Daybreak Zero (36 page)

THAT EVENING. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 5:30 PM MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2025.

Heather had barely sat down to eat at the communal mess hall when Patrick, out of breath, delivered the urgent eyes-only message from Larry Mensche; it had FAR stamped on it. Grumbling, and hastily dumping her plate of noodles and grouse-nuggets into a go-bag, she headed back for her office, reminding herself over and over that Larry didn’t send messages of that kind in any situation except one where most agents would have been screaming for a regiment of infantry.

With Leo settled into his crib, she opened the envelope, read, and sat up as if she’d been shocked. Leo did his nervous cry, the one that meant he felt something wrong, and she went over to comfort him. “Me, too, kid.”

Larry had provided her with a cc: list; she could see at once what he was doing, making sure no one could intercept or sweep it under the rug.

She said, “Come in,” to the knock at the door before she had time to think.

Debbie Mensche was there, with Beth, Ysabel, Dan Samson, and Roger Jackson. “I kind of thought you’d want to have your team together,” she said, “after I got the note from Dad, so I rounded’em up and brought them here.”

It was everyone from the cc: list except for James and Arnie. Heather said, “I think we’d all better sit for a moment, if you can all find somewhere to do it. Deb, brilliant idea, you’re right. I take it you didn’t bring Arnie or James because—”

“Because they’re the only two other guys it can be,” Debbie said. “I grabbed Beth first because I wasn’t gonna believe Beth would’ve betrayed Jason; she alibied Izzy. I knew our missions were decoys, but you’d kept that information from Roger and Dan, so they were clean. That leaves James and Arnie. James is probably at home, this time of day; Arnie’s teaching a math class over in the literacy program. By now I bet they’ve both read Dad’s note. I don’t know how we can—”

James burst in, panting, out of breath. He looked at who else was in the room. His expression of relief was amazing and overwhelming. “All right,” he said. “It looks like everyone is here, and I’ll be happy to explain why it’s Arnie you want, and not me, but you’d better get someone over to the secure holding facility,
now
, to protect Leslie. If they just stand outside and don’t let Arnie in, we can probably—”

“Dan—” Heather didn’t speak the rest of her sentence because Samson and Jackson were both already gone.

5 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 5:15 PM MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2025.

James was surprised that he wasn’t panting as he squatted next to Debbie. “We’ll intercept them about five blocks further on,” she breathed, “but we have to wait till Arnie gets turned away, and then see which way he goes. The guy in the blanket over there still hasn’t seen us.”

“How did you know he’d be there?”

“I didn’t know he would. I knew it would be possible.”

“And the other guys didn’t spot him?”

“He probably got here after they did. Dan’s inside, probably with Leslie, which is where you have to be to guard someone that close, so Dan hasn’t seen blanket man. Roger’s going to be a damned fine agent in about five years, but he’s got no instincts right now; he’s watching for Arnie because Arnie’s the only thing he’s been told to watch for.” The slim woman squatted beside him. “If I have to move fast, I will. If it comes to a fight, don’t get all fussy and worry about catching them alive. It’ll be more than enough if we just stop them.” She stretched, as if preparing to sprint. “Once I’m in striking range of Arnie I’m going to follow him and his little shadow from a distance, and see how much I can hear and see before I have to move, but when it’s time to move, I’ll move, and you catch up then. Till then, hang two blocks back, try to stay in the shadows, and make no noise. Now let’s—there.”

James didn’t see what she saw, but he saw where she went, and sprinted after her along the shadowed side of a high wall, through an alley, and through an overgrown public park along the brick pathways. The next ten minutes were an obstacle course of alleys, schoolyards, passages between boarded houses, and underpasses, between rows of abandoned cars and around piles of junk, until, as they squeezed between Dumpsters and garbage piles toward the mouth of an alley, Debbie pointed at the ground. He hoped that meant “wait here” and that her pointing down the street meant “watch me go this way,” because that was what he did. He peeked around the corner.

Debbie ran silently, at top speed, seemingly touching nothing. As she passed a point he judged to be two blocks away, James ran after, trying to breathe quietly enough, trying not to think about having old, less-flexible ankles, making occasional scuffing noises but not many and not close together.

At a recessed storefront, Debbie caught him by the shoulder, and told James, “Look ahead. See Arnie? See where his little shadow went into that doorway?”

“The guy that just slipped into the bushes by that house?”

“You got talent. Get ready, any sec now—”

As they watched, Arnie slowed, dragged his feet, as if some invisible cord were pulling him backward. “Okay, James, throw your distraction, and make it loud.”

