C.14

July, Present Day

CRS Project, Edwards AFB

“You’re working too hard, Danny.” Phil Sherman stood in the entryway to Danny’s cubicle, leaning against one of the partitions. “You’ve got vacation time saved up. I’d say it’s time to spend some of it.”

Danny looked at him, forced a grin he didn’t feel. If he was right, Judgment Day was only weeks away, perhaps days. There was no way he could afford a vacation before then. And after it happened—well, it hit him that he might never have a vacation again. “I could say the same about you.”

“Exactly my point.” Sherman snapped his fingers, which he always did when he felt he’d won an argument. “And end of work today, my wife and I go on vacation. Your turn.”

“Well, hell.” Danny shook his head. “No way I could take time off now.”

“Why not? That field test with the Russian tanks is the last one we have scheduled for a while. Now’s the perfect time.”

“Psst, boss.” The whispered words floated over the partition that separated Danny’s cubicle from Jerry’s. “Come heeere. Tell me I need a vacation.”

“Jerry, I suspect what you need is electroshock therapy.”

“Where are you going?” Danny asked.

Sherman flashed him an uncharacteristically easy smile. “Wherever I want. I get to hop in the car and drive. We have to figure out whether we’re going to head up to a friend’s cabin in Michigan, in the upper peninsula, or visit my wife’s brother in D.C.”

“D.C.” Danny imagined the commencement of Judgment Day, with missiles raining down on the centers of American government and military organization. “Phil, I can’t say this strongly enough. Go to Michigan.”

“Why?”

Danny raised both hands to his forehead as if shielding his eyes from the sun. “I’m peering into the future. I’m seeing you fishing, boating, walking through the trees. I really, really think you’d have more fun there.”

“Well … maybe you’re right.”

“I am. Tell you what. You promise to go to Michigan and I’ll put in for a week’s vacation today. Before you leave, you can approve it.”

“Deal.”

“Have fun.”

Danny watched Sherman leave. He slumped back in his rolling chair. He felt as shaken as if he’d just yanked his boss out from in front of an oncoming bus.

Maybe he hadn’t made a difference just then. Maybe Phil’s vacation would end before J-Day and he’d return just in time for the world to go to hell.

Maybe not.

Danny got back to work.

August 2029

Savio Village, California

The delegation from Tortilla Compound met Connor’s small caravan within the ruins of what had been a Methodist church on the outskirts of town. The church, on a hilltop leading out of town, survived mostly intact, with one section of wall opening into the main hall having collapsed; the parking lot and streets around it were also not too decrepit.

This was in marked contrast to the rest of the town. From the hilltop, and until his truck rolled into the building through the hole in the side, John could see the muddy plain, decorated with wild grasses, flowers, and the occasional building peak, that lay across what had been Savio Village.

Savio Village had once been a skiing town near Lake Tahoe and Squaw Valley. It didn’t have the slopes or the prestige of the more famous skiing sites, but it had decent slopes and powder and constituted a less-expensive holiday site than its more famous neighbors.

There weren’t any vacationers there in what would have been the first ski season after Judgment Day—just survivors protected from California fallout by the Sierra Nevada mountains. Their numbers dwindled in the next few years as people died or migrated to Lake Tahoe.

Then came the mud slides of 2015. Runoff from an especially heavy season of precipitation sent mud flowing down the slopes that had once been the source of Savio Valley’s economy. There were almost no humans left to erect berms, to pile sandbags, to take steps that might have preserved the town—and those few who were left would not expose themselves to Skynet’s distant, unsympathetic eyes. Mud flowed through the streets and rose against the sides of the buildings, not just that year but during the next several. Its weight crushed some buildings, tore others from their foundations and pushed them away, distorting and destroying them.

But, though Savio Village vanished, buried beneath the sea of mud, some construction survived—well-built cement or stone buildings, basements, storm drains, sewers. Some even survived without being filled in, holding firm throughout the years as the mud slides dried into earth.

In 2021, a Lake Tahoe hunter who’d originally come from Savio Valley found a storm drain discharge pipe and followed it into the remains of his home town. He reported the find to his compound leader, who reported it to Home Plate, and within months John had directed settlers to move there.

In the years since, the settlers had occupied the available construction and dug out other areas that had been filled in but were still sturdy. They’d dug new tunnels, set up hydroponic gardens, built low-tech hydroelectric generators that were invisible from the air. Now known as Tortilla Compound, Savio Valley was a community again.

But no one skiied.

