by Tom Abrahams
Something as simple as washing his face hadn’t ever felt so cleansing, so purposeful. He wondered how many of life’s mundane rituals would become more substantial, more life-affirming, the longer he lived in the post-CME world. He sucked in a deep breath of filtered air, filling his lungs before exhaling.
“Time to go,” he said to himself and faked a smile in the mirror. He grabbed the DiaTab off the bed, left his room, and trudged along the long hallway back to the elevators. Others dressed in the same drab clothing as he passed him on their way back to their rooms. All of them were men, which was unsettling. He still didn’t understand the separation of sexes or the naming of the different areas.
He walked from the INTACT section of level five, following the stencil-painted arrows on the walls. As he neared the corridor that led to the elevators, he saw women walking from the OPEN area of the level. One woman glanced up from her DiaTab and offered a demure smile.
Chandra, overriding his timidity with his curiosity, caught the woman’s attention. “Excuse me,” he said. “You are assigned to the OPEN area?”
The woman looked at him, glanced over her shoulder, and then nodded. “Yes,” she said softly. “Why?”
Chandra kept walking toward the elevator and kept pace with the woman. “Just wondering,” he said. “Is it all women over there?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed as if she hadn’t considered the segregation. “I guess it is,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it. I’ve been too preoccupied with all of this technology.”
She held up her DiaTab, tightly gripping the sides of the glass device. “I was just getting settled when they called me to go to my job. I had no idea I’d have a job.”
“Me too,” said Chandra. “Where are you working?”
“I’m a software engineer,” she said. “They have me in systems and operations.”
Chandra stopped walking and offered his hand. “I’m Vihaan,” he said. “I’ll be working in meteorology.”
“I’m Sally,” she said, stopping beside him. “A scientist, huh?”
“Yes,” he said. “You said you were struggling with the technology, but you’re a software engineer?”
“I didn’t suggest I was struggling. I said I was preoccupied. I’m fascinated by its intuitive capacity.”
Chandra’s cheeks flushed. “My apologies,” he said, looking at his feet. “I didn’t mean—”
Sally laughed as they reached the elevator. “It’s fine, Vihaan. I’m not some snowflake who’s offended by everything. Are you headed up now?”
He punched the call button. “Yes. Building four. You?”
“Same,” she said. She stretched her hands above her head, revealing a shiny object tucked at her waist.
Chandra pointed at it. “What’s that?”
Sally felt at her waist and touched the object. She chuckled. “Oh, that’s my pocketknife. I keep it with me all the time. You can’t trust anybody these days.”
“Good idea,” said Chandra.
The doors to the elevator whooshed open and the familiar uniformed guard greeted the pair. Another man rushed into the car before the doors closed. The guard surveyed the three before asking their destinations.
“Feed,” said the new passenger. “Level two.”
“We’re both level one,” said Sally. “Transfer, please.”
The guard pressed the corresponding buttons. The elevator surged upward and Chandra felt the gravity push him into his shoes. He grabbed onto a stainless steel waist-high railing and kept his balance as the car rushed upward. It slowed almost as fast and the doors opened for the man to exit at the feed level. The doors closed and in an instant Chandra and his new acquaintance were at the transfer level.
They followed the directions to the main tram, the one that had carried them from underneath the Jeppesen Terminal to this new subterranean world. A lighted sign above the track indicated they had two minutes to wait.
Chandra broke the awkward silence. “Software engineer?”
“Yes,” she said. “I helped design weapons systems for a prominent defense contractor in Colorado Springs. Guidance and telemetry mostly. You? You’re a weatherman?”
Chandra smirked. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “My expertise is in high-altitude and space weather.”
Sally raised her eyebrows and ran her long, thin fingers through her strawberry blond bob, whisking stray strands away from her eyes. “Like the solar flares that hit Earth?”
