Robert Sawyer - Triggers

Memories unveiled; secrets revealed. Hexley had been in Afghanistan, along with Gordo Danbury and Dirk Jenks. All three of them had been converted there, wooed with real riches in this life and the promise of so much more in the next.

Leon Hexley was older than the other two men, and had been with the CIA before the Afghan war; it had been easy enough for him to get a senior position in the Secret Service upon his return to the States, and eventually to become its director, promoting and deploying Danbury and Jenks as he saw fit.

But they had waited until the time was right—until the US had been demoralized by attacks on San Francisco and Philadelphia and Chicago—to strike at the very heart of the American government. Danbury was to have gone out in a blaze of martyrdom killing Jerrison. Then Jenks was supposed to take out Flaherty, or whatever surviving presidential successor became commander in chief after the White House was destroyed: two dead presidents in a matter of hours.

Seth was relieved to learn from Hexley’s memories that only three members of the Secret Service had been compromised; tomorrow, he’d go back to having its agents protect him and his family. But for now…

The Secret Service had originally been part of the Treasury Department; Seth had used that bit of trivia in his classes at Columbia. Since 2003, it had been an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, and DHS was a cabinet department under his direct jurisdiction as leader of the executive branch. “Agent Dawson?” he said.

She was still holding her gun. “Sir?”

“I’m giving you a promotion. Effective immediately, you are the new director of the United States Secret Service.”

Jan Falconi was lying down now on the couch, her head in Eric’s lap. She was listening to all the voices and reliving all the memories: hers, and those of the veteran named Jack, and those of everyone he’d touched at the Vietnam Memorial, and—

Ah, yes, it was a cold night, and Jack had gone to a homeless shelter. He’d brought in dozens more there, first by touching them, but then, after the total number had reached some critical threshold, merely by looking at them.

Eric’s ornate wall clock made its hourly chime; it was midnight. The TV was still on, and a new program began. Jan laughed, and Eric, who was linked to her, did, too, and so did Nikki, safely back at her house, since she was linked to Eric, and so did Lucius Jono, who was linked to Nikki, and on and on: the laughter cascading not just down the chain, for it was no longer a simple series of links, but out onto the branching, growing network.

The new TV program Jan was watching, and so therefore were all the others, was an infomercial—for a surefire technique guaranteed to improve memory.

Triggers.

Stimuli that invoke memories.

So idiosyncratic: a fragrance, the way someone holds their head, a pattern woven into cloth, a few bars of music, a taste, a touch, a word. For one person, a memory might be brought to the fore; for another, nothing.

History provides shared triggers. Where were you when you heard President Kennedy had been shot? When Armstrong took that first small step, that first giant leap? When the Twin Towers fell? When they blew up the White House?

But even those were only triggers for a fraction of the world’s population. Still, there were a few general triggers—universally shared experiences—that focused most minds, putting people on the same page, the same wavelength.

The circle had originally been closed.

Then—with triggers figurative and literal—it had opened. More and more individuals were drawn in. A few dozen minds, then a few hundred, then a few thousand, then more still.

Many of those in the original circle had had trouble adapting to it, but now each new mind that joined in was greeted, boosted, buoyed, embraced by countless others who had already experienced the first moments of connection, who had survived it, and who were now reveling in it all. Calming waves and swelling euphoria washed over the newcomers, enticing them, relaxing them, welcoming them.

And yet, despite the peace felt by those who were linked, despite the tranquility of shared joy, of banished loneliness, there was still something dark, something evil, something outside.

Those who were already linked considered, contemplated, cogitated, until…

A realization, a revelation—and a resolution.

This madness—the insanity that had cost humanity so much for so long—could not go on.

It could not, or the world would not long endure.

Things had to change—and they had to change now.

But for the next step, the next leap, a trigger was still needed: a general trigger, a shared trigger, a trigger that would sweep the globe…

Dora Hennessey had fallen asleep at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital just after 6:00 P.M.; she still wasn’t dealing well with the time-zone change. A part of her had wanted to stay up to see President Jerrison’s speech on TV, but she’d been too tired.

Dora had been so distraught over the aborted transplant operation and the death of her father—not to mention dealing with Ann January’s memories—that she wasn’t surprised to find she’d slept for twelve hours. But by 6:00 A.M., she was wide-awake and so decided to go for an early-morning walk.

Her stitches had been redone yesterday, and she’d been told they would hold nicely until the incision healed. She slowly got dressed, put on the winter jacket that had taken up half of her suitcase when she’d brought it over from England, and headed down through the lobby and out into the dim pre-dawn light. There were already quite a few cars on the road, and several other pedestrians walking briskly along.

She ambled south on 23rd Street, passing the Foggy Bottom metro station and a Dunkin’ Donuts and the beige edifice of the Department of State. She turned left when she got to Constitution Avenue and was surprised to find, nestled in a grove of trees, a huge bronze statue of a seated Albert Einstein; she hadn’t known there was a memorial to him in Washington. She looked up at his sad eyes. Everything is relative, she thought; she felt like a little girl next to this giant man.

Dora had assumed it wouldn’t be safe to go onto the National Mall this early, but there seemed to be a fair number of joggers about, so she crossed to the south side of Constitution Avenue. She knew from the tour she’d taken when she’d first arrived that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was just to her right, but she continued south, toward the Reflecting Pool. The sun would be up very soon, and she thought it would be fun to watch it rise behind the tapered obelisk of the Washington Monument.

She got in position just in time: a tiny point of brilliance appeared on the horizon, slowly widening into a dome. The monument cast a long shadow pointing toward her. She’d left her phone back at the hospital, which was too bad—she’d have loved to have snapped a picture of this.

The sun quickly became too bright for her to look at directly, but it brought back memories of other sunrises over London’s skyline, over the English Channel, over the desert. Some of the memories were her own: she had indeed pulled all-nighters at college, seeing the sun rise as she hurried to finish essays.

And some of the memories were clearly Ann January’s, including one of her and David watching the sun come up from the deck of a cruise ship during their honeymoon.

But she was startled to also have memories that were neither hers nor Ann’s: neither of them had ever been to Australia, but she had a vivid recollection of the sun coming up over the Sydney Opera House. And neither of them had ever seen a solar eclipse, but she clearly recalled the sun clearing the horizon with a bite already taken out of its disk.