Free The Reset by Daniel Powell Page A

know, I’d actually been
at Georgia Tech for nine years when the shit hit the fan? Brian had been there for
thirteen: old lucky number thirteen.
    “Anyway, there were some pretty dark
days in this country before The Human Accord took over national security. I’m
not saying life was much better with THA at the controls, but the big attacks—the
all-out slaughters, really— did slow down. People felt safer venturing
out in public. But no one knew that the thing that happened at the Rose Garden
would have such a long reach. That’s how it went in those days. You heard about
terrorism, but it was so common that it didn’t leave a mark unless it touched
you directly. Everyone had a cause, and there were so many that were willing to
die, and to kill , for that matter, for their beliefs. Oklahoma City.
Dallas. Seattle. New York, of course. The large cities took the first batch of hits,
but then it trickled down: Tallahassee, Omaha, Little Rock. Terrorist attacks
on U.S. soil had been rare in the 1900s. They’ve been all too common in this
century, though.”
    “How did…how did the thing that happened
in Portland tie into the Reset?” Ben said. This time, his hand did find his
chest, though Alice couldn’t possibly understand the gesture.
    He knew things, just not everything.
    “They were called the Rose Garden
Bombings. It had been disguised as foreign terrorism, but it had been a
home-grown plot from the beginning. More than twenty-thousand perished in the
blasts. Two professional sports teams were obliterated, just like that. Scores
of wealthy powerbrokers died—movers and shakers among the corporate elite. It
had been a huge blow to the psyche of the American people—half a billion strong
had been moved to pass immediate, sweeping surveillance legislation. Life after
the bombings,” she shook her head, “was no picnic for many Americans. There
were labor camps, witch hunts, secret trials. It was just another example of
that age-old cycle of human distrust, and tens of thousands lost their lives.
    “The only survivors of the blasts had
been a small group of children and their caretakers. Nineteen little miracles,
whose nursery in the bowels of the building had somehow survived unscathed. The
man responsible for the attacks, we learned years later, was, to say the least,
an improbable suspect.”
    A rueful shake of the head said it all.
    “His name was Alexander Calvin. He had
been on the cover of all the magazines—had won the Nobel Prize. He probably was the world’s greatest bio-engineer—no hyperbole there. Alex Calvin was also a
radical—a rabidly anti-Human Accord dissident whose hatred of what the corporate
economy had done to the world developed into an obsession with toppling the
system.”
    Ben lost himself in memory, returning to
his time on the ranch. To his time in Dr. White’s home, and in Mr. Brown’s
school. A single tear tracked down his cheek.
    “He called himself Dr. White, and he
lived on a sprawling ranch outside of Bend. He’d recruited a cadre of dedicated
followers, and he built his version of a utopian society there on the bluffs.
This culture—it became the second wave of his fame. The world media portrayed him
as a saint—the benevolent caretaker of the Rose Garden Nineteen, those poor
orphans whose overwhelming loss would be at least softened by a first-rate
education and an easy path to employment in the premier economy. White would
see to it that these children knew comfort and security, while just about
everybody else scrambled after resources and fought to scratch out a place in a
dying world.”
    She snickered. “ He had planned
the attacks on the Rose Garden. He had engineered the weapons that triggered
the Reset. Alex Calvin was brilliant and he was patient, and it proved
to be a terribly destructive combination.”
    Ben looked away. He had never known his
parents, of course, and yet in that moment he was choked by grief for their
loss.
    John and Kathryn. They had