Garner’s eyebrows knitted together, like he agreed with the point but didn’t see its significance.
“Imagine it from any random person’s view,” Travis said. “What would it be like on the receiving end of this technology? One day everything’s fine. The next day, you wake up and you don’t even want to move. You’re miserable lying there, but the thought of getting up makes you miserable too. You don’t even know why, but there it is. Every part of it overwhelms you, and you realize there’s nothing on your horizon that makes you happy. Nothing pulling you forward. It’s not like any sadness you’ve ever felt before. It has no cause. It’s just there. But knowing that doesn’t make it go away. You lie there thinking about that, and you start to get scared. You realize you’re having a serious problem, and you think maybe you better go talk to someone about it. Maybe pretty soon, too, because you don’t know what you’ll do to yourself if this keeps up for any length of time. Now imagine you find out, over the coming hours, that it’s not just you. That it’s happening everywhere, to everyone, all at once. Picture it. Make it as real as you can. Think of the public reaction. People would know something was going on, but they would have no idea what. It’d be the strangest damn thing anyone ever saw. It would make the news, obviously, but how would it be covered? What would they say? What the hell would anyone say, except to wonder what was happening to them, and how anyone was going to fix it?”
Garner looked chilled at the idea. His eyes were far away now, seeing his own version of a day like that, the effect bringing cities to a dead stop.
“Imagine it gets worse the next day,” Travis said. “And the day after that. Until you’re ready to just end it. You no longer even care what’s causing it. No one cares. All that matters is how bad it feels. The papers are calling it Bleak December. That’s all they’ve got. A name. Still no real information. Another day, and it’s worse yet, and right then, when you’re thinking in specific detail of how you’re going to end your life, a friend calls and asks if you’re watching the news. You turn it on, and there it is. The one place where this effect simply isn’t happening. Yuma, Arizona. No one knows why, of course. And no one cares, either. What matters is that it’s true. You can see it even in the background of the coverage. You can see people already arriving there from other places, and it’s obvious from their body language that they’re not sad anymore. They’re better than not sad. They’re euphoric.”
In the dim interior of the car, it was impossible to discern Garner’s skin tone, but Travis imagined it’d gone pale.
“Think of Finn’s original plan for conflict zones,” Travis said. “Profile everyone. Weed out the bad. Keep the good. People with just the right attributes for a peaceful society. I think even when he’d decided the whole world was the problem, he still thought that idea was the solution. Just on a bigger scale. A global scale.”
Garner looked at his phone again, the map of northern Chile still on the screen. He backed it out and dragged it until both Chile and the United States were visible in the frame. He drew imaginary lines with his fingertip, tracing routes from all over America toward Yuma. And then a single line: Yuma to Arica.
“You’re saying he wants to kill the world except for a few tens of thousands of people,” Garner said, “and then use them as some kind of seed population to start over, in Arica?”
Travis nodded. “We can stay away from what we’d have to guess about; what we already know is enough. We know ELF can be used to move people around en masse. Push and pull them at will. You could empty a city like Arica of its original residents. Draw them off to their own version of Yuma, up or down the coast. You could kill them once they were there. Turn up the signal until the depression is unbearable. Kill the rest of the world too, outside the United States. And within the U.S., we’ve seen for ourselves what happens. Everyone comes to Yuma, with their cars packed full of whatever they think they might need. They’ve already heard something about flights going out of there, and they’d be happy enough to catch one of them, but what they want more than anything is just to reach Yuma itself. Because then the pain will go away.”
Silence came to the car. They were passing through the suburb now, the two-lane bisecting separate reaches of it. Travis saw an overpass far ahead, where 495 crossed the road.