Age of Monsters by John Schneider (books to read for self improvement .TXT) 📗

fuse up there alone' – but plain old 'Major Tom' was the one he liked best – he used it as his call-sign.

Sometimes in the pure deadpan of the military, people would call him Major 'Major Tom' – he didn't know what he'd do if he got promoted.

Truth to tell, he never wanted to be – space was the final frontier, after all.  Any higher rank, he'd be looking at a desk job.

And pretty much anything would be a come-down after this.

You floated up here.

Last time down, he'd submitted to an interview – a pretty, perky, and painfully ambitious young reporter, who spoke her name like a catchphrase – 'Rebekah Adams, KAB News, Houston' – probably all of twenty-three.  Young Miss Adams seemed torn between producing a puff-piece and 'penetrating journalism' – acting out her own version of good-cop/bad-cop – tossing her blond locks like a runway model, while holding her microphone like a taser gun.

Reciting questions as if for a full-page in the Campus Confidential, this young reporterette, had asked if there was anything he missed on Earth.

“Nothing,” Tom had replied.  “When I'm up there, I don't care if I ever come back.”

In recent days, THAT little comment had come back to bite him.

The young reporterette had been on one of the last network feeds to go dark.

He didn't precisely know what had happened to her, but those last moments hadn't looked good.

None of it had – and he had seen it all.

That was his job.  He was the watchman – the Eye in the Sky.

The EITS space-station was a relatively new addition to the reinvigorated space-race – part of the new space military.  It had only been up a year, and was specifically designed for intelligence – possessing its own internal database that could theoretically access any outlet on Earth.

Major Tom was also currently the only human being in space.

The International Space Station was presently running on automation – debris from a Chinese satellite had compromised the structure, and it was scheduled for repair later this month.

Tom had actually picked up a lot of the ISS's duties himself, rerouting communications from other satellites – he'd actually been a little irritated, and had been hoping they'd be getting back on line sooner than later.

Besides the tedium, it was also a bit high-profile for the EITS – the buzz among those that talked about such things in the civilian sector, was that this was a communication/espionage project.  His perky little reporterette had asked a couple of penetrating questions along just those lines.

Tom understood the truth of it well enough.  It was not, in fact, an espionage project – it just absolutely enabled it – no, we're not listening in your living room – we're just setting up a bug so we can do it whenever we want – or clone any database we can tap into.

Obviously, he couldn't tell that to his oh-so-serious young interviewer, so he just talked about his daily duties – about fifty hours a week performing necessary functions – didn't really do weekends.

“What do you do the rest of the time?” she had asked.

Unable to resist, he had said, “Oh, I just like to tap into people's phones and TV sets – you know, watch what everybody's doing in their living rooms.”

Rebekah Adams – KAB News, Houston – had not laughed.  His comment proceeded to go on a rotating news-cycle for weeks afterwards.

Tom's commanding officer had actually, formally, ordered him not to crack any more jokes.

“Don't be funny,” he had said.  “The press does not have a sense of humor that we are aware of.”

Currently, however, this communications juggernaut was having difficulty raising a walkie-talkie.  That was a fundamental flaw – there had to be a signal to read, and it seemed that the grid itself had gone dark.

There had been a few initial reports coming in from Houston, but since then, the digitized communications channels had been gone.

One of the more commonly asked questions Tom had gotten about satellites was 'could they function in a crisis?' – specifically in regards to the world-wide web – the disaster-scenario being something like a global emergency.

Tom's personal pick as the best way to take out the digital-grid, would have been some sort of invasive super-virus, but the most commonly cited, of course, was always 'nuclear exchange' – and the potential electromagnetic pulse – the semi-mythical EMP.

His answer was always yes, the network should function – assuming the database remained, and every tower on Earth wasn't taken out too.

Remarkably, something very close to that seemed to have actually happened – everywhere, all at once.

Initially, he picked up a lot of extraneous images – mostly local TV and radio-stations – particularly in the sticks, where they were more likely to still be using open broadcast – although the bulk of these blacked-out quickly as well.

At the moment, he was trying to raise contact with one particular tower – a new installation just north of Eureka, California, built in conjunction with the launch of the EITS station.

Most of the towers that had gone down were in the urban areas – where the infrastructure had been the hardest hit – the Eureka tower was fairly remote.

But that too was down.  Tom didn't know if it had been destroyed as well, or was simply off-line.

As for what had happened to the world...

Well... the images he could get told him that.

At the very beginning, there had been news reports – he played and replayed images from all over the world.  From his vantage, he could see it all – he could collate it, even run graphics-extrapolations and simulations based on it – but contact with his chain of command was cut-off alarmingly early-on.

That by itself should have been impossible.  If they were broadcasting anything, unless literally