James emerged from the alley, waving his pistol, and yelled “Yang, you son of a bitch, your fucking Daybreak hippie friend killed Leslie!” Keeping his gun leveled (
I hope it’s too far away for him to see I haven’t cocked it
), he walked slowly toward Arnie, who stood paralyzed in the street, the gun leveled at him. “He killed Leslie!” he repeated. “I’m gonna shoot your worthless ass!” He kept walking toward the slender figure of Arnie Yang.
Oh, man, let him just have those knives he carries, this would be totally the worst time
ever
to get shot,
he thought, and tried not to smile at his mental imitation of Leslie.

Debbie said, “It’s done,” firmly and loudly.

The corpse of Arnie’s watcher plunged out from the bushes and lay still. Arnie made a strange noise and pelted away as if his feet had a will of their own; Debbie shouted “Shit!” and ran after.

Not sure what to do, and having run about as much as he could already, James walked after. He paused to look at the corpse. Debbie’s wire garrote was sunk deep into the flesh of the thin young man’s neck, and his eyes bulged and tongue protruded. His hands were at his throat, where he’d made a futile try, probably, to dig the wire out. He wore several layers of shabby old clothing, a full beard, and long curly hair.

James looked up to see Deb returning, with Arnie in a hammerlock-and-nelson, bent backward brutally.

“Well,” James said, “I guess one of us needs to go get Heather, and she’ll want to bring along—”

“One meal ticket,” a voice said, behind him. He turned and saw Patrick, who was grinning. “For one meal ticket I will go find anybody you like and send them here.”

“How the hell—”

“Hey, Mister Hendrix, it is not my fault if you’re
way
more interesting when you’re not teaching us to read
Great Expectations
.” Patrick was bursting with pride. “I saw you guys following Doctor Yang and followed you here, ’cause I knew you’d both got those special messages.”

Debbie winked at James, and said, “See what happens when you don’t look for things? How’s this guy doing with Dickens?”

“Top of the class.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “Any agent I’m going to train can’t have enough Dickens.”

Between them, James and Debbie figured out who Patrick needed to bring, and he went on his way with “a slightly swollen wallet and a slightly swollen head,” James said. “And hey, why does a spy need Dickens?”

“Because you’re making me read it in the adult class, and if I have to, so does any poor bastard I train. Same principle as fraternity hazing, if I went through it, so does everyone.”

The sun descended slowly, the shadows lengthened, and it was the better part of two hours before everything was sorted out, but at the end of it, people were where they belonged: Aaron was on his way to the morgue, Arnie was in Leslie’s cell (and the guards had been carefully coached by James about the four different ways someone could get in, and fixed them), and everyone else, including Leo, was at James’s house. “Even Wonder,” Leslie said, her face buried in the big dog’s fur.

“Well, he’s been living here.”

“I can tell,” she said, thumping the big dog’s sides. “Too much good food and not enough exercise, you lazy old goof, you’re gonna be running your ass off for a couple months. And you too, Wonder.”

“That was an evening,” Heather said. “I guess I’ve never been happier to miss out on meat lumps and noodles.”

Leslie looked up from Wonder, and said, “James, it’s Monday night, still,” and pausing only to consider that he had enough in the larder, James said, “There’re three big jugs of wine in the lower drawer in the living room hutch, and glasses on the top two shelves. Everybody grab a glass and fill it, and then sit down and stay out of the way—I’m about to cook.”

THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 9:30 AM MST. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025.

“I’m really not totally cool with this,” Izzy said. “He might be able to send me into a seizure, and even though Beth has never had one, she’s pregnant. I don’t like doing this at all.”

“Me either,” James said, “but it’s all I can come up with.”

Since five o’clock that morning, James, Izzy, and Beth had been practicing the “mutual correction” protocol that he had evolved to keep Leslie from slipping into Daybreak. It had begun as a pure desperation measure, with James adapting tricks from a twenty-year-old pamphlet,
Interrogation Tips: Avoiding Implanting False Memories
. But it seemed to have kept Leslie out of Daybreak, and even to help her develop some immunity—whatever it was that immunity might mean in this case. It was as good a protection as they knew how to do against the version of Daybreak in Arnie.

According to the guards, Arnie had been sitting upright on the bench-bed ever since his arrest. He had risen to stretch twice, and to use the chamber pot once. Mostly he sat and stared into space.

Arnie looked up and said, “Hello,” tonelessly, when they came in.

James said, “Sit up and look at me.” It wasn’t a sharp command, or a harsh order, but it was clear he expected to be obeyed.

Arnie sat up, and by visible effort, made himself look at James.

“Now.” James held his voice flat and neutral. “Tell me about what you think happened. Start with the first time you thought about Daybreak as anything other than a problem to be solved.”

Arnie stared off into space. “I am visualizing reading a paper in a journal and the title is, ‘On the identification of Daybreak in the Psyche of Test Subject AY.’ The abstract says, ‘Keller’s Conjecture [2003]’—”

James found it impossible not to laugh.

