“That looked like it hurt,” Beth said.
“It did, I guarantee it,” Izzy replied. “We’d better run the mutual confirmation protocol, James; I don’t think he tried anything but that’s kind of like thinking your sex partner was probably okay.”
“If Arnie’s telling the truth, it’s exactly like it,” James said. “All right, remember he only talked about Daybreak because we asked. What did he say and was it true?”
There didn’t seem to be much to correct this time, but they still checked to make sure he hadn’t referred to anything that hadn’t happened. “Just the notebooks under the mattress,” Izzy said. “Dude, we are such a bunch of amateurs. Wouldn’t a professional operation have torn his place apart two minutes after he was arrested?”
Beth nodded. “Prolly right, but we are all amateurs here. The pros are mostly dead, and the ones we have like Heather and Larry can’t be everywhere. If we’re gonna win the amateurs’ll have to win it.”
The door opened. A guard said, “He wants to talk to you again.”
Arnie looked pale and sick but determined. “Read those notebooks, but make sure people read them together and keep stopping and questioning each other, exactly like what you’re doing right now. If you can find a few rock-hard believers in anything—I don’t care if it’s a Republican or a Communist, a Catholic or an atheist, just so they’re dead certain they’re right—who have the rhetorical chops to approach it in a completely detached way, that would be best, but they still need to check with each other constantly.” His grin was ragged but real. “I finally beat it, just then. I made myself assume you’d found the notebooks, and that tricked it into letting me give the information. I don’t know why but it couldn’t seem to stop me from writing those, after everything it could make me do or keep me from doing, that was one thing that was outside its power. Maybe because keeping good records of research is the only thing I really believe in.”
“Maybe,” James said. “Arnie, you know that everything you tell us is making it crystal clear we can’t keep you as a research subject. The people interrogating you would be in danger.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, quietly. “And I don’t think Daybreak will let go of me… let go of me…” and he began to scream. He was still shrieking Let go of me! when they decided he wouldn’t be coming back for a while, and left the building. They could still hear him a block away.
THAT EVENING. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 5:45 PM MST. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025.
Heather would rather have been alone with Arnie, but everyone, including Arnie, had agreed that it would be just too dangerous. So MaryBeth Abrams and James Hendrix sat with her and Arnie while they waited for the time. They had found a secure-enough room with windows; it was too cold to have them open.
He’d had his requests: a pitcher of Dell’s beer, a fresh steamed trout and fried potatoes, and a can of pineapple for dessert. Every now and then, a tear ran down his face, but otherwise he didn’t talk much.
Finally Heather said, “Arnie, it’s getting to be time. I didn’t mention it before now because I didn’t want to trigger a seizure, but we found the notebooks. Nobody will ever be alone with them, and we’ll watch everyone who reads any part of them like a cat at a mouse hole. I wish we could keep you; your ability to analyze—”
“Would only make me brilliant at devising traps, sending you down wrong alleys, and hiding the truth,” Arnie said. “And eventually I’d find a way to plant Daybreak in some of you. I’m a smart guy and I spent my life studying how ideas move, Heather. In the long run you can’t safely talk to me with Daybreak in me, and you have no way to be sure Daybreak isn’t in me.
“Besides, having me pay for it, in public, will do you a thousand times more good as an example than I would as a research subject. Just hit the obvious themes about it: nobody’s above the law, nobody’s too big to be seized by Daybreak, be alert, never never never talk to it, fight it. Don’t save my reputation; you can’t afford to have anyone find anything attractive about this.”
The sun descended; it was inadvisable to let Arnie talk without interruption, but what he seemed to want to do most was just share memories with Heather, about the time before Daybreak, so they took turns interrupting him, encouraging him to skip from one memory to another.
When the time came, as Arnie rose to take the final walk, James said, “Arnie, I know you’ve been touching a piece of paper in your pocket. I have to ask to see it.”
Arnie reached for his pocket and collapsed in a howling seizure. Heather and MaryBeth pinned him down; James picked that pocket. The guards rushed in.
When Arnie was tied to a stretcher, Heather said, “We knew this might happen. We’ll proceed with the plan for the seizure; frankly I hope he doesn’t come out.”
James showed Heather and MaryBeth the note:
Arnie woke up as the stretcher neared the scaffold, but he was too weak to walk, and too disoriented to maintain any dignity. The militiamen lifted him from the stretcher, bound his hands behind him, strapped the sandbag to his feet, hooded him, and fitted the greased aircraft-cable noose to his neck (“uglier but faster than rope,” MaryBeth had promised). In the little square of the trap door, he was weeping, and struggling for his balance, and when he asked Heather for a last hug, his own whining tone must have humiliated him.
She held him tight and close, and said, “Over quick, now. All be over quick. Just stay quiet, now, Arnie. I’m so sorry.”
The muffled sound might have been “Thank you” or “Fuck you.” His breathing was harsh and irregular; MaryBeth said, softly, “He’s close to another seizure.”
“Go in peace, Arn.” Heather hugged him hard, one more time, and stepped back. Arnie had requested no chaplain, and he couldn’t be allowed to say anything to the crowd, so the executioner simply checked to make sure the trap was clear, and pulled the lever. The gallows worked perfectly; afraid of making a mess of things, the engineers had overdone everything, and Dr. Arnold Yang plummeted into a broken neck and pinched carotids.
The vast crowd made no sound until the massed low moan as Arnie dropped; they walked away as if they had all been part of some secret shame.
As soon as they lowered him and wheeled his body into the examining room, MaryBeth swiftly checked for a heartbeat, poured the ice water into the ear, focused a bright light on the pupils of each hideously protruding red eyeball. “All right. This man is dead.” She felt around the cable and added, “And unofficially, you’re lucky you didn’t decapitate him with this rig.”
In Heather’s office, after each of them had had a shot of whiskey, James said, “About that note,” and Heather said, “Yes, of course, you’re right. I’d know that messy block printing anywhere. It’s Allie.”