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“Fuck you,” she said, and I felt like shit for saying it.

When I’d stumbled across the last day of planet Earth, of the internet at least, or the internet that my weird computer could see into, there were only thirty-seven links on the search page. I didn’t know if that meant there were only thirty-seven web servers left operating in the world, or they were the only ones my computer could pull pages from.

The top link was a stream from the International Space Station’s LiveCam. It was always pointed at the planet, and the feed was always in real time. It was uploaded by one of the Dutch science stations at the South Pole, and they claimed it had been one of only six web addresses they could still connect to. I’d been watching that when I hurled up everything and passed out on the floor.

Kassi had cleaned up my mess, a disgusting job I’m sure. Once she’d put me into bed (I didn’t remember anything other than feeling so cold I couldn’t feel my own limbs), she sat down and watched the video. It had started with a gorgeous view, the slow rotation of the planet below, the Japanese islands and their spiderwebs of light keeping the darkness at bay just coming into the camera’s range. For five minutes, the mesmerizing, beautiful display, as silent as the vacuum of space, had filled me with awe. The first flash to catch my attention made me go cold all over. The second one made me break out into a sweat. The third and fourth made my bowels contract painfully.

When the scene began to look like a tangled string of Christmas lights, I’d lost control of my body and slid from the chair onto the floor. Kass had made it past that, to where a blinding flash off to the left of the space station was followed by two more, the last one causing the camera to go dark for three seconds, then come back to a very grainy resolution for another ten.

The lack of sound made the experience even creepier, the constant flash of red light that crept around the edges of the camera ominous. A few more flashes happened as time went on, but as Europe came into view, the detonation flashes had been replaced by the massive glow of firestorms, plumes of smoke reaching more than ten miles into the atmosphere in too many places.

Less than a minute later, before the Americas were in range of the camera, it shuddered twice then began to flip end over end. Each time the camera flipped to the station, it showed a momentary glimpse of the mangled remains, some of it on fire, most of it shattered into eight or nine large chunks and thousands of smaller ones. It was hard to tell until later, when we’d watched it at least a hundred times, slowing it down, freezing it in every frame. The camera left wireless range twenty seconds after breaking away from the station, or maybe the station’s communications modules had been destroyed when the station broke apart.

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair.” I wanted to slug myself in the face for being an ass.

“It wasn’t fair at all,” she answered. “That’s why I’m so scared. We need a quicker… something. This is going to take too long. They’ll keep you in the game to fleece you, and when you get tired of it and want to move quickly, they’ll tell you all about how nothing moves quickly, especially not at the state level. Imagine how awful the national congress must be, lawdy!”

Her goofy voice at the end was exactly what I loved about her. Kass was just as stressed as I was. It’s pretty shitty knowing the exact date that the end of the world, at least the end of humanity and a good majority of the other life on the planet, would happen. Both of us had been running on nerves after the first few days of being shocked almost into catatonia. We’d had to lie, but only a little, to my parents by telling them we’d both gotten sick, probably from some take-out.

Every once in a while we’d have one of these kinds of moments where the pressure between us, or around us, felt like it was going to burst and bad things would happen. Then one of us would do or say something ridiculously stupid, and the bubble
would
burst, but with laughter instead of nightmare images of smoking craters and a dying planet as seen from space.

But she was right. The political angle was too slow. We didn’t have any other angle to work. We’d hit almost three hundred million dollars, but I’d decided to cool it for a while on all fronts. The entire country was spooked to hell already after five refineries were destroyed and the internet just happened to go down at the same time. The fiery podium speeches from patriotic lawmakers were frightening, as some of them didn’t seem to realize just how much they resembled Hitler giving one of his famous orations.

The Syrians did it. The Iranians did it. Hezbollah did it. The CIA and Homeland Security and FEMA and the Tea Party all did it. The lizard-aliens made an appearance. So did about half of the country, firestorms of accusations and defense of ideologies consuming social media like a wildfire in a dead forest. I wanted to get the same answers as everyone else did, but shit was getting crazy.

National ID cards, 24/7 drone surveillance, parking combat troops within city limits just as a visual warning. There was a flurry of bills before various committees in the House and in the Senate, an old, graying Obama scrambling to put out fires everywhere, violence breaking out in rural areas as well as the packed inner cities.

The only
real
consequence so far, other than law enforcement being extra itchy to shoot someone, especially if the someone happened to have darker skin than those making the laws did, was the fuel shortage. There were plenty of conspiracy sites that claimed, with much outrage, that the shortage was fabricated, that the country not only had more than enough in reserve, but had more than enough refining capacity left to not need such a rationing.

This was in addition to the outrage that all of the government contractors that had made out like thieves in the three wars we’d just extricated ourselves from in the Middle East were now making out like thieves again as they secured emergency contracts to rebuild the refineries, or construct new ones if that wasn’t feasible. My Fidelity account had been frozen twice in the last six weeks, both times a friendly government agent arriving at my parents’ house and verifying who we were, and how we had come about our money.

Kass and I both felt pretty sure that the suit visiting us each time seemed to be more interested in my parents than in us, even though we were the ones with the nine-figure bank account. I guess he figured that I was just another dropout that was too smart for college, and once I got some lottery money in a stock trading account, I’d done what all good geeks are supposed to do, which is
quite well
. The fact that every last bit of paperwork was legit and traceable probably helped, but that didn’t stop the guy from grilling my father the first time, a different suit working on my mother the second time.

