John Barnes - The Last President

James nodded. “And all this is assuming it has anything we would understand as a purpose at all. Maybe it has something instead of purpose; you know, a colony of ants doesn’t do things for reasons and an oak tree doesn’t grow from ambition.”

“But whatever it was,” Jamayu Rollings said, “it has just kicked our butt, and it is fairly likely that sometime not far in the future it will come back to do it again. So we should either get ready to be kicked some more, or get ready to kick back.”

“And voila ,” Rezakhani, “we present these ideas to the headmaster of a school, and the former leader of a spy organization—”

“And the complete dupe who was fooled by Daybreak itself, and lost the war with it in his home country,” James said. “And though I suppose I am more experienced, I don’t feel one bit smarter.”

“Well,” Leslie said, “We are who we have to work with.”

Afterward, as they took their first-ever walk on a beach, agreeing that they would try to do this daily if they could, James said, “I suppose the program is obvious. Start steering the governments of the world toward re-unions and mergers, and give them as much truth as they can handle. Rebuild tech to get around the nanospawn and biote barriers. Produce a bunch of smart young people who will have the brains, training, and energy to do that; maybe we can get Patrick and Ntale down here, it’d be a better place for them than Pueblo. Keep going till whatever zapped us with Daybreak shows up, if it ever does, and then do whatever we can to take our own destiny back.”

Leslie took his hand and leaned against him. When they had walked a little way in a closer embrace than he’d ever felt from her before, he said, “Are we ready to, um, take things to the next level?”

“You already have,” she said. “And I love that we have something to defend.”

First of all, I want to begin by saying that Luann Reed-Siegel has done an absolutely brilliant job in copyediting a very difficult manuscript.

The difficulty of the manuscript is only partly a matter of its sloppy author; a problem throughout this series so far has been how to mix the more conventional Chicago style with the peculiar style variously called Federal, Federal Security, and Defense/Security that is used within the American federal government. Because public servants in the United States are required to be extremely mindful of the requirements of the Constitution (which I hope most of you will see has a great deal to do with the story and how things unfold), it has long been customary in Federal documents to capitalize nouns when they refer to Federal and Constitutional functions (as I just did there) and not when they refer to other matters, in effect supplying tiny warnings to public officials when they are in areas where they may have important legal responsibilities.

Thus the President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and the Vice President presides over the Senate, but the president and vice president sometimes order a pizza in and spend the evening watching the Three Stooges (who, curiously, have no Federal function).

Similarly, the United States has an army and a navy but the Constitution governs the relationship between the rest of the government and the Army and Navy. This can result in apparently inconsistent, yet correct, capitalization on the same page or within a single sentence, and I just wanted it clearly stated that Luann Reed-Siegel has in fact done an excellent job with it, and that since I reviewed and approved it, any errors remaining are entirely my fault.

Directive 51

Daybreak Zero

The Last President

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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2013 by John Barnes.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-56084-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnes, John, 1957–

The Last President / John Barnes. — First Edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-937007-15-7

1. United States. President—Fiction. 2. Political fiction. I. Title.

PS3552.A677L37 2013

813'.54—dc23

2013010547

FIRST EDITION: September 2013

Cover illustration © Craig White.

Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.