The Last President

^{2 DAYS LATER. CASTLE CASTRO (FORMERLY SAN DIEGO HARBOR). NOON PACIFIC TIME. FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2026.}

Dave and Arlene Carlucci, and Terry Bolton, all began by trying to tell Bambi how sorry they were about Quattro, and how much they had liked him. It was little consolation that they were simply telling the truth, but some stern glares and aggressive subject-changing from Heather shut them up gently, and after that, the luxury of really good food in abundance made them nearly as quiet as the Carluccis’ teenagers, Paley and Acey.

It was a long time before they got down to business, too, because none of them had met Leo before, and “proper baby-admiring takes time,” as Terry pointed out. He seemed to be visibly brightening with each minute spent on the broad terrace, overlooking the sea, where Bambi preferred to entertain whenever the weather was favorable.

Finally, though, Pat O’Grainne took Leo down to the other end of the terrace to play, and it was time for adult business.

“Just to begin with,” Heather said, “you guys should know how grateful I am.”

“How grateful we are,” Bambi said. “And I can’t imagine what you’re going through and won’t pretend to understand; you all were career FBI with decades of experience, and now… there’s not only no job, there’s no Federal Bureau of Investigation, there’s not even a Federal. So we wanted to make you a special offer, in two parts.

“One, Heather has graciously agreed to be the Countess of Laguna Beach, and we’ll start construction of Castle O’Grainne or Castle Laguna or whatever she decides to call it this summer, and probably she’ll move in next summer, because the weathermen say that was our last really cold winter after the disaster; most of the soot is out of the air now, so we won’t have snow next year, and only a normal volume of rain.

“Heather will need all of your skills—not just Dave and Terry’s guns, but your experience with small-scale firefights, and Arlene’s nursing experience. Any of you can have a job there, and the job will start well before the castle is built, since you’ll be putting together a team. Carlucci, that also means that any of your local deputies that are interested will be first in line with Heather—or with me.

“Two may be more interesting, or less. I need a freehold to anchor your end of the coast; that’s a very vulnerable area in my county, and therefore in my duchy, right now. So you guys could freehold together, set up two small freeholds, or one could freehold and the other could hire him. Any combination you like.”

Carlucci said, “Could I just… man.” He was wiping his eyes. “Bambi, I’m sorry, but I just feel like I lost the argument with your father, and him on the other side of the grave. I mean… no more America, you know? And I was a pretty rah-rah go-America U!S!A! kind of person—embarrassed my kids with super-patriot names and all”—he saw their glares—“which I won’t explain right now, but anyway, it’s a lot to give up. And you both know, we’ve been through a lot together, it might take me some days to make up my mind.”

Terry Bolton sat back and said, “You know, I guess I feel differently. If I could get the whole, old, back-before world back in one big swoop, sure, I’d do that in a heartbeat. But in this new world… well, I don’t know about being a freeholder. But, uh, if you need a chief of arms, Heather—is it okay to call you Heather?”

“I’ll insist. Especially if you work for me. And I like ‘Chief of Arms.’ Can I ask, since you seem to be baby-experienced, to judge by how you get along with Leo, what you’ll need for quarters?”

“Space for me and three kids, girl ten, boy eight, and boy six.”

“Caucasians, with any identifying tattoos or scars?” Heather was smiling.

“Yeah, well, we all get that way after a decade or two of filling out reports, don’t we? My online dating profile had things presented pretty much the way they would be on a handbill in the post office. Anyway, I’m a single dad, now. My wife divorced me and she and her new husband were honeymooning in Hawaii on Daybreak day. Haven’t heard from her since, not even in the first days when the hams were still up and operating. But if there’d be room for a little family at Castle O’Grainne? Even if the older boy is sort of ADD and aspy?”

“There would be. Start looking for guys you’d like to have serve under you, Terry.” Heather gazed at Carlucci thoughtfully. “Dave, I know you a little better, and just to point this out: you’d make a good freeholder.”

“That’s what worries me,” Carlucci said. He nodded at his son. “Paley already tells me my politics are medieval.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. RUINS OF PALE BLUFF. 3:00 PM CENTRAL TIME. SATURDAY, MAY 16, 2026.}

When Larry Mensche and Dave McWaine met up again after combing through the town in opposite spirals, they still had not found Freddie Pranger. Pale Bluff had been his home town; he’d known who lived in most houses, climbed most of the apple trees in the orchards, and recognized most of the names in the town cemetery. The Army officers had asked him to identify bodies but he’d darted into the town and vanished as soon as they’d arrived.