He hesitated. Solar flares weren’t the same thing as coronal mass ejections. A lot of people got them confused. Both flares and CMEs were rapid, dramatic releases of energy and both disrupted the solar corona, but they were distinctly different phenomena. Normally, he’d bristle at someone making that common mistake. It was like nails on a chalkboard. But here, in this place, with this woman, Chandra bit his lip.
He nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “Just like that.”
She smiled. “That’s fascinating,” she said as the train whooshed into the terminal. “I’d love to learn more about that.”
Chandra felt a fluttering in his tightened chest that momentarily made it difficult to breathe. He nodded. “Sure.”
The doors slid open and he motioned for Sally to enter the cabin first. She stepped across the threshold and grabbed onto a pole planted in the middle of the car. Chandra followed her and gripped the same pole just beneath her hands.
A sterile voice announced the train’s departure for building two, the doors closed, and the train accelerated along the tracks. Chandra felt the inertia pulling his body slightly outward. The tracks were curved, something he hadn’t noticed on his arrival.
They made brief stops at buildings two and three, with their identical “transfer corral” terminals, and then headed for their destination. Neither of them spoke during the short trip and both exited the train to find supervisors awaiting them in the building four corral.
Sally ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it from her face. “I’ll see you later?” she asked. “Breakfast tomorrow?”
Chandra glanced at the lab-coated Rector just ahead of him and self-consciously nodded at Sally. “I’d like that,” he said and then turned his attention to his new boss, extending his hand.
Rector was much shorter than he’d appeared on the monitor. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. He reached up and took Chandra’s hand, shaking it vigorously before abruptly letting go. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and sniffed.
“It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Chandra,” he said. “I trust you got here without any issues?”
Chandra motioned toward the painted stencil on the wall marking the BUILDING 4 TRANSFER CORRAL. “Yes,” he said. “It’s hard to get lost with directions posted everywhere. I feel like I’m in a factory or a processing plant.”
Rector’s left eye twitched, but he otherwise didn’t react. “Follow me,” he said, dipping his hands into his lab coat’s wide pockets. He marched with short, quick steps to the elevator at the far left end of the corral. The doors opened and he stepped into the car, directing the uniformed guard to level four. He offered his DiaTab to the guard, who held it up to a wall-mounted scanner before pressing the button on the elevator’s number bank. He handed the device back to Rector, who turned to Chandra with a raised eyebrow.
“Do you have your DiaTab?” he asked. “You’ll need it. We’ll get it updated with the appropriate Quick Response Access Code once we reach the lab. You won’t be able to get into the building without it.”
Chandra patted his back pocket. “I have it,” he said. “So what is level four?”
Rector’s eye twitched. He sniffed, crinkling his nose. “Meteorology, Climatology, and Environmental Engineering.”
Environmental Engineering?
Chandra watched the floor indicator change from two to three to four. The elevator eased to a stop and the doors opened to a resonant, ambient hum, revealing a space straight out of a science fiction novel.
/> The flooring, unlike the other levels he’d visited, was made of large lacquered black square tiles that Chandra recognized as those used to cover electronic cabling. When he stepped across it into the lobby awash in the blue glow of wall-to-wall Telenet monitors, it clicked with the hollow sound of a false floor. The flooring reflected the variety of LED colors flashing across the displays. There were no spray-painted labels marking the direction of various “corrals” or “levels”. Everyone appeared to know exactly where they were headed without guidance. It was as if they had a familiarity with the space acquired after having worked there for weeks or months.
Men and women, all of them wearing identical white lab coats and carrying DiaTabs, hurriedly moved across the lobby area. All of them appeared deep in their work, preoccupied by whatever was on the screens of the handheld glass devices. Their shoes squeaked and clicked across the floor. It was as impressive as it was unsettling.
“You can gawk later,” said Rector. “We have work to do, Dr. Chandra. Please follow me.”
