The Reset (8 page)

Ben lost himself in memory, returning to
his time on the ranch. To his time in Dr. White’s home, and in Mr. Brown’s
school. A single tear tracked down his cheek.

“He called himself Dr. White, and he
lived on a sprawling ranch outside of Bend. He’d recruited a cadre of dedicated
followers, and he built his version of a utopian society there on the bluffs.
This culture—it became the second wave of his fame. The world media portrayed him
as a saint—the benevolent caretaker of the Rose Garden Nineteen, those poor
orphans whose overwhelming loss would be at least softened by a first-rate
education and an easy path to employment in the premier economy. White would
see to it that these children knew comfort and security, while just about
everybody else scrambled after resources and fought to scratch out a place in a
dying world.”

She snickered. “
He
had planned
the attacks on the Rose Garden.
He
had engineered the weapons that triggered
the Reset. Alex Calvin was brilliant
and
he was patient, and it proved
to be a terribly destructive combination.”

Ben looked away. He had never known his
parents, of course, and yet in that moment he was choked by grief for their
loss.

John and Kathryn. They had enjoyed
living in the United States, although it had become clear to him when he went
through their things that they would always be Londoners in their hearts.

Mr. Brown had taken great lengths to
procure keepsakes for each of the children. The last time Ben had seen Coraline,
she was still wearing her mother’s silver wedding band—the one with her
parents’ initials engraved on the interior and the thick gouges on the
exterior, where it had been scarred by falling concrete—on a chain around her
neck.

Ben knew his parents through their
photographs and writings. Before the Internet went down, he had combed through
his father’s blog postings hundreds of times. John Stone was a bright
pragmatist with a sharp wit. He was a journalist and a film critic. His mother
had been tall and pretty, and she and her husband had chronicled the pregnancy
that would produce Ben with hundreds of photographs that they’d posted online.

The photographs had vanished when things
went dark, but Ben retained in his mind the image of his mother holding him as
an infant, her cheeks flushed with happiness. He thought of that image often.

Ben bit his lip, blinking away tears. White
had hurt them all—every single person he had ever held dear to him had been
irrevocably damaged by the man.

 “Nineteen orphans became nineteen
weapons. Calvin’s staff raised them as family. They educated them. They
disciplined them. They cared for them when they were sick. By some accounts
they loved them, and by some accounts, that affection might even have been
genuine.”

“Accounts? What do you mean?”

“A single member of Calvin’s staff was
away from the ranch on the day of the homecoming. Her name was Patrice Clover, although
they called her Ms. Black on the ranch. She’d been off purchasing supplies on
the day Karl Trickett came home. February 23, 2038. Super Bowl Sunday. The evening
of the big game.”

He smiled when he heard their names. Ms.
Black had been wonderful, a gourmet cook who always had a kind word for the
children. He remembered Karl, the class clown whose last name, if he’d ever
known it to begin with, had long been forgotten.

“Karl Trickett,” he whispered.

Alice nodded. “That’s right. Karl
Trickett. The only one of the nineteen to fail the medical portion of his entry
exams. He’d gone to work for a company called Nike, right back where it all
started, in downtown Portland. Their doctors were the only ones whose suspicion
was sufficient to send one of the kids home. And Karl had been crushed,
because….”

“…because he had been in love with a
girl,” Ben finished.

Alice smiled. “The man on the road to
Pensacola?”

Ben just shrugged. He was filling in the
blanks now, connecting the events from the other side of the mirror.

“
Her
name was Ariel Cook,” Alice
continued. “She was an engineer at Boeing, in Seattle. Hers had been among the
first detonations. We know that Karl and Ariel had seen each other many times
in the weeks after moving in with their host families, taking the train back
and forth on the weekend.

“When Calvin armed the…the weapons, it
was hers that destroyed the Space Needle. I can’t,
we
can’t, ever think
of any of the Kids as willful participants in what happened. Certainly more
than anyone else, the Kids suffered at the hands of Dr. Calvin.

“Anyway, Nike sent Karl packing. This
was in late January, and Karl was despondent. He’d knocked around Portland for
a short time before finally deciding to return to the ranch. It took him a few days
to make his way home—he wasn’t in any kind of hurry, of course—and a truck
driver delivered him to within four miles of Calvin’s ranch on the very morning
of the Reset.

“That truck driver survived, by the way.
He’d outraced the fallout, though the residual contamination probably led to
his premature death a couple years later. His name was Kirby Middleton, and he
wrote one of the best early histories of what happened in Oregon shortly after
the Reset. He was a good man. I spoke with him, briefly, back when the telecom
grid was still in place.

“Ah, but the Homecoming! How I’d have loved
to have been a fly on the wall when Calvin saw his protégé walking down that
dusty lane on Super Bowl Sunday!” she laughed. “Of course, Karl Tricket’s
device might never have been armed if White or his staff had managed to
intercept him. Calvin didn’t want to be a martyr. Just
what
his plans
for the world that emerged after the Human Accord had been destroyed were,
we’ll never know, but Clover was certain that he’d never planned for his own
demise to become any part of the reshuffling.” She scowled. “Which is pretty
fucking cowardly, if you ask me.

“Anyway, Karl had already taken the
injection. Things were in motion and poor Karl, as was the case with the rest
of the Kids, had become a living, breathing weapon of mass destruction. There
was no going back—just a violent chemical reaction to come, and one that had
been decades in the making, mind you.”

“It was all but two, right?” Ben said,
leading her.

“Yup. Two of the weapons never detonated.
Patrice Clover had some…interesting theories on that topic.”

Ben nodded, filing the statement away
for future discussion. He shifted gears. “You mentioned injections?”

