She bent forward, ballerina-like, easily grabbing the toes of her left foot, propped on the back of the couch. She held the position for several seconds, rocking slightly as her calf muscles stretched, then switched legs and repeated the move on her right. With that, she tightened the laces of her sneakers and stepped out into the dark sea air.
The ocean lapped at the shore a hundred yards away, and she glanced up at a waning moon, breathing in the cool air as she launched herself onto her routine morning path. She loved running as the sun was coming up; it always kick-started an energetic and positive day.
As the poff of her running shoes on the dirt path ticked off the seconds till sunrise, she let her mind wander back through the weekend, the two days she’d spent with her cousin, who’d departed the previous evening; their DVD binge Friday night, with the pizza and popcorn she was now burning off. Their catch-up talk the following afternoon, as they’d wandered this same path under a lazy sun, exchanging dating disaster stories. As her second mile became her third, she smiled in the dark in gratitude for the time they’d shared.
At the end of the third mile, she paused, catching her breath, and looked out at the ocean’s horizon. By now, she’d have expected the blackness to be relenting and the stars in the east to be fading.
She checked her watch. 6:22. She frowned.
The sun should be coming up in the next 20 minutes. She was certain of the timing of sunrise; the previous morning, she and her cousin had gotten up early, despite having stayed up late bingeing, because she’d wanted her to experience the sun coming up over the ocean.
She continued to stand there, looking out at the dark waters, eyes on the edge of the sky. The color of the horizon remained unchanged; the stars just above it remained bright.
She should be seeing the earliest reach of pink wisps above the water, followed by a familiar orange tinge; she should be moments away from the first thin crescent of solar presence, arising from the depths.
There was only the cool darkness.
My watch is wrong, she realized, checking it again. 6:27. I’m out here too early?
Time change? No, it wasn’t the right time of year. She glanced at the watch yet again.
Broken?
She turned and resumed running, confusion sweeping over her, and something else – something unclear, unacknowledged.
She ran faster.
She didn’t slow as she raced up the driveway and around to the back of the hour, throwing open the kitchen door and finding the wall clock.
6:51.
Her heart, already racing, began overtly pounding within her.
She bolted into the living room and threw open the front door, emerging onto the porch, hoping for light, any light, over the sea. The starry blackness was unchanged. She felt panic stirring inside her.
She turned on the television, seeking out a cable news channel. A morning show was on – exactly the one that should be at this hour.
It wasn’t her watch. It wasn’t the clocks. It wasn’t the time of day.
It was the sun.
This isn’t possible, she caught herself whispering. No no no it isn’t possible. She was college-educated, and an avid reader besides. She knew how the sun and the earth worked, how the planets worked, how gravity and inertia worked. It is not possible for the sun to not rise!
It is supposed to be the only certainty in life...
She ran into her bedroom, grabbed her cell phone from the nightstand. She called her cousin.
“Ginny! Ginny!”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Look out your window! Is the sun coming up?”
“Settle down,” was the sleepy reply. “You sound upset. Are you okay?”
“Look out your window!!!”
“Of course the sun isn’t coming up. I flew home last night, I’m two time zones over.
The sun won’t come up here for at least another hour. It’s barely up at your house.”
“Ginny, it isn’t coming up at all!”
“Honey, did you stay up all night again? I told you we should have taken a nap yesterday.”
“Ginny, you’re not hearing me! The sun isn’t coming up!!!”
“Sweetie, go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.” And she was gone.
She ran back outside, staring up in horror at the still-dark sky. Panic was no longer a distant tremor; she was disoriented, breathing far too quickly, trembling. Dizzy.
She fell to her knees in the dewey grass of her front yard.
“There’s no sun!!!” she heard herself scream at the top of her lungs.
She rose to her feet and looked down the road. Her neighbors’ houses were widely spaced, but surely they had heard her. She ran to the yard next to hers.
“The sun is gone!!!” she screamed at the dark front window. “There’s no sun!”
If anyone was hearing her, they weren’t acknowledging her.
They must think I’m crazy, she realized, and that thought struck her like a thunderbolt.
I’m losing my mind...
The sun can’t be gone, the sun can’t rise... so it has to be me...
I’m losing my mind...
She pitched forward on her neighbors’ lawn, tumbling inward, falling far, falling fast. The darkness above reached into her mind, growing and deepening, as terror pushed thought and awareness away completely.