Larry and Dave finally found him by giving up; he was saying goodbye to Roger Jackson, who was hobbling on crutches, but whose leg seemed to be healing straight, at least so far. “Just wanted to make sure I said bye-bye to all my old scout buddies before I took off for good,” Freddie said. “I’ll do their body identification, though it makes me sick, but then I’m resigned and off on my own.”

“What will you do, then?” Larry asked.

“Well,” Freddie said. “You, uh, ever hear of a guy named John Johnson? That’s kind of how I feel about those Castle Earthstone assholes. Haven’t quite figured out what my trademark is going to be, but I’ll have one soon enough.”

Larry considered for a moment. “Yeah, I guess I have. Going to make a career of that?”

“Well, Johnson didn’t. He did lots of things afterward, mined and ranched and was a lawman. So maybe not forever. Maybe just till I catch up with Lord Robert and give him my personal payback, after paying back some of his men. But for right now, that’s the project that I’ll be undertaking. So I’m out of the army, out of the scouts, and off to take care of that.”

He very solemnly shook hands with each of them, slung up his gear, and walked off to the chief of scouting to tender his resignation.

Roger Jackson said, “Okay, so who is John Johnson, and I’m betting his trademark wasn’t on baby shampoo?”

“Well, he was a mountain man who had a real big vendetta against the Crow, which is why one of his nicknames was ‘The Crow Killer.’ And as for his trademark, they called him ‘Liver-Eating Johnson.’” Mensche looked around at the many carts hauling bodies and the soldiers with clipboards compiling lists, and said, “Mind you, looking at this town, if I were from here like Freddie is, I’d be seeing his point of view very clearly.”

^{2 WEEKS LATER. PULLMAN, WASHINGTON. 6:15 PM PACIFIC TIME. SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2026.}

No one recognized Neville Jawarah on the walk from the railroad station; maybe they hadn’t seen much of this uniform before they all went east, maybe they didn’t want to see anyone in this uniform because so many had not come back, maybe it didn’t occur to them that Neville might be inside this uniform. Didn’t matter, he didn’t want to talk in the street. There was one place he wanted to be.

When he came through the door, his mother virtually pinned him to the wall with her hug, hanging onto him and crying. “I don’t even know how to ask how it was,” she said, rubbing her face with her apron. “We heard such horrible, horrible things.”

“They were mostly true,” Neville said.

“Did you see any bad things?”

“More than I’m going to tell you about.”

“And… did you do anything… ah—”

“I survived and I did everything they asked. That was a lot.”

“And… Jimmy?”

“He didn’t make it, Maj’. Something big and sharp got him in the face, I wasn’t there when it happened, but I saw him laid out afterward, there were long rows of bodies, I never… aw, shit.”

Neville hung on to his mother and cried until she pried him off and gave him a bowl of soup and some warm bread. That night, he looked up at the old dog-eared Lord of the Rings on his bookshelf, thought Well, I’m home, and felt the tears begin to flow just before he fell asleep.

^{5 WEEKS LATER. CHRISTIANSTED. 10:15 AM ATLANTIC TIME, SATURDAY, JULY 4, 2026.}

When James Hendrix, Leslie Antonowicz, and her dog Wonder stepped down from the pontoon of Bret Duquesne’s seaplane and into the row-taxi, it was a little awkward for James, natural as breathing for Leslie, and time for a joyful jump and bark for Wonder. Wonder wedged himself between them, so they held hands around him as they approached the beautiful little town under its deep blue sky.

“Pretty place,” James said. “Going to have to brush up on those fresh-seafood skills.”

“Looks like there’s space to get some exercise,” Leslie added, practically.

On the pier, he met the local dignitaries, each of whom had to tell him how much they had always appreciated the Jamesgrams, and shook his way through a forest of hands before meeting the two people he most wanted to talk to.

The first of these was Tarantina Highbotham, who seemed more solidly muscled than he had imagined, but even more alert and quick. She gave him a lightning-fast rundown of the arrangements she had made; he would have a week to settle into his new quarters and go over the paperwork before the summer term started at the new academy. There was already an abundance of students sixteen and younger; he would be adding and developing courses for older students, up at least through a bachelor’s degree. They’d have an extension service that would publish newer and better pamphlets than Pueblo had had available, and eventually occupational journals as well.