The waiting delegation consisted of a redheaded woman in her midthirties and two lean rifle-bearing men about the same age. All were dressed in rough garments whose dirty green coloration matched the surrounding terrain. John noted, not for the first time, that he just didn’t see as many redheads now as he had before J-Day; many of the pre-apocalyptic ones had gotten their coloration from a bottle. Those bottles were in short supply.

Stepping down from the truck’s passenger seat, he extended his hand to the woman. “Carla Torrance, right?”

She flashed him a smile. She was moon-faced, a trifle overweight—a testimony to the fact that Tortilla Compound produced enough food to export—and good-looking in an earth-mother, 1960s folk singer sort of way. “That’s right, Commander. Welcome to Savio Valley. What’s our situation?”

“I’ve got forty-two refugees and some members of my advisory and protective staffs here, total fifty-four. And there are just under three hundred others, all Hornet Compound survivors, headed this way in four groups, estimated time of arrival from three days to one week. How many can you take in?”

She considered. “Well, we can take them all temporarily. For a week or so.”

“All.”

She nodded her head. “Food’s an issue. That large a group would go through our stores pretty quickly. But room’s not a problem. In a pinch, we could house—well, you’d be amazed at how many we could house. But we’re pretty tight with Bronze Compound—its organizer and I are up to date on one another’s resources. I can take a hundred permanently, and he can probably take another hundred.”

“Not bad.” Now John had to find another home for the remaining 140 or so refugees from Hornet. He would; it was something he and Kate were good at. They’d had to do it numerous times.

Carla watched the refugees who’d ridden in the truck bed dropping to the church floor, stretching their legs. She raised her voice. “If you’ll move into the back, we’ve got some food and drink for you. No running water until we get belowground, I’m afraid, but once we’re there, we’ve got plenty.” She saw Daniel, eyes closed, being carried off the second truck on his stretcher. “How many injured?”

“Six, in this group,” Kate said.

“We also have a hospital.” Carla grinned. “Not just a corridor for the injured. A building with wards and private rooms … and two doctors.”

“Two.” John fixed her with a look. “I may have to steal one to distribute to another compound.”

“Did I say two? I meant, one and a former corpsman who never actually completed his medical education…”

“Sounds like two to me,” Kate said. “I used to be a veterinarian. That makes me a doctor now.”

John nodded. “That’s what happens when you brag to the brass, Carla.”

*   *   *

A day later, John rapped at the door and, at the answering grunt, opened it.

Beyond was a small, windowless room, furnished with a bed, a chair, a table. Some effort had been made to brighten the room; posters of late twentieth–century movies, mostly comedies, had been stapled up on each industrial-green wall. But one could only make a windowless hospital room so cheerful, when the building was buried in a mud slide within a hostile world.

Daniel Ávila lay on the bed, propped up by pillows. He looked almost normal, except for the slight droop to the corner of the right side of his mouth. As John entered, Daniel smiled, but only with the left side of his mouth, emphasizing the abnormality.

John shut the door behind him. “Mike said you needed to see me.”

Daniel nodded. The gesture seemed weary. “I do. I need to figure out how not to kill everyone in Tortilla Compound.” His words were slightly garbled, distorted by the fact that his mouth wasn’t working right.

“What do you mean?” John took the room’s chair.

“If Tamara is right, if I throw off electromagnetic radiation when I dream and attract Skynet’s attention, we need to figure out how to block it off so I don’t call a Terminator strike on this complex.”

John shook his head. “Daniel, that operation’s at an end. You need to concentrate on getting well. You have to forget about the dreams.”

“If the operation’s at an end, we can never set up shop in any of the caves and missile silos Young Me was going to be protecting.”

“That’s right.”

“So the operation’s not at an end. You have a bunch of choices.” Daniel held up his left hand and began counting them off. “You could put a bullet in me now. You could keep me in a drugged stupor for the rest of my life. You could have someone escort me off into the wilderness so I’ll be far away from people the next time I do it. Or you could try to figure out some way to block off the EMR. You’ll notice that none of these options includes me not resuming the operation.”

“Daniel, you’re half a man right now. With therapy, hard work, and not doing this dreaming anymore, you could bounce back to normal, or nearly to normal. Don’t you want that?”

“I’m a quarter of a man right now!” With anger behind them, Daniel’s words became even more slurred. “I’ve been half a man since you found me all those years ago. I’ve been half a man all my life, all the life I can remember.” Daniel closed his eyes briefly, trying to regain control of himself. When he opened them again, he looked more rational. “Try to understand, John. I’ve been giving stuff up since I can remember. I gave up my pre–J-Day memory and never knew why that happened. I’ve never had a wife or children and have pretty much given up on ever having them. I’ve given up on … on living long enough to see Skynet fall. Now I’ve given up on having a fully functional body.

