The Filter Trap (4 page)

“I will do whatever I can to help. Who is with you?”

“My wife, my security detail, a few members of my Cabinet and a few Congress members. We are requesting temporary asylum in the United States.”

The conversation paused as the American president’s Cabinet scrambled to make a decision.

“Why were you flying north in the Pacific? We’re well out of Mexican airspace, and the last I checked the cartels had home-made tanks, not fighter jets.”

After a marked delay, the contrite former Mexican president replied, “Mr. President, I must admit to you that it is merely a fortuitous accident that we happened upon you. We’d hoped to fly undetected to Northern Canada to take refuge.”

“Those old escort jets couldn’t make that trip, how were you going to refuel them?”

“Our pilots do not have the luxuries yours enjoy.”

Several minutes of radio silence passed. On Air Force One the president requested refueling for the F-5s. Refusal came with the logic that the F-5s would never make it back to the mainland anyway.

“Are we just going to let those pilots nosedive into the Pacific?”

“Excuse me,” a young staffer, who’d been lucky enough to be brought to Hawaii, but unimportant enough to keep her mouth shut while on the jet, spoke up. “I have a thought.” She stood from her seat at the back and walked forward.

The president swiveled his chair and smiled. “You see? The future of this country, half my age and twice as smart I’m sure. What do you have for me, Ms. Tanning?”

She stumbled for a moment, not expecting the president to remember her name. “Mr. President, we’ve scrambled every Navy carrier in this direction to avoid the ensuing tsunami. Aren’t the majority of our fighter jets up in the air right now, your ‘air barrier?’”

He nodded.

“The Ronald Reagan undocked from San Diego before the Event; it’s not far from here. Can’t we just let these two Mexican fighters land on it temporarily? If necessary, we can shove the planes into the ocean if ours come back and need the parking spot. At least the pilots won’t have to eject up here.”

The President clapped his hands together then put them on his knees, beaming at her.

“Please tell me you’ll run for office in twenty years,” he said, before turning to the general on board and pointing in a much less congenial tone. “And
you
tell me we can land those planes on one of our carriers. Señor Presidente can come with us to Edwards.”

“Speaking of which,” Ms. Tanning spoke up, “Major Britely is asking you to confirm your list before he ‘wastes any more good men on political favors.’”

The president grunted.

“Sorry, sir. His words, not mine.”

“I know, Ms. Tanning, I just didn’t expect the hints of mutiny so soon. What the good major doesn’t understand is that Doctors Sands, Tarmor, and Douglass may be the best chance we’ve got to make sense of all this.”

Chapter 3

“Spectacular!” Doctor Allan Sands whispered through excited breaths. He tapped the big monitor, inches in front of his nose, studying new satellite photos of distant galaxies.

His wife walked to his chair and gave him a soft hug before bending his head backwards to see her. “Come to bed, sweetheart. It’s past ten, the kids are waiting for Santa and the stars have been there for a billion years, they aren’t going anywhere.”

“Technically these galaxies have been there for
tens
of billions of years, and they’re all going places . . .” he trailed off, seeing her face turn sour. “But . . . none of them are as bright or beautiful as you, dear. I’ll be up to bed in a few minutes, just have to tag these and correlate with Oscar.”

“Oscar must be single,” she protested. “You’ll be too if you keep me waiting too long.”

“Oh, Oscar gets around,” Allan smiled. “He’s the Open Source Differential Photometry Code for Amateur Astronomy Research—”

She moved his hand to her breast, whispering, “Santa shouldn’t be the only one coming tonight.”

Allan’s heavy breathing came back for a moment as he caressed her through the sheer nightgown. “In a few minutes, I promise.”

She twirled away, making sure her nightgown flew up for a moment.

Several tags later, Allan turned off the monitors. Shrouded in darkness, he waited for his favorite moment, when the Moon came just past apex and into full view of the skylight in his study. Tycho, the 53-mile-wide lunar crater, appeared as a great white spot encircled by a faint grey perimeter with bright rays expanding to grip and hold the rest of the Moon from beneath.

‘Time for another Moon to light up my night,’ he thought to himself, then shook his head, hoping he’d never let an embarrassing pun like that ever make it down to his lips. Must be the eggnog talking. He grabbed his telescope for one last close-up look at his first love.

His night literally lit up, turning stark white too quickly for his pupils to tighten against. He slammed his eyelids shut, the searing pain crumpling him to the floor. He banged his head on a shelf and his ears buzzed a nauseatingly low and loud hum for a moment. Or had the sound started
before
he fell? He opened his eyes a crack to see the study bathed in hot, yellow mid-day sunlight. He let his eyes adjust, then slowly scanned up to the skylight.

