Misjudgment Day by Robert Reed

* * * *
Our most prolific contributor, Robert Reed returns after a long absence (two months) with a tale of two brothers in a time of great changes. 
* * * *

Jake wasn’t any species of genius. Not like some people claimed to be. But without any doubts, he would tell the world that he was smart enough to get by. And besides, he’d never made the same mistake twice.

For instance, when Jake was eight and a terrific blizzard had blown through town, he climbed on top of the garage, dragging his little plastic toboggan after him. A neighbor lady spotted him perched on the windswept roof, and wearing only her bathrobe, she stepped outside long enough to assure the boy that his logic was flawed. But the snow looked so steep and smooth, and how could there be any danger when there was nothing to fall on but dreamy deep fluff? So Jake launched himself, and the ride was everything he imagined it would be. Sure, the landing was a bit rough, but a week of bed rest put him back into his old life. And wiser by a long shot, he liked to boast.

At fifteen, Jake borrowed his mom’s car, and with nothing in his wallet but fifty-two dollars and a learners’ permit, he drove out of state to buy boxes of fireworks from a one-handed fellow working out of a U-Haul trailer. His baby brother, Mark—who just happened to be a real genius, according to ten different tests—examined his purchases before grimly informing Jake that he was an idiot. The fireworks were obviously made in somebody’s garage or tool shed, which meant they were illegal and exceptionally dangerous. “You’re going to kill yourself,” Mark promised. Which was why Jake took precautions. He waited until it was late at night, keeping witnesses to a minimum. He filled one plastic bucket with water, in case of fire. With a second bucket, he built a launch tube to contain any unfortunate booms. And to hold that bucket in place, he lined the bottom with chunks of scrap concrete. In other words, the resulting mess was his little brother’s fault. Who knew that a single defective rocket could generate that kind of blast? Practically every window on the block was blown out. Plus the bucket shattered, and the concrete ballast became shrapnel, one exceptionally malevolent shard smacking Jake in the face and leaving his jaw pretty badly shattered.

But Jake learned from his experience, acquiring a powerful fondness for protective gear. Just short of twenty, he bought an old Kevlar vest from a friend’s uncle who once served in the Army. But what’s the point in being bulletproof if you never actually proved it? Ten different friends said, “No,” to his simple request. But his genius little brother was always the best choice. Mark was a crack shot and not even an occasional drinker, and all Jake had to do was lie, parading around in the vest, claiming that so-and-so was coming over with his deer rifle to pop him a few times.

“Not that idiot,” Mark said. “Christ, he can’t shoot. And a deer rifle is way too powerful.”

“So what should I do?” Jake asked, flashing a big, dismissive grin. “Got a better idea?”

Mark was a practical fourteen. “Why don’t you hang the vest on a post and shoot it yourself?”

“Where’s the point in that?” Jake asked. “Jeez, where’s the fun?”

“Don’t do this,” Mark begged.

“But it’s all set,” said Jake. “As soon as my buddy finds the ammo, he’s dragging his thirty ought six over here.”

“I’ll tell on you,” Mark threatened.

“Tell who?” Their father was long gone, and it was far too late in the day for Mom to rise to any challenge.

“Okay,” said Mark. “If I’m going to do this, I’ll use our twenty-two.”

“That pretty little lady’s gun?” his big brother teased.

“That’s the only way,” Mark claimed, trying to look tough. But he was still just a sweet-faced little kid, and both of them knew it.

“Well, then,” Jake said, trying not to laugh. “That has to be all right, I guess.”

The rifleman suddenly faced an enormous challenge. Mark wanted to be as far back as possible, to help cut the bullet’s velocity, but still close enough to be sure of striking the target. He decided on twenty-five feet, and he aimed at the belly, in case the bullet went wide. Which is exactly what happened. The boy was nervous, and his normally steady hands were jumping, and the little bullet accelerated to supersonic speeds, leaping across that tiny distance before striking his much bigger brother directly above his heart.

What Mark suspected and what Jake learned for himself was that even tiny projectiles can have a terrific momentum, and although Kevlar can absorb a bullet, it eats only a portion of the energy. Two ribs were broken with the impact, and the bruise was as ugly as any a grown man could suffer. Yet for the next several weeks, Jake would pull up his shirt and show his wound to everyone who expressed even a passing interest. And to his little brother’s horror, he found more than a few souls who were happy to agree with his boneheaded assessment—the wound was an emblem of fortitude and courage.

