Daybreak Zero (8 page)

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. MOTA ELLIPTICA, TEXAS (WEST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER). 3:20 AM CST. MONDAY, JULY 14, 2025.

So that’s it. The EMP will burst over us somewhere between 4 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the 17th.
Arnie scribbled a note and had the desk attendants copy it for every relevant officer, department head, and technician at Mota Elliptica, to get preparations under way at WTRC; gave a short note to the radio room to alert Pueblo, Athens, and Olympia; and dropped a note titled URGENT INSERT into the basket for the control bunker, so that once an hour they would stop the rolling tapes and warn the planet of the impending EMP.

With nothing more to do, he headed up the stairs for bed.

“So,” Trish said, behind him. “Five days of delay before the moon gun went off. Longest ever. Does that mean it’s an AI?”

“I hope so,” Arnie said. “Because if it is, our job is much easier. And if it’s not, it’s what I’m scared of. Why are you up so late?”

“Same reason you are. I asked them to wake me if a report of a flash on the moon came in. So was it Christiansted that got the fix?”

“Yeah. As always; best observatory we’ve got and they’re in the right place for a trajectory from the moon that’s coming here.”

“Did they get an exact fix?”

“Exacter than the last time. We’re narrowing in. But the flash happened with Fecunditatis still in daylight, so the launch site is still someplace in a forty-mile circle on our map of the moon. Captain Highbotham will be disappointed.”

Trish shrugged. “Highbotham’s not thinking about how long it will be before we can go to the moon to deal with it, because that’s not her job. Her job was to nail the moon gun’s location, and it slipped away again.” She peered at him through those strange wire-and-strap goggles; her eyes were an interesting shade of sea-green. “Arnie, you look pretty bummed yourself. Do you just need the sleep, or would you like to get a snack in the kitchen and just hang for a while?”

They made grilled cheese sandwiches and chamomile tea. He was surprised at how good it was; how long had it been since he’d sat down to eat warm food with company?

Trish gave him her puckish, crooked smile. “Is this a secure-enough location for you to share rampant speculation?”

“Not so much rampant speculation as a contagious nightmare,” Arnie said, yielding to the warm kitchen and warm food. “Look, it’s really a pretty simple thought. Suppose Daybreak really is a system artifact. No central control, no planners, no directors or generals or chairs or presidents or kings, just an emergent property of the communication systems that existed up till a year ago, and now, somehow, is continuing to run in new media and ways, like rock and roll moving from radio to YouTube, or fundamentalism from camp meetings to TV. We’re more used to the idea that things move from lower to higher tech, but that’s probably just because we had several generations where the tech kept getting higher. So somehow Daybreak is migrating from Internet down to printing press and radio, headed for campfire stories and Gregorian chant, I suppose.

“Now, we know it turns everything it encounters to its own purpose—while it was growing all around us, it took over things like political factions, organized crime gangs, terrorist groups, communes, nonprofits, churches, artistic movements, intelligence services, corporations, maybe even electorates, rather than vice versa. For Daybreak, reproduction and development are one and the same—it makes its ideas by catching on, and it catches on by making new ideas. It can’t do things without thinking or think things without doing them.

“It’s like how biologists describe a shark—a guidance system for a digestive tract—or what some economists said banks had become, a pile of money with a will to accrete. And that’s what scares me. It wants what it wants and goes after it, using whatever it’s got, but it doesn’t sit back and say ‘
I want
to reduce humans to the Stone Age,’ which would be consciousness, or ‘Destroying the world relentlessly is
who I am
,’ which would be personality. It gets by without either.”

“Drink some of your tea,” she said quietly. She was looking at him with the kind of concern he remembered his favorite tutor had, back when life was cookies,
Star Wars
, and test scores.
She’s going to be a great mom for someone.

When he had sipped the warm chamomile and taken a few deep breaths, she said, “You sound like Edgar Allan Poe talking about the beating heart, or the black cat. Now chill for just a sec, remember it’s probably not coming for us right this second, and tell me what’s so scary about all this.”

“Something we’re overlooking. People have been the smartest things that people encountered, for at least the last hundred thousand years, right? Individual people have consciousness and personality, and they are smarter than animals, organizations, beliefs, or books. So we’ve learned that consciousness and personality are the indices of intelligence.
But what if a really big system artifact—still not conscious, still with no personality—can be smarter than any of us?
I mean, Catholicism—the whole system—is smarter than most Popes have been; physics is definitely smarter than any one physicist. Well, suppose Daybreak is smarter than we are. Completely focused in its own purpose, not caring about our suffering, not understanding ninety-nine percent of what it is that makes us worthy of existence—just like a shark eating a human saint or genius—but able to think faster and more deeply using more information than we do?”

She rubbed his hand between hers. “You’re tired,” she said, “and scared. I wish you would go to bed. We need you rested and well, and we need you to explain this idea coherently so people will listen to you.”

“You believe me?”

“I believe
in
you, and I want to give you a chance to persuade me that you’re right.”

“I just can’t help feeling like Daybreak is always a move ahead of me, like every time I ask it a question, it knows what I’m going to ask and its answer is not the truth, but the thing that will do Daybreak the most good. Like it’s learning who I am by seeing what I ask, like—

Trish finished her sandwich, and pointed at his. “Eat. It’s still warm.”

He did. It was good.

“Arnie, if you’re afraid that Daybreak really is bigger and smarter than all of us, and that it’s just manipulating us into becoming easier to destroy, then if it delayed firing the moon gun to persuade you that it’s a dumb AI,
what’s the reason?
”

“How would I—”

“You said it’s a game or dialogue. Why does an opponent fake anything?”

