Daybreak Zero (3 page)

“What do
you
think?” Arnie asked.

“I think you’re a pretty good boss. And a statistical semiotician is probably the closest thing Heather has to a cryptographer. I’m guessing you’re part of Heather trying to keep the PCG and TNG from going to war, by settling one of the big questions between them. The Provis want it all to be a big accident that’s over now except for the moon gun, so they can reconstruct after Daybreak. The Tempers want it to be Fu Manchu or Doctor No sitting on a mountain someplace giving orders so they can have a war with Daybreak. The Provis would be more comfortable in a reconstruction, and the Tempers would be more comfortable in a war. Like the guy with a hammer sees a nail, and the guy with the wrench sees a bolt.”

“What do
you
see?”

“That you’re the only guy who doesn’t know what it is and wants to find that out before he reaches into the toolbox.” Her hand slipped around his biceps, light as a toilet-paper noose, and he didn’t shake it off. “And I want to be on your side. Can you tell me what this experiment is about?”

“Well, kind of. Remember I don’t have the tools to do what I used to do. No web to crawl, no bots to crawl it with if there was one, no ESCARR to analyze the data with if I had that, no big blazing fast supercomputers that could run ESCARR if a copy of it survived. So I did what you do when you have no way to analyze the data you don’t have. I just took a pretty good stab at setting things up to maximally offend Daybreak.”

“And the point of that is—”

“Well, it’s putting together several likely guesses into a complete SWAG. The analysis team thinks the moon gun was built by robots or nanos smuggled onto the Iranian-Chinese expedition of 2019. We’ve confirmed Daybreak existed long ago enough to do that, and we know it infiltrated thousands of organizations and movements well before 2020. The moon gun is less than eighty miles from where the lunar manufacturing experimental module landed, after all.

“We’ve established experimentally that the moon gun shoots at every big stationary radio source eventually, but if there are symbols for
Daybreak sucks
woven into it with enough frequency, it shoots sooner and uses a more intense EMP. So in the experiment before the last one we sent
Daybreak sucks
as the common interpretant of all the hundreds of different representema—”

“Uh, slow down, Doctor Yang. All I ever got through was quantum physics and relativity. Explain it so my tiny mind can grasp it.”

He laughed. “Do you have any idea how good it feels to be talking to someone who
wants
to know? Instead of just demanding ‘Have you proven the liberals in Olympia are all sissies yet, and what should we blow up?’ or ‘Have you proven the nuts in Athens are warmongers yet, and how soon can we start rebuilding the interstates?’ ”

“Let me see if I do understand, Arnie, without getting into the vocabulary, okay? So two shots ago you broadcast pure news and entertainment, hardly mentioning Daybreak, and the moon gun didn’t fire for almost four days, as if it were conserving its resources—whatever those might be. Last shot you had a shitload of little bitty ‘Hey Daybreak, eat shit’ messages—almost that obvious—and it hit us earlier than it ever had before, like it was scrambling to nail us no matter what the cost. So you’ve proved that whatever controls the moon gun can tell the difference between one message and another, which means it’s either a real smart AI on the moon, or a bunch of smart guys in a cave on Earth with the remote for the moon gun. Right so far?”

“Perfect. So the material we’re broadcasting in tonight’s experiment will look much
more
anti-Daybreak to a human being, because we aimed much more elaborate versions of
Daybreak sucks
at known human hot buttons. But an AI will interpret it as much
less
hostile, because it contains a tiny fraction of the gross count of keywords and triggers that I used last time.”

“For example? If I know you, and I’m starting to, you have an analogy.”

He shrugged. “Sort of. Suppose you were trying to find out if it was me or a clever AI reacting to a racist rant, by how much effort we put into killing you for it. The AI would count every time the words ‘slant’ or ‘slope’ occurred—even if it was slanted news or a ski slope. I’d react to references to laundry, buck teeth, bad driving, and ‘Yankee got five dollars for good time?’ even if they were less numerous and didn’t use the common vulgar terms. And if you checked to see how fast we punched your bigoted nose, that would be different between a racism-detecting AI and a real-life Asian.

“So these last two experiments were calibrations of Daybreak’s response: how does it respond to Daybreak-neutral versus Daybreak-sucks messages? This experiment is to see which response a phrased-for-humans version of
Daybreak sucks
triggers. If it shoots back hard and fast and damn the expense, probably there are people holding the remote on the moon gun. If it shoots back at its convenience, just normal radio suppression, the moon gun is a robot.”

“And . . . Heather and the RRC want to know this because . . .?”

“Well, fighting a smart machine that follows complicated rules, like the Provis think Daybreak is, is different from fighting human leadership, which the Tempers think Daybreak has. Which in turn is different from fighting what I’m afraid Daybreak
really
is.” He sighed, hoping she’d pick up the hint.

