Free The Reset by Daniel Powell

much effort searching for a recovery. We’ve been on our own
from the start. That much is true.”
    “And yet,” Ben said, nodding at a
photograph of the Winstons, a picture of the smiling family he had remounted on
the wall, “here you and I sit, sipping tea together in a comfortable home. We
have a roof over our heads. We have warmth. We exist, in this moment, inside
the very evidence that a recovery was happening, Alice.”
    “That’s true,” she replied with a nod.
Her hair was lustrous in the firelight. “You’re quite the optimist, aren’t you
Ben?”
    He shrugged. “The glass is usually
half full, I suppose. Sorry to interrupt, though. Keep going, Alice. Please.
Tell me about the Reset.”
    “Well, there were the initial attacks,
which you know were simply horrific, followed by the global response, and
finally the aftermath. God, it all went to hell so fast. It all happened so
damned quickly !” she winced in wonderment. “There was just no time to really
reconcile how the Kids had been used to bring the world to its knees.”
    “The seventeen?” Ben said, fighting the
urge to touch his chest. “I heard about them from a man I met on a road near
Pensacola. His name was Benedict.”
    She nodded. “That number’s been disputed
but, again, nothing has been verified. It’s one of the great ironies of my life
as a historian, Ben; the Reset was so effective—so thorough in its
destruction—that it rendered my field pretty much obsolete. Who cares about
history? What happened happened , and there was no reason to dwell on the
‘why’ or the ‘how.’ Think about our lives—I mean our lives today . We
live almost exclusively in the moment. If we’re lucky we think about tomorrow,
but certainly we don’t dwell on yesterday. It’s how he wanted it to go. I’ve
had a lot of time to think about it, and I’m damn sure convinced of that.
    “And look, even though we sit here by a
warm fire in a comfortable house, our survival isn’t guaranteed. There are
people out there,” she pointed to the window for emphasis, “who would sooner
see us slaughtered than work with us to create an actual life on this
farm. Death and toil, Ben. That’s the new world order. Death and toil.”
    They sat in silence for a long moment.
    “Okay,” Ben finally said. “I’ll accept that
things are hard—that the world is filled with brutality. It wasn’t too long ago
I took a bullet in the shoulder, remember? But why? Why did any of this happen?
Who was the ‘he’ you mentioned earlier, and who were the Kids?”
    Alice nodded. “There are a few stories
out there about the Kids. The tale of the homecoming is certainly the most
prominent.” She looked into Ben’s eyes. “Think back, Ben. Go back to what you
remember about your time in Florida. Can you picture it?”
    Ben nodded. He had already told her
about that night at the Gator Bowl.
    “And now go back even further—to the
turn of the century. It started with, of all things, a basketball game. This
was in Portland, Oregon, pretty close to where you grew up, if I’m not mistaken.
The thing that happened at the Rose Garden? Well, it made the 9/11 attacks look
like child’s play.”
    “9/11?”
    “2001. A terrorist group flew a pair of
airplanes into a couple of buildings in New York City. They attacked the
Pentagon, and they were gunning for the White House too. The World Trade Center
was considered one of the early precursors to The Human Accord’s political
takeover of global public life. I used to teach a class that touched on those
early terror attacks, back when I was living in Arkansas. I was working at a
little school—a place called Harding College. Times were much better then, Ben.
This was in the late ‘20s.”
    Ben smiled. “You were a professor. I had
no idea.”
    Alice nodded. “I was extremely young and
extremely naïve in those days. Fresh out of school and looking to change the
world. Still, they were good, happy, ignorant days. You