Triggers

Triggers.

Stimuli that invoke memories.

So idiosyncratic: a fragrance, the way someone holds their head, a pattern woven into cloth, a few bars of music, a taste, a touch, a word. For one person, a memory might be brought to the fore; for another, nothing.

History provides shared triggers. Where were you when you heard President Kennedy had been shot? When Armstrong took that first small step, that first giant leap? When the Twin Towers fell? When they blew up the White House?

But even those were only triggers for a fraction of the world’s population. Still, there were a few general triggers—universally shared experiences—that focused most minds, putting people on the same page, the same wavelength.

The circle had originally been closed.

Then—with triggers figurative and literal—it had opened. More and more individuals were drawn in. A few dozen minds, then a few hundred, then a few thousand, then more still.

Many of those in the original circle had had trouble adapting to it, but now each new mind that joined in was greeted, boosted, buoyed, embraced by countless others who had already experienced the first moments of connection, who had survived it, and who were now reveling in it all. Calming waves and swelling euphoria washed over the newcomers, enticing them, relaxing them, welcoming them.

And yet, despite the peace felt by those who were linked, despite the tranquility of shared joy, of banished loneliness, there was still something dark, something evil, something outside.

Those who were already linked considered, contemplated, cogitated, until…

A realization, a revelation—and a resolution.

This madness—the insanity that had cost humanity so much for so long—could not go on.

It could not, or the world would not long endure.

Things had to change—and they had to change now.

But for the next step, the next leap, a trigger was still needed: a general trigger, a shared trigger, a trigger that would sweep the globe…

Dora Hennessey had fallen asleep at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital just after 6:00 P.M.; she still wasn’t dealing well with the time-zone change. A part of her had wanted to stay up to see President Jerrison’s speech on TV, but she’d been too tired.

Dora had been so distraught over the aborted transplant operation and the death of her father—not to mention dealing with Ann January’s memories—that she wasn’t surprised to find she’d slept for twelve hours. But by 6:00 A.M., she was wide-awake and so decided to go for an early-morning walk.

Her stitches had been redone yesterday, and she’d been told they would hold nicely until the incision healed. She slowly got dressed, put on the winter jacket that had taken up half of her suitcase when she’d brought it over from England, and headed down through the lobby and out into the dim pre-dawn light. There were already quite a few cars on the road, and several other pedestrians walking briskly along.

She ambled south on 23rd Street, passing the Foggy Bottom metro station and a Dunkin’ Donuts and the beige edifice of the Department of State. She turned left when she got to Constitution Avenue and was surprised to find, nestled in a grove of trees, a huge bronze statue of a seated Albert Einstein; she hadn’t known there was a memorial to him in Washington. She looked up at his sad eyes. Everything is relative, she thought; she felt like a little girl next to this giant man.

Dora had assumed it wouldn’t be safe to go onto the National Mall this early, but there seemed to be a fair number of joggers about, so she crossed to the south side of Constitution Avenue. She knew from the tour she’d taken when she’d first arrived that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was just to her right, but she continued south, toward the Reflecting Pool. The sun would be up very soon, and she thought it would be fun to watch it rise behind the tapered obelisk of the Washington Monument.

She got in position just in time: a tiny point of brilliance appeared on the horizon, slowly widening into a dome. The monument cast a long shadow pointing toward her. She’d left her phone back at the hospital, which was too bad—she’d have loved to have snapped a picture of this.

The sun quickly became too bright for her to look at directly, but it brought back memories of other sunrises over London’s skyline, over the English Channel, over the desert. Some of the memories were her own: she had indeed pulled all-nighters at college, seeing the sun rise as she hurried to finish essays.

And some of the memories were clearly Ann January’s, including one of her and David watching the sun come up from the deck of a cruise ship during their honeymoon.

But she was startled to also have memories that were neither hers nor Ann’s: neither of them had ever been to Australia, but she had a vivid recollection of the sun coming up over the Sydney Opera House. And neither of them had ever seen a solar eclipse, but she clearly recalled the sun clearing the horizon with a bite already taken out of its disk.

The shadow of the monument gradually shortened as the new day continued to dawn.

Susan Dawson soon realized what Seth Jerrison already had: links were now forming spontaneously, without physical contact. As she looked at Vice President Flaherty, his memories opened up to her, and as she looked at Seth Jerrison, he, too, became an open book. She lowered her weapon; there was no point any longer in keeping the two of them apart.

Soon, everyone at Camp David ended up with their memories intertwined. But even the linked had to sleep, and although some few managed to stay up all night, dealing with the flood of media inquiries after Jerrison’s aborted attempt to address the nation, most had nodded off by midnight. The president, of course, had been through an enormous trauma. Bessie Stilwell normally didn’t need much sleep, but the round-trip to California had left her fatigued. Ranjip Singh never managed to rally much strength that night, and was out cold by 1:00 A.M., and Darryl Hudkins was asleep by 2:00.

