Read Online Other Earths by Jay Lake, edited by Nick Gevers - Free Book Online Page A

slowing it, if only for a moment.
    “There are no people left in New York City,” his aide says. “What are your orders?”
    He hadn’t expected this, not so soon, and it takes him seven minutes to recover from the news of the death of millions. Seven minutes to turn to his aide and say, “Call in a nuclear strike.”
     
    >>> . . . and his aide comes up to him and whispers in his ear, “It’s time to go now. They’ve moved up another meeting. Wrap it up.” Health insurance is on the agenda today, along with Social Security. Something will get done about that and the environment this year or he’ll die trying . . .
     
    >>>He’s sitting in the chair reading the book, and he’s gaunt, eyes feverish, military personnel surrounding him. There’s one camera with them, army TV, and the students are all in camouflage. The electricity flickers on and off. The schoolroom has reinforced metal and concrete all around it. The event is propaganda being packaged and pumped out to those still watching in places where the enemy hasn’t jammed the satellites. He’s fighting a war against an escaped, human-created, rapidly reproducing intelligent species prototype that looks like a chimpanzee crossed with a Doberman. The scattered remnants of the hated adept underclass have made common cause with the animals, disrupting communications.
    His aide whispers in his ear that Atlanta has fallen, with over sixty thousand troops and civilians massacred in pitched battles all over the city. There’s no safe air corridor back to the capital. In fact, the capital seems to be under attack as well.
    “What should we do?”
    He returns to reading the book. Nothing he can do in the next seven minutes will make any difference to the outcome. He knows what they have to do, but he’s too tired to contemplate it just yet. They will have to head to the Heartland and make peace with the Ecstatics and their god-missiles. It’s either that or render entire stretches of North America uninhabitable from nukes, and he’s not that desperate yet.
    He begins to review the ten commandments of the Ecstatics in his mind, one by one, like rosary beads.
     
    >>>He’s in mid-sentence when the aide hurries over and begins to whisper in his ear—just as the first of the god-missiles strikes and the fire washes over and through him, not even time to scream, and he’s nothing any more, not even an ossuary.
     
    >>>He’s in a chair, wearing a suit with a sweat-stained white shirt and he’s tired, his voice as he reads thin and raspy. Five days and nights of negotiations between the rival factions of the New Southern Confederacy following a month of genocide between blacks and whites from Arkansas to Georgia: too few resources, too many natural disasters, and no jobs, the whole system breaking down, although Los Angeles is still trying to pretend the world isn’t coming to an end, even as jets are falling out the sky. Except, that’s why he’s in the classroom: pretending . Pretending neighbor hasn’t set upon neighbor for thirty days, except with guns, not machetes. Bands of teenagers shooting people in the stomach, the head, and laughing. Extremist talk radio urging them on. A million people dead. Maybe more.
    His aide comes up and whispers in his ear: “The truce has fallen apart. They’re killing each other again. And not just in the South. In the North, along political lines.”
    He sits there because he’s run out of answers. He thinks: In another time, another place, I would have been a great president.
     
    >>>He’s sitting in the classroom, in the small chair, in comfortable clothes, reading the goat story. There are no god-missiles here, no viruses, no invasion. The Chinese and Russians are only on the cusp of being a threat. Adepts here have no real far-sight, or are not believed, and roam free. Los Angeles is a thriving money generator, not a husked-out shadow.
    No, the real threat here, besides pollution, is that he’s mentally ill,