No, Jake never made obvious mistakes twice. But he had a narrow definition of what was and was not a boneheaded blunder. To his mind, there were no impulsive catastrophes in his life. None of the three ex-wives were errors in judgment, for instance. “Jeez,” he claimed, “I’d still go to bed with all of them. At the same time, if I could talk them into it.” He had at least seven kids, and each one was a blessing—though he never quite spent time with any of them. And all those bad turns involving jobs and friends were never Jake’s fault, but had more to do with lousy luck and other people behaving badly toward him.

To Jake, mistakes were spectacular events, like bullet wounds or a broken jaw. And because he had always survived his “little adventures,” including car crashes and a lifetime addiction to beer and boyish courage, he felt entitled to the confident, rakish smile that he wore almost constantly, even on his most miserable day....

* * * *

Jake was nearly forty when that most miserable day began.

By then, the world was rapidly going to hell. At what moment the process actually began, nobody knew for certain. Some experts would claim that it was a slow process visible in voting records and economic records, talk radio and all the other broad measures of society. But really, people have always been idiots. Just because the last three Presidents sucked didn’t mean there was reason to stand on the street corner, crying out, “Plague!”

For Jake, the plague began as a bunch of disconnected, barely noticed news items. One night, it was a story about some Wall Street guru selling half of his assets in order to try and corner the gold market. Another night, it was some nonsense about an Asian despot trying to sell his entire country—nukes, army, and cabbage—to Disney. Then five Congressmen suddenly changed political parties, one of them wacky enough to join the Libertarians. And finally the old Pope, conservative as a bullwhip, was giving a mass when he suddenly announced that he didn’t have the foggiest clue what God intended for the world.

But those were famous people, which meant they were all flakes.

What bothered Jake was a smaller story: Over the last six weeks, at least half of the world’s fighter pilots had been quietly grounded. Jake liked pilots, or at least he thought he would like them if he ever got the chance to meet them. He felt that he had a lot in common with the kid flying an F-18, which was why he took it especially hard when he read about the uptick in accidents, and worse, how all those high-trained men and women were suddenly making goofs while sitting inside their flight simulators.

Fighter pilots were just one of the high-end jobs that took an early beating. Some neurosurgeons and orchestra conductors showed a rather ominous decline in their performances. Paramedics and IT people had the same falloff, though their decline began several weeks later. Any task requiring complex decision-making was subject to failure. And that’s where Jake noticed the effects with his own eyes: He was presently working at the auto parts store, and the gang had a betting pool revolving around the NFL. On his Sunday off, Jake liked to drink beer and watch his games, and there was a particularly ominous afternoon when two of the most reliable quarterbacks in football history threw up six interceptions each, before halftime, after which their replacements made another eight or nine goofs on their own.

“Something bad’s happening,” people said on Monday. At work and everywhere, Jake heard the same black warnings. A voice on the radio was talking about how judges were making some crazy decisions lately, and all of the airlines were secretly testing their pilots for some undefined “failure of cognition.” And then came news about the breeder reactor in France that was shut down after an engineer decided on a whim to smack a certain valve with a pipe wrench.

Jake hated the news.

“Nothing’s happening,” he told the gang at work, even when he knew otherwise. “Every judge that I’ve ever met is an idiot. Believe me. And nukes are dangerous on their best days. And every quarterback has a bad game. Besides, it was the coaches who were calling those dumbass plays.”

“But that’s what we’re talking about,” said the new kid. He was a bright-faced fellow who read too much and thought he was smart. “Those coaches were part of the problem. Their thinking was impaired somehow.”

“Everybody’s stupid,” Jake declared, with an astonishingly hopeful tone.

“Car accidents are way up,” the brat continued. “Didn’t you notice? We’re awfully busy lately. Three hundred percent more wrecks and fender benders, according to the insurance companies.”

“I haven’t seen that,” Jake claimed.

But he had. And when he thought about it, he realized that he’d witnessed half a dozen wrecks just in the last couple months. None of them involving him, which was a nice change.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Jake told the kid.

“But I’m not saying it.” The kid punched up a set of different Webzines, each one screaming about a rise in human-made disasters.

“I don’t want to bother with this,” Jake said.

“But you have to.” A grim but pleasured look came over the kid’s face. “And you know what else they’re finding?”

“What?” Then Jake thought better of it. “No, don’t tell me.”

Too late. “Those pilots that are screwing up in the simulators? And everybody else afflicted? They’ve got another big thing in common. They don’t even realize something’s wrong in their heads. Even when they’re crashing into a mountainside, they keep believing that they’ve done everything right.”