“Yes,” Arnie said, “I really am seeing it in my head, brackets and all, and if I read from that imaginary journal article, I can speak. So the abstract says,

‘Keller’s Conjecture [2003] postulated that for every activity found in logical/memetic systems, an equivalent can be postulated in biological/ genetic systems, and vice versa, in every case with a very high probability of real-world occurrence. Terms like
virus
,
infectious
,
resistant
, and
worm
have been freely used in information science for decades, and biologists just as easily speak of transcription, expression, and reception. Before Daybreak we simply failed to see the analogy to the exceptionally dangerous diseases that attack through the immune system.

‘Specifically, just as dengue, HIV/AIDS, and BSE turn the identification system for pathogens to their own purposes, the capacities needed to understand, rebut, refute, and reject an idea, such as empathy, subjunctivity, hypothesis, and theory of mind, become the pathway by which the susceptible mind acquires Daybreak.’ ”

“ ‘Theory of mind’?” Beth asked.

“The mental model each of us has of other people’s mental processes,” Arnie explained. “The thing in your mind that you use to guess what the other person is thinking. What you need to run con games, get jokes, and understand what your mom is mad about. The thing that doesn’t work right in Asperger’s syndrome and maybe isn’t there at all in autism.”

Ysabel asked, “So what you’re saying is, Daybreak gets to you through your process of rejecting it, because to reject it you have to understand it first?”

“It takes over minds that try to understand it; it doesn’t matter
why
they try to understand it. Most Daybreakers wanted to understand it because some part of it was attractive to them. Some found it so repellent that they studied it to fight it, like St. Paul studying Christians, or witch finders studying witchcraft, or the way spy-agency analysts in the Cold War sometimes quietly converted to the other side. As for me . . . God, it was the most fascinating thing a guy in my field could have hoped for, and I wanted to plant my name on the first real study of it.”

James asked, “So who’s immune?”

“Stupid people, because they never try to understand anything. Bigots, ditto. Anybody with a strong enough belief system who becomes aware, before Daybreak takes over, that it contradicts what they believe—doesn’t matter much what it is if they really believe it.”

“But most people believe something, so how could so many people catch Daybreak? Even if it was only a few million people worldwide, that’s still a lot.”

“Well, Daybreak is pretty good at mimicking beliefs, so people who are shaky about what they believe, or used to giving lip service to some vague version, can be vulnerable. Compulsively fair-minded people are toast. And most of all, if there’s a basic contradiction—if the basic belief is that you need to believe because you’re bad or evil—it double binds you and you’re either bad for not believing or bad because you believe. Unfortunately that’s basic to all the monotheistic religions, many other religions, and some of the biggest secular political movements. I wrote a lot more about it in all in the notebooks you found under my mattress tress
tress
—” Arnie Yang screamed. His hands flew wildly around and his legs thrashed; they backed out and let the guards handle him.

“That looked like it hurt,” Beth said.

“It did, I guarantee it,” Izzy replied. “We’d better run the mutual confirmation protocol, James; I don’t
think
he tried anything but that’s kind of like
thinking
your sex partner was
probably
okay.”

“If Arnie’s telling the truth, it’s exactly like it,” James said. “All right, remember he only talked about Daybreak because we asked. What did he say and was it true?”

There didn’t seem to be much to correct this time, but they still checked to make sure he hadn’t referred to anything that hadn’t happened. “Just the notebooks under the mattress,” Izzy said. “Dude, we are such a bunch of amateurs. Wouldn’t a professional operation have torn his place apart two minutes after he was arrested?”

Beth nodded. “Prolly right, but we are
all
amateurs here. The pros are mostly dead, and the ones we have like Heather and Larry can’t be everywhere. If we’re gonna win the amateurs’ll have to win it.”

The door opened. A guard said, “He wants to talk to you again.”

Arnie looked pale and sick but determined. “Read those notebooks, but make sure people read them together and keep stopping and questioning each other, exactly like what you’re doing right now. If you can find a few rock-hard believers in anything—I don’t care if it’s a Republican or a Communist, a Catholic or an atheist, just so they’re dead certain they’re right—who have the rhetorical chops to approach it in a completely detached way, that would be best, but they still need to check with each other
constantly
.” His grin was ragged but real. “I finally beat it, just then. I made myself assume you’d found the notebooks, and that tricked it into letting me give the information. I don’t know why but it couldn’t seem to stop me from writing those, after everything it could make me do or keep me from doing, that was one thing that was outside its power. Maybe because keeping good records of research is the only thing I really believe in.”

“Maybe,” James said. “Arnie, you know that everything you tell us is making it crystal clear we can’t keep you as a research subject. The people interrogating you would be in danger.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, quietly. “And I don’t think Daybreak will let go of me . . . let go of me . . .” and he began to scream. He was still shrieking
Let go of me!
when they decided he wouldn’t be coming back for a while, and left the building. They could still hear him a block away.