Triggers (40 page)

Perhaps in response to the pain, her consciousness
fled.
She was suddenly in a fancy apartment somewhere, and there was a woman she recognized: Janis Falconi—which meant she perhaps was in the mind of Dr. Redekop. She tried to speak, but before the words could get out she was somewhere else yet again, outdoors, in the cold, brushing snow off a car.

And then her vision split in two, as if her left eye were in one place and her right another. The left showed an outdoor scene—the sun rising above some more trees that had lost their leaves for the winter. And the right showed an interior of someone’s house, with beat-up furniture and piles of old newspapers. But there was no harsh line between the two realities, no clear demarcation. She could contemplate either or—yes!—
both
simultaneously. And each object in each scene triggered memories: a cavalcade of images and sensations and feelings.

And then Susan’s vision seemed to split horizontally, showing her four images: the original two in the top quadrants, a view through a car’s
windshield driving on a highway in the lower left, and a bouncing view of a TV set in the lower right that she soon realized was the perspective of someone watching a morning news show while treadmilling.

The images split again, each quadrant dividing into four smaller views, for a total of sixteen. She felt like she was equally in all those places, indoors and out, warm and cold.

She turned her head—at least, she thought she was turning it—and the views shifted, revealing new squares to the left; and as she tilted her head up and down, more squares appeared above and below.

All the images split again; each one was now quite small, and yet, despite that, there was absolute clarity. After a moment, they divided yet again—and her whole field of view was filled with hundreds of squares. But despite their small size, she could make out minute details: reading a headline on that commuter’s newspaper; admiring the engagement ring on that woman’s finger; seeing the time on the clock in this one—and the clock on that one—and the watch on this one—and the iPhone display on that one. And they all said the same time: 7:32
A.M.
, which was
now.
It wasn’t just in times of crisis anymore; she was reading minds in real time.
Lots of minds.

She was still Susan Louise Dawson—but she was also all those other people. She was white and black and Asian. Female and male. Straight and gay. Christian and Jewish and Sikh and Muslim and atheist. Young and old. Fit and not. Brilliant, average, and dull. Both a believer and a skeptic; at once a scientific genius and a scientific illiterate.

She tried to assert her individuality: she was…was…

No, surely she was still…

But it
was
getting harder to stay separate. All the elements of who she was were still there, but they were juxtaposed with components of other minds, other lives. And she was a smaller part of the whole with each passing second.

Suddenly, she became conscious of geography. All of the minds touched so far were nearby, part of the wave front, the leading edge.

A song from her youth—from everyone’s youth—came to her, to them:
We don’t stop for nobody! We don’t stop for nobody!
And as the
world spun on its axis, as the sun came up, the wave front moved inexorably westward. But she was baffled about why South American cities weren’t included. Parts of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru were due south of Washington, and yet there seemed to be no mental contact with anyone from there. Could it be that South America was too far away to be included?

No, no—that wasn’t it. Lessons from her college studies of geography came back, reinforced by the memories of countless others who knew the same thing. Earth’s axis was tilted 23.5 degrees to the plane of the solar system. The swath of the Earth being affected was following the dawn line, the terminator. None of South America had yet been included.

The dawn,
Susan thought, and
the dawn
echoed a thousand others. As people looked up, or woke up, as they recalled previous sunrises, they were brought in—and if they didn’t note the dawn, they were soon brought in anyway, as others willed links to them.

She’d almost expected everyone to topple over; there had been much wooziness during the early stages yesterday, after all. But it seemed that each new mind that came on board—and thousands were popping in every minute now—brought new strength and stability. Agent Dawson (she found herself thinking of her in the third person), Agent Hudkins, President Jerrison, Professor Singh, and all the rest seemed to be capable of going about their normal tasks, but—

But she looked on in fascination, as if from a great height now; perhaps—ah, yes, she was linked to a traffic reporter in a helicopter over Washington, giving an update on the morning commute. Everything was flowing smoothly. Despite icy conditions on I-295 and Ridge Road Southeast, there had not been a single accident reported so far, and all roads, including the Beltway, were moving well. It was as if the combined vision and reflexes of all the drivers were enough to overcome any potential problems. It was precisely what one might expect of a…

Susan herself didn’t know the phrase, but others did, and they shared it.
Group mind:
a collective consciousness, the aggregate will of countless people, each one still separate, each a nexus, an individual, but each also linked, connected, networked. Unlike a hive with expendable drones,
those who were joined now composed a vast mosaic, every stone precious, each member cherished, no one ignored or discarded or forgotten.

The world continued to turn. Dawn broke over Ottawa, Ontario; over Rochester, New York; over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; over Atlanta, Georgia. The squares were subdividing so quickly they seemed to flicker.

She thought again about the motorways and their myriad drivers. Those individuals spurring their cars to action were…a term she’d learned from Singh’s memories:
excitatory inputs.
Those that counseled inaction were
inhibitory inputs.
And, in a true democracy, greater than what Washington or any other place had ever seen or could hope to aspire to, the excitatory and inhibitory inputs were summed, and the whole—the collective, the
gestalt
—acted, or not, depending on the result.

Sudbury, Ontario, saw first light, as did Saginaw, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. Millions of additional voices joined the choir.

But surely,
Susan and countless others thought,
a species could not operate that way.
Individual will was necessary! Individual will was what made life worth living!

It was individual will that let someone try to assassinate me.

It was individual will that let someone abuse me.

It was individual will that let someone kill my child.

It was individual will that let someone set off a bomb in my city.

The sun rose over Green Bay, Wisconsin; Columbia, Missouri; and Dallas, Texas. Daylight was spreading across the continent. Tens of millions were now interconnected. And with each passing second, more who weren’t yet connected turned to face east, face the dawn, face the new day, and they recalled a dozen, a hundred, a thousand similar mornings as the Earth spun on.