“Dispatch, this is Baker Two,” he said into his radio as the stars ahead speckled his windshield. “Nicki, I’m clocking out.”
“Baker Two, Dispatch,” came a weathered but cheerful voice. “Jimmy, I show you got another two minutes.” He smiled. Sure enough, the digital blue of the clock on the cruiser’s dashboard read 6:58.
“Can’t get anything past you,” he smirked. “I’m for some shuteye.”
“You and me both,” she agreed. “Dispatch out.”
She would log him off duty, he could head up to his exit and leave the day patrol to his relief. He glanced at the moon out the window to his left as he proceeded north.
Turning right a few minutes later, he headed east on the state highway that would take him to his trailer. He turned on the news, something regs didn’t let him do on duty, hoping to grab the headlines before getting to sleep.
“It’s four minutes past the hour,” an announcer was saying, and he frowned. Four past seven?
At this time of year, the sun was coming up when he came off shift.
It was one of the things he liked about night patrol – the solitude of the quiet and dark during the hours when everyone else was asleep. He’d learned it on his two tours of duty in Afghanistan, when he’d practically been a kid, and pulled night watch – which he thought he’d hate, but ended up finding comforting. Let the rest of the world face the new day, he’d come to think. His co-workers found him odd, all but Nicki, and that didn’t bother him.
But just last night, and the night before, and the night before, the sky had been an undarkened blue on his path home, a glowing blue with beams of orange. Had he been going home too early? No, Nicki would have told him. Why, then, was the edge of the sky still dark? He turned off the news and grabbed his police radio speaker mic.
“Dispatch, Baker Two,” he said.
“Dispatch,” Nicki replied.
“Thought you went home, Nik?”
“You too. Whatcha need?”
“Can you give me a time check?”
“A what?”
“What time you got?”
“Ah...” There was a pause. “I have eight minutes after seven.”
He said nothing.
“Jimmy?”
“Thanks, Dispatch. Baker Two out.”
The trees ahead blocked the eastern horizon, so he picked up speed. He was over the limit, but the road was empty. And he was a cop.
Minutes later he was in Warren, past the turnoff to home, frustrated that buildings had replaced the trees in blocking his eastern view. The sky remained dark and star-spotted. There was no hint of an impending dawn.
He flipped on his lights, slowing only slightly as he swung through town, passing only a couple of other cars, and turned south. The turnpike was only a couple of miles away.
This is crazy, he thought. The sun should be up by now...
Almost seven-thirty. The sun should be all the way up by now.
He reviewed what he knew about the sun in his head. He knew what an eclipse was, he’d even seen one while overseas, but this wasn’t that, not by a long way. He knew how dark it was in the morning when there was heavy storm over the ocean – but he could see the stars. It wasn’t that, either.
He realized he was sweating, and that his heart was pounding.
How can the sun not rise???
He flipped a dial on his police radio.
“All units, Baker Two,” he almost barked. “All units, who has-”
Shit, what should he say?
“Who has a clear view of sunrise?” he almost shouted.
There was a long silence.
“Baker Two, Dispatch,” said Nikki’s relief. “Say again? Did you say ‘sunrise’?”
He sounded panicked, even to himself. He slammed down the mic on the passenger seat. He accelerated onto the turnpike ramp, again heading east, and gunned it. His lights were still on.
A cold dread cut through the sweat on his face. He shot down the turnpike, which had picked up morning traffic, turning on his siren. Most of the traffic, however, was on the other side, heading west.
The sunrise! there has to be a sunrise!
But up ahead, per the clear view he now had of the eastern horizon, there were only stars.
His heart thundered as he pushed the cruiser faster still. Dizziness began to sweep over him.
He was going over a hundred when he left the road.
“Toby, grab your lunchbox,” she called out to her son as she ran a brush through her hair one last time. Stepping out of the bathroom, she saw the six-year-old bounding into the kitchen. She grabbed her purse, joined him there and held the door into the garage open for him.
She wasn’t crazy about getting him up and out this early, but the school counselor had notified her that Toby was having some difficulties, and his teacher had kindly offered to meet with him fifteen minutes before class each day, which she had gratefully accepted. She softened this routine by sprinkling it with drive-thru Mickey D breakfast on days when she had a little extra money, which he loved.
As he piled into his car seat behind her, she squeezed the door opener that was clipped to her sun visor and started the engine. Once the door was up, she rolled out into the driveway, noting the darkness, figuring they were in for a stormy, dark-clouds day. She closed the garage door behind them and rolled out into the street.
