ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. MOTA ELLIPTICA, TEXAS (WEST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER). 11:30 PM CST. WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2025.
The planning room
looked like a parlor commandeered by a Civil War general, the night
before a battle. Golden light flickered from oil lamps, and the men
and women stood around the big tables covered with maps and charts,
or traced lines with yardsticks and string on the carefully
hand-drawn charts on the walls.
Arnie Yang rested his
eyes on the tacked-together sheets of graph paper covering much of
the north wall, no longer really seeing the huge graph. He could
have drawn it in his sleep; the horizontal axis was Transmission dates, the vertical Events, both axes marked in six-hour intervals from
December 18, 2024, to June 15, 2025. Squares, triangles, circles,
and diamonds represented phases of the moon, changes in
transmissions, sightings of bright flashes on the moon, and EMPs;
yarn linked one point to another.
The scientists and
analysts at Mota Elliptica knew, now, that the fourteen EMPs which
had struck since Daybreak were caused by helium-3 pure fusion
bombs, wrapped in glass made from melted moonrock, exploding at
between sixty and thirty miles above the antenna of any powerful
radio transmitter. Because the helium-3 fusion reaction produces an
ideal mix of relativistic protons and soft gamma to induce an EMP,
even though the bombs were not big by nuclear standards, for about
a hundred miles around the point directly under the burst the
induced electric currents were strong enough to heat wire fences,
power lines, and water pipes red-hot, and sometimes weld railroad
tracks or cause arcs in the steel frames of skyscrapers. Hundreds
of miles beyond that, the induced current was still strong enough
to blow every fuse, throw every circuit breaker, make fire-starting
sparks, build up electric charge on metal objects, and cook any
chips or transistors that nanoswarm had not already
destroyed.
Tonight they were
going to try to provoke another one.
As usual on a fire-up
night, tempers flared. Arnie turned around to see Ruth Odawa, his
chief for math and computation, shouting at Malcolm Cornwall, his
meteorologist. “Hey—,” Arnie began, but then his deputy, Trish
Eliot, waded in like a den mother separating two angry Cub
Scouts.
“All right,” Eliot
said. “What’s this about?”
Odawa’s arms were
folded. “He keeps calling the EMP device the enemy weapon, and I
know it’s because he wants his Army buddies to take
over—”
“It’s a nuclear bomb
exploding over our country—,” Malcolm said, in a correcting tone
suitable for an unruly puppy or a recalcitrant
undergrad.
“Does this have
anything to do with doing fire-up in twenty-one minutes?” Trish
asked. After a moment Odawa and Cornwall both admitted it didn’t,
and got back to work.
Once again, Arnie was
glad he had promoted Trish to his deputy. Over her strange,
goggle-like glasses—her plastic frames had decayed and Trish had
made a contraption of coat-hanger wire and leather straps to hold
the lenses—she glanced at Arnie and winked.
He winked back.
Almost half his scientists were Tempers, loyal to the Temporary
National Government at what used to be Athens, Georgia, and the
other half were Provis, loyal to the Provisional Constitutional
Government at Olympia, Washington. Arnie had played a role in
establishing both governments, and so was trusted by neither; but
while the country was breaking into Provis and Tempers, Trish had
been taking a long, dangerous hike all the way from Riverton,
Wyoming, to Pueblo. When she had finally heard about the split, she
had simply refused to take a side.
Plus she’d been a
Little League coach, which made her perfect for dealing with
Arnie’s tech people, who sometimes resembled confused and
frustrated children, and often resembled entitled
parents.
“Checklist?” she
asked Arnie.
“Yeah, it’s
time.”
