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“Now, Mrs. O’Hara, does she look like my daughter?” Jake smiled at Stephanie, who was black and forty-one. She was short and sported a huge Afro while Jake was tall with wavy hair.

A frail woman propped up on the couch raised her hand. “Hey, what about the joke, Will?”

“You want your weekly joke, huh?” He looked around. “Okay, let’s see. Mrs. McGillicutty was here in this very nursing home, right down the hall, and she got tired of being ignored by the two most eligible bachelors, Bob and Steve.”

Someone in the back called out, “Louder!”

“Oops, sorry.” Jake stood and raised his voice. “Mrs. McGillicutty decides to get Bob and Steve’s attention by streaking. She takes off all her clothes and goes through the TV room, pushing her walker, naked. After a few seconds, Bob turns to Steve and says ‘Who was that?’ Steve replies, ‘I think that was Mrs. McGillicutty.’ Bob says, ‘What the hell was she wearing?’ and Steve replies, ‘I don’t know, but it sure needs ironing.’”

He got a good response—they always liked risque jokes about fellow seniors. Mrs. Arthur shook her head but also clapped and laughed.

Jake motioned Stephanie over and took her around to visit with some of the residents.

It was when they were waving their goodbyes that everyone sneezed. Twenty individuals all sneezed at precisely the same moment. A woman in the back cried out, “Praise the Lord!” and one of the men chuckled. Other than that, silence.

“What was with that sneeze?” Stephanie asked when they walked out to Jake’s car.

“Beats me. Doesn’t make any sense. I think every single person sneezed. Did you see the dog?”

“The seeing eye dog?” she asked.

“Right. Mrs. Thompson’s dog. He didn’t sneeze. So it was only people. Even Mrs. Hall did it, and I’ve never seen her move a muscle.” Jake put his key into the door and the pain hit him. He flipped forward and hit the car’s roof. Stephanie fell against the hood.

When it was over, she dusted herself off and looked over at Jake who was rubbing his chest. “Whoa. What was that all about? Did it happen to you too?”

“It did. It came out of nowhere. Then it went away completely. Sure was weird.” Jake shook his head. Too weird. Something strange was going on.

After driving in silence for a while, Stephanie leaned forward, turned, and looked him in the eye. “Will, I saw a new side of you today. You’re usually the world’s biggest introvert. At the club, you play the piano then retreat back into your shell at break time. But today, you were actually socializing.”

“It’s all an act. I’m not an extrovert, but I play one on TV.”

“Well, it looked genuine to me. Those people loved you. And you love them back, don’t you?”

“I do,” he said. “That’s genuine. But acting extroverted is just that. An act. I’ll pay for it tonight.”

“Pay for it?” Stephanie frowned.

“I won’t sleep well. Socializing does something to my nervous system. Like poison oak for my brain. I played the extrovert for twenty years and did an okay job of it, but it was exhausting. I’m done with that now, except for the nursing home.” He stopped the car in front of The Take Five and shut off the engine. “You know that feeling you get where you have to get out of the house, go talk with people, even if it’s only to go to the store?

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t get that feeling.”

She shook her head, put her hand on the door handle, and looked back at him. “That can’t be good for you, Will. And it wouldn’t hurt business if the sophisticated William Evans, best-looking man in the county, would schmooze with the customers now and then. During your breaks, you head over to that booth in the back like Mr. Turtle and escape into your book.”

“Mr. Turtle does notice what happens, even when he’s in his shell.” He glanced at Stephanie and saw her faraway look.
She knows what I’m referring to.

A few months earlier, during a break, a robber had threatened Stephanie with a knife, demanding money from the till. Jake had staggered toward the bar, pretending to have a severe physical and mental disability. The robber dismissed him as non-threatening, and when he tried to push Jake away with his foot, Jake had grabbed it and soon had the robber trussed up on the floor.

Stephanie got out of the car then leaned over. “I still think this isolation isn’t good for you. You need to get more involved with the world.”

“I’m glad you came with me today, Steph. They liked meeting you. Some of those guys don’t get any visitors at all. I’m going to go home and recharge, and I’ll be in around nine.” Jake drove off and then had a hunch and turned on the radio. Sure enough, every station was airing news bulletins about the sneeze, saying that it had happened everywhere around the world.

Well, that’s the end of my new hermit life.
President Hallstrom would want him on the team. The feds were going to track him down and drag him back to Washington.
Looks like my year of not trying is going to be cut short.

CHAPTER TWO

Charli’s grandmother, Marie Keller, was a BMW. Not a car, a Big Maine Woman. That was the local expression for a woman who was tough enough to deal with Maine’s brutal winters. She wasn’t physically big. She was short and squat, like a beautiful ice sculpture that had partially melted then refrozen into a solid block.

At the sneeze hour Marie Keller’s SCOP cruiser sat in the most dangerous neighborhood of Lipton, Maine. By stationing themselves under a tree in front of the Save-a-Lot grocery store, she and her partner kept the 5,012 residents safe from shopping cart thieves and those who didn’t put a quarter in the box for the honor-system coffee.

Marie had joined Senior Citizens on Patrol five years ago at age seventy-six. She liked to try new things, and since they didn’t accept septuagenarians at the police academy, she settled for driving around and being the remote eyes of the sheriff’s office. She’d done her civic duty, and now she was ready to quit. Too boring.

“… and I have to say that that probably wouldn’t surprise you,” her partner Madge said, “because nothing surprises you.”

Marie just sipped her coffee.
Here we go with the surprise thing again.
All her life she’d taken things as they came. A huge surprise party only got a chuckle. When her doctor told her she had breast cancer, she simply nodded and asked for the options. She’d heard that many in town thought there was something missing in her brain.

