Sunset often made her think of the Spin. The sun had aged and expanded during the radically foreshortened years of the Spin, and although it looked prosaic enough in the western sky, that was an engineered illusion. The real sun was an aged and bloated monster, furiously dying at the heart of the solar system. What she saw on the horizon was what remained of its lethal radiation after it had been filtered and regulated by the inconceivably powerful technology of the Hypotheticals. For years now—for all of Sandra’s adult life—humanity had been living on the sufferance of those alien and voiceless beings.

The sky was a hard blue, obscured to the southeast by clouds like glassy coral growths. One hundred five degrees Fahrenheit in downtown Houston according to the weather report, just as it had been yesterday and the day before. The talk on the newscasts was all about the ongoing White Sands launches, rockets that injected sulfur aerosols into the upper atmosphere in an attempt to slow global warming. Against that pending apocalypse (which was none of their doing) the Hypotheticals had offered no defense. They would protect the Earth from the swollen sun, but the CO2 content of the atmosphere, apparently, was none of their business. It was, self-evidently, mankind’s business. And yet the tankers continued creeping up the Houston Ship Channel with their cargoes of oil, plentiful and cheap now that Equatorian crude had begun to flow from the new world beyond the Arch. Two planets’ worth of fossil fuels to cook ourselves with, Sandra thought. The car’s laboring air conditioner hummed a rebuke to her hypocrisy, but she couldn’t bring herself to forego the rush of cool air.

Ever since she finished her internship at UCSF and went to work for State Care, Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.

By the time she reached her apartment in Clear Lake night had fallen and the temperature had dropped a trivial degree or two. She microwaved dinner, opened a bottle of red wine, and checked to see if Bose’s email had reached her yet.

It had. A few dozen pages. Pages Orrin Mather had supposedly written, but she saw at once how unlikely that was.

She printed the pages and settled down in a comfortable chair to read them.

My name is Turk Findley, the document began.

Chapter Three. Sandra and Bose

CHAPTER TWO

TURK FINDLEY’S STORY

1.