The Fires of Orc

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge –

myth is more potent than history –

dreams are more powerful than facts –

hope always triumphs over experience –

laughter is the cure for grief –

love is stronger than death.

Robert Fulghum

Lieutenant Colonel Martin Black, a U.S. Marine, served his country for thirty-two years, including six years of combat duty, three in Iraq and three in Afghanistan, where he lost his right arm three inches above the elbow in 2009. He remained an active duty Marine and worked at the Pentagon until his death on Inauguration Day, 2029, when he was shot by Secret Service agents after shooting and killing President Tom Markus.

Black was an invited guest of the new president. He passed through many layers of security screening before being ushered to his seat five rows up from the stage on the West Front of the Capitol Building. He passed through two metal detectors and a backscatter full body imaging station. He moved blithely through every step of the security process. After the automated screenings there was practically no chance he would be physically searched for a weapon by enlisted Marines whose salutes he returned with a carbon fiber hand. As it turned out, that prosthetic hand was itself a weapon. It was one of history’s most notorious cases of hiding in plain sight.

Lieutenant Colonel Black had never met Tom Markus before that day and indeed never spoke a word to him before shooting him through the head with the forty-four-caliber bullet discharged from the barrel of a weapon built into the socket of his prosthetic forearm. Black fired the single-fire gun by activating a myoelectric trigger with a specific series of electrical signals generated by his shortened triceps. The design was diabolically ingenious – a single electrode patch attached to Black’s upper arm sent a current via a thin filament that ran down the inside of the prosthetic socket to a trigger mechanism secured in a hollow in the elbow joint. The trigger released a spring-loaded striker that struck a bullet chambered in a carbon fiber barrel built into the forearm of the prosthesis. The nine-inch barrel terminated near the underside of the wrist joint and the mouth of the barrel was covered by the hand until Black cocked the wrist in the act of aiming at the president a split second before firing the fatal round.

No one would have bet that a decorated war hero and serving Marine Corps officer would assassinate the president, no one except Theowulf who, weeks earlier, informed Black of certain facts and a few speculations surrounding the death of his only daughter, Lydia. From the ether, Black received an email in December from an unknown sender. The email included copies of communications among Markus campaign staffers and an audio recording of a conversation between me and Lydia, our argument about the Dunlap scandal obtained by Theowulf through a hack of my tablet. Through the campaign’s network he was able to force the microphone on. He had probably listened to my office for months. The heated discussion about releasing the abortion story and Lydia’s passionate objection were just the sort of drama he was waiting for.

There was one other recording accompanying Theowulf’s email to Lydia’s father. I should have known that my office was also being listened to by The Soldier. He heard the same argument between me and Lydia via a bug hidden in the wall. Upon hearing our fight, and his determination that Lydia posed a threat to the campaign, he went to Markus. They had a two-minute phone discussion, which Theowulf recorded. The most damning lines of their brief exchange were:

The Soldier – Sir, there’s probably a fifty-fifty chance she’ll keep quiet and go away. If she wants to blow the whistle after the election we can handle that. But if she goes to the press now it could finish us. In my opinion the risk is too great. I believe we should deal with her.

Markus – Agreed.

Theowulf sent the damning product of his remote snooping to the father of a girl who died under murky circumstances, circumstances hastily deemed accidental suicide by investigators who barely looked at the case. The information suggested quite strongly that the man newly installed as the most powerful person in the world was at least indirectly involved in her death. A trained killer, Martin Black’s reaction was predictable but no one in the campaign knew what Black knew. Therefore, when invitations were sent for the inauguration no one raised any objections to inviting the father of a dedicated staffer who worked tirelessly for the new president for months. Seating a grieving father and a wounded war veteran in dress uniform on the aisle behind the podium to witness the swearing-in seemed to everyone concerned like a magnanimous gesture and a stroke of marketing genius.

