear Coraline, are you still out there?

  “You and I,” Alice concluded quietly. “We are what’s left. Two wandering souls sequestered in a lonely farmhouse, isolated at the end of some shabby dirt road in what used to be Georgia. There’s us and maybe some other people like us, but there are many, many more people like Roan—sadistic animals without a care for humanity. He’d cut our throats out of spite, Ben, and that’s not a lie. Are you…are you still planning to go after your friend in Atlanta?”

  “I have to, Alice. I have to find out if she survived.”

  “May I look at the photograph again, please?”

  Ben fished the picture from his pocket and handed it to her. Alice studied it for a long time. “She’s very pretty. I hope you find her.”

  She stood and gave him the photo, letting it linger between them for an instant, Coraline’s image closing the circuit.

  “Goodnight, Ben.”

  And there it was—a tiny moment, the smallest of human openings—and he longed to take it. Hell, he wanted to take her in his arms. Instead, he cleared his throat and flashed a sheepish smile before slipping the photo back into his pocket.

  “Thank you,” he replied, “for sharing such a sad story. It can’t be easy, going back there in your mind. I still have some questions, but I’ll wait for another time to…to go any further.”

  Alice nodded. “Goodnight,” she repeated.

  And with that she gathered her empty mug and her blanket and left. He heard her rinsing the dish in the
kitchen and then retreating into her bedroom.

  He sat before the fire, watching it burn down until only coals remained. When the room grew cold, he went to his bed and burrowed beneath the covers, falling asleep with the tips of his fingers held against the ridge of scar tissue spanning the length of his sternum.

  ELEVEN

  Winter gradually loosened its hold on rural Georgia. On a warm day in mid-May, the Earth spun close enough to the sun that the clouds actually parted and the light shone through. It bathed the ash-choked fields, delivering a much-needed dose of warmth and optimism to the man and the woman trying to resurrect the farm.

  Ben was in the orchard, pruning fruit trees while Billy and Josie picked over the scant stubble of vegetation that had sprouted among their roots. The ponies were emaciated, the inadequate stock of coarse grass the old man had put by for their winter keep almost spent. Ben supposed the old man had never planned to keep the animals through the winter anyhow.

  He worked hard enough to break a sweat, feeling invigorated as he stripped out of his jacket and flannel shirt. He kept his tee-shirt on, however, always mindful of the secret carved into his chest.

  He worked well into the afternoon, sheering branches and stacking them on the burn pile.

  His mind raced as the sun and the exercise energized him. It was confusing. He was warming to Alice, and she seemed to be opening up to him as well. And yet, at least once or twice each day he fished Coraline’s picture from his pocket and made a silent promise to search for her a final time.

  When the sun had swung well out into the west, Alice appeared at the gate, a plate balanced on the metal crossbar.

  “Care for some lunch?” she called. “You’ve got to be starving, Ben.”

  He dropped the loppers and climbed down. “I am,” he replied, “but I didn’t want to quit. It’s just so peaceful out here, being with Bill and Josie and all, and the sun is nice. It feels—I don’t know, like a renewal, I guess.”