The man who had looked back at me from the bathroom mirror was a Den. He might have lacked the business talents, and he knew nothing of wine, but there were some things he and Den had in common. My father had had a long career in promiscuity and it had shaped my life, my mother’s and brother’s, too. My memories are of anger and misery, and it was cruel of nature to let this DNA hide in my younger self, only to surface and now confront me in the mirror. It may have turned out that physics is quite feckless, but genetics is actually malicious.
I cross town, get onto the Interstate, and take an exit that must mystify most travelers as it seems to lead only to semi-arid wasteland. I merge onto the road that takes you to the site.
I park and check my phone before throwing it onto the passenger seat, leaving it in the car as security protocol requires. Late again. The shift director won’t comment. They never do, but I sense that records are being kept. I enter and no one approaches me, not even Kasper. That’s a pity since I’d decided to be nice to Kasper today having felt a bit guilty about yesterday. It’s unusually quiet. I never did get my tea so I make a beeline for the kitchen.
Something seems wrong. I turn and notice there’s no motion in the control room. In fact, no people in the control room. In fact, no people anywhere. I enter the control room. Confirmed. No one. Even the Big Chair is empty. In my years at TMA I’d never seen the Big Chair empty before. Protocol requires it never be unoccupied except in the instant of a shift change or a toilet break swap-out. I’m panicked and jump into the chair. I have no qualifications or authority to be in this chair but it being empty is worse. I now notice several green lights on the map. Germany, Australia, Venezuela, Japan–two in Japan. Worse still I see a cluster of green. That’s an event correlation if I ever saw one. Not good. And what makes it worse than not good is that the cluster is in southeastern Washington state. It’s right here. As occupant of the Big Chair I need to order “Affirmative to Echo,” but there’s no one to say it to. The tachyons are streaming in but I can’t do a thing about it. I can’t echo them to neutralize the events. I don’t know how. It’s an art and it’s never been my job. I jump up and look into the console from where the echo is triggered, but the controls are soft and not even slightly intuitive. I’m nauseous. What’s happening out there? What happened right here? The cold sweat of a hangover has turned to the icy sweat of panic. I’d give up a limb to see a red light right now, but it’s all green. Just green. Another green light illuminates.
I need to call someone so I burst out of the control room and run toward my cubicle. Then the Earth shudders and I fall. There’s a roar that shakes and deafens me and I clutch onto the ground as the control room glass shatters, cubicle walls collapse and the ceiling lights swing violently. I’m going to be sliced, crushed and buried under a mountain of rubble. I hear myself scream. I hadn’t intended to scream but my body knew it was called-for. There was another roar and whatever had been left standing now hit the ground all around me. I cover my eyes as debris rains on me, but it seems light and fragmented rather than heavy and deadly. I look up and the ceiling is still where it should be. If that comes down, it’s over. I need to get out of here because where there are two explosions there may be three. I lope toward the main entrance, hurdling over debris. The main door is no longer standing and I run straight out into the parking lot. The other smaller buildings are in various states of collapse. If I’d been in one of those ... The concrete pad of the parking lot is a web of cracks and craters, some a foot across. In all directions I see plumes of rising smoke like a Dickensian landscape of billowing chimneys. Those must be from the elevator shafts and ventilation ducts serving the labyrinth of corridors that navigate the tachyon detector array. I wait but there’s no third boom. I notice that my right arm is cut. There’s a lot of blood but it doesn’t look deep.
Now there’s silence but for the geyser of water erupting from one of the collapsed buildings. The detection array has blown up. Why had it taken so long for this to occur to me? An explosion, two explosions, half a mile down is what just happened. But there’s nothing in the array that could cause an explosion. So someone did this–blew it up. Something else that had not occurred to me until now is that the parking
