John Barnes - Directive 51

Thanks, Graham! This could be worse. She explained, “Meaning-of-life stuff accounts for the usual-suspects component of Daybreak, too. French poets who think any words that resonate must be true. German performance artists who want to overthrow the tyranny of words and live in a world of pure action. Popomos looking for something to replace the Revolution. Back-to-peasantry long-bearded Tolstoy wannabes.

“The really big innovation with the ‘Daybreak’ crowd is that they don’t talk about purpose, plan, or program anymore. It’s Daybreak for Daybreak’s sake. They often say, ‘The point is, there’s no point.’”

“Why do it if there’s no point?” Browder snarled, now more angry than amused.

“The Daybreakers would say, ‘Why do it if there is a point?’ The idea is that they’d all like to blow up all the Wal-Marts, so why worry about which reason—”

The door opened, and Arnie came in. “Heather,” he said, “something big.”

“Um, Arnie, I’ll call you when it’s time to—”

“Lenny Plekhanov had some extra time and people this morning and they got a breakthrough on the keys for Daybreak, so we caught up with one—”

“Arnie, we’re—”

Arnie stopped leaning forward, stopped gesticulating, and stood as still as if he were at attention; that stopped Heather when nothing else would have. In a perfectly normal conversational voice, not moving a muscle, he said, “Heather. Secretary Weisbrod. I’m sorry, but it’s urgent. Daybreak started today, at midnight, GMT. There are at least nine hundred AGs reporting they’ve started their actions, which means maybe seven thousand people doing some kind of sabotage or other for Daybreak just here in the States, right now. That’s just what I’ve been able to attach an ID to. I’m guessing there are maybe as many as twenty thousand. Probably three or four times that overseas. Up to a hundred thousand participants worldwide.”

They all sat, stunned, and it was Crittenden who broke the silence. He stared out the window at the trees, red and gold in the autumn morning sun, as if somewhere in the wild colors, there were a puzzle to be solved. “A group of saboteurs the size of a medium-sized national army—”

Browder snorted. “With no point and no plan. And many of them seem to be people who couldn’t get a job delivering Domino’s.”

Crittenden speared Browder with his over-the-reading-glasses stare. The heavy, rumpled man sat back, as if startled; Heather thought, I’m glad I never had a late paper with that guy .

The old professor’s mouth crooked sardonically. “You haven’t been listening. Engineers, technicians, applied scientists— dissatisfied successes , in Heather’s useful phrase. And if that’s ten percent of their movement, that’s all they need; a pizza-delivery boy can carry a bomb if someone builds it for him.” He glanced back at Heather. “You had me once you said they were leaderless and programless. Daybreak sounds far too much like nihilism or futurism, back around 1900.”

Browder shrugged ostentatiously. “The world lived through that.”

Crittenden shook his head as if Browder were trying to BS through an oral quiz and not convincing anyone. “Better a high card you know in another man’s hand than a joker loose in the deck. The nihilists’ thirty years of bombings and assassinations smoothed the road for Lenin and communism in a dozen different ways. The Futurists… well, Marinetti, their founder, was among the first intellectuals to support Mussolini. So before Dr. Yang entered, I was about to say, Heather was absolutely right to bring this to our attention.” He favored Heather with a sardonic smile. “But Dr. Yang’s news has convinced me that we should not be worried. We should be scared . Heather, if there’s anything my office can do to help you determine what we’re dealing with, please call me at once.”

“I know I can count on all of you,” Heather said.

Graham was beaming at her, leaning back against the wall just below the poster Heather had given him. She’d found an old magazine in the library with a perfect article title—and the facing page for the article had depicted a robot taking dictation on an old-fashioned steno pad, a typist in a space helmet, and a woman doing her nails in front of what appeared to be some sort of gigantic computer console—all those images surrounding the caption THE SECRETARY OF THE FUTURE!

She’d had it blown up to poster size as a gag gift; Graham had insisted on hanging it in the conference room to remind everyone how silly it was to spend your life trying to predict the unpredictable.

Her old teacher dropped her a wink; in that instant, it was like he’d seated her on the couch by his fireplace, handed her a drink, and heard her troubles out—something he’d done often enough in reality.

Browder was still sitting where Crittenden’s glare had frozen him; with a grudging nod, he said, “Let me see how many resources I can shift to cover the technical side of Daybreak.”

Allie looked up from her notes and grinned; Graham was already smiling at her; and it was left to Arnie to spoil the mood by saying, “Well, by the way, it’s nice that everyone agrees, but we probably are under attack.”

Jason had placed sixteen eggs; the most entertaining one was right on the crotch of the smiling cowgirl on a neon sign over the gate of a roadhouse. Wish I could’ve jumped higher, I could’ve put black-egg nipples on her neon-tube boobs.

The two-lane road had climbed up into the park-and-pass country, where whenever a car came the other way, both drivers would raise a hand off the wheel in salute, kind of an I know we are both here that always made him feel like he was finally out among the real people. Most of the other cars were SUVs, but after all, he was driving a big old F-150 himself, the only thing they’d been able to find that was cheap, untraceable, and old enough not to rely on as much electronics, so that it stood a chance of finishing the trip.

Anyway, up here, where you could be coping with ground blizzards, deer and cattle on the road, snowdrifts, washouts, all kinds of whatnot, Jason saw no problem with pickups or even the old SUVs.

Emily back at the commune said people used their SUVs for evil things like hunting and going to logging jobs. He’d had a lot of good arguments with Emily about that.

The coolest thing about Daybreak: Almost everyone thought something about the Big System was all right, even positive. But when you put everyone together, you could compromise and agree, hey, we’ll get rid of the thing you hate, if I can get rid of the thing that I hate, and when you were all done, there’d be no Big System left.

A solar sign in the middle of an old clear cut announced to the saplings and brush that there was NO MESSAGE—DRIVE SAFE. He needed the stepladder this time to leave two more little black eggs.

He rolled on, glorious coustajam cranked to rattle the windows, the F- 150 tracing the edges of gulches and crossing steep-sided creeks on high truss bridges—almost like flying, with the land coming up and falling away.

In the last low hills, the small, stunted trees thinned out. The park was all rich browns and grays, dried out and ready for winter, with just streaks of green, gold, and yellow where aspens and cottonwoods revealed creeks. About a dozen pronghorns ran away from the road as the old truck roared by. “Soon, guys,” Jason said. “Soon. Your grandchildren won’t have any idea what an engine means.”