Madge wore a quilted housecoat and had curlers in her hair. “And the best part was that she never,
a-choo
, she never, oh, wasn’t that funny, Marie, we both sneezed at the same time didn’t we? I swear I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before, I’ve never seen that. Have you ever seen that happen, Marie?”

Marie shook her head even though she had, in fact, seen it before. Once she and her first husband had sneezed at the same time. During sex. Funny. No big deal.

“Well, Marie, I can tell you that I’ve never seen it. I guess it could happen, I mean we all sneeze all the time. Well not all the time, but you know what I mean, it’s what you’d call a common occurrence. You know, it happens a lot. That we sneeze, I mean. But I think it’s a little surprising that we both sneezed at the same time, even though I’m sure you don’t because nothing surprises you.”

Marie was glad she wasn’t allowed to carry a gun. They drove out of the parking lot and the pain hit. Madge flailed around, but Marie just clenched her teeth and put on the brakes.
Well, that was surprising.

* * *

Wunderkind Alex Carter penciled in a change on the schematic diagram in front of him. The change would improve the device’s throughput. He shook his head. How could anybody miss that? He held up the schematic and pointed to the modification.

His twin brother Martin looked up from his soldering, squinted at the paper, and said, “Absolutely. Much better. I wonder why they didn’t think of that.” Both teenagers had long faces and rebellious hair. The jury was out on whether they’d ever grow out of their nerdy looks.

They’d designed and built their workroom, with green laminate counters, high-efficiency task lights, and tools laid out on a pegboard wall. A central table let them sit across from one another and interact while they worked. Their mom made them keep the door closed so the whole house wouldn’t smell of solder.

When Martin glanced back down to his circuit board, the sneeze hit them both. They laughed.

“What are the chances of that?” Alex asked.

“Let’s see.” Martin soldered a capacitor to the circuit board while he talked. “Let’s say you and I sneeze, on average, once every … three days. So, twenty-four times—”

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Einstein?”

“What?” said Martin.

“Sleeping. People tend to not sneeze in their sleep, or hadn’t you noticed?” Alex had one finger on the schematic and another on the parts list. “And you have to assume the sneezes are independent.”

“Yeah, okay. So, three sixteen-hour days comes out to about … 173,000 seconds. Hand me the Tronex cutters.”

“Get them yourself. They’re on your side. And we define simultaneous as …”

“Say, within .1 seconds of one another.” Martin picked up the cutters and snipped the capacitor leads.

Alex released a diode from its packaging. “Okay, so the chance that we’ll sneeze at the same time, for a three-day period is—”

“One chance in 1,730,000.”

The twins continued their soldering and reasoning, and estimated that there was a one in two-hundred-three chance of them both sneezing simultaneously at some point in their lifetimes.

They were identical except for the color of their hair. Both hated being mistaken for the other, so they’d decided, at age five, to implement color coding. Thus Alex’s hair was Alex-Aqua and Martin’s, Martin-Magenta. Their mom wasn’t thrilled about having day-glo kids, but they manipulated her by first suggesting distinctive nose-rings and tattoos.

The system worked perfectly. People could not only tell them apart but also remember their names.

Both kids had IQs among the highest ever measured. At eighteen months of age, Alex could read a newspaper. At age three, Martin could solve difficult math problems. Other children had achieved similar feats—Adam Kirby of England reportedly potty-trained himself at one after reading a book about it—but a set of twins this precocious had never existed.

They had learned many languages as if by magic, and, of course, developed their own, with a unique alphabet. Because of its simplicity, it was an improvement over every other on Earth. Linguists drooled over it, with a “why didn’t we think of this?” attitude, and lobbied to have it adopted worldwide.

For example, since there was a strict one-to-one relationship between phonemes and characters, spelling was never an issue. Every word was spelled the way it sounded. If the world adopted this language, spelling tests would go away.

The twins also had an unmatched aptitude for machines. Given the plan for a complex device, they could quickly understand how it worked and even suggest improvements.

Apart from those things, they were normal teenagers, and their mom raised them intelligently, with the advice, of course, of a board of elite scientists and psychologists.

When the pain gripped the twins, Martin burned his finger with the soldering iron, and Alex dropped a box of resistors.

* * *

While watching the first episode of
Breaking Bad,
Louis Corby had had an epiphany. At the end of the show, God spoke directly to him. Louis blinked rapidly, seeing both God and the end credits at the same time.
What is happening?
He hit the off button, but God remained. High-def God, in extreme closeup. God frowned.

“Go back to school, Louis,” said high-def God.

Louis was a concentration-camp version of his younger brother. He and Jake had started out looking like twins, but a steady diet of mental illness had taken its toll on Louis. He was no stranger to visions and answered right away. “I am in graduate school, Lord. I am studying your word. I—”

“Make methamphetamine, Louis.”

“What, Lord?”

“Louis, I know you heard me.” The supreme being was still frowning.

More blinking. Louis reached over to the desk, picked up the latest printout of his doctoral thesis, and held it inches from the screen. “But Lord, my doctoral thesis—”

“Cast it away, Louis.”

Louis stared at the screen with a slack jaw, but he was a dutiful servant of God. Even though his doctoral thesis,
Socio-Economic Factors Contributing to Christian Fundamentalism
, was only weeks away from completion, he tossed it into the virtual trash can. He browsed to the university’s course catalog and registered for an undergraduate double major in chemistry and business administration.

With years of manic studying, an emaciated Louis Corby graduated near the top of his class. Three years after that, he was the number one producer and distributor of methamphetamine in Kansas City. He paid off all his student loans and had a fortune in cash. The Lord’s plan worked well for Louis Corby.
Thank you, Lord.