And Taj, feeling suddenly every year of his age, was left looking at his son, his daughter-in-law, his granddaughter, and Mr. Toutant . . . wondering what they had become.
National technical means are no longer available to us: The last Indian-built imaging surveillance satellite, RISAT-5, was launched in 2021 and ran out of maneuvering fuel a decade later.
Commercial platforms such as OrbImage and GeoEye have been inaccessible to nations outside the Free Nation sphere and are reportedly no longer functional. (There have been no commercial imaging launches since the Aggregates consolidated their control of Free Nation U.S. in 2023.)
To be blunt, we lack overhead capability.
Combined with travel restrictions and information firewalls, our only sources of intelligence are the so-called undernet, and inferences that can be made from economic studies.
Leading to this conclusion: Free Nation U.S. is in the midst of a construction project that dwarfs the Apollo program and, indeed, compares to the buildup of American nuclear forces (missiles, warheads, aircraft, naval vessels) in the period 1946–1992.
And the center of this construction is a facility located in northern Arizona, an area formerly known as the Arizona Strip.
The purpose of this project is still unknown.
INTELLIGENCE REPORT, RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS WING,
DELHI, 25 MARCH 2040
WHIT
“First trip east?”
Whit Murray blinked at the voice, which belonged to a man a few years older than him—possibly twenty-five. He was tall, thin, with reddish blond hair and beard. A ginger, his mother might have said.
Whit had memories of two stops after his middle-of-the-night arrival, when the train had largely been empty. Where had all these people come from? And who was this strange man next to him? “Yeah.”
And why did the guy have a deck of cards in his hand?
The man’s voice was surprisingly rich and deep. “Any idea what you’re in for?”
“No. Just, something related to my work.”
“Which was—?” The man opened his hand and began to slide cards from palm to fingers.
Whit made a face. He was blinking, hoping his eyes would begin to water. “You don’t look like a member of THE,” he said.
The man laughed. “I’m the last fucking person to be in THE.” He pronounced it “Thee” with a long E rather than the preferred “T-H-E,” which didn’t make Whit any more comfortable. “I am notoriously indiscreet.” Freezing his cards in his right hand, he held out his left. “Randall Dehm.”
Awkwardly, they shook. “So, Randall, how long have you been working on . . . whatever it is you’re working on, including that business with cards?”
“The cards? Since I was eight, right after . . . things changed and it wasn’t so easy to play games on the Web or watch TV. Something to do.”
“How many tricks have you mastered?” Whit realized he was looking past Dehm as he spoke, taking his first look at the others in the car . . . which itself looked and smelled brand-new. Everyone seemed to be Whit’s age—under twenty, certainly, and in a couple of cases, much younger.
All equally dazed, too.
“Exactly eight,” Dehm said. “The Count, Do as I Do, Cutting to Aces—”
“They’ve got names.”
Whit was unable to hide the sarcasm. Dehm smiled. “I’ve been on this project since I was twenty, seven years ago. They . . . recruited me midway through college.” He smiled. “The cards, even longer. On my own.”
“Oh, a college guy.” Whit was immediately jealous. He’d had the grades and test scores for college, but no opportunity. The days of Pell grants and scholarships—the things that allowed his dad to go to UNLV, according to Mom—were long gone. The Aggregates preferred to take “promising young minds” and “channel them.” “Where were you studying?”
“Caltech.”
That made it even worse. Not only was Caltech where all the best technical people went—okay, maybe MIT—but it was in Los Angeles. Whit had always wanted to go to Los Angeles.
He had always wanted to go anywhere besides Las Vegas.
He realized, in fact, that this train trip to wherever might be his third, possibly his second trip across a state line!
Whit’s earlier assignment, programming field calculations for a giant generator, had kept him within Las Vegas city limits, at the former Nellis Air Force Base. (There were still some U.S. military craft there, but no airmen or pilots that Whit and his team were ever allowed to meet. Of course, the giant electrified fence between the Installation and the rest of the base might have had something to do with it.)
The new one was far outside the city, outside the state, in fact. Whit had grabbed his gear from the dorm and hoofed it back to the metro stop in order to catch the oh-dark-thirty bus to the Henderson node.
There he found a special train heading east . . . past Hoover Dam (which he could see from the window, since he happened to be sitting on the right-hand side of the car), then into the trackless waste of northwestern Arizona.
Well, not trackless . . . this train had tracks, new ones to Whit’s untrained eye.
Dehm squinted past him. “Oh, check this out.”
No sooner were the words out of Dehm’s mouth than the train turned to the left, and Whit was looking out his window at the most fabulous structure he had ever seen in his life.
Far in the distance, sitting on the high desert under a cobalt-blue desert sky, was some kind of termite mound ten stories tall, rising like an ogre’s castle on the north rim of a canyon. It was actually a city in one huge structure—an arcology, to use a term Whit remembered from his reading—but not necessarily a human one. There was no obvious activity, no aircraft or trucks going in and out . . . no ads, no personal touches . . . no color.
Just a squat, intimidating dun-colored structure taking up a huge amount of space and looking as though it had stood for a thousand years.
Detracting from the ancient temple image, however, were two visible rows of slablike power towers—no lines, just the towers themselves—stretching across the landscape from Hoover Dam and nuke plants elsewhere in Arizona, Utah, and California like monoliths.
Surrounding those structures . . . a series of giant flat mirrors on pedestals, all pointing at a common center.
The whole thing looked like Disney World conceived by, say, Attila the Hun.
“How far away are we?” Whit asked.
“Half an hour at least,” Dehm said, which meant the mound was even larger than Whit had thought. “We have to go through a couple of tunnels first.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this. We’re going to live there?”
“And work there. That’s not all . . . the whole top of that canyon, the side away from us . . . Well, just wait. And get used to it, too.” Then, with no apparent concern that he might be overheard—and Whit could see that two girls and a boy in the next seat were listening—Dehm added, “It’ll be the last home you’ll ever know.”
Whit was so alarmed that he forgot to be cautious. “What are you talking about?” He didn’t really believe this Dehm guy, but why would he say something like that?
“This project is entering its final phase,” Dehm said. “That’s why they gave the senior people—like me—one last vacation. To say good-bye.”
“And that’s what they told you.”
“Of course not. They just gave everybody in my section leave at the same time, which had never happened before. But there is a sense of completion and finality.” Dehm smiled and proudly, stupidly displayed four jacks.
“So what? Then it’s on to the next project, right?”
“See, that’s just it.” And here Dehm managed to lower his voice and glance over his shoulder. The eavesdroppers sat back, though to Whit their eyes remained wide and their ears remained tuned. “What I heard a while ago was that this particular project was kind of a terminal one, that when the Aggregates hit the on button, it would leave the facility and maybe North America and possibly even the entire world pretty much dead.”