He’d never met Highbotham in person before, but they seemed to get along very well, and by the end of the conversation, she was cheerfully explaining, “You get knowledge into them, I’ll keep the pirates away from them, and we’ll have ourselves a civilized Caribbean again before you know it. The rest of the world can go through a Dark Age if it wants to; we’re doing a Dim Decade, max. Now, this handsome young man is Whorf Rollings—don’t look so surprised, Whorf, you are handsome, and it’s the privilege of a lady old enough to be your grandma to discuss it in front of you. Whorf was the person who wrote to you, and brought it to my attention that there was good reason to bring you here and employ you. Then after you freshen up a little in your quarters, he’ll be taking you, and you too, Ms. Antonowicz, to hear two gentlemen with a remarkable story.”

Their rooms, on a second floor of the old country club, were pleasant and spacious, and someone had set out fresh fruit on the table. “Headmastering is definitely looking better than librarianing did,” James said, between bites of orange.

“I’ll miss skiing but I have a feeling the swimming and sailing will make up for it.” They each took turns washing in the basin, and then, since Whorf hadn’t knocked yet, they sat down in the wicker chairs facing the big French doors onto the balcony, and looked at the view over the town toward the sea.

“Well, we could definitely have done worse for a place to live,” James said.

When they opened to a discreet tap at the door, Whorf was waiting for them with a slim young red-blond man about his own age, and an older, burly black man with thick dreads. “This is my buddy, Ihor Reshetnyk. He was along on Discovery too, and saved my ass several times. He’s coming along because I trust his judgment. And this is my father, Jamayu Rollings, who is skipper of the good ship Ferengi where Ihor is second mate. Dad is coming along because if he didn’t get to he’d curl up and die.”

They walked the half mile or so down into town to the little house; the three men pointed out many more things than James and Leslie could possibly remember, ranging from the bar with the cheapest beer to the spot where a pirate treasure had been uncovered two hundred years before. Everyone seemed a little nervous.

The two men living in the small brick house were an Iranian robotics engineer, Rezakhani, and a Chinese software engineer, Tang. When everyone was seated and had been served tea, Rezakhani said, “Now, I don’t know how much Mister Whorf Rollings shared with you in his letter.”

“The main thing he did was to explain that the two of you had worked on the Iranian-Chinese industrial expedition to the moon—that test-bed project to see if you could manufacture anything worthwhile there—and that you had some insight into the moon gun. Other than that, everything you say will probably surprise us.”

“Oh, it will do that,” Tang said.

Rezakhani said, “Let me launch directly into the parts that were never released to news media; you can ask about anything that’s unfamiliar as we go, but I’ll assume you know anything that was widely covered.

“All right, then. So as you probably know, what we sent to the moon was actually not a fleet of construction robots so much as they were a demonstration set of mobile rock-sorters with some little drills and saws for cutting bigger samples. Well, shortly after they landed and we activated them, all the little mining units stopped acknowledging control signals from Earth and crawled away—eighty kilometers to the Northwest, right to where the moon gun is, at least if Captain Highbotham and her excellent observatory team are right. But the mining robots could not have built it, any more than a flatworm can play the guitar.

“Well, our bosses were hardly going to come out and admit that anything of this sort had happened. Instead they covered it up and kept monitoring the site from the lunar orbiters. In mid-2023—about eighteen months before Daybreak—the mining robots were seen by a Chinese lunar orbiter to be fleeing the area where they had been working, putting themselves on the far slopes of a number of ridges from an immense flare that appeared on August 1, 2023, with a full moon at midnight right over the Pacific—the time when there would be the fewest observers, with the least ability to see what was happening. The US Naval Observatory reported a possible meteor impact; at that time, only the Chinese orbiter was working, and the government of China was not sharing any information. But Mister Tang eventually became privy to what they had seen: on the next orbit, a large object, something the size of a good-sized warehouse—which I am quite sure was your moon gun, it was the right size, shape, and everything—was standing where the flare had appeared.

“Over the next few days, it disgorged rovers ranging in size from about a shoebox to a small car, and the mining robots came back over the ridges and began to work with the newly arrived rovers.”

Tang took up the story. “We watched it for more than a year afterward. Before the ground link failed irretrievably due to the EMP from the superbomb at Shanghai, the aliens had constructed a strange sort of glass pyramid almost 30 meters tall. We did not know but we were watching them build the re-entry vehicle for their first shot, the one that silenced KP-1 and destroyed so much technology.”

