James looked up to see Deb returning, with Arnie in a hammerlock-and-nelson, bent backward brutally.
“Well,” James said, “I guess one of us needs to go get Heather, and she’ll want to bring along—”
“One meal ticket,” a voice said, behind him. He turned and saw Patrick, who was grinning. “For one meal ticket I will go find anybody you like and send them here.”
“How the hell—”
“Hey, Mister Hendrix, it is not my fault if you’re way more interesting when you’re not teaching us to read Great Expectations.” Patrick was bursting with pride. “I saw you guys following Doctor Yang and followed you here, ’cause I knew you’d both got those special messages.”
Debbie winked at James, and said, “See what happens when you don’t look for things? How’s this guy doing with Dickens?”
“Top of the class.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “Any agent I’m going to train can’t have enough Dickens.”
Between them, James and Debbie figured out who Patrick needed to bring, and he went on his way with “a slightly swollen wallet and a slightly swollen head,” James said. “And hey, why does a spy need Dickens?”
“Because you’re making me read it in the adult class, and if I have to, so does any poor bastard I train. Same principle as fraternity hazing, if I went through it, so does everyone.”
The sun descended slowly, the shadows lengthened, and it was the better part of two hours before everything was sorted out, but at the end of it, people were where they belonged: Aaron was on his way to the morgue, Arnie was in Leslie’s cell (and the guards had been carefully coached by James about the four different ways someone could get in, and fixed them), and everyone else, including Leo, was at James’s house. “Even Wonder,” Leslie said, her face buried in the big dog’s fur.
“Well, he’s been living here.”
“I can tell,” she said, thumping the big dog’s sides. “Too much good food and not enough exercise, you lazy old goof, you’re gonna be running your ass off for a couple months. And you too, Wonder.”
“That was an evening,” Heather said. “I guess I’ve never been happier to miss out on meat lumps and noodles.”
Leslie looked up from Wonder, and said, “James, it’s Monday night, still,” and pausing only to consider that he had enough in the larder, James said, “There’re three big jugs of wine in the lower drawer in the living room hutch, and glasses on the top two shelves. Everybody grab a glass and fill it, and then sit down and stay out of the way—I’m about to cook.”
THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 9:30 AM MST. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025.
“I’m really not totally cool with this,” Izzy said. “He might be able to send me into a seizure, and even though Beth has never had one, she’s pregnant. I don’t like doing this at all.”
“Me either,” James said, “but it’s all I can come up with.”
Since five o’clock that morning, James, Izzy, and Beth had been practicing the “mutual correction” protocol that he had evolved to keep Leslie from slipping into Daybreak. It had begun as a pure desperation measure, with James adapting tricks from a twenty-year-old pamphlet, Interrogation Tips: Avoiding Implanting False Memories. But it seemed to have kept Leslie out of Daybreak, and even to help her develop some immunity—whatever it was that immunity might mean in this case. It was as good a protection as they knew how to do against the version of Daybreak in Arnie.
According to the guards, Arnie had been sitting upright on the bench-bed ever since his arrest. He had risen to stretch twice, and to use the chamber pot once. Mostly he sat and stared into space.
Arnie looked up and said, “Hello,” tonelessly, when they came in.
James said, “Sit up and look at me.” It wasn’t a sharp command, or a harsh order, but it was clear he expected to be obeyed.
Arnie sat up, and by visible effort, made himself look at James.
“Now.” James held his voice flat and neutral. “Tell me about what you think happened. Start with the first time you thought about Daybreak as anything other than a problem to be solved.”
Arnie stared off into space. “I am visualizing reading a paper in a journal and the title is, ‘On the identification of Daybreak in the Psyche of Test Subject AY.’ The abstract says, ‘Keller’s Conjecture [2003]’—”
James found it impossible not to laugh.
“Yes,” Arnie said, “I really am seeing it in my head, brackets and all, and if I read from that imaginary journal article, I can speak. So the abstract says,
‘Keller’s Conjecture [2003] postulated that for every activity found in logical/memetic systems, an equivalent can be postulated in biological/ genetic systems, and vice versa, in every case with a very high probability of real-world occurrence. Terms like virus, infectious, resistant, and worm have been freely used in information science for decades, and biologists just as easily speak of transcription, expression, and reception. Before Daybreak we simply failed to see the analogy to the exceptionally dangerous diseases that attack through the immune system.
‘Specifically, just as dengue, HIV/AIDS, and BSE turn the identification system for pathogens to their own purposes, the capacities needed to understand, rebut, refute, and reject an idea, such as empathy, subjunctivity, hypothesis, and theory of mind, become the pathway by which the susceptible mind acquires Daybreak.’”
“‘Theory of mind’?” Beth asked.
“The mental model each of us has of other people’s mental processes,” Arnie explained. “The thing in your mind that you use to guess what the other person is thinking. What you need to run con games, get jokes, and understand what your mom is mad about. The thing that doesn’t work right in Asperger’s syndrome and maybe isn’t there at all in autism.”
Ysabel asked, “So what you’re saying is, Daybreak gets to you through your process of rejecting it, because to reject it you have to understand it first?”
“It takes over minds that try to understand it; it doesn’t matter why they try to understand it. Most Daybreakers wanted to understand it because some part of it was attractive to them. Some found it so repellent that they studied it to fight it, like St. Paul studying Christians, or witch finders studying witchcraft, or the way spy-agency analysts in the Cold War sometimes quietly converted to the other side. As for me… God, it was the most fascinating thing a guy in my field could have hoped for, and I wanted to plant my name on the first real study of it.”
James asked, “So who’s immune?”
“Stupid people, because they never try to understand anything. Bigots, ditto. Anybody with a strong enough belief system who becomes aware, before Daybreak takes over, that it contradicts what they believe—doesn’t matter much what it is if they really believe it.”
“But most people believe something, so how could so many people catch Daybreak? Even if it was only a few million people worldwide, that’s still a lot.”
“Well, Daybreak is pretty good at mimicking beliefs, so people who are shaky about what they believe, or used to giving lip service to some vague version, can be vulnerable. Compulsively fair-minded people are toast. And most of all, if there’s a basic contradiction—if the basic belief is that you need to believe because you’re bad or evil—it double binds you and you’re either bad for not believing or bad because you believe. Unfortunately that’s basic to all the monotheistic religions, many other religions, and some of the biggest secular political movements. I wrote a lot more about it in all in the notebooks you found under my mattress tress tress—” Arnie Yang screamed. His hands flew wildly around and his legs thrashed; they backed out and let the guards handle him.