The End Is Now

The national news was all bad. Unemployment had reached forty-nine percent. Two more cities were on fire: Atlanta and San Francisco. San Diego was also burning, but that was due to wildfires rather than rioting. The GNP was in the toilet and getting liberally shitted on. Children were starving, old people were starving, animals at the zoo were starving. When the entire workforce under thirty years old will not work in any industry that remotely damages anyone, a population already heavy on the elderly inevitably falls into slow, agonizing collapse. The only reason the United States hasn’t had a revolution is that revolutions are made by young people, and our young people were all Sweets.

In the rest of the world the situation was the same or worse, except for China. Their one-baby policy had kept the number of Sweets down, and a few years after the volcano, they’d limited population growth even further. Their trouble will come later than ours, but it will come. Meanwhile, they have the only thriving space program, all of which is secret and worrisome.

Part of the worry is that the economic situation lent itself to idiots. On TV, Louis William Porter, the latest conspiracy-theorist pundit, spewed his kitchen-sink theory of the world.

“Is it just a coincidence that our young people have been biologically incapacitated, our glorious country fallen economically just as China rises, and so-called aliens present in our skies? Do you believe in that much coincidence, my friends? Because I surely do not. No! This is not chance; it is a scheme, the most ungodly and dangerous scheme ever mounted against the United States by a worldly enemy. This has all been planned, planned in the laboratories and spaceports of Beijing. First, create poisons that damage our innocent precious children and spew them like vomit across the globe. Decades later, present so-called ‘evidence’ that there is an ‘alien’ ship waiting out there in space. There is no ship, my friends, there is only the insane ambition toward world domination on the part of the Chinese, who—”

“Turn it off,” I said, and Ian did. “Porter is nothing but a crackpot.”

“His following is enormous and growing. People want someone to blame.”

“So they need three someones—aliens and Chinese and Sweets as an unholy trinity? The E.T. fathers, heathen sons, and insubstantial ghosts?”

Ian laughed. Wit was one of the things he enjoyed about me. Christ, I loved him so much.

Love will get you every time.

* * *

Ian’s research group had a breakthrough. He came down to the cafeteria to tell me about it, his gray eyes glowing, his whole face alive. I was in the back room, washing up lunch dishes. Ted and Sarah had already left, and I had the kitchen wallscreen show an ancient rerun of some old comedy, for the mindless company. Before the Collapse I’d been an insurance adjustor, back when ordinary people had insurance. With a community-college degree in English, there was nothing at APBRI that I was qualified to do, but Ian got me this job so that I wouldn’t be one of the 49% unemployed. It paid crap but that didn’t matter. It’s necessary work, feeding people. I wasn’t much of a cook but I could chop and mix and clean. My mother did those jobs her whole life.

“Sophie—I think we’ve isolated it! The protein!”

I wiped my hands on a not-very-clean towel. “Really?”

“Yes!” He began a long, involved explanation of what his team had done, or maybe it was what the protein had done. I’d never taken much biology in school. But from Ian I’d learned Francis Crick’s “central dogma” of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes protein. Which then folds and goes about its business in and out of cells. A wrong fold and you can get prions, which can lead to a lot of terrible outcomes like mad cow disease and Alzheimer’s.

I said, “Is it a misfolded protein?”

“A differently folded protein, anyway.”

I let that go. Ian never referred to Sweetness as a disease; it didn’t meet something called “Koch’s postulates.” But then, Ian didn’t have a younger sister.

I said, “So what now?”

“We play with it.” Ian began a long explanation of what this “play” might involve, but I was no longer listening. The wallscreen had interrupted its comedy and raised its volume.

“—report that a so-called ‘Sweet’ has been arrested and charged with murder in Erie, Pennsylvania. The victim, whose name has not yet been released, was a six-year-old child. The alleged suspect, Martin Michael Shields, is being held without bail at—”

“Not possible,” Ian said. “Either he’s not really a Sweet or they have the wrong man. Fear bradycardia—”

I stared at the TV. Martin Michael Shields certainly looked like a Sweet: a big man in his twenties but with the same shy, vaguely bewildered look I’d seen on my sister’s face her entire life. I said, “It’s a frame.”

“What?”

“A frame. Someone else killed the kid so that a Sweet could be blamed.” Bile rose in my throat. Had the child died quickly? Was it a boy or a girl? Six years old . . .

Ian frowned. “Why?”