“Crap,” he said. “Once we see the flash, we all know nothing is going to happen for three days, so first we all take a long nap, and then we spend the rest of our three days grounding everything and wrapping it up—”

She held her finger up, eyes widening. In the momentary silence they heard bells, whistles, sirens—all the signals the Army used along the defensive perimeter.

The kitchen door flew open. Lieutenant Quentin, normally the night liaison for the Army forces guarding Mota Elliptica, said, “Doctor Yang, Professor Eliot, we need you to get everyone ready to evacuate, downstairs,
now
. Big tribal raid—”

Arnie and Trish bounded up the stairs; he shoved the door open into the men’s bunkroom. “We’ve got a major tribal raid coming in. Evacuation starts
now
. No arguments.” The snoring stopped from a couple of bunks, some men began to mutter; only Harper, the chemist, sat up, groping for his bathrobe. Arnie pushed his glasses up his nose and bellowed. “Everyone,
now
!” The room went dead silent but he could feel that they were all awake. “This is why we ran all those drills. Dress. Put your personal effects in your bug-out bag. Get the books and papers you’re responsible for into the marked boxes, and the boxes where they’re supposed to go. This is
not
the time to think of better ideas. When everyone is safe, and the records are safe, you may then tell me about all the terrible mistakes we made. Now get moving, do
not
try to figure out a better way, and if you finish early, come to me and I’ll give you something else to do. No creativity, just get this done.” He turned up the oil lamp, letting it flare, and saw that they were all moving, now.

He ran to his own room, swept his framed photos and treasured books into his pack, thought for an instant,
Wish I was the guy who could just toss the three pictures of Allie into a corner and leave them here,
and shrugged. He’d try
that
kind of courage some other time.

Something heavy slammed against the outside wall, cracking plaster inside. Arnie grabbed his bag and went into the hall; the men’s and women’s bunkrooms were pouring people into their jobs. Trish and Arnie brought up the rear, urging people down the stairs. She had a moment to turn and whisper to him, “And now I
know
you’re right. Soon as we’re back in Pueblo we’ve got to plan what you’re going to say to Heather.”

Something else hit the outside wall, hard enough to be felt through their feet.

“Trebuchet,” Lieutenant Quentin announced loudly. “Like the Mongols used. Just a big lever and fifty tribals yanking a rope to throw a rock the size of a bowling ball.”

They all jumped at the loud clang; that one had hit steel shutters on the ground floor. “Keep moving,” Arnie said. The snipers in the attic began to fire, and he added, “It’s being taken care of. Do your job, and they’ll do theirs.”

Documents virtually flew into boxes, the boxes seemed almost to close and stack themselves. No more rocks arrived; a sniper called from above that the tribals had abandoned their trebuchet. “Okay, do the optional part of the list,” Arnie said.

Engineers and technicians scrambled to put the instruments and other hard-to-replaces into boxes. Trish said, “No response from the control bunker—”

A shutter broke inward through a window, tipping onto the floor inside with a crash; a moment later, an arrow quivered on the floor. The snipers in the attic were firing so fast it sounded like continuous volleys.

Everyone dropped to hands and knees and crawled into the central hallways.
Good, they remembered something else from their drills, and this time without being told.
At another window, the steel shutters rang, but held; this trebuchet crew must be more competent, closer, maybe both.

As Trish and Arnie took quick roll of the scientific staff in the hallway, Quentin rolled in a rack of rifles. “These are pre-loaded—Newberry Standards, same thing the troops are using. Who’s qualified on them?”

“Everyone,” Arnie said. “I insisted. Some of us don’t like it, though.”

“Some of us do,” Trish said, picking up a Newberry and five four-shot magazines. Arnie stepped forward, and then everyone else was forming a line, the more reluctant taking the rear.

“I’ll have other jobs than shooting for some of you,” Quentin said, “but it’s bad; I think you should all have a gun with you, all right?”

Ruth Odawa sighed. “I hate the things but I hate being clubbed or burned to death even more. I’ll carry it but I’ll be happy to do almost anything else.”

The front door opened and slammed shut in an instant; the sergeant outside said, “In the center hallway.”

Carton, a Ranger from Olympia, came in. “Lieutenant Quentin, the colonel says we’re going to be surrounded, and he’s ordering everyone who can to fall back here. Captain Piersall and Lieutenant Ayache were killed in the first attack. Colonel Streen has direct command of Charlie Company and he’s bringing them in here. He’s also got both platoons of Rangers. If any of the engineering and scientific party can shoot—”

“We just went over that,” Quentin said. “They’re armed and ready.”

“Armed anyway,” Odawa said; Trish shut her up with a glare.

“Where’re the TexICs?” Quentin asked.

“Trying to chase the tribals away from the windmills,” Carton said. “The tribals swarmed up onto the mota, hundreds of them, with grapnels on big pieces of piano wire that tangle around and wreck the hubs, and rocks on poles to smash up the rotors, and God knows what else. I was on a watchtower up there when it started. We’ve lost at least four windmills that I know of. A few guys with black-powder repeaters couldn’t even slow the bastards down; I don’t know how the Texans’ll do with lances, pistols, and sabers, but at least they’re on horseback.” He might have grimaced or laughed; his expression was strange. “Guess we’ll all have to stop making fun of our pony soldiers and their cowboy outfits.”

“Guess we will,” Quentin said. “All right, we don’t want to be—”

Bangs, pops, and roars stuttered above. One of the men above shouted something down the stairs; then the front door opened. “Everyone stay down!” Colonel Streen shouted. “Troops coming in!”

Suddenly the house was full of soldiers—over a hundred Temper infantry, in their “Rorschach jammies,” the gray wool camo-blotched with India ink that had replaced the rotted-away ACUs; around fifty of the President’s Own Rangers, in their black flannel shirts and jeans; a few TexICs, Texas Irregular Cavalry, who looked to Arnie like they’d escaped from a Nashville revue.