It was a dozen minutes later that they eased into the drive-thru, harvesting a pair of sausage-and-egg biscuit sandwiches, coffee for her, orange juice for him. She handed the bag back to him and pulled back out onto the road, turning east towards his school, and realized there were no dark clouds in the sky.
Puzzled, she pulled up the weather app on her cell phone. It predicted a clear and sunny day.
But it’s almost seven-thirty, she thought. The sun should have been up more than twenty minutes ago?
Above them, there were only stars and darkness. No trace of the softening of sunrise on the eastern sky.
In the rear-view mirror, she saw him blissfully gnawing at his sandwich. Frustrated at the buildings and trees blocking her view, she bailed on the school and headed for the edge of town. Ten minutes later, beyond the city limits, she had an unobstructed view of the unchanging horizon.
Her heartbeat reverberated through her chest, and she felt sweat breaking out under her blouse. There was only one reasonable explanation, she concluded. The sun can’t not come up, so they must be out an hour earlier than she thought they were. Yes, that was it! It wasn’t seven-forty-five, it was six-forty-five. The clocks must have changed yesterday - Sunday after all - and she must have missed it.
If it was actually only six-forty-five, then the sky would start to glow any minute now.
She parked the car beside the road, where she had a clear view of the eastern horizon, and waited.
“Mommy? Aren’t we going to school?” He had finished his breakfast.
“Of course, honey,” she answered tensely, “in just a few minutes.”
The minutes passed. The sky remained dark and star-pocked.
Dread swept through her like a spirit suddenly possessing her, and she fought to slow her breathing.
The sun isn’t rising, she realized, and the sun has to rise. The sun has to rise!
If the sun did not rise, it could only mean one thing. It meant the day had finally arrived. The day she’d learned about as a child.
The final day.
She waited there another thirty minutes, as Toby, frightened, said nothing. Then she calmly started the car and drove home.
I won’t put him through it...
She kept looking at the sky in the rear-view mirror as she drove back to the house.
The sun, of course, did not appear.
She pulled into the driveway and shut the garage door.
“Is everything okay, mommy?” he asked timidly.
“Yes, honey,” she said calmly, “everything’s going to be okay.”
She left the engine running, and rolled down all four windows.
He loved the night.
He had always loved the night, as far back as his memories went, into his early childhood. The peace of darkness, the silence. It fell like a cloak around him, comforting him, warming him.
Sometimes speaking to him.
He pulled back the curtain of the large window in the main room of his apartment, staring down at the pre-dawn streets. A smattering of traffic. A police cruiser. Beyond, a forest of concrete, and the seaport beyond that. He soaked up the glorious sky, with its deliciously underpowered lights and infinite gasp.
Any minute now, the sun would come around and ruin it. He’d always hated sunrise. It felt like surrender. It felt like a subversion, a denial.
He fixed himself a drink. Unusual, at this hour, but he’d stayed up all night at his workbench, and it felt like the end of the day, not the beginning. He wasn’t going anywhere, anyway.
The whiskey seared his throat on the way down, as he liked it. He squinted a bit, picking out a star or two in the slivers of blackness between buildings. The blue should be lighter?
He glanced at his watch. Past seven. He frowned.
This isn’t right...
He turned and consulted the clock on the microwave in the kitchen. Same time, just past seven. He turned out the living room light, darkening the room completely, to see if it helped.
No. The eastern sky was still dark. No trace of rays.
He stood completely still, patiently waiting out the sky, sipping occasionally. Seven-fifteen came and went. Seven-thirty.
Something had to be off. Time change? No, not that time of year. Am I high? Drunk? No, if I were, this would taste different...
The sun isn’t rising...
But the sun couldn’t not rise. He was intelligent, well-educated, and clear on the impossibility of the sun not rising. And as he stood there, staring out at the stars, it dawned on him – I'm okay with that.
He knew himself. He’d come to terms with who he was, long ago. He knew himself, and fully understood his acceptance of this impossibility.
The sun isn’t rising...
He thought about what that meant for the world, and what it meant for him. For the world, it meant... fear. Panic. Terror.
For him, it meant - something else entirely...
“Gentlemen, ladies, I apologize for the uncommon hour,” the deputy secretary said to the handful of people – several military, several specialists – in the conference room they’d just entered. “I have to submit this report to my boss in a few hours, and before I do, I wanted to give you all a chance to respond to it.”