“But who are ‘they’?” James asked.

Rezakhani nodded eagerly. “Well, as you might guess, we were curious about that. No one on Earth had that kind of technology—they had to be from another star system. If you take the generally accepted date that the British radar experiments in 1936 were the first radio to reach outside Earth with a signal that was at least possibly detectible, and if whoever it was took a while to locate us and get ready, and they were advanced enough to build such machines, it did not seem incredible that they might have dispatched ships as long as fifty years ago. And remember, back before, the Priestley satellite had found a dozen planets in habitable zones with free oxygen in their atmospheres.”

“More than that, I thought,” Leslie said. “I was a nerdy pop-science fan, I thought it was like a hundred?”

Tang nodded. “It was. But the Priestly actually reached out to 180 light years. And with planet types, it depends on the cube of the distance; if you double the distance, you get eight times as many planets of a given type. Anyway, out to fifty light years, there were twelve candidate planets to be the home world of the device we now know as the moon gun. At the time, we thought it was some sort of an extraterrestrial exploration mission, though we were very puzzled by how it had taken over our mining robots, and we were going to mount a secret expedition to investigate the Fecunditatis site in 2025. And then Daybreak hit.”

James asked, “How could they send a mission that must have taken decades to get here, and know we would build supply robots for them, apparently exactly what they needed?”

Tang nodded. “That was where I came in; my specialty is automated reverse-engineering, which is why, if you could still look through the files where Lake Washington is now, you’d find me on several lists of people not to be let into the United States, ever, and high priority for recruiting for defection. Also why they bombarded me with English lessons from an early age.

“Here’s what I realized—not that everyone agreed with me, but as the sole survivor, I get to be right, eh? As long as you thought of them hijacking our system, it made no sense. The robots were not even designed till 2016; if they somehow dispatched a mission at light speed the instant they could possibly have heard of the robots, they’d still have to be almost on top of us—closer than Alpha Centauri, which is not one of the systems with a habitable world. So the mining robots weren’t compatible because they hijacked them; they were compatible because they designed them.”

“But you designed them—”

“Three engineers did. And when we investigated those engineers, we discovered something else that made little sense to us… we discovered Daybreak. We were tracking it too, like your Heather O’Grainne and her OFTA, back before. We only got so far with it, for the same reasons you didn’t get very far—Daybreak day arrived too soon, and we lost our capabilities before we had all the pieces of the puzzle. But in the five months we were looking into it, we established that it went far, far back—all the way to before 2000.”

“Arnie Yang always thought it was at least that old,” James said.

“He was right. What a loss that we don’t have him here, but, well, life is long, perhaps someday we will be able to pick his brains about this. Anyway, when we arrested the three main design engineers, two suicided right away. The third claimed that Daybreak had simply begun sending them these marvelous designs, magnificent leaps in coding, all sorts of useful advances, always calling itself the ‘anonymous friend’ or the ‘friend of good computing’ and asking them, if they liked the software, to pass it off as their own. Once we knew what to look for, we found a dozen other researchers who had all had experimental proposals that seemed to sail right through the review process, and whose work looked like once-in-a-lucky-century breakthroughs. You see? It was the way that it not only won us over but made us dependent on it. Our rapid progress of the last few decades, every time Daybreak could plant an algorithm or a pattern, made us easier and easier to read, made our networks easier for them to penetrate, gave Daybreak more hooks to attach to—”

“Daybreak grew in our Internet,” Leslie said, “but the seed it grew from was… extraterrestrial? It was planted here?”

“It was friendly soil,” James said. “I keep going back to what Arnie Yang said about it, that he thought Daybreak had grown from human self-hatred, from the way that so many people were unhappy, back before, with things about ordinary modern life, whether it was the way the Third World got screwed, or how ugly all the parking lots were, or how bad they felt for the animals being crowded out, or the way that media got in everywhere and undercut their religion. But he always wondered how it managed to cross over from the people who hated tech to the people who lived to make tech. Now, I guess we know.”

Tang nodded. “I think we know a lot more. I’m guessing this is the root of the Fermi Paradox.”

Jamayu Rollings coughed and said, “Some of us may not be nerdy enough to know what that is.”

“Sorry to admit I’m one of them,” James said.