* * * *

Jake went home that night all stirred up.

But his girlfriend would put him in a good mood, he knew. Her name was Sindee, which sounded just like Cindy, and despite that goofy name, she was always something of a rock when it came to opinions and commonsense.

“It’s nothing,” she promised. “So what if a few more people are having brain-farts? This isn’t going to make the world come to an end.”

Probably not, he conceded.

“Smart people are working on the problem right now,” she said.

Which made Jake wonder about his brother. What did the family genius make of this craziness?

“In another few days, I bet, everything’ll be fine.”

“Hope so,” he squeaked.

“Know what you need?” Sindee said.

“A distraction,” he replied hopefully.

His girlfriend nodded and grinned. And when the distraction was finished, he felt warm and good and lazy, and nothing was wrong in the world. Even when he heard sirens blaring in the distance, there wasn’t an ounce of worry left him, and he slept hard and woke up early, ready for whatever the day was bringing.

A funny-familiar noise was coming from somewhere close.

Where was Sindee? Outside, he realized. In the predawn gloom, she was working. Jake stepped outside the two-story house that they were sharing, finding his girlfriend dressed in her bathrobe and on top of a second-hand ladder. An exceptionally long orange extension cord dangled beside the ladder, and she was balanced on the rung just under the top rung, bare feet lifting so that her left arm could reach out farther, holding an electric leaf blower up where it could kick the autumn debris out of the rusting gutters.

Jake screamed a couple times before he was noticed.

It was still dark enough that Sindee’s face was barely visible. But he thought he could see impatience and maybe puzzlement with his puzzlement. She shut off the blower and gazed down at him for a moment, then very firmly reminded him, “If we don’t get these leaves out, we’ll have a mess later on.”

“Granted. But—”

“Jake,” she said, “I’ve got to do this.”

Then she turned the blower back on, and with a fearlessness that choked off Jake’s breathing, she leaned out into the empty air, pushing a few more brown leaves into a spinning, mostly useless motion.

The housecoat, the roof. The implicit danger.

This whole business looked awfully familiar. And not knowing what else to do, Jake backed off, trying not to distract the crazy woman.

* * * *

The morning news was full of statistics: Experts armed with graphs told how divorces had been on the rise for months, matched almost perfectly by the number of new marriages. Suicides and conceptions had doubled; murders had tripled; and curiously, charitable giving was up nearly five-fold. Nationwide, daily liquor consumption was reaching New Year’s Eve numbers, while recreational drug prices were spiking in response to the sudden demand. Yet at the same time, people were exercising more than ever—judging by the surge in sprained ankles and ruptured ACLs.

Jake dug out his brother’s phone number, but it had gone stale long ago. He wasted a few minutes talking to a woman named Florence—an old gal who wouldn’t stop jabbering until Jake admitted he was a Libra. Then he massaged his head, trying to dig up the name of that bio-tech company Mark worked for. It was a simple question, and for a terrible moment it seemed that he must have caught the disease. Why couldn’t he remember something so easy? But then the name popped into his head, which brought out a smile. And just then, a news conference started, the Surgeon General dressed in full uniform, marching out to tell people what was known and what wasn’t.

“This condition—it’s premature to call it a disease—seems to be limited to the judgment centers of the brain.” Cross-sections of a random head were thrown up on the screen, different patches of white circled and wearing complicated, useless names. “The decision-making process is being affected. But nothing else. This is not a sudden onset of Alzheimer’s, nor is it mad cow disease. As far as our tests show, IQ scores are unaffected. It’s just that the afflicted people are more likely to act impulsively, to feel no fear, and to make judgments before thinking about the consequences.”

The Surgeon General paused for a moment. Then with a tight voice, she admitted, “Our preliminary evidence is that this condition, while it has no known agent, is nonetheless spread like a cold is spread. Close proximity with an infected party is the surest way to see a transformation in behavior.”

At that moment, Sindee came strutting through the front door, limbs intact, smiling at her morning’s accomplishments. “Aren’t you going to be late for work?” she asked.

“I called in sick,” Jake lied.

“But you’re not sick,” she snapped. “What kind of attitude’s that?”

More than anything, Jake wanted Sindee to keep her distance. And since he couldn’t think of any other way to do it, he jumped up and grabbed his car keys off the hook, trying to slip past her.

“Where are you going?”

There was no point in lying. “To find my brother,” he said.