The checklist was an
inventory of about three hundred pieces of mail and radiograms that
should have been received before running the next experiment. The
scribbled notes were pinned to a large bulletin board next to the
main analysis chart as they came in. In quick order, Arnie read off
the list, and Trish pulled the corresponding note from the board,
dropping it into the file. It was how Goddard might have cleared a
rocket launch in 1938, but it was the best they could do to ensure
that in the still-functioning parts of North America, rails, pipes,
and long wires had been grounded; planes would land and drain their
tanks within twenty-four hours; precious surviving tech of all
kinds would be inside some kind of Faraday cage within seventy-two
hours; phones, hams, and telegraphs (in the few places where they
still existed) would be unplugged; volunteers would watch the moon;
and fire watches were standing by for the inevitable spark-ignited
surprises.
They finished the
checklist with ten minutes to spare. Meanwhile Cornwall had
reviewed weather to make sure the moon observers would mostly have
clear skies, Odawa had re-run the predicted outcomes matrix, and
Daniels, the Army intelligence officer, had once more reviewed her
“unusual activity reports”—the euphemism for “as much as we can
find out about where the tribals are and what they are up
to.”
The control bunker
had begun as a storm shelter; sometime in the twentieth century it
had become a fallout shelter. It was about two hundred yards from
the house, with a broad firebreak between, because the
irreplaceable electrical gear did not belong near irreplaceable
paper on the biggest EMP bull’s-eye on the continent.
Trish fell into step
beside him. “Do we have a full set of programming for this
run?”
“Yeah, all the
regular stuff and more so. We have five hours of documentaries and
news, fifteen hours of music, twenty new Tech
Tips episodes, but those are short, of course, and a thing
called Obso-Leet! that was Abel Marx’s
idea.”
“Obsolete?”
“ ‘Obso’ as in
obsolete, ‘Leet’ as in L-three-three-T. Promoting the coolness of
identifying old-time machines and putting them back in service;
people don’t necessarily recognize a mechanical adding machine, a
grain auger, or a cow pump, let alone know what they’re good for.
We also have President Weisbrod and the Natcon Nguyen-Peters each
blathering on about what good things the Provis and the Tempers are
doing, and why everyone should come to Olympia or Athens. And we
have more than a hundred anti-Daybreak messages scattered all
through.”
“You know perfectly
well,” she said, affecting to be frustrated by his obtuseness,
“that what I want to know is—”
“There are also two
full episodes each of A Hundred Circling
Camps, Orphans Preferred, and Rosie on
the Home Front.”
“No spoilers! Don’t
tell me what happens in Orphans
Preferred!”
“Same thing that
happens every time. We reinforce national unity and provoke
Daybreak hard enough so they decide to hit us.”
“You sound like
you’re sure there’s a ‘they,’ and they think and plan. Have you
gone all the way over to the Tempers?”
Arnie kicked at the
ground. “Lots of people are asking me that, these
days.”
“Yeah, but
I’m the one who has to get other people
to do what you want. Come on, Arn, as
my boss and my friend, what are you thinking? Why are we even
putting WTRC on the air, and taking the damage from that, at all
anymore? I thought we had established everything we
could.”
“Not quite
everything. Look, we’ve only got a few minutes till fire-up. Once
it’s running, we can talk.”
“Deal, but I’m
holding you to it.” She was smiling, and he wasn’t sure whether it
was his imagination but she seemed to be walking closer to him than
usual.
The electric lights
in the control center made the arrays of equipment seem too vivid
to be real. Pahludin, the chief engineer, looked up as they came
in. “Power’s up everywhere, all running clean and true, so we’re
ready to fire up as scheduled.”
Arnie glanced at the
clock, showing just a couple of minutes to midnight. “All right,
let’er rip on time.”
Mota Elliptica had
become the home of West Texas Research Center by a series of
locational accidents. The mota itself, an undistinguished patch of
Texas plains two miles across and barely a hundred feet above the
surrounding emptiness, would have been Oval Bluff or Egg Butte if
Anglos had been there first. It looked like nothing much, but it
lay in the middle of a powerful, reliable wind stream and offered
tough, solid rock to anchor to, so more than a decade before
Daybreak, the Department of Energy had built an experimental wind
farm there to test a new blade design.