Daylight. The Sun barely past apex, replacing the Moon.

“Ariel!” he shouted for his wife.

She walked toward the study. “Allan, you old coot, you left me alone again. Boy, I sure didn’t sleep well, feels like I just closed my eyes and now the Sun’s up. I tried to wait for you, but that eggnog was strong!”

He walked to her and held her hand. “I think I passed out.”

“My God, Allan! Did you forget to take your heart pills again?”

“I don’t think so,” he said without certainty. He ran to their bedroom, his worried wife one step behind.

“Did you remember to put the presents under the tree before you passed out?” she yelled after him.

Allan grabbed the old fashioned alarm clock on the nightstand. “Look! It says 1:37am!”

She rolled her eyes, grabbed the clock and flipped it over. “It must have run out of batteries. I’m assuming that means you did
not
put our children's presents under the tree. Good thing they’re sleeping in, which I admit is odd for Christmas morning.”

The clock ticked to 1:38.

“Dead batteries, huh?”

“Or the power went out and it restarted.” She tossed the clock onto the bed and went into the walk-in closet. “We better hurry before they wake up.” She started uncovering large wrapped gift boxes.

Allan flipped from channel to channel on their bedroom television.

“C’mon, Lego sets are heavy, help me with these,” Ariel said from the closet over the fuzzy static from the TV.
Realizing he wasn’t coming she came out to drag him in.

“Well, it’s a white Christmas even in California,” Ariel joked, looking at the TV and tugging Allan toward the closet. “Gonna be a sad Christmas if we don’t get these downstairs before the kiddos. C’mon . . .”

Allan moved like a zombie to the closet as a terrifying hypothesis formed in his mind. What if he hadn’t passed out and she hadn’t slept? It portended an eventuality beyond belief for a scientist of his stature, one of the few in the world qualified to verify such a theory.

“Maybe the box burned out,” Ariel offered to explain the TV, seeing the worry in his face.

Allan looked out the window at the still brilliant Sun, then bounded back to his study. He turned the monitor back on and brought up the links to several of the satellites that were commissioned for his exoplanet search. He started breathing faster.

“They’re not responding,” he whispered to himself. “They’re not responding!” he shouted to his wife, entering the room, a stack of presents cradled in her arms.

“Who?” she asked, increasingly alarmed, not knowing if her delusional husband had suffered a stroke in the night or if something larger happened.

“Nobody,” he said, back at the monitor, clicking furiously through to different live satellite links. “GOES-WEST, GOES-EAST, Meteosat Ten, Meteosat Seven, MT Sat, all . . . gone.”

“What’s ‘G-O-E-S west?’”

“It isn’t just the TV, Ariel, they’re all gone.”

“All what!”

“All the
satellites
.”

She crumpled to the ground and began to hug herself softly, the suddenly forgotten presents tumbling across the carpet. “Terrorists then,” she surmised, looking past the gift boxes in the direction of their still sleeping children. “I
told
you we couldn’t let another liberal get in the White House, but you and your damn professor friends, you threw away our freedom. After gutting our military and hobbling the CIA, now we’re under attack on Christmas morning!”

“There’s no need for hysterics. We have the largest military in the world several times over and the CIA still listens in on everybody everywhere. With the planning and equipment needed to carry out something this big they would have seen this coming a mile away.”

“How? We treat jihadists like honored guests when we grab them. No interrogation, just tea time and clean turbans.”

“You think torture would have stopped an attack on our national communications infrastructure?”

“They’re terrorists! They only understand one thing: either we die or they do!” She stood, balling her fists and letting tears patter her cheeks.

If Allan hadn’t had a stroke before, he was approaching a burst vessel now. He knew marrying Ariel for her youth would have consequences, but, in a role reversal, he’d tried to whittle away the decades of staunch conservative values instilled by her father. Apparently none of it took. She had merely learned how to be a good actress.

“It’s not terrorists. It’s probably just a collision with space debris. If we spent even a fraction on space that we spend on the military this could have been avoided. Your right-wing buddies are the ones that keep shooting down NASA funding! Dammit, Ariel, maybe a day without Fox News will do you some good!”

They stared at each other in silence, letting the rage dissipate. If nothing else, the astrological event enabled them to discuss what they’d avoided their entire marriage.

“I’m sorry, Ariel.” He squeezed her arm, but she flinched at his touch, retreating into her personal island.

“Look at you, you’re terrified,” he said. “That’s fear programming from . . . well, from the programming you watch.”