“I’m not going to give this up. I’m not going to give up doing the one thing I can pull off that nobody else in the world can. And I’m not going to give up having this chance to see the world I can’t remember. Hell, the last time I was in the past, I walked around in his, my, bedroom. And afterward, I remembered it. I remember what I saw, what I smelled. I remember the dust on the tops of the books. I remember the photograph of my parents and brothers. I was standing in the doorway to my entire past. I can’t let that go.”

“You could have another stroke. Tamara says it could easily kill you. We need you, Daniel.”

“You also need what I was doing in the past. That’s not completed yet. It’s Operation Schrödinger. Until we complete it, it exists in a state neither done nor not-done.”

“Now you’re theorizing.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going back, John, with or without your cooperation. Since I don’t want to cause all these good people to get killed, I’d prefer to do it all alone in the woods fifty miles from here, or buried so deep in the ground or lined in lead so Skynet can’t detect me. What’s it going to be?”

“I’m thinking hard about that bullet option. I don’t like to be blackmailed.”

“Well, make it a forty-four at least. I’d hate to be killed by a lesser caliber.”

John snorted. “I’ll think about the lead-lined option. For real. If you’ll promise not to try anything until I get back to you.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

July, Present Day

CRS Project, Edwards AFB

Jerry rested his chin on the cubicle partition and stared down at Danny. “They’re calling it Nemo,” he said.

“They’re calling what Nemo?”

“The uber-virus.”

Danny tried not to react visibly. “What uber-virus?”

Jerry assumed an expression of comic disdain. “Haven’t you been paying attention to water-cooler gossip the last few hours, young man?”

Danny shook his head.

“No, you haven’t. You’ve been ignoring your pals, keeping to yourself, being furtive and nasty. Give me a good reason for it, Danno. Tell me it’s because of a girl.”

“It’s because of a girl.”

Jerry’s eyebrows rose. “No kidding? What’s her name?”

“Linda.”

“Oh, that’ll be confusing. Two Lindas hanging around the Ávila homestead.”

Danny shook his head.

Jerry’s eyes opened still wider. “The same Linda? Your brother’s wife? Oh, man.” The tone of his voice somehow suggested both scorn and respect.

Danny tamped down on the irritation he felt. “The virus, Jerry?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s a monster. A whole bunch of monsters, really. There are versions for several different operating systems, but they were obviously written to act in concert. They’ve clogged up secondary U.S. military networks, screwed with Internet servers, and begun to mess up phone communications. The brass is whispering that if the Big One came, if someone launched against the U.S. right now, we’d only be able to field a reduced response.”

Danny forced a grin. “And who’s going to launch the Big One now? Survivalists in Montana? Lichtenstein? Left Wallawallaland?”

“If we can’t exaggerate the danger, we can’t have as much fun.” Jerry disappeared behind the partition. “Snob.”

Danny lost the grin and turned back to his monitor. His stomach churned.

This was it, the final sign of the apocalypse to come. And there was no room left in his head for worries about the consequences of his actions, about the contempt or imprisonment he’d face if the apocalypse didn’t come and he were caught. He’d do this for Linda, for Mama, for himself.

He had to acquire a copy of the Nemo virus and examine it, figure out how to piggyback his own virus on it. And if versions of Nemo had been written for several different operating systems, it multiplied the amount of work he’d have to do.

He picked up his phone and dialed home. “Hello, Mama? Is Linda back from work yet? Oh. Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell her that I’m going to be working late tonight. Maybe all night…”

August 2029

Tortilla Compound

Tortilla Compound was unusual among the human habitats of 2029 in that it had both a main community and suburbs.

The main community was what had once been the town of Savio Valley, hiding under dried mud flow. But there was more to Tortilla Compound than that. There was also an old tourist trap that now kept hundreds of people alive and fed.

Savio Caverns, a commercial venture that, before J-Day, offered tours through the nearer, safer portions of a limestone cavern network, had been occupied after J-Day by Savio Village’s survivors, but abandoned by the last of them when the first mud slides came; the entry building had been one of the first sites to be buried. But now these caves were open again, and the better-organized settlers of Savio Village explored them in a systematic fashion. They found the tunnels leading into deeper, larger cave systems and began to set up habitats and hydroponic gardens there. Savio Caverns, a mediocre set of caves by tourist trap standards, now known as the Grottoes, and Tortilla Compound together constituted a community that was more than merely self-sufficient; it could export food to other compounds. And the existence of the Grottoes, accessible from Tortilla Compound by an easily defended, easily collapsed tunnel, was not likely to be discovered by Skynet even if Tortilla Compound itself was detected and overrun. Tortilla Compound could die … with every one of its residents surviving, with the Grottoes continuing its food production without interruption.