The new blades were
not any better as blades, but their sharp, narrow tips drew
frequent lightning strikes, so Mota Elliptica was re-purposed for
research into an innovative passive charge-dispersal and conductor
system (PCDCS) for surge protection. PCDCS was a real success—it
had preserved Mota Elliptica’s windmills through countless
thunderstorms, and now through five dead-overhead
EMPs.
Unfortunately, while
the special materials from the surge control project—primarily a
fine violet powder that seemed to be a room-temperature
superconductor—had worked perfectly, and seemed to be biote-proof,
all records had been either electronic or blown up in Washington
DC. Chemists using decades-old methods were analyzing the violet
powder now, and perhaps in a decade or two they’d be able to make
some.
Till then, Mota
Elliptica supplied enough power to WTRC to produce freak effects
nearby—they broadcast using old-fashioned AM because it was easier
for people around the world to make receivers for it, and AM
notoriously could be received, if powerful enough and close enough,
on drainpipes, lightning rods, and even weathercocks, but at least
they knew it was getting through. QSLs had come back to them from
Perth, Tierra del Fuego, Diego Garcia, Tashkent, and Kamchatka.
WTRC reached the world.
The clock counted
down to midnight. The tape whirred to life inside its
positive-pressurized argon-and-ammonia chamber, the most
nanoswarm-and biote-proof containment they had been able to devise
so far. The monitor speaker came alive with the voice of Chris
Manckiewicz: “People of Earth, this is WTRC, the radio voice of the
Reconstruction Research Center, broadcasting from West Texas
Research Center at Mota Elliptica—”
Manckiewicz
introduced short messages from Graham Weisbrod, the President of
the United States if you thought the Provisional Constitutional
Government in Olympia, Washington, was legitimate. Then Cameron
Nguyen-Peters, the Natcon of the Temporary National Government in
Athens, Georgia, the man in charge of restoring true Constitutional
government if you leaned that way, delivered a message exactly as
long. The order had been settled by coin flip and would be reversed
on the next cycle through the programming.
If everything worked,
a flash in Mare Fecunditatis on the moon sometime in the next four
days should be followed, 73 to 85 hours later, by an EMP directly
over Mota Elliptica. By then the complete loop of programming would
have played at least eleven times.
“How’s signal
strength?” Arnie asked.
Pahludin grinned.
“Daybreakers in Panama are picking us up on their dental fillings.
Our planet is hearing us, Arnie; if there was anyone to listen on
Mars, they’d hear us too.” The men fist-bumped, and Arnie and Trish
handed out chilled pre-Daybreak beers for a toast before the
first-shift running crew took over.
As they walked back
to the house, Arnie decided that Trish Eliot was definitely walking
close to him. Have to think what to do about
that, but maybe not tonight. Kind of built funny, big butt and
small top, a little frog-faced. Arnie knew that was unfair.
It wasn’t Trish’s fault that his last girlfriend had been Allison
Sok Banh, who pretty much defined “head-turner,” was far out of his
league, and dumped him to become the First Lady in
Olympia.
But if it weren’t for Trish, I’d be so lonely
here—
The farmhouse had
probably been the spiffiest thing in the county when the newspaper
landing on its porch said GARFIELD ASSASSINATED. In the century and
a half since then it had been a successful farmhouse, then a failed
hotel, then a boarded-up derelict advertised as a “fixer-upper
Victorian.” Probably no previous owner would recognize it now, with
its steel shutters, faced with mirrors, covering every window;
mirror-covered roof; silver-painted walls; and carefully
rounded-off corners and edges. In the gray-blue moonlight it looked
like a just-beginning-to-melt tin model of Auntie Em’s
house.