Susan did manage to stay up all night, sitting in her wheelchair, but she knew it was pointless: the vast majority of those in DC, in Maryland, and in Virginia were asleep, and although that didn’t impede accessing the memories of those who were already linked, those who were unconscious couldn’t reach out to others.

The infirmary had a big window that happened to look east. Although the view was partially obscured by trees, Susan was nonetheless drawn by the rising sun. A memory came to her of a sunrise over the Taj Mahal—seen by Ranjip Singh on one of his trips to India.

Another sunrise came to her, one familiar and yet alien. Familiar, because it was a view through the windows in the East Wing of the White House, looking across East Executive Avenue toward the Treasury Department—a window she’d often enough looked out herself. But alien because she’d never looked out those windows at dawn, and—ah, more of the memory came to her: and certainly not with the First Lady standing next to…to him. It was the morning after their first night in the White House, and Seth Jerrison and his wife had come here to watch the day break.

Ranjip Singh was waking up—they’d eased him onto one of the infirmary beds. The sleep had done him good, it seemed: he was capable of speech again. He looked at Susan, and the first words out of his mouth were, “You can read President Jerrison’s memories.”

“Yes.”

He sounded amazed. “I can recall you recalling him recalling a wonderful sunrise seen from the White House.”

Susan nodded. “The beginning of his first full day in office. Yes, it just came to me.”

“This is…is…”

“ ‘Major league,’ as your son would say,” said Susan.

Singh smiled. “That it is.”

Darryl Hudkins was lying on one of the other infirmary beds. His eyes fluttered open. “Good morning, Miss Susan,” he said, softly, looking at her. But Darryl never called her that; in fact, the only person who’d called her that recently was…

Bessie Stilwell.

Susan found she no longer needed the wheelchair. She rose from it and walked over to him. “Bessie?” she said, looking into Darryl’s brown eyes.

“Yes, dear?” he—or she—replied.

Susan swallowed. “Bessie, where’s Darryl?”

“Darryl? Such a nice young…young man.” A frown. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”

Susan called over her shoulder. “Ranjip! Ranjip!”

He hopped off the bed and joined her. “What?”

She gestured at Darryl. “His body is awake, but it’s as if Bessie is answering my questions.”

Singh looked at Darryl. “Agent Hudkins?”

“Yes?” said a voice.

“And Mrs. Stilwell?”

“Yes?” said the same voice.

Seth Jerrison woke next, sitting up straight in his wheelchair. His eyes seemed alert.

“Mr. President,” Susan asked, “are you all right?”

“No,” he said. “No, it’s—it’s like when I was dying. I feel distant from my body.”

Dr. Snow must have rallied at some point, because she soon appeared at his side. “Sir, you’re here at Camp David, in the infirmary. You’re here. Is there any pain?”

That seemed to be the wrong question. Suddenly, Jerrison’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open and he let out a grunt as if he’d been punched in the stomach—or shot in the back.

“Damn,” said Snow, under her breath. “Sir, it’s all right. It’s all right.”

But it wasn’t. Susan suddenly felt a sharp pain in her chest, too. The sight of Jerrison echoing what had happened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was triggering her to access that memory, too. And the pain of being shot brought back the different pain of having shot—the shock and nausea she’d felt after gunning down Josh Latimer.

Perhaps in response to the pain, her consciousness fled. She was suddenly in a fancy apartment somewhere, and there was a woman she recognized: Janis Falconi—which meant she perhaps was in the mind of Dr. Redekop. She tried to speak, but before the words could get out she was somewhere else yet again, outdoors, in the cold, brushing snow off a car.

And then her vision split in two, as if her left eye were in one place and her right another. The left showed an outdoor scene—the sun rising above some more trees that had lost their leaves for the winter. And the right showed an interior of someone’s house, with beat-up furniture and piles of old newspapers. But there was no harsh line between the two realities, no clear demarcation. She could contemplate either or—yes!—both simultaneously. And each object in each scene triggered memories: a cavalcade of images and sensations and feelings.

And then Susan’s vision seemed to split horizontally, showing her four images: the original two in the top quadrants, a view through a car’s windshield driving on a highway in the lower left, and a bouncing view of a TV set in the lower right that she soon realized was the perspective of someone watching a morning news show while treadmilling.

The images split again, each quadrant dividing into four smaller views, for a total of sixteen. She felt like she was equally in all those places, indoors and out, warm and cold.

She turned her head—at least, she thought she was turning it—and the views shifted, revealing new squares to the left; and as she tilted her head up and down, more squares appeared above and below.

All the images split again; each one was now quite small, and yet, despite that, there was absolute clarity. After a moment, they divided yet again—and her whole field of view was filled with hundreds of squares. But despite their small size, she could make out minute details: reading a headline on that commuter’s newspaper; admiring the engagement ring on that woman’s finger; seeing the time on the clock in this one—and the clock on that one—and the watch on this one—and the iPhone display on that one. And they all said the same time: 7:32 A.M., which was now. It wasn’t just in times of crisis anymore; she was reading minds in real time. Lots of minds.