“Mark? I didn’t think you two talked anymore.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I’ve got questions to ask him. All of a sudden, it seems important.”

Sindee laughed.

“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” she chimed in, brushing the leaf litter off the front of her dirty bathrobe.

* * * *

Maybe the world was collapsing, but at least the ATMs were working and still stocked up with cash. And gas pumps took a credit card, and vending machines were stocked with pop and waxy chocolate donuts. The traffic was reasonably heavy, most of humanity apparently still needing to pay its bills. Jake drove just under speed limit, heading south out of town. For the first time in his life, he listened to Public Radio—a warm wash of smart voices describing at length how little was known, and how universal the disease was becoming. Most commercial air flights had been canceled. Travel was being discouraged, but for the moment, there were no official restrictions. Some voices wanted to close schools and ban all public gatherings. But other experts argued that it was too late to maintain effective quarantines, since whatever the disease agent was, it had already spread to every portion of the civilized world.

Then, as the station was dropping behind the horizon, one of the smart voices suddenly blurted out, “But what about our nuclear weapons? Are they being protected from us?”

Jake killed the radio. In its place, he played the same few CDs again and again. Johnny Cash and the Eagles carried him through the next two states. He filled his tank only at automated pumps. If he couldn’t find vending machines standing alone, he didn’t bother to eat or drink. Sometimes another car roared up from behind, but unlike every other day in his life, Jake would pull aside and let the speeder pass. In four hundred miles, he saw maybe twenty accidents—crumbled cars pushed to the shoulder, and once, a tipped-over semi abandoned in the median. But nothing seemed as dangerous or awful as he’d imagined. No amateur NASCAR races, or highways cluttered with survivalists breaking for the mountains. The bulk of humanity couldn’t have looked more ordinary/boring, spending its day traveling in the proper lane, holding to a mostly legal speed, with the conscientious drivers occasionally nodding to one another as if to say, “My head’s working fine, and I’m glad to see yours is too, friend.”

At three o’clock, Jake tested the radio again.

Apparently the President had just given a news conference. He heard the same few phrases repeated on every AM station. “Our medical experts are working on the problem,” said a sturdy, unflustered voice. “As a precaution, I’ve ordered our nuclear umbrella to be closed up for the time being. As our Russian brothers have done, for everyone’s sake.” Then responding to the most pressing question, the leader of the Free World admitted, “I am showing symptoms, yes. Moments of impairment, bursts of great bravery. But since I’m basically just a figurehead in this office, and everyone in the line of succession is equally infected ... for the moment at least, I’m making only those decisions I have to make, and only with the total support of everyone around me....”

The news dissolved into an ESPN sports show. For twenty minutes, Jake listened to a serious discussion about how the disease would impact next Sunday’s games. “We’re going to see simpler offenses,” he heard. “More instinctive defenses. And plenty of cops to keep rowdy fans in the stands, too.”

A rest area popped up on the right.

Jake parked as far from everyone else as possible.

Just to be safe, he walked off into the scrub woods to pee. Then with a leather glove on his hand, he fed quarters into a Coke machine, touching no surface with his own flesh.

Some people were like him, keeping to themselves. But others seemed resigned to the process, or lost. One old guy was bent over beside a long RV, hands wielding two different colors of spray paint. With a focus obvious at a hundred feet, he was painting an elaborate picture on the parking lot’s bare pavement. Jake walked close enough to satisfy his curiosity—an orange rose outlined in black—and then the fellow looked up at him, asking, “What do you think?”

“Pretty,” Jake lied.

“Not this,” the old guy said. “I mean the world. Think we’re going to make it through the night?”

“Sure,” he replied, feeling like he was lying again.

He drove the last couple hundred miles without a break. Only when Jake pulled off the Interstate did he seriously wonder if Mark still lived in this city. A public phone let him talk to a robot that gave him a wrong phone number. No one answered, but it was most definitely not his brother speaking on the voice mail. Was this just another dumbshit thing to do, driving all this way? Jake risked handling a beat-up phone book, thinking with every turned page that he was being exposed to trillions and zillions of brain-killing viruses. But he found the address for the tech-company, and after referring to the street map, he realized that he was just ten blocks from the front gate.

What was once a country club had been transformed into a corporate park. Armed security guards patrolled the tall iron fences, every one of their ugly faces hidden behind a white mask, helping accent the suspicious eyes. Jake did what he thought was best. He drove straight up to the main entrance and asked to see his brother.

“No visitors today,” he was told.