Trish had begun as
his senior electrostatics engineer because she had a mostly
completed doctorate in physics and a willingness to try, and he had
a desperate need and a minuscule applicant pool. Her great gift for
dealing with people—a gift Arnie felt he totally lacked—had proved
more important than her adequate talent for explaining weird
electric effects.
The warmth of her
body close beside him in the cool summer night was distracting.
“Pahludin was a great choice for your radio chief,” she said,
quietly. “One of the few of them that doesn’t resent
you.”
“Are the techies
still saying a real scientist should be in charge?”
“All except Odawa.
She says a real mathematician should be.” Trish shrugged. “You
know, before the next experiment, I wish you’d take three days or
so, and spend some blackboard time, and just let the technical
people know what you do and why you’re in charge. Half of them
think it’s nepotism because you were Heather’s protégé, and the
other half think it’s because Heather can’t tell one guy who works
with numbers from another.”
“What do you think?” Arnie asked.
“I think you’re a
pretty good boss. And a statistical semiotician is probably the
closest thing Heather has to a cryptographer. I’m guessing you’re
part of Heather trying to keep the PCG and TNG from going to war,
by settling one of the big questions between them. The Provis want
it all to be a big accident that’s over now except for the moon
gun, so they can reconstruct after Daybreak. The Tempers want it to
be Fu Manchu or Doctor No sitting on a mountain someplace giving
orders so they can have a war with Daybreak. The Provis would be
more comfortable in a reconstruction, and the Tempers would be more
comfortable in a war. Like the guy with a hammer sees a nail, and
the guy with the wrench sees a bolt.”
“What do you see?”
“That you’re the only
guy who doesn’t know what it is and wants to find that out before
he reaches into the toolbox.” Her hand slipped around his biceps,
light as a toilet-paper noose, and he didn’t shake it off. “And I
want to be on your side. Can you tell me what this experiment is
about?”
“Well, kind of.
Remember I don’t have the tools to do what I used to do. No web to
crawl, no bots to crawl it with if there was one, no ESCARR to
analyze the data with if I had that, no big blazing fast
supercomputers that could run ESCARR if a copy of it survived. So I
did what you do when you have no way to analyze the data you don’t
have. I just took a pretty good stab at setting things up to
maximally offend Daybreak.”
“And the point of
that is—”
“Well, it’s putting
together several likely guesses into a complete SWAG. The analysis
team thinks the moon gun was built by robots or nanos smuggled onto
the Iranian-Chinese expedition of 2019. We’ve confirmed Daybreak
existed long ago enough to do that, and we know it infiltrated
thousands of organizations and movements well before 2020. The moon
gun is less than eighty miles from where the lunar manufacturing
experimental module landed, after all.
“We’ve established
experimentally that the moon gun shoots at every big stationary
radio source eventually, but if there are symbols for Daybreak sucks woven into it with enough frequency,
it shoots sooner and uses a more intense EMP. So in the experiment
before the last one we sent Daybreak
sucks as the common interpretant of all the hundreds of
different representema—”
“Uh, slow down,
Doctor Yang. All I ever got through was quantum physics and
relativity. Explain it so my tiny mind can grasp it.”
He laughed. “Do you
have any idea how good it feels to be talking to someone who
wants to know? Instead of just
demanding ‘Have you proven the liberals in Olympia are all sissies
yet, and what should we blow up?’ or ‘Have you proven the nuts in
Athens are warmongers yet, and how soon can we start rebuilding the
interstates?’ ”
“Let me see if I do
understand, Arnie, without getting into the vocabulary, okay? So
two shots ago you broadcast pure news and entertainment, hardly
mentioning Daybreak, and the moon gun didn’t fire for almost four
days, as if it were conserving its resources—whatever those might
be. Last shot you had a shitload of little bitty ‘Hey Daybreak, eat
shit’ messages—almost that obvious—and it hit us earlier than it
ever had before, like it was scrambling to nail us no matter what
the cost. So you’ve proved that whatever controls the moon gun can
tell the difference between one message and another, which means
it’s either a real smart AI on the moon, or a bunch of smart guys
in a cave on Earth with the remote for the moon gun. Right so
far?”
