Nov 3, 2009, Midwest Energy control room, Duluth, Minnesota t twenty past five in the morning, Manny Hooks put the finA ishing touches on his notes, detailing major and minor events, and Manny’s responses to those events, from the start to the end of his twelve-hour shift.
Unlike his friend Art, who had retired last year, Manny wanted to work another ten years. He’d been planning to work the last two of those years as a Team Lead in the first-ever GREOC, the Global Rainfall & Energy Operations Center. The timing couldn’t have been better. At fifty-four, he was the most experienced operator in the system, and a shoo-in for one of the coveted slots that would be created when the GREOC began operations, slated for 2017. Manny had been dreaming of it. He’d get to spend the last two years of his career doing what most in his field would envy him for, and then he’d retire when the GREOC moved on to the next stakeholder country. Last night, all of that had become questionable, at best. For the first time in his career, Manny had left one major event out of his notes, even though he knew multiple systems had recorded the event, and operations engineers would know of his actions within thirty minutes of the start of the workday.
It had been shaping up to be an average night until his old friend Art Revel had called wanting a favor. A big favor. An outrageous request, for which he could supply no explanation. Manny’s reaction had been to ask Art what the hell he’d been smoking. Art didn’t respond. For several seconds the phone connection was silent. Then, with the most somber note in his voice Manny could imagine, Art told him this was a matter of life and death for a great many people, that he asked Manny to do it out of friendship, and if that wasn’t enough, he would remind Manny of a favor he’d done for Manny a 297
few years back. Speaking without thinking, Manny had told Art to go right ahead then. So, Art did, he reminded Manny of his nephew.
Manny loved his one-and-only nephew. He was a good kid, smart, with a good job, a great wife and two beautiful little children.
It hadn’t always been that way. When Jed was sixteen, he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd, and things were touch and go for a year or so. Then he made a big mistake, and it placed Jed at a crossroads in his young life. Prison looked likely. Manny told Art that Jed was scared, and he was ready to listen to those who loved him. Art knew one person who could intervene, and he did, on Art’s word alone that Jed was ready to make an about-face, immediate, complete, and permanent. Art had only seen Jed a handful of times in the five years since, but each of those times, Jed had found a way to get Manny alone long enough to thank him for what he and Art had done for him.
“I don’t know if you value what I did then,” Art said, “in equal proportion to what I’m asking now…” He left the sentence incomplete, and gave Manny a few seconds to think.
“What you ask now is trivial compared to what you did for Jed,” Manny said. “If you say this is as important to you, as Jed is to me…”
“It is.”
Pausing to take a deep breath, Manny said, “Then I’ll do it.
Give me the details.”
Saying is one thing. Doing is another. Manny first looked for the closest relay satellite, saw that he needed ten hours to reposition it, so he got the satellite moving.
Then he sat and thought for a spell, made his decision, and got busy. He made a list of three items that other systems, especially the Canadian system, would notice: move a satellite, start an idle array, and beam full power, for over an hour, from array, to satellite, to the Arctic ice cap.
Manny got into the coding protocols for the satellite and the array. He slipped in a few changes that at first glance would make 298
it look as if programming errors had resulted in the series of events he would initiate manually.
It wouldn’t fool anyone on the engineering staff for more than a microsecond. The changes gave his supervisor the chance to save Manny’s job, if he so desired. The equipment in play all belonged to Midwest Energy. If this boondoggle finished without harming any one or any thing, then Yul Strickland might have the option of keeping it low-key, in-house: a programming error, with no damage done. It would satisfy the curiosity of external systems about the unusual positioning of Midwest equipment, and with no harm done, that might be the end of it. It was a long shot, Manny knew, but it cost nothing to take that shot. If Yul wanted to can him, the few lines of programming changes wouldn’t make it any worse.
When he had everything set up, the system was still quiet, so Manny sat back and waited for the exact coordinates to come through Art, from Bell.
Bell. Bell indeed. He hadn’t mentioned it to Art, but friendship and the debt he owed Art weren’t the only reasons he’d agreed to do this for Art. Another reason, quite possibly the clincher, was that Art had mentioned the name Bell. He’d said, “Bell will zip me the exact coordinates.” Sure, the name wasn’t unique. It could be a coincidence. Something told Manny it wasn’t.
He’d read a peculiar book once, an obscure book he’d found in a used bookstore, ten years earlier. Titled, What If She Had Failed, a man named Britten some-thing-or-other had written it. Probably a vanity publisher. Many didn’t recognize it. How the book came to be in that used bookstore was a mystery. The owner of the store didn’t even know.
According to the author, Kennedy should have died in the early 1960s. THE Kennedy, JFK himself, would have been assassinated, the author said, but someone has saved him. Bell, Britten’s daughter, had been involved, though the author didn’t say how.
