John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

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.