ON
any given day, about 150,000 people die, almost all peacefully from natural causes. When Josh Latimer had been shot, only Janis Falconi had been linked to him. But behind each person dying now stood millions of others, all connected to him or her. As lives slipped away, the
gestalt strained to hold on to the expiring individuals: first this woman; then this man; then, tragically, this child. With the attention brought by millions, with the scrutiny of the legions, each demise was examined in detail and seen for what it was: the piecemeal dissolution of self. It didn’t depart all at once, it didn’t transfer from
here
to
there,
it didn’t go
anywhere.
Rather, it decayed, crumbled, disintegrated, and ultimately vanished.

And so, reluctantly, sadly, the majority began to accept what the minority had always known. The dead hadn’t passed on; they were
gone.

But, at least now, they would never, ever be forgotten.

PTERANODON
—the E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post—continued its westward flight through the darkness, the black waters of the Pacific far below.

SUSAN
Dawson—the physical body of the Secret Service agent—was still in President Jerrison’s office at Camp David. She had previously doubled over in pain but now fought to dismiss it from her mind.

Alyssa Snow—again, the body called by that name—was attending to the form called Seth Jerrison, who also had been experiencing great pain.

Susan felt herself simultaneously inside and outside her body, and what Singh knew about observer and field memories came to her: sometimes you remembered things as your eyes had seen them, and sometimes you saw yourself in your memories, as if observing from a distance. But this was
both
simultaneously—both an in-body and an out-of-body experience. She looked at Dr. Snow—and looked at herself looking at
Dr. Snow—and saw in Alyssa’s eyes that she must be experiencing the same duality.

The president’s face was a battleground, with grimaces coming into existence and then being suppressed. Susan watched for a moment in concerned fascination, but then saw a preternatural calm come over Prospector’s face, as if he was now drawing strength from all the linked minds. “My God,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”

Perhaps fifty million people were linked together now—but there were still seven billion who weren’t. The daybreak line would continue to sweep across Canada, the US, and Mexico, but it would be four hours until New Zealand—the first non–North American landmass of any size—saw the dawn, at about the same time that Ketchikan, Alaska, did. If it really was going to take a full day for the effect to circle the globe, covering fifteen degrees every hour, then the United States would be fully absorbed long before Russia or China or North Korea.

“We’re not safe,” Susan said. “If those who aren’t linked decide that we’re an abomination, they could nuke us. We have to maintain the appearance of normalcy until tomorrow morning—until the transition is complete.”

“But how?” asked Jerrison. “Everyone would have to act in concert to maintain the illusion, and…oh.”

Susan nodded. “Exactly. We’re linked; we’re one.”

“E pluribus unum,”
said Jerrison, his voice full of awe. He looked at Singh, then back at Susan. “Still, it can’t be that everyone wants this. Why’s it happening?”

“It’s like my kirpan,” Singh said. “An instrument of
ahimsa
—of nonviolence; a way to prevent violence from being done to the defenseless when all other methods have failed.”

Susan looked at him, and he went on. “In the ancient past, a crazed human could only kill one other person at a time. Then we developed the ability to kill small groups, and then larger groups, and still larger groups, and so on, until now a person can take out a major portion of a city, or”—and Singh glanced at Jerrison—“even a whole country, and soon after that, the whole wide world.”

“And so
this
is happening?” Susan said. “We’re linking together as a survival strategy?”

“I think so,” said Singh. “Once again, the needs of the many
will
outweigh the needs of the few; the human race in aggregate will do the things that are best for the human race. The individuals will still exist, in a way, and those that need to do work to support the collective still can: farming and maintaining the infrastructure of civilization, but—do you feel it? Any of you?”

Darryl Hudkins spoke up. “I do,” he said, and then, “We do.”

Singh looked at him and nodded. “It’s
gone,
isn’t it? Racism, prejudice.
Gone.
Hatred, abuse.
Gone.
They were never the majority state of the human race—or, at least, hadn’t been for decades and maybe longer—and they’re being diluted away into nothingness as the gestalt grows.”

Susan looked out the window. The sun wasn’t directly visible anymore, but the trees were still casting long shadows. It had been perhaps two hours since daybreak, meaning it would presumably take another twenty-two hours for the process to finish. She was worried that someone here who had ties to people in Russia or China or another nation with nuclear weapons would alert them, urging them to stop the expansion in the only way they could.

But no—no. This was too good to wreck, this was too wonderful to derail, this was too
necessary
to stop.

On that point, all those who had been affected were of one mind.

DAY
came to Montana and Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico. And then to Washington state and Idaho and Utah and Arizona. And, at last, it swept west into California, the sun clearing the Sierra Nevada mountains.

PTERANODON
continued its nighttime flight. Peter Muilenburg was pleased that the aircraft carriers and B-52s were all now on station, right on schedule. Of course, the E-4 wasn’t going all the way to South Asia;
there was no need for the command post to be proximate to the theater of operations. He wanted it positioned where it could get ground support, and there really was nowhere more appropriate, the secretary of defense thought, than west of Honolulu, high above Pearl Harbor—still the headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet.

SUSAN
Dawson now knew things she had never known.

The complete works of William Shakespeare.

Every verse of the Bible, and the Qu’ran, and every other religious text.

How to identify thousands of species of birds and thousands of kinds of minerals.

She knew calculus and how to play the stock market. She understood rainbows and tides. She knew why Pluto wasn’t a planet.

She could play hundreds of musical instruments and speak many dozens of languages.

And she remembered countless lives: millions of first days at school, millions of first kisses, starting millions of new jobs, and millions of dreams about a better tomorrow.