“At some point, he’ll realize he has no choice, and we need to be gone by then. I’ll find my friends, and we can leave. PHOEBE will do the rest.”
“What about the missile launch?”
Alex froze in his tracks. “What are you talking about?’
“What do you mean, what am I talking about? The Russian sub. The launch countdown sequence has started. There’s less than thirty minutes before launch. It wasn’t the Russians who started it, so I figured it was one of your people. Are you saying it wasn’t part of your plan?”
“It’s definitely not part of my plan.”
“Holy shit.”
“Holy shit is right.”
“But how could you not know this? I thought you could see macro patterns like this before they happened. I thought you could see everything.”
“I can’t. I don’t predict the future, just the cumulative choices of human behavior, remember?”
Alex knew Kirby was right. He had seen the threat of the sub, but not the details of the actual launch. How could he have missed something like this? The momentum behind it should have made it obvious. How could he not see something so enormous and devastating being done by the people around him? How could he not see this in the most basic patterns of human behavior?
Then it dawned on him.
“It wasn’t human,” Alex said aloud. “That’s why I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t part of the collective momentum of human behavior and decisions.”
“What wasn’t human?” Kirby asked.
“Whatever authorized the launch sequence. Whatever it was that made the decision to launch, it wasn’t a human.”
Read the rest of the story at
Luthecker: Revolution
Also by Keith Domingue
Luthecker
Luthecker: Rise
Luthecker: Revolution
* * *
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Rise: Luthecker, #2 Page 34