John Barnes - Directive 51

“Are you saying that it was… like a suicidal obsession?” Lenny said. “Depressive thinking that got out of hand?”

“Cam asked me the same question,” Arnie said. “Yeah. I always come to the same answer: I think Daybreak was like an immense death wish of, by, and for our whole global civilization. Furthermore, it has succeeded. It self-cured the same way a lot of suicidal obsessions do—it actually pulled the trigger and killed the system it was running on. But that’s just a step on the way to seeing what happened to il’Alb.”

Lenny asked, “Is the idea you’re driving toward that it wasn’t a case of the terror groups infiltrating Daybreak, and turning it to their own purposes, but that Daybreak took over il’Alb?”

Arnie nodded. “Yeah, I’m avoiding saying that because I know it’ll kind of freak people, and you’re right, I need to face up to it. Here’s the thing. One reason Daybreak grew so fast and effectively was its fierce immune response to ideology; it strongly discouraged anyone from talking about why to take down the Big System; the idea was to only to take it down. That let it grow very fast—it never had to fight with most of people’s pre-existing beliefs. Most Daybreak AGs started as separate organizations—little chapters of Earth First or small anarchist parties or Stewardship Christian prayer groups. After a while in touch with Daybreak, they still might have said they believed the same old weird stuff they always had, but their commitments and priorities were aligned to make them operating tools of Daybreak.

“You know how they used to say that the Internet experienced censorship as damage, and just wired around it? Well, what I’m saying is, Daybreak experienced il’Alb as just one more affinity group that wanted to hit part of the Big System, and it subverted them the same way it did any other group, then directed them to the target that best suited Daybreak’s purpose on a given date.”

“And you think this because—”

“Because at every point where I’ve got data, and the processing algorithms to look for patterns, the communications look like that is what is happening—and I don’t see anything that looks like there’s any internal dictator, or any orders coming in from outside. I’ve got ten thousand ducks quacking and waddling, with one deluded chicken that thinks it’s a duck in the middle. I think it’s a flock of ducks; Cam thinks it’s a malign conspiracy of chickens.”

After a long silence, Graham Weisbrod said, “So there you have it. Either we are being attacked by a foreign power using an absolutely brilliant new strategy—I call that the Covert Hitler interpretation—or what has just happened is more like a disastrous storm in the noosphere—call it the Hurricane Daybreak interpretation. And at first glance it would seem that the thing we have to do is figure out which it is. But Cam and Arnie asked me to be the neutral party explaining why we need to be aware of the question, try to answer it, all of that—but we don’t want to get into it today.

“Here’s the deal. Several very large Daybreak affinity groups announced to the rest of Daybreak that they were prepared—but they never activated. And around those groups there were a lot of messages with a single theme— that you can kill a man by giving him a poison that kills all the cells in his body, or by whacking him on the head, but the way to be sure is to do both. That message was all over the Aaron Group, for example. So looking at the situation, we’re reeling from Daybreak and from the Air Force Two attack—two different kinds of massive damage—and those affinity groups seemed to be working on places where it would be more effective to hit us later, when we don’t have the tools to mitigate the attack or defend ourselves.”

“Such as?” Edwards asked.

Cameron shrugged. “Well, right now we could probably still evacuate a big city if we had to. Enough working phones, radios, and vehicles, especially in the so-far-lightly-hit places like DC and Miami. So right now a nerve gas attack in a downtown would be copable-with. But in a week or two, when no one has a radio, a phone, or a car?”

Dead silence in the room.

Weisbrod looked around. “So it doesn’t matter today, or probably even this month, whether it’s Covert Hitler or Hurricane Daybreak that has just walloped us. Whether it’s a foreign enemy or a ghost in the system, it is probably going to strike at us again in the next few days, hard, at least a few more times.

“Strike us hard with what ?” Colonel Green said. “Isn’t that the real question?”

Cam nodded, taking the command of the meeting back from Weisbrod. “Yes, it is. And if Jim Browder here is right, we think we may know what they’ve got aimed at us. So the job for today’s meeting is to make sure that the president—whichever of them is going to be the president—does not get caught up in my suspicions and paranoia, or in Dr. Yang’s charts and equations, but focuses on the scary thing Dr. Browder will be presenting. That’s the message you’ll all be pushing as hard as you can—‘it doesn’t matter, let’s talk about pure fusion bombs.’”

“You want our group to be an idea pump for that,” Edwards said.

“Bingo.” Weisbrod, Cam, and Arnie spoke simultaneously, and everyone laughed.

It was being a morning for superlatives. As he’d ridden in the candidate caravan to the Dubuque airport, Chris Manckiewicz had received a text from Anne telling him he was getting Cletus’s old title and the biggest raise of his career. Plus he’d just finished an exclusive with the now-probable winner one week before the election. Of course, it did happen on board the Low on Taxes, High on Jesus Express , the dumbest name ever come up with for a campaign plane.

Norcross urged him to “ask the tough ones, Chris. My polling people tell me thirty million people will vote for me on election day and hate themselves for it a month later—and hate me twice as much. I have to make them feel okay about this, because it’s their country too, and just their bad luck that they’re getting me for a president. If you don’t hit me with hard questions now, and give me a chance to say the right things, they’re never going to have a chance to give me a chance.”

So Chris had asked about the Christian Bill of Rights. Norcross had said, “Yes, it is my belief that the Christian religion has a special place in American culture and we should codify that, but that is not what people are going to elect me to do, so I won’t act on it while our country is in danger, nor try to slip it in without adequate debate while the country is busy trying to survive.”

He was equally blunt about everything else. Tax cuts? “Of course I want to do that. Everyone in office does. But just now we have no clue what shape the economy will be in or what actions the government will need to take; we’ll just have to see.”

Obscenity? “Well, I’m not for it, but when I’m worried about how nearly four hundred million people are going to make it through the winter, I’d be pretty silly to think the biggest thing we had to cope with was naked ladies. When everyone is warm, has a job, and can eat, then yes, there are spiritual issues I want to address.”

At the end of it, Chris thought, My camera, my editing: the first draft of how a president formed out of an obscure nutcase senator.

He worked quickly and well, slapping camera cuts into place, cutting stammers, nervous laughter, and trail-offs. Someday, people will point at my work and say, that’s why he became President.