“Sometime soon, I want you to tell me what you’re afraid Daybreak is, and why it frightens a smart, tough guy like you so much. But at least now I know what you’re up to.”

Several images of the moon danced in the mirrored exterior of the old farmhouse. The gray plains around them, a mixture of scrub and grass waving in the stiff wind, glowed dim gray-green. They stopped short of the porch to finish their conversation, away from the others.

Trish was standing very close now. “So I don’t screw things up by accident—how much does Heather know of what you’re up to?”

“Well, every time I try to talk to Heather about it, she freaks out and tells me not to waste resources on a question that doesn’t matter. So, this time . . . as far as she knows, it’s to help settle the Provi/Temper argument.”

“So she doesn’t know.”

“Not really.” He felt embarrassed to admit this was all behind the back of his friend, mentor, and leader. “Sooner or later I’ll have enough to make her listen and see why this is important. But I won’t get the chance if I tell her what I’m doing right now.”

“Thanks for trusting me,” Trish said quietly. “Let’s talk more tomorrow—after I’ve heard the new
Orphans Preferred
. Don’t tell me if Lewis makes it back alive!”

“I haven’t listened to the whole thing myself,” he admitted. “I gave them text to insert, but I didn’t want to know any spoilers. Are we a pair of geeks or what?”

She giggled and fist-bumped him. “Hey, geeks rule. Let’s try to have lunch, just us, soon, so you can tell me about the rest.” She went inside with a little wave; he stopped briefly to talk to the security guard and make sure everyone was locked in for the night.

His bedroom on the second floor, at the opposite end of the hall from the men’s and women’s common bunkrooms, didn’t seem as lonely tonight.
I really can’t keep pretending I don’t know Trish likes me. Quite probably That Way. This stuff is always so confusing. Maybe I should call Heather and talk it over—

He laughed at himself. Whenever something got really scary, whether it was the end of civilization, atom bombs from the moon, or girls that liked him, he wanted to talk to Heather O’Grainne.

5 HOURS LATER. NEAR PINEHURST, IDAHO, ON US ROUTE 95. 4:15 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.

Bambi woke at dawn, pulled on her pants and boots, and transmitted again. While she listened on the headphones, she ate another cheese and jerky sandwich; she heard nothing. After this meal she had material for about four more sandwiches.

She washed up in a steel bucket of icy water from the pump behind the building, used the toilet, and flushed by pouring her washwater in.
Can’t say much else for the place but there’s mostly-indoor plumbing.

A pile of outgoing mail bore the letterhead:

BIG RANGE OUTDOOR ADVENTURE CENTER
CANOE TRIPS * HORSEPACKING * OUTFITTING

She was glad she’d been warned. In her improvised hangar, the Stearman was fine, just damp around the forward edges—an hour of morning sun would fix it.

But last night’s mystery odor was mummified horses. They lay with heads propped against the automatic watering troughs, which would have failed whenever the electricity did. The barn had protected them from larger scavengers who might have torn the bodies apart. Rats and mice had tunneled them, and insects had eaten the soft parts of the faces, leaving skull or patches of skin. For the most part hide still covered the bones and the remaining desiccated flesh.

She could smell that with the big door open, water had blown in to moisten the dry flesh and start the rot afresh. Later today the barn would reek.

Bambi had grown up a horse-crazy rich girl with an indulgent father, and the sight of the horses, stretched toward their troughs, mouths open, touched her more than the unburied millions of radiation victims in Los Angeles, the three-storey-high pile of charred bodies in St. Paul, or the frozen drift of the drowned, an island of protruding hands and feet, in the river downstream from Sioux Falls.

October 28, the day Daybreak hit, would have been in mud season here, when tourist businesses shut down because it was too cold for hikers and riders but there wasn’t enough snow yet for skiers. It looked like the caretakers had never come back; the horses had died helplessly penned up.

I want out of here, soon.
Bambi turned to go back to her radio.

The wide doorway framed a dozen men and women, all armed, dressed in old coats, decorated hats, immense amounts of handmade jewelry—
tribals
. All had weapons drawn, mostly spears and axes, but a couple of them were holding drawn wooden bows, the arrows pointed at Bambi, and one was whirling what could only be a real, honest-to-God little-David style sling.

The stout woman in the center, who wore what had probably been a homecoming tiara before it had been decorated with small machine parts and colored stones, said, “In the name of the Blue Morning People, I declare you our captive. Raise your hands over your head.”

Bambi put her hands up. The bows relaxed, the sling stopped spinning up to speed, but the spears stayed leveled.
You guys’ll be in so much trouble when Heather hears about this.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF, NEW STATE OF WABASH (PCG) OR ILLINOIS (TNG). 6:30 AM CST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.

Chris Manckiewicz was coming back from putting together a series of articles about life in the Temper capital at Athens, Georgia, and had caught a ride on the Gooney Express with Quattro Larsen; as always, heading back for Pueblo, Quattro had chosen to land in Pale Bluff. The main reason for choosing that route was to visit Carol May Kloster.