“I only read it on the way over,” answered the man in an Army colonel’s uniform, “but I imagine you already know what we think of it.”
“Well, then, let’s put it right out there,” the deputy secretary replied. “This program isn’t just the most wildly unethical project in the history of the Western world; your pilot program has been outright criminal. People have died – Americans! - and you sit here, unaccountable, as if you didn’t know the risks. As if you didn’t understand, when you first cooked up this egregious obscenity, that it would not only kill civilians, but kill them in the most despicable manner imaginable.”
“No one in this room will dispute the intensity and consequence of this remedy, Mr. Secretary,” the colonel answered, “but these are unprecedented times, and after Gaza, it became clear that some means of immobilizing people in small groups without military engagement was becoming imperative.”
“And you tested your ‘remedy’ on fifty American civilians! And a third of them are either dead or seriously injured! And they, in turn, could have inadvertently killed others!”
“The premise of the mechanism is that targeted drones can deliver subliminal hypnotic tones and deliver highly-specific hallucinatory inducements,” one of the civilians offered. “We required a completely randomized sample to verify that it works as effectively in the field as it did in the lab. Otherwise it’s worthless.”
“This report captures every detail,” the deputy secretary almost seethed. “You convinced these people, with your drones, that the sun had not come up! And it drove them mad!”
The civilian nodded. “Just as it did under controlled conditions. But we also needed a randomized sample in uncontrolled environments to get a sense of the scope of the effect – to understand just how far-”
“-to get a sense of the potential collateral damage.”
“If you will.” He shrugged. “We got everything we needed, and we contained the damage. As it happens, it also turns out to be a particularly effective psychopath detector.”
“You had to do this here? On American soil? Risking American lives?”
“We needed to do this where we could respond rapidly and not run afoul with interference we couldn’t control. We selected subjects who were reliably in relative isolation and had predictable routines-”
“And seventeen people are dead! You experimented on your own countrymen!”
“If memory serves, Mr. Secretary, your own team has a few such experiments tucked away in its closet. Tuskegee? The San Francisco Spray?”
He sipped his coffee.
“Mr. Secretary, this is an astonishingly effective weapon. It can be implemented invisibly, is utterly untraceable, and is effective against everyone, from the deadliest soldier to the most innocuous truck driver. It can be deployed, without modification, against the most elite tactical team in the field or the most sedentary strategic command center. It is utterly immobilizing, and only incidentally fatal. And while we ran up quite a bill developing it, its deployment will be far more economical than any competing solution.
“And, as I said, this is an undetectable weapon. There is no way to prove it has been used. We can never have it hung around our necks.”
“No accountability,” the deputy secretary nodded. “That’s part of my problem with this, colonel, and why I’m going to take up with the secretary.”
The colonel raised his voice. “This isn’t DARPA! There’s no paper trail on any of this, for obvious reasons! It has been kept completely off the books! And it will stay off the books.
“You have to make your report, I understand that, and you are of course free to log your objections and intense displeasure with your boss,” he said. “But, for the record, this was signed off on by his boss.” He smiled. “Just so you know.”
They sat there in silence for a long moment, until the deputy secretary’s military adjunct spoke up.
“For the record, colonel, be reminded that all of you on that side of the table are bureaucrats and scientists,” he said. “Your field personnel are under our jurisdiction, and while we might not have been in the loop on this field test of yours, we’re in the loop now.”
The deputy secretary frowned and turned.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid I’ve done something you aren’t going to approve of, sir,” the adjunct answered. He turned back to the colonel.
“You’ve created a weapon of unprecedented effectiveness, and unprecedented horror,” he said. “It’s difficult to characterize the insidiousness of what you’ve done. And it was sanctioned from above, that’s true, and you – nor we – can ever be held accountable for what has happened. You’ll have this weapon at your disposal from now on, and you will employ it against the enemies of the United States as you will.
“But another consequence of this ‘uncommon hour’ is that the field test was extended this morning. You all arrived here before sunrise, at our request – and drones arrived in each of your homes at around the same time.”
Everyone stared in horror. The deputy secretary was aghast.
“You’ll have this weapon and use it as you will, but after today – after what you find when you return to your homes – you'll never deploy it again without fully feeling the consequences of what you’re doing it, having seen it in the faces of your wives and children.”
He stood very formally to await the arrest that would immediately follow.
“...just so you know.”
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