Excerpt

"My dad's a rock star, my mom's an astronaut on Mars, and once I get my master's in water chemistry, I'm going to apply for upper management."

Carmen Vincent forced a smile and hoped this response was snippy enough to end the conversation with her workmate Nora. The room was stuffy. She unzipped and pulled off her red hoodie and reclipped her ID badge to the front of her black T-shirt. The photo of her was off, making her skin appear a darker shade of brown. The photographer also hadn't waited for her to retie her ponytail. The poof of black hair made it look like she had just rolled out of bed.

Nora remained leaning in the doorway to the Ross County Water Treatment control room and didn't appear to be going anywhere. She was a tall woman, mid-fifties with a broad jaw. She had big arms and wide shoulders and Carmen wondered if she lifted weights.

Carmen shifted slightly in her chair to block the screen of her laptop.

Nora snorted. "The point of two truths and a lie is to only lie once. Come on, Carmen, lighten up. You're new on the night shift crew. The bosses don't care what we do as long as we pick up the phone before it rings three times."

As if to emphasize her point she produced a flask, took a swig, and offered it to Carmen.

Carmen closed the laptop. "No thanks."

Nora set the flask down in the center of the long table, rounded the workstation, and took a seat opposite Carmen. "Suit yourself. That's there when you're ready. Maybe after you've been a turd herder for a few weeks, you'll partake. Now go on, ask me."

"Ask you what?"

"Two truths and a lie, silly. I'll show you how it's done. Because no one working here at this hour has anything more than an associate's degree and I very much doubt the other stuff you mentioned. An astronaut as your mother? Hah, that's rich."

"I want to get started on my work."

"Nose to the grindstone, right? And I suppose you'll next say that your little laptop you have plugged into the router has something to do with our job here."

Carmen leaned so she could better see her workmate between the monitors. "All right, tell me. Two truths and a lie?"

Nora's face brightened as she reclined on her chair. "I used to teach surfing, I've never shoplifted, and I love my cat more than my husband."

"Hmmm, those are good ones. I'll say the one about your cat is the lie."

Her coworker shook her head. "Nope."

"Okay, then you've never surfed?"

Nora wrinkled her nose. "Used to daily when I was young. Taught at the JC in Honolulu."

"Well, then you're a naughty girl."

"Aren't we both?"

As her workmate continued to talk, Carmen got back on her laptop and opened the special browser that would anonymously connect to the sanitation district network. Within seconds she was online. The Ross County Water Treatment system had a fiber-optic connection running at top speed and was nothing like the pokey internet Carmen could access from home with its restricted content.

No one got good connections anymore since the Big Wipe.

Internet, mobile phone service, and GPS had gone away in one dramatic night of arcing power poles, exploding transformers, and green auroras filling the sky. It was the last day anyone heard anything from the Lunar Gateway, the space stations, or the Mars mission.

It had also been the last day of her mother's life.

Over the past two years no one would tell her what had happened. Carmen's lingering sense of dread was compounded by guilt. Her mother had sent a message three days before the Big Wipe and Carmen hadn't listened to it. Had been busy. Had been angry all these months since her mother's departure. And now even that final message was gone.

With the NASA servers fried, she could only imagine that the message had been lost forever. The promises from the space program's admins that her mom's voicemail and video mail would be recovered had grown repetitive and stale. The news blackout about the global catastrophe only made things worse.

The Big Wipe's Black Wednesday and Darker Thursday had become the Year of Blackout from which the United States and the rest of the world were only just starting to emerge.

And now the NASA admins weren't returning Carmen's calls or emails.

It was how people trying to hide things behaved. It was what criminals did. If what happened on Mars was an accident, then the agency needed to come forward with details. If all hands were lost because of a catastrophic event, the families deserved to know.

New messages? Zero.

Her spam filter had flagged forty-seven incoming emails from advertisers selling clothes and beauty products or scammers not in her contact list phishing for a reply because her credit card number was being frozen and "Immediate Action" was needed. Even with the internet on life support, spam was alive and well.

Meanwhile Nora continued to yammer.