When they walked past the monitors, Chandra noticed they displayed video from outdoors. The monitors individually cycled through what appeared to be a series of cameras. Some of them, however, didn’t appear to be at their facility. It was nighttime in Colorado, but some of the displays showed daylight. A couple of them were trained on a coastal region, another in the middle of an empty metropolitan street.
Rector huffed. “This way,” he said and led Chandra into a darkened corridor. As they moved into the hallway, overhead lights flickered to life, their steps triggering the illumination. Chandra expected a Xenomorph from the Alien movie franchise to burst from the darkness, slime him, and rip him to shreds.
Rector plodded forward, his feet clicking on the hollow flooring until he stopped at a door at the end of the hallway. The door was marked only with the number 29 at its center. Next to it was a display slightly larger than the DiaTab.
Rector waved his wrist and DiaWatch over the display. A voice prompted his next move.
“Hello, Henry Rector,” it said. “Please state your full name and place your face directly in front of the screen.”
Rector angled his body to comply and said his full name. The voice directed him to stand still while a laser scanned his eye.
“Thank you, Henry Rector. Admission granted.”
The screen went black and the door slid open with a metallic click. Rector walked through the door, ushering Chandra into the room beyond the threshold, and the door clicked again, sliding shut behind them.
Rector offered Chandra a hint of a smile. “This is our work space,” he said. “You’ll be here several hours a day on most days. We have a good team, I think. It’s still coming together, of course, given the recency of the activation.”
Chandra planted his hands on his hips and looked around the room. There were a dozen workstations, each of them with a sextet of curved monitors. Three were occupied. At the maple-colored desks were three men, each of them wearing lab coats identical to Rector’s. They each wore a microphone-equipped headset and palmed a large mouse, which they slid across the desks. Chandra recognized the predictive modeling software on some of the monitors. Others appeared to be satellite imagery, which was odd, because Chandra was under the impression all satellites were down.
Rector referenced one of the empty workstations. “You’ll be over here,” he said. “You’ve got a Kameleon suite of software working on this display. The SWX2 Java 3-D model is accessible here.”
Chandra was familiar with both of the space weather data models. He’d used them at NOAA.
Rector puffed his chest. “What’s fantastic about the SWX2 we’ve got running here is the proprietary upgrades we commissioned for the magnetosphere and heliosphere. They’re incredible at rendering beautiful analytics. Take a look.”
Chandra followed Rector’s lead and took a seat at his terminal, sinking into the ergonomic seat. He rested his elbows on the desk and took the mouse in one hand, his eyes dancing from display to display.
A hand dropped onto his shoulder. “Better than what you had at the Prediction Center, isn’t it?”
Chip Treadgold stepped into Chandra’s peripheral vision and then sidled up to the workstation. He was wearing the same issued clothing as Chandra. He crossed his arms, revealing his new DiaWatch. He smiled.
“Higher tech, right?”
Chandra looked at Treadgold and over his shoulder at Rector. He scanned the room. The other workers were engrossed in whatever they were doing. He became acutely aware of the hum of the computers and the hiss of their internal cooling systems. His eyes drifted back to Treadgold and he nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Much more advanced. I didn’t know we had some of these capabilities.”
Treadgold chuckled, patted Chandra’s shoulder, then squeezed it. There’s a lot you didn’t know.”
CHAPTER 3
TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2020, 10:17 PM CST
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS
Jackie’s fists tightened and she dug her fingernails into her palms. The same obstinate guard who’d denied her entrance to Johnson Space Center four days earlier was somehow less helpful.
She and her party stood exhausted at the front gate to JSC. In addition to the guard, a pair of armed soldiers stood watch. They didn’t react to the guard’s unwillingness to help. Instead, they stared off into the darkness as if programmed not to interfere, even when incompetence was evident.
The air was damp enough that Jackie was sweating despite the breezy chill that came with a late January cool front. She unballed her fist and wiped her brow with the back of her hand.
