Lightspeed: Year One

She’s said this before, or Joe has. Each time the issue arises, they assume opposite sides of the argument, and fight until they’re tired of words. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to do it, no matter what.

“We’ve got to go,” Joe says. She hears the words again and again, even though she knows he says them only once. Déjà vu. Time is slowing and spreading. Her ghost of five minutes ago injects an eight-year old boy with dead eyes. Comfort him, her present self wants to scold. He’s all alone.

The sick bay is a field of bodies. Abandoned. Forsaken, because the engineers believe their insanity will infect the machine. They’ll meet Black Betty in corporeal form from this room, while the lucky few whose numbers get picked will live on inside Second Coming. Technological Singularity trumps Gravitational Singularity. It’s a boxing match: Mankind in one corner, God in the other.

“Let me finish with the injections, so at least they’re calm when it happens,” Sarah says.

Joe shakes his head. The kids are waiting, is what he’s saying without words. The kids come first. Before morality. Before their parents’ survival. Before the rest of the human race, if necessary. She knows this. All parents know this. But still, she can’t leave her patients without offering them some solace.

Onscreen, the closer they get to the anomaly, the more she expands, like a pupil exposed to dark. Just inside her edges, something moves. Something like life.

Or maybe something like God.

Three more hours to impact, and counting.

Joe punches his suction boots against Second Coming’s slurry floor, which is becoming less solid with every passing second. “Okay,” he says. “For you.”

Then he lifts a syringe, and together, they Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!, until every patient in the ward is drugged or dead.

From the corner, the ghost boy watches.

The day Black Betty appeared, Sarah was still home on maternity leave with baby Sally, but she’d known something was coming. Already, magnetic north had reversed without warning. You could see the Northern Lights as far south as Costa Rica. Migratory birds’ internal radar had jammed, too. They flew outside the troposphere, then plummeted from loss of oxygen. Roads and roofs and empty farmland hosted their open graves. No one knew how their loss would affect the ecosystem, but mornings without their songs seemed more bereft.

Baby Sally was swinging happily in her rocker that morning, and three year-old Bradley toddled between the kitchen and television room, calling out names of things: Shoe! Knee! Strawberry! Sally!

On the radio, the regular morning program got interrupted for a special report. ”Jack the Jerk-Off” cut off a geriatric Salieri clone’s rendition of “Me and My Shadow,” and read:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, do not be alarmed!”

Sarah listened as she rinsed a glass baby bottle. The water spun counterclockwise.

“Initial reports are sketchy as an Etch-A-Doodle, but the Department of Defense, in tandem with Kliffoth Cybernetics. . . . Is this a joke?”

Sarah walked over to the radio. Bradley bobbled between her legs, then out, then in, like a maypole dance: “Mommy . . . mommy . . . mommy . . . leg!”

Static flushed the frequency even though it was a clear, Nebraska day. Jack the Jerk-Off returned:

“Okay, folks, they say it’s not a joke, but so did Orson Welles, so we’ll see. Put it this way, if they’re wrong, sue somebody else. I’m not liable, bitches! Anyway, Kliffoth Cybernetics, the American Government contractor for science, health, incarceration, propaganda, the national and state lotteries, consumption, toxicology, humanitarian aid, and defense, says they think the reason polarity shifted so suddenly and completely is because of an anomaly about twenty million miles between Earth and Mars . . . ”

Sarah braced herself against the counter while Sally chirped like a small bird in her swing, and Bradley danced.