The book described what the U.S. and the world would have been like had Kennedy died back then. That was eerie. The author spoke of a world of treachery, cruelty, and corruption that escalated 299
over the decades until midway through the 21st century, when the maliciousness plunged the world into a dark age, where the strong ate the weak. When, after many centuries, a new humanity emerged, all that remained of what had been were crumbling heaps of fallen skyscrapers, visible through the foliage of natural habitat that had reclaimed the planet.
He thought about that book often. The writing was so dark and troubling that he’d shown it to no one, kept it hidden even from his family—especially from his family—fearful it could taint them.
He’d tried to find the author, wanting to ask him why he wrote such a book, only to learn that he had died. He found three children though, all girls, and he had telephoned, and then written, to all of them, but none would reply. He’d called and left messages once a month, until the one named Bell had returned his call.
She said she would answer questions about her father’s book, if she could, but then Manny must stop calling them. Manny agreed.
She said that in the late 1980s her father began having memory problems. Manny could tell it hurt her to speak of it. Her father’s problem, she said, appeared to involve only Kennedy, and things Kennedy did. He would forget, then be surprised each time he learned Kennedy was still alive. In 1990, he disappeared for six weeks, causing them all great anguish. When, out of the blue one day, he returned, he would say only that he had gotten it done, he told the story. They all brushed it off as part of his health problems.
Five weeks later, he died. Two weeks after that, three large boxes containing three dozen copies of the book arrived at his home where Bell, another daughter, and Brit’s wife still lived. They all read it, didn’t know how to explain any of it, and they had stashed the boxes in the attic. When Manny began contacting them, Bell had gone up to the attic to count them, and all three dozen were still there. They tried to find the small publisher who had printed the book, to ask if there had been other copies, sent somewhere else, but the publisher had gone out of business and disappeared. They were at a loss to explain how a single copy had found its way to the used bookstore.
When Manny mentioned how preposterous were some things 300
her father had said in his book, he could tell that Bell bristled, just a little, and got defensive of her father.
“Consider this,” she’d said. “What if the reverse were true and Kennedy did die in 1963? What if the world did become more and more evil? Under those conditions, what if someone wrote a fictional book wherein Kennedy lived, and all the great contributions he made during his long life were part of that fictional book?
Wouldn’t all the wonders we currently enjoy sound just as preposterous then, as the dark age sounded to Manny now?”
He’d felt there were logic errors in her hypothesis, and some of her answers sounded less than truthful. He would have loved to discuss the matter further, but he knew he was close to wearing out his welcome. He agreed she was right, thanked her at great length for the time she had given him, and promised he would not contact her family again.
It wasn’t until after he’d hung up, and he replayed the conversation in his head, that he realized Bell had asked him to imagine
“Kennedy did die in 1963.” Not the early 1960s, as Britten had written in his book. He’d dug the book out of its hiding place and confirmed it. Damn. He wished he had asked her about that. Then he remembered the other question he’d been planning to ask her. On the title page of the book, someone, Britten presumably, had written:
To my Bell,
I only wish I could be there to save you,
when you’ve finished saving the world. Dad
Shit, he’d planned to ask her about that too. He wondered if he dared risk another call, and decided against it.
It was just too much of a coincidence, he decided. Whether or not he still had a job, he decided he would drive out to Art’s house soon, give him the book, and ask him to read it. Maybe then Art would share with him the reasons for the favor he’d asked of Manny last night, and what role the woman named Bell had played. It had 301
to be one humdinger of a story.
At 5:35, after briefing his day shift counterpart, (minus the Arctic event) Manny took the elevator to his car, hopped in, and drove out of the garage. While still on the perimeter drive, he stopped his car where it would block the path to the garage. He knew Yul Strickland would arrive soon, a good hour before most other daytime employees. He got out of his car, stood by the open door, and leaned on the roof as he stared east over the car.
It was still over an hour before sunrise on this early November day. The nearest laser shaft descended from Heaven to its receiver anode a few miles to the south. While it would be visible during the daytime, the spectacle never failed to stir him in pre-dawn darkness.
Considering last night’s events, together with the strange book he’d read, he couldn’t help but wonder how different the world might be were it not for the foresight of one very special person, and the manner in which that person had woven his visions into the very fabric of every culture on Earth.
The U.S. today ran on electricity created by the sun. It was free for most moderate residential users, and cheap for the largest industrial users. The lower cost of doing business reflected back to society in the form of lower, stable prices for goods and services. A handful of nations had already adopted the U.S. model, but Manny was sure it would one day cover the earth, as nation after nation found its own solution to the challenges of deconstructing their economic model in favor of the one being called for by their citizens.
He was lost in thought when he heard someone say, “You fall asleep, or am I interrupting your communion with the sky?”
Startled, Manny turned to find Yul, who’d driven up behind him while he’d been daydreaming. Steeling himself for the unpleasant conversation to come, Manny answered, “I guess it’s that communion thing.” He walked to the passenger door of Yul’s car, opened it and got in. “Wanted to catch you before you review the night’s event logs. We need to talk.”
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