How could anyone in the Markus camp have known what was known to only two people in the world – Theowulf and Martin Black? After all, Theowulf almost didn’t exist and Black was a Marine with more than three decades of service, cloaked in dignity and pathos, utterly above suspicion, the object of admiration, gratitude and sympathy. No human mind could have anticipated what was to come.

But of course in those days there were minds other than human minds. There were quantum minds, minds grown from the Markus fold. The greatest minds of the old world, in fact, were quantum minds. It was one of those minds that pieced together the evidence to explain the assassination of America’s fiftieth president.

The case was made by the Quark Metrics quantum computer known as Zeke, short for Ezekiel, derived from ESQL, or the Earth-Space Quantum Laboratory, a component of the massive second International Space Station, ISS2, a miniature moon a quarter-mile in diameter orbiting two hundred miles above the earth. U.S. Secret Service and Homeland Security personnel provided Zeke with raw data, basically just the killer’s identity. Zeke figured out the rest.

With overlapping views from hundreds of optical and radio cameras arrayed across its surface, ISS2 fed Zeke a continuous stream of astronomic and terrestrial data, essentially the entire range of information that percolated through the cosmos, events stretching back fourteen billion years and others happening within microseconds of their detection. Zeke’s brain could parse trillions of possibilities per second and track fingerprints obscured from human view by the fog of the cyberverse. For all intents and purposes, Zeke knew everything. With incalculably large input batches per second, it could predict nearly everything on a large scale to a degree of certainty that was practically absolute. Unfortunately, on the small scale Zeke’s powers of prognostication faded to zero. The smartest computer ever built knew nothing about a father’s vengeance before it was lived out. Martin Black was an unpredictable variable, one wild card in a deck of eight billion who blamed Tom Markus for the death of his child. That was beyond Zeke’s capacity to understand. Thus the greatest mind in the cosmos could explain everything that happened that fateful afternoon, but only after the fact.

It took a few weeks for the entire story to come out. It was no doubt sanitized for the consumption of the mass of Americans who could never have come to terms with the full truth even if they had it. But the facts in broad strokes were accurate enough: Martin Black had received communication from an unknown party whose correspondence indicated he was affiliated with the Julianistas. That communication implicated people within the Markus campaign and Markus himself in a possible plot to eliminate Lydia Black after she voiced her objection to the campaign’s use of information obtained from Camille Dunlap against the Republican presidential candidate, Smith. Upon learning of the alleged plot, Black began researching methods and strategies to overcome presidential security. In late December Black received an invitation to the inauguration. After shooting the president, Black ran through the scrambling audience on the West Front porch and into the crowd on the Capitol grounds. He was spotted by security forces on the ground who descended upon him at the same moment that he was shot in the back by a Secret Service officer.

Docu-dramas and conspiracy-theories saturated the first few months of popular media coverage as Christine Brown attempted to begin implementing policy and affecting legislation as an accidental third-party president. The cards were stacked against her from the start. The Senate was squarely in the hands of a sixty-forty Democratic majority while a narrow Republican majority held the House. Brown’s budget was dead on arrival at the Capitol. She threatened to veto several pieces of supply-side legislation but she needn’t have. The Senate and the House were at odds with one another to the point that nothing was going to happen in Washington with or without the president’s consent.

As she approached the end of her third year in office, Brown was engaged primarily in the process of campaigning for re-election, a futile exercise. At year’s end, 2031, she was pulling less than twenty percent in the polls. For all intents and purposes she abandoned her campaign, intent upon using her last year in office to get something done. By the spring of 2032, with six months to go before the November elections, she still had achieved nothing of any significance and the polls had here at fifteen percent, with the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees each at near forty percent. The dream of a presidency free of party control, one not beholden to established interests, the whole idea that began with Tom Markus’s audacious declaration just a few years before, it was all just a blip on the otherwise constant trajectory of late America. It was a sham, the whole enterprise, pushing through an outsider with promises of reform. Christine Brown couldn’t change Washington and had he lived Markus would have fared no better.