I’d been scared to death the whole time that he’d suddenly let me know why he was
really
at our house, then pull a gun on me and force me to show him the computer. In my stupid fear-based waking nightmare, I knew he’d put the gun into Kassi’s stomach, or to her head, and threaten to kill her. Or maybe my mom. But neither had even looked around. My father and I were pretty sure that the government knew there wasn’t anything fishy going on, they just wanted to make sure we knew they were watching. It felt like some surreal 1984 shit, to be honest.

“Let me at least go meet these people,” I said, “see what they have to say. I’ve got my best bullshit filter active, and my anti-charm forcefield is at one hundred percent charge. When we get home, we’ll try to brainstorm some more. But this is the only real avenue we can go without either giving up the secret of the computer, or ending up in Guantanamo ourselves, and them getting the computer anyway.”

“There has to be something we can do,” she said, giving my tie another adjustment before smoothing the front of my jacket.

“There is,” I said, giving her leg a squeeze. “Go in with me. Be your smart, awesome self, but be kind of a bitch about stuff you know for a fact and can back it up with hard data if they call you on what they think is a bluff.”

“Fine,” she said with a sigh. “But only because you talking dirty like that means I might get something later.”

“Gross,” I said, getting a two middle finger flash in reply.

*

I knew within the first five minutes that I hated these motherfuckers. They treated me exactly as Kassandra had predicted. I was just a young, wet behind the ears trust fund baby, some little dipshit with a lot of money and a lot of tech know-how. Except I hadn’t built up an app service or dot com powerhouse then sold it to a global corporation for billions of dollars and a mountain of stock. So I was even one step lower in their eyes than a know-it-all college dropout tech wiz who’d become a billionaire in the corporate world. I was just a nerd that was good at picking stocks. I thought about looking up their deaths and then telling them in detail, but those dates would more than likely be the same as seven billion others: March 19, 2022.

If I hated them, they
HATED
Kassi. God, she was a bitch to them. Not that I could blame her. We’d never even breached any issues that we thought might be a foot in the door to the real meeting, where we’d grease palms, or at least line the pockets of their PACs in return for some promises of meeting others further up the chain, maybe even sponsoring some low-key legislation that would put a congressman’s name in the news.

The local Idaho news, but still… Idaho seemed like a backwards state, and it was anywhere outside of Boise, but we’d had our share of powerful senators like Frank Church. Of course, we had many more shameful ones, the gay encounter in an airport bathroom just one in a string of politicians that everyone outside of Idaho considered to be loony as hell.

One of the older men had made a sexist comment, and before I could grab her arm, she was already burning a trail into a heated argument with the guy, some no-name from Clark County. Then No-Name, instead of backing off and shutting up, insulted her with something along the lines of
make me a sandwich while you’re in the kitchen
. Now, he didn’t say exactly that, but he might as well have.

To Kass’s credit, she’d kept her cool just enough to shame the cranky old white motherfucker, but the rest of them clammed up quick. We were too young, too radical, we didn’t have the experience and the context of life that those gentlemen did. They’d learned over their long lives that change is a thing best left to long-term studies and small experiments for long periods of time until forgotten.

Or profitable. I had no doubt if we were here to talk about business, we’d be shaking hands over brandy and cigars. They would be falling all over themselves to negotiate a way to have a say in where a factory or store would be built, how many jobs they could claim they created for the state. How many of their buddies’ contracting companies could get the federal grants and matching funds from other various crevices of the black hole known as the National Budget.

But we were too radical for suggesting things like contraception for women, health care guarantees for the lowest income groups, raising the minimum wage to pull some people out of poverty. Kass had agreed with my original ten year plan, watching the world for a decade while amassing a fortune, then doing whatever possible, down to spending every last dime if necessary, to cure some of the greater ills of humanity. We both knew it was a grand, noble idea. We also were smart enough to know it was a stupid idea that would go nowhere, since there would be no world to make better after 2022.

*

“Those fucking… MEN!” Kassi yelled when we got back to the car. Shrieked would be a more accurate word. I couldn’t help but laugh. It didn’t make it easier to be serious as I imagined her kicking No-Name in the balls then doing a karate chop to the throat of Hanging Belly. “It’s not funny! They were fucking pigs, Tyler.”

“I know,” I said, trying to be serious. “You wanted to kill one or more of them. But we got somewhat of a foot in the door. As painful as it was for both of us.”

“All we got was a promise to donate fifty grand to four different campaigns that were on the block this November. They got their money, and they also got some dopey kid and his militant bitch wife on the hook to keep doling it out to whatever friends they can attach to us. They’re like fucking ticks. Blood sucking ticks.”

“I know it’s too slow. I know it won’t work. But what good is money going to be if no one is alive to spend it? Two hundred thousand is nothing. A scratch. A scratch that bought us face time with a finance committee chairman and a member that sits on the social services committee.”

“And what exactly has that purchase given us?” I could feel the anger still radiating from her. “What is it that we’ve bought?”

“I don’t know,” I said, hating to hear it come out of my mouth yet again. “But it means they won’t forget us,” I said before she could complain about me not knowing anything. “They’ll come knocking since they know I’m young and stupid and playing with throw-away money that I didn’t even earn. If it costs twenty million dollars just to maybe nudge the end date a few years, maybe that’s a few years all of the crazies will back off.”

“I love you,” she said, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek, her hand finding its way inside my jacket, fingers trailing across my expensive shirt, “but you’re pretty delusional sometimes.” She gave my nipple a slight tweak as she kissed me on the cheek again, then sat back in her seat, face forward, waiting for me to drive us home.