She glared at him with red eyes. She didn’t have to say ‘hypocrite,’ it was written in his voice. He was scared too. After all,
he’d
called her in here after she’d suggested benign explanations for ten minutes.

Ariel rolled her eyes and looked down, hands patting her thighs, searching for something. Like everyone in her generation, her mobile phone had become a bodily extension. It moved from her nightgown pocket to her hand, then up to her head.

“Call Daddy,” she whimpered.

“Calling Daddy,” the phone’s soothing voice replied.

“Calm down, Ariel. The TV’s down but there have to be online reports.”

Allan opened an Internet browser, furiously typing out one URL after another, opening ten tabs, fifteen tabs, twenty tabs. “This is slower than dial-up.”

“Sorry, I can’t connect with . . . Daddy right now,” the phone asserted, with none of the terrible implications of that fact reflected in its calm, motherly intonation.

“Why won’t my phone connect?” Ariel sobbed and sat back down.

“The entire network is churning to a halt. The Internet, the phone networks, everything. Of course, they
would
be overloaded if the satellites are down. Los Angeles started a cellular infrastructure project last year because studies showed in an earthquake the existing networks would never handle the bandwidth. Not soon enough, apparently.”

His wife spoke softly, but directly. “There
wasn’t
an earthquake. Even the tiny ones freak me out, and I didn’t feel anything.”

“You sure seemed freaked out a minute ago.”

She grumbled, “Besides, why are all the clocks wrong? None of the lights turned off, none of the clocks are blinking zero, and the power never went out. Even my phone has the wrong time.”

In his obsession with finding the satellite feeds and jumping on a more satisfying theory, Allan had forgotten about the clocks. Satellite collisions and overloaded cell towers couldn’t explain the sudden loss of eight hours of night.

“Come on,” he gestured to her, getting up out of the chair. “The kids will be up soon.”

She reacted to the trepidation in his eyes with cold shivers before rising resolutely again, absolving his faults and restoring her faith in him. Space, computers, satellites, and stars were all Allan’s realm; best to give her husband a long leash so he could take his mind where it needed to go in order to allay her fears and protect herself and the children.

Ariel’s father and his guns were a thousand miles away in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. She hoped Allan’s brain provided commensurate protection for their children during whatever crisis this turned out to be. She’d rather be at Trapper Peak, on solid ground and removed from civilization.

Her father had warned her about living in a city of ten million people. “Pedicures and Persian food are great, sweetheart, but when the big one comes you’re gonna have millions of desperate people fighting over the same bottles of water.” He tugged at his graying beard like it might go with his daughter if he didn’t hold onto it. “It’s only a matter of time, but we can’t stop you from following your heart.”

She wondered if it was not her heart she followed so much as a healthy checkbook. That was the security she needed at the end of her teenage years, and Allan’s book deals provided plenty. But royalty checks wouldn’t save her children from terrorists.

“Come on kids!” Allan shouted, running down the hallway. Their mother echoed, and the children came out of their rooms excited, innocently assuming they were being summoned to open presents. The family took the stairs to the living room, the children tripping over themselves with glee. At the bottom, their smiles drooped, presents absent from under the tree.

“Dad?”

“Outside!” he motioned for them to follow him out the door.

After the four of them stood in the front yard, the children drooped again.

“Dad, there’s nothing here. Are the presents in the garage?”

Their suburban Pasadena neighbors emerged from behind the picket fences and vine-covered siding, the adults showing as much confusion as their children.

“Nothing working over there either, Allan?” shouted a neighbor across the street.

“Electricity is on, but no network. No Internet.”

“So weird, huh?” their next door neighbor said. “All my clocks say it’s yesterday, and I feel like I didn’t sleep a wink. It’s like that old movie . . . uh . . .”

“
The Day the Earth Stood Still
,” Allan finished.

“Kids are really upset,” another neighbor chimed in. “This is worse than when the PlayStation network went down last Christmas.”

“Worse than Klaatu leaving Earth a burnt-out cinder?” Allan said under his breath.

“What?” Ariel gulped in horror at the vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding name. She wondered if he’d lied about it not being terrorists, but she knew if he had, it was probably to keep her calm in front of the kids. She could live with that. For now.

“Nothing,” he said, grasping his daughter’s hand. Allan hadn’t come outside to chat with neighbors; he wanted the innocence of a child to back up his new hypothesis. He pointed her hand at the fence at the end of the short driveway.

“Katie, do you remember when we came out last month and looked at a planet in the morning?”

“Venus, Daddy?”

“Yes, Katherine, do you remember how to find Venus?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Show me, sweetie. Show daddy where Venus is.”