“I need to speak with Irma Molinares,” she said. “Please get her on the phone.”
The guard sighed. “As I’ve repeated several times now, protocol will not allow your entire party to enter the property. The only names I have on the list are yours and your children. That’s it. We’ve been given strict instructions not to—”
Jackie stepped uncomfortably close to the guard. “Not to what?” she snapped. “Let the wife of a missing astronaut speak to the crew support for his mission? Are you seriously stupid? Did they give you a walkie-talkie and all of a sudden you think you have power? Do you—”
Marie touched Jackie’s arm, gently coaxing her back a step. “Mom,” she said softly, “he’s only doing his job. It’s not his fault.”
Jackie bristled and then relaxed. She looked at Marie and then at the ground. “You’re right.” She nodded. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have demeaned you. I need your help. I know you’re capable of helping.”
The guard stood unflinchingly silent. He tugged on his utility belt and shifted the buckle.
Jackie clasped her hands in prayer as she spoke. “Would you please call Irma Molinares? One call. If she doesn’t answer or won’t talk to me, we’ll go away. I promise.”
The guard shrugged. “One call?”
Jackie held up a finger. “One.”
“Then you’ll leave?”
Jackie pulled her clasped hands to her mouth. “Please,” she whispered.
The guard sucked in a deep breath and exhaled loudly. He stepped into the booth and placed the phone call. Jackie could hear the muffled sound of the phone ringing on the other end. Once. Twice. Three times.
The guard looked over at Jackie and moved his finger to the telephone switch hook. It hovered over the button. Four rings. Five. Six.
“There’s nobody—”
Jackie pleaded. “Two more rings?”
Seven.
“MCC. Hello?” came the muted voice answering the call. Jackie sighed with relief.
“Yes,” said the guard and introduced himself. “I’ve got a visitor here looking for Irma Molinares.” The guard paused, listening to the voice on the other end. “Jackie Shepard.”
The voice said something Jackie couldn’t understand and the guard moved the receiver from his mouth, cupping it with his hand. “They’re getting her,” he said and
held out the phone toward Jackie. His cheeks were flushed red.
“Thank you,” Jackie said. She stepped to the booth and took the phone. “Again, I’m sorry.”
The guard waved her off. “It’s fine,” he said flatly.
Jackie drew the phone to her ear. A familiar voice greeted her after a series of clicks.
“Jackie? It’s Irma. Are you here at JSC?”
“Yes.”
“Great,” said Irma. “I’ll be out in a few minutes if you can hang on.”
“It’s not just me,” said Jackie. “I’ve got people with me.”
The line was silent for a moment; then Irma said, “Jackie, we explicitly told you that the invitation only included you and the chil—”
Jackie was ready for the challenge. She’d thought about what to tell Irma during the long tense walk from her house to JSC. Over and again in her head, she ran through the conversation until she’d settled on pity and guilt. If NASA knew armed robbers had attacked them in her home, she hoped her appeal to their collective sense of mercy would lead them to forego their rules.
“I know what you told me, Irma,” she replied. “I also know we had a violent home invasion last night. Three people died in my house. I wasn’t about to leave anyone behind.”
Another hesitation. “How many people?”
“Five plus me and the kids,” said Jackie. “Eight total.”
“Hang on,” said Irma. She returned to the line an agonizing minute later. “Okay. We’ll accommodate all of you. For now.”
Jackie didn’t hesitate or question what “for now” meant. She wasn’t pressing her luck. She smiled wide, gave a thumbs-up to the group, and thanked Irma repeatedly. A half hour later they were inside the gate, crossing the sixteen-hundred-and-twenty-acre campus toward building 30-A.
Inside 30-A was the Mission Operations Directorate. It was adjacent to buildings 30-M and S, which housed the former and current Mission Control Center. NASA had set up cots in the hallways and in some offices, and the place looked to Jackie more like a Red Cross shelter than an administrative headquarters.