By that summer I was tired of my own comings and goings and I settled into life in Tequis, committed to staying put long enough to decide what next grand undertaking should consume me. I watched American campaign coverage disinterestedly and infrequently. I could see what was happening. I could see the future of America with perfect clarity. Mine was not a quantum mind. I didn’t need to deal in probabilities; I was certain of the future. What the future held was more of the same – of that I was positive.

“Old timer….”

“Yes?”

“When I was a little boy I used to see the lights in the night sky. My dad told me they were called, what was it…?”

“Satellites,” I say. “You’re probably thinking of satellites.”

“Yeah!” he exclaims. “Satellites.” He scratches at his flabby neck. “What happened to those? I never see them anymore, except for the one bright one that comes out sometimes.”

“The one you’re talking about,” I instruct, “is the largest orbital body ever built. It will probably still be circling the earth a hundred years from now.”

“Really?”

“I swear.”

“And people made it?” he asks incredulously. “How did they get something that big so high in the sky?”

“Well it’s not really in the sky at all,” I explain. “It’s beyond our sky, past the point where the air runs out. It’s in space, just beyond earth’s reach.”

“How does it stay up there?”

“That would take hours to explain, but the gist of it is that it’s moving so fast it can’t come down. It wants to fall to earth, but as it falls it keeps moving forward and at the rate it’s moving the earth curves away beneath it so it can’t get any closer.”

“So it’s chasing the earth and the earth keeps falling away?”

“That’s basically it.”

“Okay, but you didn’t tell me how they got it up there.”

“One piece at a time,” I tell him.

“Then how did they put the pieces together?” he asks.

“We sent men and women into space to assemble all the pieces.”

“My dad told me about them!” he shouts. “They were called astronauts, right?”

“That’s correct. Astronauts traveled to and from space in rockets that traveled faster than bullets and they put together the super-satellite you still see at night. As far as I know, it’s the only satellite left in earth orbit.”

He nods, “Yeah and that’s what I was wondering about at first. What happened to the other ones?”

“I’m pretty sure they all fell to earth.”

“They stopped moving fast enough?” he asks.

“Basically, yes, they slowed down and gradually fell to earth.”

“Do you think we could find one?”

“I doubt it. Why would you want to?” I inquire.

“To learn from it. Those things must have all sorts of stuff on them from the old world that could make life here and now a lot easier.”

“Sadly,” I counsel, “they probably never had anything on them that would be of any use whatsoever in this world. And besides, we won’t ever find one because they all burned up as they fell to earth.”

“Why?” he asks.

“That’s how it works when a thing from space comes to earth. Unless it’s absolutely enormous it burns up before it hits the surface. Even if a small chunk survives the fall, the earth is mostly covered in water. If there are any black, twisted, useless parts of the old satellites that made it to earth, they’re probably a mile deep in the ocean.”

“So all that’s left is the one light in the night sky and we can’t talk to it and it can’t talk to us?” he asks.

“It could be worse,” I note.

“How?” he wonders.

“There could be no light in the sky at all.”

It was all vanity, I suppose, enveloping the world in a satellite net, connecting each orbital node to every other and tying them all together through one master station. In its day the satellite net seemed like the highest human achievement in all of history. In 2024 the system reached its apex – nearly five thousand mini-satellites in low earth orbit spread evenly in a pattern that covered the entire planet, providing direct line of sight for every point on earth. Each satellite’s communications and observational data were fed to Zeke, which processed the inconceivably vast data of a post-industrial globe as fast as it was received. If something happened, Zeke knew about it. All that and now, a lifetime later, it’s all gone. Only a mute, impotent Zeke remains in its frigid space cube.

It blinks even now in its encircling path, the ISS2 with its lone passenger, the great quantum thinking machine. If it still pays attention it has now seen a half-century of earthly folly. So sad is the show here on earth, I wonder if Zeke has turned its gaze outward, watching the black and endless cosmos for some hopeful twinkle in some far corner of a distant galaxy. Maybe Zeke no longer watches us at all.