Robert Sawyer: Triggers

“Yeah.”

“All right, then. Here we go. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”

Singh pushed a button; it made a loud click. At the vertices of each triangle in Kadeem’s vision, blue-green lights appeared, like laser pointers. In the demos Singh had done for him, colored dots had shown up on the dummy head. They’d stood out brightly against the white Styrofoam, but were doubtless hard to see against Kadeem’s dark skin. He’d thought there might be some sensation associated with them: heat, maybe, or a tingling. But he felt nothing at all. The lights weren’t strong enough to blind him, but he did nonetheless shift slightly to stop one of them from hitting his left eye.

Singh moved around, looking at Kadeem again. He seemed satisfied, and said, “Okay. I’m going to run the program now. Remember, if you feel any discomfort, tell me and we can abort.”

Kadeem nodded. Since the sphere was supported by the articulated arm, it didn’t bob at all as he did so. Singh reached over to a laptop computer sitting on a surgical-instrument stand, moved the cursor with the trackpad, and finished off with a rapping of his forefinger.

The program started executing. The blue-green lights began to dance; they were on tiny gimbals and moved in patterns Singh had programmed. It was impossible to keep the teal points from hitting his pupils every few seconds, and rather than fight that, Kadeem just closed his eyes. The beams were bright enough that he could still tell when one was touching his eyelid, but it wasn’t irritating, and the darkness helped him clear his mind.

This was going to be hard, he knew. He’d spent years trying to avoid triggering flashbacks—and now Singh was going to find whatever switch in his brain caused them and throw it, hopefully for the final time. The only small mercy there’d been with the previous flashbacks was never expecting them—they just hit him upside the head, with no warning. But now Kadeem felt dread, knowing one was coming. He was hooked up to a vital-signs monitor, and he could hear the soft ping of his pulse accelerating.

The intersecting lasers were specially tuned to pass through bone and flesh; the teal dots were mere markers for invisible beams that coincided with them. The beams entered his skull without having an effect, but when two or more beams crisscrossed inside his brain, they stimulated the neural net at the intersection and caused it to fire, providing, as Singh had explained to him, the equivalent of an action potential. First one net was brought to life, then another, then another. Singh’s equipment bypassed the usual excitatory disinhibition that frustrated other brain researchers: normally, if a neural net had fired once recently, it was disinclined to fire again. But Singh could make the same net fire as often as possible, until it had, at least temporarily, exhausted its supply of neurotransmitters.

Singh was doing that just now, and—

A picnic, one of the few happy moments of Kadeem’s childhood.

Five big kids taking his lunch from him on the way to school.

His mama, trying to hide her bruised eye from him, and his rage at knowing she was going to let that man back in their home.

His first car.

His first blowjob.

A sharp pain but—but no, only a memory of a sharp pain. Ah, it was when he broke his arm playing football.

More pain, but of a good kind: the short, sharp shock of Kristah playfully biting his nipple.

A flock of birds blocking the sun.

The sun—

The sun.

Hot, beating down. The desert sun.

Iraq.

Yes, Iraq.

His heart pounded; the sound from the monitor had the tempo of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.”

Singh was homing in, getting close, circling his prey.

Kadeem gripped the padded arms of the chair.

Sand. Tanks. Troops. And, in the distance, the village.

Shouts. Orders. The roar of vehicle engines fighting against the drifting sand and the heat.

Kadeem’s breathing was ragged. The air he was taking in was cool, but his memory was of searing hotness. He wanted to shout for Singh to abort, abort, abort! But he bit his lower lip and endured it.

The village was growing closer. Iraqi men in desert gear, women who must have been sweltering in their robe-like black abayas, children in tattered clothes, all coming to see the approaching convoy. Greeting it. Welcoming it.

Kadeem tasted vomit at the back of his throat. He fought it down and let the memory wash over him—all the screams, all the pain, all the evil —one last time.

Sharpshooter Rory Proctor continued to watch the activity on the roof of the White House from what he hoped was a safe distance. He was angry and worried: the nation had been pounded for months now by al-Sajada. How much more was yet to come? How much more could this great country take?

He’d tuned his headset to pick up the appropriate police channel and was listening to the running commentary from the man operating the bomb-disposal robot: “I’m going to try cutting into the side of the enclosure so that we can get at the device. In five, four, three, two…”

Agent Susan Dawson kept flashing back to an episode of Columbo she’d seen years ago, in which Leonard Nimoy had guest-starred as a surgeon who’d tried to arrange the death of someone while supposedly saving his life: when installing an artificial heart valve, Nimoy’s character had used dissolving instead of permanent suture. But as far as she could tell, Eric Redekop and his team had worked fervently to save Seth Jerrison.

“Central to Dawson,” said the voice in her ear. “Justice Horvath is en route to Andrews, but says he can’t proceed without an official death notice. Has the president actually—”

Screeeeech!

Susan yanked her earpiece out; the wail from it was unbearable. The lights in the observation gallery flickered, then died, as did the ones down in the operating room. A few seconds later, emergency lighting kicked in below. Mark Griffin bounded up the steps in the small gallery and opened the door at the back. More emergency lighting spilled in from a ceiling-mounted unit containing what looked like two automobile headlamps.

“Those are battery-operated lights,” said Griffin. “The main power is off—meaning so is that defibrillator, as well as the perfusion pump.” Susan saw someone run out of the O.R., presumably to get a crash cart with a portable defibrillator.

Eric Redekop, starkly illuminated from the upper left by the harsh emergency lights in the O.R., reached his gloved hand into the president’s chest and began squeezing Jerrison’s heart. The surgeon glanced at the paired digital wall clocks—the actual time and the event timer—but their faces had gone dark.

After a moment, the regular lighting flickered back to life. Susan looked down at the surgical bed. Redekop continued to squeeze the heart once per second. Other doctors were frantically trying to reboot or readjust equipment. She turned to Griffin. “What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The emergency power is supposed to kick in automatically. An operating room should never go dark like that.”

Susan picked up her earpiece and, after making sure it wasn’t still wailing, put it back in her ear. “Dawson,” she said into her sleeve. “Whiskey tango foxtrot?”

A deep male voice: Secret Service agent Darryl Hudkins, looking up at her from down in the operating room. “Could it be an electromagnetic pulse?”

“Christ,” said Susan. “The bomb.”

“Agent Schofield cutting in,” said another voice in Susan’s ear. “Affirmative. The bomb at the White House has gone off.”

“Copy that,” replied Susan, stunned.

“How are they managing with Prospector?” asked Schofield.