“You had company,” Ihor added. “Mister Rezakhani had to explain it to me.”

Leslie said, “The Fermi Paradox was in one of the more recent NASA documentaries we had for the schools, back before. The physicist Fermi pointed out that there were probably a lot of habitable worlds—and it turns out he underestimated by a lot—and no reason to suppose intelligent life wouldn’t grow on all of them given enough time, there were billions of years of time available, times billions of livable planets, and technological progress is so rapid once it starts that on the geological time scale, basically all intelligent species should be leaping from the caves to the stars. So why hadn’t dozens or hundreds or thousands of intelligent species in our own galaxy made the leap and come to visit us? As he put it, where was everybody?

“Well, that only became more mysterious in 2021 when the Priestly Space Telescope started finding all those planets with free oxygen in the atmosphere and in the habitable zone; just from what you could find close by, they were estimating that the galaxy contained maybe seven billion planets with life, and even if intelligence and technology were both incredibly rare, there still should have been thousands of species that could have visited us by now. So we were back to Fermi’s question, where was everyone? And I’m starting to see what Mister Tang is getting at.”

He nodded. “Suppose Daybreak is not an Earth problem, but a galactic one. Perhaps it started on one world, somewhere, once, but by now, it may have existed for billions of years.

“Suppose there is Daybreak throughout the galaxy, with listening posts everywhere, and probably industrial plants attached to asteroids or perhaps small airless moons, places where civilizations would not notice if they looked. And they wouldn’t be looking for very long, because Daybreak would find them and collapse their civilization while they were still just struggling off the planet. Maybe Daybreak was once a weapon, or it might have been created by a civilization that was much more environmentally conscious than ours, or maybe all life in the galaxy really is one and Daybreak evolved, somehow, as the way that life protects itself against the disaster of intelligent technological species. So when Daybreak notices a civilization that has risen as far as radio… it knows there will soon be networked computers… .”

“And it gets into covert contact, finds its way in like a hacker breaking into a secure system, and shuts it down,” Whorf said, quietly.

Ihor cleared his throat. “Chinese and Americans are clever, and can even be devious, but they have mostly been happy nations with big successes. Now, nations like Ukraine and Iran, because we have lived by our wits, and done what we had to, or we would not be here, we understand more about treachery.

“Doctor Rezakhani and I were jamming about this too. Maybe Daybreak is just like Galactic Greenpeace and shuts down high-tech civilizations. But what if it is a softening-up weapon and in another hundred years the alien invasion ships will show up to hand out blankets and beads and herd us onto reservations, while they turn this planet into a resort. Or maybe they plan to harvest all the protein on the surface, and they didn’t want us crapping all that protein up with chemicals. Whatever it is, we know three things about Daybreak: one, it’s bigger than we thought, maybe bigger than we can imagine. Two, it’s not our friend. And three, we’ve already lost almost everything we had to fight it with.”

James nodded. “And all this is assuming it has anything we would understand as a purpose at all. Maybe it has something instead of purpose; you know, a colony of ants doesn’t do things for reasons and an oak tree doesn’t grow from ambition.”

“But whatever it was,” Jamayu Rollings said, “it has just kicked our butt, and it is fairly likely that sometime not far in the future it will come back to do it again. So we should either get ready to be kicked some more, or get ready to kick back.”

“And voila,” Rezakhani, “we present these ideas to the headmaster of a school, and the former leader of a spy organization—”

“And the complete dupe who was fooled by Daybreak itself, and lost the war with it in his home country,” James said. “And though I suppose I am more experienced, I don’t feel one bit smarter.”

“Well,” Leslie said, “We are who we have to work with.”

Afterward, as they took their first-ever walk on a beach, agreeing that they would try to do this daily if they could, James said, “I suppose the program is obvious. Start steering the governments of the world toward re-unions and mergers, and give them as much truth as they can handle. Rebuild tech to get around the nanospawn and biote barriers. Produce a bunch of smart young people who will have the brains, training, and energy to do that; maybe we can get Patrick and Ntale down here, it’d be a better place for them than Pueblo. Keep going till whatever zapped us with Daybreak shows up, if it ever does, and then do whatever we can to take our own destiny back.”

Leslie took his hand and leaned against him. When they had walked a little way in a closer embrace than he’d ever felt from her before, he said, “Are we ready to, um, take things to the next level?”

“You already have,” she said. “And I love that we have something to defend.”