“Perfect. So the
material we’re broadcasting in tonight’s experiment will look much
more anti-Daybreak to a human being,
because we aimed much more elaborate versions of Daybreak sucks at known human hot buttons. But an
AI will interpret it as much less
hostile, because it contains a tiny fraction of the gross count of
keywords and triggers that I used last time.”
“For example? If I
know you, and I’m starting to, you have an analogy.”
He shrugged. “Sort
of. Suppose you were trying to find out if it was me or a clever AI
reacting to a racist rant, by how much effort we put into killing
you for it. The AI would count every time the words ‘slant’ or
‘slope’ occurred—even if it was slanted news or a ski slope. I’d
react to references to laundry, buck teeth, bad driving, and
‘Yankee got five dollars for good time?’ even if they were less
numerous and didn’t use the common vulgar terms. And if you checked
to see how fast we punched your bigoted nose, that would be
different between a racism-detecting AI and a real-life
Asian.
“So these last two
experiments were calibrations of Daybreak’s response: how does it
respond to Daybreak-neutral versus Daybreak-sucks messages? This
experiment is to see which response a phrased-for-humans version of
Daybreak sucks triggers. If it shoots
back hard and fast and damn the expense, probably there are people
holding the remote on the moon gun. If it shoots back at its
convenience, just normal radio suppression, the moon gun is a
robot.”
“And . . . Heather
and the RRC want to know this because . . .?”
“Well, fighting a
smart machine that follows complicated rules, like the Provis think
Daybreak is, is different from fighting human leadership, which the
Tempers think Daybreak has. Which in turn is different from
fighting what I’m afraid Daybreak really is.” He sighed, hoping she’d pick up the
hint.
“Sometime soon, I
want you to tell me what you’re afraid Daybreak is, and why it
frightens a smart, tough guy like you so much. But at least now I
know what you’re up to.”
Several images of the
moon danced in the mirrored exterior of the old farmhouse. The gray
plains around them, a mixture of scrub and grass waving in the
stiff wind, glowed dim gray-green. They stopped short of the porch
to finish their conversation, away from the others.
Trish was standing
very close now. “So I don’t screw things up by accident—how much
does Heather know of what you’re up to?”
“Well, every time I
try to talk to Heather about it, she freaks out and tells me not to
waste resources on a question that doesn’t matter. So, this time .
. . as far as she knows, it’s to help settle the Provi/Temper
argument.”
“So she doesn’t
know.”
“Not really.” He felt
embarrassed to admit this was all behind the back of his friend,
mentor, and leader. “Sooner or later I’ll have enough to make her
listen and see why this is important. But I won’t get the chance if
I tell her what I’m doing right now.”
“Thanks for trusting
me,” Trish said quietly. “Let’s talk more tomorrow—after I’ve heard
the new Orphans Preferred. Don’t tell
me if Lewis makes it back alive!”
“I haven’t listened
to the whole thing myself,” he admitted. “I gave them text to
insert, but I didn’t want to know any spoilers. Are we a pair of
geeks or what?”
She giggled and
fist-bumped him. “Hey, geeks rule. Let’s try to have lunch, just
us, soon, so you can tell me about the rest.” She went inside with
a little wave; he stopped briefly to talk to the security guard and
make sure everyone was locked in for the night.
His bedroom on the
second floor, at the opposite end of the hall from the men’s and
women’s common bunkrooms, didn’t seem as lonely tonight.
I really can’t keep pretending I don’t know
Trish likes me. Quite probably That Way. This stuff is always so
confusing. Maybe I should call Heather and talk it
over—
He laughed at
himself. Whenever something got really scary, whether it was the
end of civilization, atom bombs from the moon, or girls that liked
him, he wanted to talk to Heather O’Grainne.