“Part of the sheer audacity of Calvin’s
plan, if you ask me. The Kids,” her brow wrinkled at the thought of it, “didn’t
lead easy lives on the ranch. From the time that they were toddlers, they had
undergone a series of operations. Month after month, year after year, they
suffered through rigorous, invasive surgery. I can’t imagine how life must have
been for them—always mending through some form of post-operative recovery.” She
shook her head.

“The kids became, for all intents and
purposes, the vessels for Calvin’s biological weapons. You had to understand
how far ahead of his time he was. When the corporations bailed out the United
States Government after Eurasia’s attempt at the Great Takeover,
they
ramped up security. They privatized the military and built the foundations for
the economic and social sectors that shaped life throughout the two decades
prior to the Reset. The Human Accord sensed the shift in public dissidence, but
they were still unprepared for the waves of terror attacks that would follow. A
group calling itself the Refinement Movement popped a dirty bomb on Universal
Studios, down in California. Just like that, about a tenth of the U.S. entertainment
sector vanished. The holes in corporate media’s programming lineups were ancillary
to the horrific burns, the widespread cancer, and the staggering level of suffering
for the people of Los Angeles. The American people complained bitterly that
their favorite shows had vanished. Can you believe that? Years ago, Brian and I
had heard that the Hollywood sign still glows a sickly green from a dozen miles
away.

“Universal was bad, and so were the
biological weapons leaked through Pfizer and the cyber warfare that took down Microsoft
and about a fifth of the world’s data matrix. The Human Accord bolstered
security, drawing itself even further away from the general population. Landing
a gig in the primary economy was almost like winning the lottery—not quite as
rare, but it was approaching that kind of exclusivity. You actually took the entry
exams at St. Joe?”

Ben nodded.

“What did you think?”

“They were very…thorough. They took
their time in vetting their employees.”

“Where did you go to school?” she said.

“Central Catholic,” he lied. “Small
private school.”

“You must have done very well to make it
onto step one so early in your life. The St. Joe Company was a powerful
political entity. It was a Fortune Twenty company—in control of the criminal
justice system in the American South. We’re talking everything from petty
larceny to capital punishment—doled out by a largely autonomous company that
specialized in commercial development, but had also built the majority of the
country’s prisons. What did you do for them?”

“Like I said, I was only there for a
short time before the Reset. I was going to work in environmental affairs,
though. That was the plan.”

Alice snorted at the idea of it.

“Environmental affairs! St. Joe was the
biggest developer in America, Ben. I’d love to hear how they interpreted the
phrase ‘environmental affairs’! At any rate, the tests, the vetting, the skyrocketing
costs of education in this country—those were the first lines of defense for
the companies that dominated the economy and controlled the standard of living.
It was the haves and the have-nots, and the end result was the great
repositioning of wealth in the 21
^st
Century.

“And you know what? Mostly, the
corporations were successful in stopping the attacks! There was a political
movement called Occupy Wall Street that had some traction for a short time, but
the Human Accord’s policies never allowed it to take root in the minds of the
American people, and direct attacks on the world’s dominant economic forces
dwindled. That’s not to say that peace reigned, or anything sappy like that. To
the contrary, a major backlash festered and corporate resistance slipped
underground. The billions of people toiling in the secondary and tertiary and
black economies, to say nothing of the indigent and the illiterate—channeled
their hatred toward the economic powers that held them mired in place.

“I never read anything about Calvin’s
connection to an organized resistance group. But what was crystal clear shortly
after the Reset is that Calvin wanted to
obliterate
the status quo. He
believed in a basic democracy based on majority rule, not on the legacy-dominated
system that had emerged in the first quarter of the new century. The ends don’t
justify the means here—that’s the absolute
last
thing I’m saying—but his
ideals really weren’t so awful.”

 Ben sighed. “And yet, those ideals fucked
us over for good and for all, Alice. They ruined everything!”

Alice nodded, thoughtfully studying him.
“You know, I’ll bet your situation probably isn’t all that unique. The more I
think about it, the more I can imagine that there are probably scores of folks
such as yourself—survivors who immediately went to the mattresses, so to speak,
when the bombs fell in earnest. In a way, there’s some hope in that idea. You
haven’t been tarnished, at least not completely, by the vicious nature of
how
it all ended.”

“But I’ve had to struggle in the Reset’s
aftermath,” Ben shot back. “Since coming topside I’ve wandered this hell,
searching for answers that simply do not exist. Do you know how frustrating it
is to be alone like that? To not know if anyone I’d ever known from before was still
alive? I’ve met
a handful
of souls in all those years of walking—empty building
after empty street after empty town—and
nobody
had much to say about the
Reset. Even Benedict was unsure of his answers. If there
are
others like
us, where are they? Why don’t we see them?”

“Maybe they don’t want to be seen. Maybe
it’s better to stay hidden. I wouldn’t have left my home in Atlanta if I hadn’t
been forced out. The time I had left there was very short. Roan’s scouts were
getting more and more brazen on a daily basis. I’d let the place go to seed after
Brian died, hoping it would blend in with the others.” She shook her head. “It
didn’t matter. His thugs pushed into Buckhead, and I heard them at night—racing
up and down the streets on their dirt bikes, tromping from house to house, searching
for hideouts and burning buildings in their wake.”

She sighed heavily. “There was a good man,
his name was Killingsly, who lived in our neighborhood. We didn’t know him
before the Reset, but we struck up a friendship in the years afterward…after things
settled down some. Killingsly helped me through some very tough times, right
after Brian was murdered. I went to see him a few months ago. His home was just
two streets over, and we’d carved a kind of path through the rubble. I found,
him, butchered, in the claw-foot bathtub he’d always been so proud of.
Killingsly had been an antiques trader. That bathtub had been a gift from his
first wife.