Ranjip Singh was waking up—they’d eased him onto one of the infirmary beds. The sleep had done him good, it seemed: he was capable of speech again. He looked at Susan, and the first words out of his mouth were, “You can read President Jerrison’s memories.”
“Yes.”
He sounded amazed. “I can recall you recalling him recalling a wonderful sunrise seen from the White House.”
Susan nodded. “The beginning of his first full day in office. Yes, it just came to me.”
“This is…is…”
“ ‘Major league,’ as your son would say,” said Susan.
Singh smiled. “That it is.”
Darryl Hudkins was lying on one of the other infirmary beds. His eyes fluttered open. “Good morning, Miss Susan,” he said, softly, looking at her. But Darryl never called her that; in fact, the only person who’d called her that recently was…
Bessie Stilwell.
Susan found she no longer needed the wheelchair. She rose from it and walked over to him. “Bessie?” she said, looking into Darryl’s brown eyes.
“Yes, dear?” he—or she—replied.
Susan swallowed. “Bessie, where’s Darryl?”
“Darryl? Such a nice young…young man.” A frown. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”
Susan called over her shoulder. “Ranjip! Ranjip!”
He hopped off the bed and joined her. “What?”
She gestured at Darryl. “His body is awake, but it’s as if Bessie is answering my questions.”
Singh looked at Darryl. “Agent Hudkins?”
“Yes?” said a voice.
“And Mrs. Stilwell?”
“Yes?” said the same voice.
Seth Jerrison woke next, sitting up straight in his wheelchair. His eyes seemed alert.
“Mr. President,” Susan asked, “are you all right?”
“No,” he said. “No, it’s—it’s like when I was dying. I feel distant from my body.”
Dr. Snow must have rallied at some point, because she soon appeared at his side. “Sir, you’re here at Camp David, in the infirmary. You’re here. Is there any pain?”
That seemed to be the wrong question. Suddenly, Jerrison’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open and he let out a grunt as if he’d been punched in the stomach—or shot in the back.
“Damn,” said Snow, under her breath. “Sir, it’s all right. It’s all right.”
But it wasn’t. Susan suddenly felt a sharp pain in her chest, too. The sight of Jerrison echoing what had happened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was triggering her to access that memory, too. And the pain of being shot brought back the different pain of having shot—the shock and nausea she’d felt after gunning down Josh Latimer.
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…