Carmen's workstation monitor showed all the lights of a system running on automation that required little in the way of interaction. So she surfed. But thirty minutes of searching led only to the same dead ends she would reach when she could manage to get on to any of the meshnets or shortwave networks. These proved erratic in availability, as they vanished or got shut down as quickly as they'd show up.

The message boards that existed in the nooks and black corners of the web were full of the worst conspiracies and provided nothing of substance. Still, she browsed a few pages of thread titles just in case.

President Dragging Feet on Internet Restoration, New York Times Confirms.

United Nations Detonated EMPs.

Silver Surfer Caused Big Wipe. We All Know Who Comes Next.

And after two years everyone was an expert on coronal mass ejections and the Carrington Event.

Idiocy, rage, and so much distrust. Her cursory reading made her stomach hurt.

Still, there were nuggets that interested her, perhaps only speculation, but after being repeated often enough and lying fallow for so long they might as well be truths.

The order of the disaster, for one. Some smart people had figured out the timing of the Big Wipe. The moon, then the satellites, then most of the Western Hemisphere during the night. Much of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, which were enjoying daylight, had been spared the full force of the event, but that didn't save them as the wave of radiation bounced around inside the atmosphere with varying degrees of damage to electrical infrastructure. But they got it a fraction of a second after the dark side of the planet.

So if the Big Wipe was a solar event, how was that possible?

Eyes growing bleary, she navigated to the public news sites to scan for anything official.

The usual minor disasters and outrages ruled the headlines. But as for the Big Wipe, cable and radio news continued with their stock answers which only hinted at the greater conspiracy that the government didn't want to give the country back its internet. The world was on an information lockdown, and the Big Wipe stood at the center of the mystery.

And it was as if the world's space programs had never existed.

Her notification inbox went red. A new email.

Her hand froze on the laptop's touchpad.

Help me.

The subject line caught her attention but when she saw the sender ID she rubbed her eyes.

From: Sylvia Vincent.

Mother.

Her cursor hovered over the trash button. It was from her mom's email address. Somehow some virus had infected it. The last thing Carmen needed.

She deleted the message.

A new message appeared.

Help me. From: Sylvia Vincent.

She clicked delete again.

A third one showed up followed by a fourth. Next came a row of new messages with the same subject from the same sender.

Help me. From: Sylvia Vincent.

Carmen checked the box on all of them and dumped them into her spam folder. Considered the possibility that it wasn't a virus but some malicious prank.

Her sister, Jenna, was the executor of her mother's estate, but everything remained in limbo while NASA dragged its feet on the paperwork that would give closure to their loss. On top of it all, Jenna had her own problems and was always a week away from getting anything done. But if her mom's accounts still hadn't been canceled or her personal electronics were being accessed, Jenna needed to know. Passwords had to be changed before someone started opening credit cards in her mom's name.

Nora took another sip from the flask before setting it back down between them. Said something, but Carmen couldn't make it out.

"Please look at me when you speak," Carmen said.

"Oh, sorry. I said, 'Don't suppose you'll tell me what you're looking for online that you don't want anyone to see.'"

"Sorry, no. I'd just have to lie to you again."

This earned a laugh.

Carmen needed to contact her sister. Even as she reached for her phone to send a message, a text appeared.

Help me.

It had come from her mom's phone. Her mom's smiling face stared at her from the text message thumbnail. Then more messages arrived, her phone buzzing with notifications.

Nora craned her neck over her monitor. "Aren't you popular?"

Carmen muted her phone. This wasn't something that could wait for Jenna to reply to in the morning. She tapped her contact list and called her sister. The phone rang but Jenna wasn't picking up. It went to voicemail. Carmen ended the call and dialed again. She would keep trying until she got through.

She barely noticed when Nora got up and hurried past her. The entry doorbell was buzzing. Ross County Water Treatment received few visitors at night and no deliveries after hours. One of the techs had probably forgotten their card key and needed to be let inside.

As she began to compose a text message, Nora's bright voice called from the hallway.

"Carmen, these men are asking to see you."

Two men entered the control room. The first was a deputy with the Ross County Sheriff's Department. He studied his phone for a moment before looking straight at Carmen.

"That's her."