She was still Susan Louise Dawson—but she was also all those other people. She was white and black and Asian. Female and male. Straight and gay. Christian and Jewish and Sikh and Muslim and atheist. Young and old. Fit and not. Brilliant, average, and dull. Both a believer and a skeptic; at once a scientific genius and a scientific illiterate.

She tried to assert her individuality: she was…was…

No, surely she was still…

But it was getting harder to stay separate. All the elements of who she was were still there, but they were juxtaposed with components of other minds, other lives. And she was a smaller part of the whole with each passing second.

Suddenly, she became conscious of geography. All of the minds touched so far were nearby, part of the wave front, the leading edge.

A song from her youth—from everyone’s youth—came to her, to them: We don’t stop for nobody! We don’t stop for nobody! And as the world spun on its axis, as the sun came up, the wave front moved inexorably westward. But she was baffled about why South American cities weren’t included. Parts of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru were due south of Washington, and yet there seemed to be no mental contact with anyone from there. Could it be that South America was too far away to be included?

No, no—that wasn’t it. Lessons from her college studies of geography came back, reinforced by the memories of countless others who knew the same thing. Earth’s axis was tilted 23.5 degrees to the plane of the solar system. The swath of the Earth being affected was following the dawn line, the terminator. None of South America had yet been included.

The dawn, Susan thought, and the dawn echoed a thousand others. As people looked up, or woke up, as they recalled previous sunrises, they were brought in—and if they didn’t note the dawn, they were soon brought in anyway, as others willed links to them.

She’d almost expected everyone to topple over; there had been much wooziness during the early stages yesterday, after all. But it seemed that each new mind that came on board—and thousands were popping in every minute now—brought new strength and stability. Agent Dawson (she found herself thinking of her in the third person), Agent Hudkins, President Jerrison, Professor Singh, and all the rest seemed to be capable of going about their normal tasks, but—

But she looked on in fascination, as if from a great height now; perhaps—ah, yes, she was linked to a traffic reporter in a helicopter over Washington, giving an update on the morning commute. Everything was flowing smoothly. Despite icy conditions on I-295 and Ridge Road Southeast, there had not been a single accident reported so far, and all roads, including the Beltway, were moving well. It was as if the combined vision and reflexes of all the drivers were enough to overcome any potential problems. It was precisely what one might expect of a…

Susan herself didn’t know the phrase, but others did, and they shared it. Group mind: a collective consciousness, the aggregate will of countless people, each one still separate, each a nexus, an individual, but each also linked, connected, networked. Unlike a hive with expendable drones, those who were joined now composed a vast mosaic, every stone precious, each member cherished, no one ignored or discarded or forgotten.

The world continued to turn. Dawn broke over Ottawa, Ontario; over Rochester, New York; over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; over Atlanta, Georgia. The squares were subdividing so quickly they seemed to flicker.

She thought again about the motorways and their myriad drivers. Those individuals spurring their cars to action were…a term she’d learned from Singh’s memories: excitatory inputs. Those that counseled inaction were inhibitory inputs. And, in a true democracy, greater than what Washington or any other place had ever seen or could hope to aspire to, the excitatory and inhibitory inputs were summed, and the whole—the collective, the gestalt—acted, or not, depending on the result.

Sudbury, Ontario, saw first light, as did Saginaw, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. Millions of additional voices joined the choir.

But surely, Susan and countless others thought, a species could not operate that way. Individual will was necessary! Individual will was what made life worth living!

It was individual will that let someone try to assassinate me.

It was individual will that let someone abuse me.

It was individual will that let someone kill my child.

It was individual will that let someone set off a bomb in my city.

The sun rose over Green Bay, Wisconsin; Columbia, Missouri; and Dallas, Texas. Daylight was spreading across the continent. Tens of millions were now interconnected. And with each passing second, more who weren’t yet connected turned to face east, face the dawn, face the new day, and they recalled a dozen, a hundred, a thousand similar mornings as the Earth spun on.

On any given day, about 150,000 people die, almost all peacefully from natural causes. When Josh Latimer had been shot, only Janis Falconi had been linked to him. But behind each person dying now stood millions of others, all connected to him or her. As lives slipped away, the gestalt strained to hold on to the expiring individuals: first this woman; then this man; then, tragically, this child. With the attention brought by millions, with the scrutiny of the legions, each demise was examined in detail and seen for what it was: the piecemeal dissolution of self. It didn’t depart all at once, it didn’t transfer from here to there, it didn’t go anywhere. Rather, it decayed, crumbled, disintegrated, and ultimately vanished.

And so, reluctantly, sadly, the majority began to accept what the minority had always known. The dead hadn’t passed on; they were gone.

But, at least now, they would never, ever be forgotten.