The Games

Chapter THIRTY-FIVE



The control room of Phoenix Nuclear was awash in flashing red. The warble of a dozen sirens had coalesced into a single continuous note of alarm, drowning out the shouts of the systems analysts as they worked to get the city’s lights on again. The giant screen against the far wall showed their progress. Still thirty million units without power. They were looking at a black hole roughly the size of Arizona. The power went into the system, but it didn’t come out.

“What the hell is going on?” the systems supervisor said. His name was Brian Murphy, and he stood sweating in the sniper roost—the name the console jocks gave the supervising office that overlooked the control room. Brian looked out over the rows of men and women working frantically at their computers. He shook his head. He had a degree from MIT, and until six hours ago had been enjoying the very prime of his career, that ephemeral juxtaposition between the opposing slopes of work experience and educational obsolescence. But now everything had changed. Phoenix was dark for the first time in more than sixteen years.

He wiped a hand across the top of his balding head, and it came away wet. An absentminded flick of his fingers sent the sweat to the carpet as he studied the readouts again. The power source ran clean and strong, and the gauges were all well within their specifications. In fact, as far as anybody could tell, there was no problem at all with the plant itself. The problem was in the grid.

There were two other men in the room with him: one he answered to, and one who answered to him.

“How long has it been?” he asked.

“Eight hours now,” the technician at his side answered. That was the man who answered to him. The man was short and heavy. He sat at a console, stubby fingers playing occasionally across the buttons and dials.

The man he answered to, Jim Sure, stood in the back. That was his real name, Jim A. Sure. A comforting name for a man running one of the world’s newest experimental power facilities.

Brian had often wondered how a name like that might play into the progress of a career. Were promotions infinitesimally easier to come by? Would a name like that naturally rise to the top of the résumé pile when being considered for the head job at a nuclear plant?

Brian looked at the man critically from the corner of his eye. Things weren’t going well for Jim Sure this day. He peeled another antacid from the plastic wrapper and popped it into his mouth.

But Phoenix Nuclear wasn’t alone in its problems. Several other power stations in California had the same emergency, their juice shunted away down some dark hole.

It was like his nightmare. The one he’d been having more and more often lately, watching helpless as the core’s heat dump failed and the whole assembly degenerated into catastrophic meltdown, blowing the majority of Phoenix to God.

But this was no dream.

On the big screen, the tide began to turn. The engineers finally tracked down where the power was going—a single grid in the technical district outside of San Bernardino.

Now that the hole was found, the engineers began the task of plugging it. But it was not as easy as they’d hoped. The power sluices didn’t respond.

“Dispatch field unies to the area,” Jim Sure said. “Find out what’s there. Shut it down.”

The call was made. The coordinates were given. As the tech put the phone back in its cradle, the supervisor looked up and realized it might have been a moot point. Things now were very quickly turning around on the screen. Power, by the kilowatt second, was beginning to shunt off in its correct directions.

On the big screen, a few squares lit up, representing thousands of misdirected kilowatts flowing back into the city. It was a battle, and the little squares stayed illuminated only momentarily.

The system was adapting.

They watched the screen. Power flickered across the darkened squares. For the first time, the gauges in the plant moved, revving.

The supervisor smiled again. They were winning. Very gradually, kilowatt by kilowatt, they were winning. It was slow, but they were gaining the upper hand on whatever was stripping the power away.


PEA FLICKERED. Evan was sure of it. The puffy clouds behind him had skipped in their path across the sky while the ocean stood silent, a stiff shoulder against the shore. Even the gliders froze in their path across azure, halted in midair for a lingering moment before continuing in their slow spirals. It was a hiccup, a change, and Evan knew it for what it was, a break in the flow of power. The dark eyes now looked down at him from a pained expression.

“Time has almost run away from us,” Pea said. “They are faster than I thought.”

Evan lowered his attention back to the work in his lap, forcing himself faster. He braided the cable wires together with his bare hands, sanctifying the copper union with blood earned from his fingertips. What God hath joined, let no man tear asunder. Now, where had he heard that? It was funny how those old days still came back to him sometimes, as if from out of a mist, from a time when he was a different person completely. Church had been so important to Mother. He wished she could see what he’d done, what he’d made of his life. She’d be proud, he thought.

Shortly after the state took Evan away from his mother, he’d begun asking to see her. He hadn’t liked the new rules, or the new tutors, or the cleaning lady that came in and picked up after him. He hadn’t liked the way he suddenly seemed to be so important to everybody. Eventually, he demanded to see her. The men with the smiles didn’t take him seriously until he refused to continue his studies. Then the smiles disappeared. He told them he wouldn’t work on their puzzles until they let him move back in with his mom. That was when the counselors sat him down on a couch and told him about the fire.

They said it started in a laundry room on the floor below their old apartment. His mother never felt a thing, they assured him. She died in her sleep of a combination of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning.

They explained to him how lucky he was that the state had stepped in when it did, or he would have been in the apartment, too. He owed the state his life, they told him solemnly. And that was a debt he had a responsibility to repay. He didn’t know enough then to doubt them. He knew enough now, though.

Years later, when he’d learned to mistrust the system’s intentions, he used library files to search for a deadly building fire shortly after his twelfth birthday.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, he secretly believed that his mother was still living, and that she’d been told a similar sort of story about the accidental demise of her son. But they’d been more thorough than that. Buried in the middle of section B, between an article about childhood obesity and a fatal car crash, Evan found it. The fire had happened. Seven people were injured seriously. Two died. He saw his mother’s name.

He gave the wires in his hands a hard last twist. Finished. The marriage was imperfect, coaxial to copper spiral, but when he tugged, the bond held fast. It would conduct. It would do.

He grabbed the second odd end and began the slow braid. Pea took notice of what he was doing, looking down without approval.

“Do you know what will happen if you do this?” Pea asked.

“Yes.”

“And are you sure you still want to do it?”

“All for you, Pea. All for you.”