Free The Reset by Daniel Powell Page B

enjoyed
living in the United States, although it had become clear to him when he went
through their things that they would always be Londoners in their hearts.
    Mr. Brown had taken great lengths to
procure keepsakes for each of the children. The last time Ben had seen Coraline,
she was still wearing her mother’s silver wedding band—the one with her
parents’ initials engraved on the interior and the thick gouges on the
exterior, where it had been scarred by falling concrete—on a chain around her
neck.
    Ben knew his parents through their
photographs and writings. Before the Internet went down, he had combed through
his father’s blog postings hundreds of times. John Stone was a bright
pragmatist with a sharp wit. He was a journalist and a film critic. His mother
had been tall and pretty, and she and her husband had chronicled the pregnancy
that would produce Ben with hundreds of photographs that they’d posted online.
    The photographs had vanished when things
went dark, but Ben retained in his mind the image of his mother holding him as
an infant, her cheeks flushed with happiness. He thought of that image often.
    Ben bit his lip, blinking away tears. White
had hurt them all—every single person he had ever held dear to him had been
irrevocably damaged by the man.
     “Nineteen orphans became nineteen
weapons. Calvin’s staff raised them as family. They educated them. They
disciplined them. They cared for them when they were sick. By some accounts
they loved them, and by some accounts, that affection might even have been
genuine.”
    “Accounts? What do you mean?”
    “A single member of Calvin’s staff was
away from the ranch on the day of the homecoming. Her name was Patrice Clover, although
they called her Ms. Black on the ranch. She’d been off purchasing supplies on
the day Karl Trickett came home. February 23, 2038. Super Bowl Sunday. The evening
of the big game.”
    He smiled when he heard their names. Ms.
Black had been wonderful, a gourmet cook who always had a kind word for the
children. He remembered Karl, the class clown whose last name, if he’d ever
known it to begin with, had long been forgotten.
    “Karl Trickett,” he whispered.
    Alice nodded. “That’s right. Karl
Trickett. The only one of the nineteen to fail the medical portion of his entry
exams. He’d gone to work for a company called Nike, right back where it all
started, in downtown Portland. Their doctors were the only ones whose suspicion
was sufficient to send one of the kids home. And Karl had been crushed,
because….”
    “…because he had been in love with a
girl,” Ben finished.
    Alice smiled. “The man on the road to
Pensacola?”
    Ben just shrugged. He was filling in the
blanks now, connecting the events from the other side of the mirror.
    “ Her name was Ariel Cook,” Alice
continued. “She was an engineer at Boeing, in Seattle. Hers had been among the
first detonations. We know that Karl and Ariel had seen each other many times
in the weeks after moving in with their host families, taking the train back
and forth on the weekend.
    “When Calvin armed the…the weapons, it
was hers that destroyed the Space Needle. I can’t, we can’t, ever think
of any of the Kids as willful participants in what happened. Certainly more
than anyone else, the Kids suffered at the hands of Dr. Calvin.
    “Anyway, Nike sent Karl packing. This
was in late January, and Karl was despondent. He’d knocked around Portland for
a short time before finally deciding to return to the ranch. It took him a few days
to make his way home—he wasn’t in any kind of hurry, of course—and a truck
driver delivered him to within four miles of Calvin’s ranch on the very morning
of the Reset.
    “That truck driver survived, by the way.
He’d outraced the fallout, though the residual contamination probably led to
his premature death a couple years later. His name was Kirby Middleton, and he
wrote one of the best early histories of what happened in