Most members of the procession now making its way down from the compound into the Grottoes didn’t know its recent history and wouldn’t have cared if they did. Most of them had never walked it before—had never traversed the steep natural tunnel slopes, not all of which had been improved through the carving of steps or bolting in of handrails. Two of them, big and strong men, were hauling a third man, even bigger, on a litter. They cursed at the uneven footing, at the endless twisting tunnels and crevasses, at the lengthening amount of time since they’d had anything to eat or drink. Silently, they cursed at the weight of their cargo.

Eventually the procession reached the deepest cave used for hydroponics. Here were large raised platforms made of scavenged wood and sheet metals, ringed in by glass, illuminated by lights powered by the hydroelectric power from the subterranean streams below. Workers moved among the enclosures, checking moisture and nutrient levels in the sand that stood in for earth, checking temperatures and light levels. The enclosures here were growing potatoes.

“Staple of a freedom fighter’s diet,” said Daniel, the man on the litter. “Hey, Mike, wasn’t this what you were doing when John and Kate found your compound?”

Mike, walking ahead of the man at Daniel’s feet, dropped back until she was beside Daniel. “Pretty much,” she said. “But we didn’t have all this room.” She continued to look around, appearing both amazed and nervous. “What a huge setup. I hope Skynet never finds this site. What a loss it would be.”

“True.” But Daniel didn’t say, So, to keep this place as safe as possible, let’s cancel my plan. He just lay back to ride out the rest of the trip.

They passed through the hydroponics chambers into a dark natural shaft that did not benefit from the Grottoes’ electric lighting; the oil lamps of the members of the procession constituted the only illumination. One member of the procession now spooled insulated cables along as they marched; one cable would carry power to the enclosure being built at their destination, the other would carry telephone signals.

Here the going got rougher. These tunnels might have been visited by explorers from Tortilla Compound, but they had never been set up for human occupation. Their contours were as sharp and rough as they had been for thousands of years.

At one point Daniel had to be helped off his litter and strapped into a sling. He was hauled up a mostly vertical shaft some three stories into the air, to a broad ledge. He could hear the sound of running water, feel the coolness of mist in the air as he was helped off the sling. The winch that had been used to haul him up was far enough above him that it was still out of sight.

He took most of his weight on his good leg, but would still have fallen over if not for Mike holding him upright. “Are you going to visit me up here?”

She smiled; her face was barely visible to him in the light from the oil lamps being carried around the ledge. “I’ll be here, too. Someone has to monitor your experiments. Tamara won’t usually be. Her medical expertise is needed down in the compound until the other injured Hornet people are all on the mend.”

“That’s good. Now I’ll get only half the disapproving glowers I used to get.”

When the litter and its bearers made it up—the litter via the sling, the bearers via the rope ladder that provided access to most people—Daniel could ride into the depths of this cave and see where he’d be living for the forseeable future.

It was a broad cave, a jumble shaped by some long-ago earthquake. It had probably started as a water-filled volume, but the earthquake had sheared away one end, creating an opening between the the cave and the cavern. Now, millennia after both caves had drained, what was left was an elevated cave with a waterfall taking up one wall, its runoff trickling to pour off one corner of the cliff face the procession had climbed. The cave was like a deep balcony overlooking the greater space … but there was only a view in those rare times when lights were brought here.

Building material and furnishings had been brought up here already. Daniel saw a bed, numerous chairs, a great stack of scavenged lumber, a large number of sandbags. His litter bearers brought him to the cache of materials and got him set up in one of the chairs.

“We’re waiting on lead,” Mike told him. She had to raise her voice over the roar from the miniature waterfall. “Actual sheet lead from the applied physics laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. They’re going to build you a room, with a control chamber, like you had at Hornet. The whole thing will be built on top of a bed of sand, to dampen vibrations, and lined with lead to reduce EMR of whatever sort. Then you can get back to business. Plus we’re deeper into solid stone than we were at Hornet. Of course, maybe I can talk you out of it…”

Daniel shook his head, a quiet indication of the futility of such an effort. “How long will it take to build?”

“A day, no more, once the lead gets here. Which could be as soon as today or tomorrow.”

“Good.” Daniel relaxed into the chair and watched as other members of the procession began using the sling to bring up more building materials. “It’s time to finish this.”