John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Arnie sat up, and by visible effort, made himself look at James.

“Now.” James held his voice flat and neutral. “Tell me about what you think happened. Start with the first time you thought about Daybreak as anything other than a problem to be solved.”

Arnie stared off into space. “I am visualizing reading a paper in a journal and the title is, ‘On the identification of Daybreak in the Psyche of Test Subject AY.’ The abstract says, ‘Keller’s Conjecture [2003]’—”

James found it impossible not to laugh.

“Yes,” Arnie said, “I really am seeing it in my head, brackets and all, and if I read from that imaginary journal article, I can speak. So the abstract says,

‘Keller’s Conjecture [2003] postulated that for every activity found in logical/memetic systems, an equivalent can be postulated in biological/ genetic systems, and vice versa, in every case with a very high probability of real-world occurrence. Terms like virus , infectious , resistant , and worm have been freely used in information science for decades, and biologists just as easily speak of transcription, expression, and reception. Before Daybreak we simply failed to see the analogy to the exceptionally dangerous diseases that attack through the immune system.

‘Specifically, just as dengue, HIV/AIDS, and BSE turn the identification system for pathogens to their own purposes, the capacities needed to understand, rebut, refute, and reject an idea, such as empathy, subjunctivity, hypothesis, and theory of mind, become the pathway by which the susceptible mind acquires Daybreak.’”

“‘Theory of mind’?” Beth asked.

“The mental model each of us has of other people’s mental processes,” Arnie explained. “The thing in your mind that you use to guess what the other person is thinking. What you need to run con games, get jokes, and understand what your mom is mad about. The thing that doesn’t work right in Asperger’s syndrome and maybe isn’t there at all in autism.”

Ysabel asked, “So what you’re saying is, Daybreak gets to you through your process of rejecting it, because to reject it you have to understand it first?”

“It takes over minds that try to understand it; it doesn’t matter why they try to understand it. Most Daybreakers wanted to understand it because some part of it was attractive to them. Some found it so repellent that they studied it to fight it, like St. Paul studying Christians, or witch finders studying witchcraft, or the way spy-agency analysts in the Cold War sometimes quietly converted to the other side. As for me… God, it was the most fascinating thing a guy in my field could have hoped for, and I wanted to plant my name on the first real study of it.”

James asked, “So who’s immune?”

“Stupid people, because they never try to understand anything. Bigots, ditto. Anybody with a strong enough belief system who becomes aware, before Daybreak takes over, that it contradicts what they believe—doesn’t matter much what it is if they really believe it.”

“But most people believe something, so how could so many people catch Daybreak? Even if it was only a few million people worldwide, that’s still a lot.”

“Well, Daybreak is pretty good at mimicking beliefs, so people who are shaky about what they believe, or used to giving lip service to some vague version, can be vulnerable. Compulsively fair-minded people are toast. And most of all, if there’s a basic contradiction—if the basic belief is that you need to believe because you’re bad or evil—it double binds you and you’re either bad for not believing or bad because you believe. Unfortunately that’s basic to all the monotheistic religions, many other religions, and some of the biggest secular political movements. I wrote a lot more about it in all in the notebooks you found under my mattress tress tress —” Arnie Yang screamed. His hands flew wildly around and his legs thrashed; they backed out and let the guards handle him.

“That looked like it hurt,” Beth said.

“It did, I guarantee it,” Izzy replied. “We’d better run the mutual confirmation protocol, James; I don’t think he tried anything but that’s kind of like thinking your sex partner was probably okay.”

“If Arnie’s telling the truth, it’s exactly like it,” James said. “All right, remember he only talked about Daybreak because we asked. What did he say and was it true?”

There didn’t seem to be much to correct this time, but they still checked to make sure he hadn’t referred to anything that hadn’t happened. “Just the notebooks under the mattress,” Izzy said. “Dude, we are such a bunch of amateurs. Wouldn’t a professional operation have torn his place apart two minutes after he was arrested?”

Beth nodded. “Prolly right, but we are all amateurs here. The pros are mostly dead, and the ones we have like Heather and Larry can’t be everywhere. If we’re gonna win the amateurs’ll have to win it.”

The door opened. A guard said, “He wants to talk to you again.”

Arnie looked pale and sick but determined. “Read those notebooks, but make sure people read them together and keep stopping and questioning each other, exactly like what you’re doing right now. If you can find a few rock-hard believers in anything—I don’t care if it’s a Republican or a Communist, a Catholic or an atheist, just so they’re dead certain they’re right—who have the rhetorical chops to approach it in a completely detached way, that would be best, but they still need to check with each other constantly .” His grin was ragged but real. “I finally beat it, just then. I made myself assume you’d found the notebooks, and that tricked it into letting me give the information. I don’t know why but it couldn’t seem to stop me from writing those, after everything it could make me do or keep me from doing, that was one thing that was outside its power. Maybe because keeping good records of research is the only thing I really believe in.”

“Maybe,” James said. “Arnie, you know that everything you tell us is making it crystal clear we can’t keep you as a research subject. The people interrogating you would be in danger.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, quietly. “And I don’t think Daybreak will let go of me… let go of me…” and he began to scream. He was still shrieking Let go of me! when they decided he wouldn’t be coming back for a while, and left the building. They could still hear him a block away.

Heather would rather have been alone with Arnie, but everyone, including Arnie, had agreed that it would be just too dangerous. So MaryBeth Abrams and James Hendrix sat with her and Arnie while they waited for the time. They had found a secure-enough room with windows; it was too cold to have them open.

He’d had his requests: a pitcher of Dell’s beer, a fresh steamed trout and fried potatoes, and a can of pineapple for dessert. Every now and then, a tear ran down his face, but otherwise he didn’t talk much.

Finally Heather said, “Arnie, it’s getting to be time. I didn’t mention it before now because I didn’t want to trigger a seizure, but we found the notebooks. Nobody will ever be alone with them, and we’ll watch everyone who reads any part of them like a cat at a mouse hole. I wish we could keep you; your ability to analyze—”

“Would only make me brilliant at devising traps, sending you down wrong alleys, and hiding the truth,” Arnie said. “And eventually I’d find a way to plant Daybreak in some of you. I’m a smart guy and I spent my life studying how ideas move, Heather. In the long run you can’t safely talk to me with Daybreak in me, and you have no way to be sure Daybreak isn’t in me.