Unhappenings (51 page)

“Take me back six months,” I said aloud. In a flash, the snow appeared to instantly sublimate. Surrounding me were the broken remains of Amherst, exactly as I had seen them moments ago. At least it was warm.

“Take me back one year,” I said. Another flash, this time the flora had receded slightly. Otherwise the view was the same.

“One more year.” Another flash. Some of the damage to the visible buildings was partially repaired. Slightly less overgrowth.

“One more year.” Flash. Boards came off of some windows. A smashed storefront was restored. Still no evident human activity. “One—”

A hand grabbed my wrist, hard.

“
Stop
that,” said Athena.

till holding my wrist, Athena said, “Hang on.”

The world flashed once more, and hundreds of Amherst residents went about their daily business, oblivious to the apocalypse in their future.

“When are we?” I asked.

“2119. Can we get off the street please?” We made for a small park across the street, and found a bench. “It took me three weeks to find you,” she said. “Please don’t do that again. Multiple long jumps in rapid sequence are incredibly difficult to track.”

“Sorry. What happened here?”

“Plague,” she said. “Something viral, and almost certainly deliberately engineered.”

I thought back to where she and I had been only minutes before.

“Are we going to catch it?”

“No,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“No. The priority right now is identifying the root event, and handicapping its opportunity. The outbreak happened in 2132. By 2134, over ninety percent of the world population was already dead. Did you go into any of the houses you saw?”

“No,” I said, grateful but queasy.

“Good. By the time I found you, which was June of 2136, the disease had mutated, and new cases were rare. Probably a genetically engineered self-destruct. Most of the smaller towns were evacuated and condemned, as were most of the larger cities.”

“Helen?” I asked as calmly as possible.

“Safe, and extremely worried about you. ‘Stingrays,’ by the way. She wanted me to pass that along.”

“Incredible,” I choked. And then the tears started. Athena gave me a minute to let that out and regain myself. Even in all this horror, my time with Helen had been preserved. I wondered what our trip to the aquarium had been like in the face of this viral dystopia. “He tried to kill an entire planet to get to us,” I suddenly realized out loud.

“And he still failed,” said Athena. “Hold on to that. Your connection to Mom is the anchor we are going to use to fix this.”

I looked around at the people who would all soon be dead or grieving ninety percent of their loved ones. “He did this just to get to me,” I said. “Even if we undo this, how much farther is he willing to go? The entire world is going to die, and it’s all my fault.”

My daughter slapped me across the face, hard enough, I saw later that day, to leave a mark.

“Don’t you
ever
say that again! He’s not doing this because he’s a cuckold. He’s doing it because he’s a sociopath! You are a good man who did a stupid thing. Lots of good people do lots of stupid things. That doesn’t make them liable for the atrocities of madmen!”

Stunned, unconvinced, and in pain, I let the matter drop.

dentifying a root event is a mind-bogglingly delicate task. As Athena and I spent the next four weeks of our lives exploring the span of eight years between 2120 and 2128, I gained a new appreciation for her work.

We started in 2128, looking for vectors. The earliest reports of infection came simultaneously from Australia and South America, in the form of twenty-one separate incidents. It would be several months before the world community made connections among all twenty-one cases and realized they were all the same virus. By then, it was far too late.

It took us a week to find the common source of contagion for both continents. It turned out to be, of all things, separate shipments of a specific brand of toy from the same manufacturer. Ostensibly, the toy was being piloted in South America and Australia before the launch later that year in North America and Europe. By the time the launch date arrived, of course, the world was in chaos.

He used a toy as a disease vector. The son of a bitch started with children.

It took us another two weeks to trace the connections between this toy manufacturer and the private laboratory where the virus was created. From there we had to back-track to 2121, which was the inception date of that program.

In August of 2120, at 3:00 on a Sunday morning, we blew up the building.

The consortium that owned the lab and the intellectual properties derived from it fell into disarray under allegations of arson and insurance fraud. By convenient timing for us, their previous quarter had been a fiscal disaster, adding a level of plausibility to the proceedings that ultimately destroyed them, despite the eventual findings that the explosion had been an act of domestic terrorism.

“Won’t he just try this again?” I asked right before we set the charges.

“Not if this works,” Athena told me.

“Why?”

“For the same reason I wasn’t able to save Carrie Wolfe after failing on my first try,” she said sadly. “Space-Time doesn’t give second chances.”

It would be some time before I fully understood or appreciated that statement.

thena and I returned to my house the same evening I left. Helen was sitting in front of the fire reading.