Free Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson

lockdown?”
    “Sorry, no.”
    “No explanation?”
    “It’s unusual, obviously, but no. And you don’t have to tell me how pissed-off people are. We’ve got a guy in Personnel whose wife went into labor just before the gates closed Friday. You can imagine how happy he is about all this.”
    His situation wasn’t unique. That afternoon Chris interviewed three more day workers at the Blind Lake gym, but they were reluctant to talk about anything except the shutdown—families they couldn’t reach, pets abandoned, appointments missed. “The least they could do is give us a fucking audio line out,” an electrician told him. “I mean, what could happen? Somebody’s going to bomb us
by phone
? Plus there are rumors starting to go around, which is natural when you can’t get any real news. There could be a war on for all we know.”
    He could only agree. A temporary security block was one thing. Going most of a week without information exchange in either direction bordered on lunacy. Much longer and it would look like something truly radical must have happened outside.
    And maybe it had. But that wasn’t an explanation. Even in times of war, what threat could a web or video connection pose? Why quarantine not only the population of Blind Lake, but all their data conduits?
    Who was hiding what, and from whom?
     
     
    He intended to spend the hour before dinner putting his notes in some kind of order. He was beginning to imagine the possibility of a finished article, maybe not the twenty thousand words
VE
had asked for but not far short of it. He even had a thesis: miracles buried under the human capacity for indifference. The somnolent culture of UMa47/E as a distant mirror.
    A project like this would be good for him, maybe restore some of his faith in himself.
    Or he could wake up tomorrow in the usual emasculating fog of self-revulsion, the knowledge that he was kidding absolutely nobody with his handful of half-transcribed interviews and fragile ambitions. That was possible too. Maybe even likely.
    He looked up from the screen of his pocket server in time to see Elaine bearing down on him. “Chris!”
    “I’m busy.”
    “There’s something happening at the south gate. Thought you might want to see.”
    “What is it?”
    “Do I know? Something big coming down the road at slow speed. Looks like an unmanned vehicle. You can see it from the hill past the Plaza. Can that little gizmo of yours capture video?”
    “Sure, but—”
    “So bring it. Come on!”
    It was a short walk from the community center to the crest of the hill. Whatever was happening was unusual enough that a small group of people had gathered to watch, and Chris could see more faces leaning into the windows of the south tower of Hubble Plaza. “Did you tell Sebastian about this?”
    Elaine rolled her eyes. “I don’t keep track of him and I doubt he’s interested. Unless that’s the Holy Ghost rolling down the road.”
    Chris squinted into the distance.
    The sinuous road away from Blind Lake was easily visible under a ceiling of close, tumbling clouds. And yes, something was approaching the locked gate from outside. Chris thought Elaine was probably right: it looked like a big eighteen-wheel driverless freight truck, the kind of drone vehicle the military had used in the Turkish crisis five years ago. It was painted flat black and was unmarked, at least as far as Chris could tell from here. It moved at a speed that couldn’t have been more than fifteen miles per hour—still ten minutes or so away from the gate.
    Chris shot a few seconds of video. Elaine said, “You in good shape? Because I mean to jog down there, see what happens when that thing arrives.”
    “Could be dangerous,” Chris said. Not to mention cold. The temperature had dropped a good few degrees in the last hour. He didn’t have a jacket.
    “Grow some balls,” Elaine scolded him. “The truck doesn’t look armed.”
    “It may not be armed, but it’s armored.