Carol May’s pancakes with apple butter (supposedly the orchards that surrounded Pale Bluff had been planted by Johnny Appleseed himself) would have been justification enough, even if Carol May hadn’t been one of the Reconstruction Research Center’s most important agents, and Chris’s best stringer. She handed Chris her pieces for the
Pueblo Post-Times
. “Got my pieces for you on the table, Chris. It’ll save the telegraph man’s finger if you just take them along.”

He speed-read as he ate; they were “the usual fine work,” he said, amused at how that made her blush.

To most people, Carol May probably looked like any other small, plump lady in a hand-sewn dress, but Chris suspected she was one of those invisible people who drives history—not that she would ever admit it.

As the Secretary of the Pale Bluff Town Meeting, she’d taken down and transcribed Graham Weisbrod’s brief speech to the Pale Bluff city council when his plane had been forced down here during his escape from the TNG’s prison. Chris had obtained a copy from her a few days later, and immediately seen that if now-Acting President Weisbrod kept his word—and if Cameron Nguyen-Peters, who ran the TNG, could see it—Weisbrod’s “Pale Bluff Address” was the basis for reunification. Chris figured it would probably enter American history alongside
The Crisis
, the Gettysburg Address, and “we choose to go to the moon.” And now that he had been editing her work for a while, he couldn’t help noticing that though the ideas in the Pale Bluff Address were Graham Weisbrod’s, the stirring phrases and ringing cadences were pure Carol May Kloster.

Chris turned the last page of her last article and read,

Chris, don’t look up or let Quattro know. Bambi’s plane is down in Idaho, she’s okay and has radioed in, Larry is on the way, and Heather says don’t let Quattro know till you land in Pueblo, so he doesn’t freak. CMK.

“That last piece,” he said, “really has an impact, but I can see why they don’t want word to get out.”

“Exactly,” Carol May said.

Quattro, who rarely read anything, kept his attention on his pancakes.

Carol May said, “Excuse me here, but I’m going to have to talk your ears right off, because I think we’ve got big trouble here, and it’s going to take some time to explain it. Lieutenant Marprelate, the representative from the TNG, doesn’t say much out in public, but he spends a lot of time with the town militia, and Freddie Pranger says he’s always reading the Constable’s Log. He scares the hell out of the gun-and-war kind of conservatives, and draws a
lot
of maps. My guess is, the TNG has this place in mind for a fort.

“And the Provi guy here is no better. Congressman Tornwell, our rep for the New State of Wabash in the PCG Congress, at least has to be away at Olympia, but his idiot nephew here treats Marprelate like he’s an army of occupation, and I know he’s hiring kids to put up anti-Temper graffiti.

“So if anything the Provi-Temper tension is getting worse. Definitely
not
what we had in mind when Heather made them make peace back in April. Tell Heather I said it’s serious.”

Chris nodded. “We will.”

“Okay, second big thing, which might just be personal. My niece Pauline, a few weeks ago, decided to go off with a tribal boy, up to the northeast of here, and there hasn’t been a word heard from her, or any of the other kids that went with that band of tribals, in six weeks now, and on their way out of the territory they trashed a little town just north of here, Wynoose.”

“Trashed how?”

“Smashed everything, killed some people, took others with them—the survivors, and there weren’t many, all moved down here. I don’t suppose the Army has any plans to do anything about the tribes?”

“It’ll be in the next
Post-Times
,” Chris said. “Tribals were threatening to wipe out some of the Old Amish families in Pennsylvania. That Temper general, Grayson, basically fought his way down the Yough Valley and brought the Amish out—with all that farming knowledge we’ll need. The Amish told Grayson that the tribals had been talking like Daybreakers, telling them to quit killing Mother Gaia with their plows, ordering them to liberate their poor oppressed horses, that kind of thing, and had been threatening and intimidating them.”

“Well, good on Grayson, then. When that tribe camped here, supposedly it was for peaceful trade, but we had a good number of brawls here in town because so many tribals wouldn’t shut up about how nice the world is since Daybreak, and our people who lost relatives and friends in Daybreak weren’t going to take that. Anyway, I’m worried about Pauline, and more worried that nobody comes over the border anymore, and Freddie Pranger admits he’s scared to scout in that direction—he still does, but he’s
scared
, and you know Freddie, that’s not natural.”

Quattro nodded. “We’ve got some things in the works, and some of our people are pushing to make the tribes a bigger priority. They don’t look as much like harmless bad cases of PTSD as they did three months ago.”

“Just so Heather knows and she’s thinking about doing something; if she’s on the job I don’t worry. I’m sure right now she’s distracted—having a baby will distract you, every time. Can I get more food into you before you go? Flying that plane looks like hard work to me.”

“Any excuse for more of the apple butter,” Quattro said.