“But Mark’s expecting me,” he said. Then with an easy urgency, he added, “It’s personal stuff. About our mom.”

Their mother died ten years back, but maybe the brains behind those suspicious eyes would feel sorry for him.

A call was made, then a second call.

Finally the head guard returned, leaning down and telling Jake, “Your brother says, ‘Hello,’ but he can’t come out and play today.”

“He said that?”

“You’ll need to move your car, sir.”

“Tell you what,” Jake replied. Then he flung open the driver’s door hard enough to knock the guard off his feet, and into the sudden mayhem, he shouted, “Move it for me. Thanks!”

* * * *

“How are those ribs?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “They felt worse that one time ... remember...? The day you shot me...?”

They were alone in a large, well-furnished office. Mark was still a little poop, and he still had the young face. But he wasn’t exactly boyish anymore. He looked tired and embarrassed, pissed but maybe a little grateful too. Wearing a cumbersome biohazard suit, he seemed half again bigger than he really was. That suit must have been heavy and hot, judging by how he leaned against the nearest wall, taking a breath or two before asking, “Why did you come here, Jake?”

“Can’t you guess? To see you.”

“But why today?”

“I had some things I wanted to know. I figured if anybody had answers, it was you.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “It is a disease, Jake. Isn’t that what you want to know? A fast-acting microvirus that has no symptoms except to degrade four or five sites in the human brain, particularly in the prefrontal ventromedial cortex.”

“Where’d the bug come from?”

“I don’t know, Jake.”

“Did you invent it?”

“No.” The word was emphatic and defensive. Then Mark added, “There’s two or three bio-tech companies in China working with neuro-manipulating viral bodies. If I were guessing, I’d say one of their labs built this bug as part of some project, trying to get a different, better kind of bug instead. And then their monster got loose, or somebody released it on purpose—”

“Who in the hell would do that?”

Mark shrugged inside the big suit. “If I’m guessing? Probably some little lab tech passed over for a promotion.”

“But you’re going to find the cure, right?”

“No.”

“Not you, I mean. But somebody will. Won’t they?”

“My opinion? Nobody’s going to fix this condition. The damage is done, and it looks permanent.”

Jake took a moment to think that over.

“But we are lucky,” Mark continued. “The virus is showing no signs of mutating. Most of the brain is left untouched. Change a key gene, and we could have all gone blind. Or we might have forever lost our sense of balance. The world could be collapsing into a permanent state of schizophrenia, or hordes of zombies would be roaming the streets, eating human flesh. So you see, as these kinds of plagues might go, we are pretty lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“The power is still on, Jake. Governments and social services are still functioning. It’s just our individual judgment that’s taken a big hit.” He paused, and then said, “Jake,” a second time, sounding more than a little patronizing. “From here on, like it or not, most of the people in this world are going to behave a lot like impulsive fourteen-year-olds.”

Jake took another moment.

“Like your idiot brother,” he said.

Mark nodded. “The thought has occurred to me. Yes.”

“But who’s going to fly our planes?” Jake asked.

The question earned another shrug. “That’s easy. Every machine that humans have ever built has been engineered around human frailty. What we will have to do, starting today ... we’ll have to invest a couple trillion dollars making our planes and other toys safe again. We’ve got the necessary software and AI technology. And the same fixes can work for other human tasks, too. Surgeons will require robot helpers. New innovations will probably take longer, because it’s going to be hard for the best minds to concentrate long enough on the right problems. But that isn’t a world-killer either.”

“The government?”

“Will need new checks and balances. We can’t afford to have a President who gets pissed off at another country and goes to war without ninety percent of the Congress agreeing with him.” Then Mark paused and laughed softly. “But it’s going to be a more passionate government in the future,” he admitted. “And that could be a good thing. A great thing, even. This is going to be a world of fourteen-year-olds. The status quo will take a beating every day.”

Rubbing at his bruised chest, Jake said, “That guard who pounded on me ... is he infected...?”

“I’m sure he is.”

“But he was wearing a mask.”

“This isn’t a common cold, Jake. Microviruses don’t ride on fluid. They drift on the wind, and they’re far too tiny and tough to be stopped by just a simple filter.”

“Then why wear the things?”

“It makes our people feel better, I guess.”

Looking at his brother, Jake asked, “Are you infected?”

“I don’t believe so. Not yet.”

“How many others are here? Like you...?”

“A few dozen of us.” Mark lifted a gloved hand. “My shift had just started when we received a confidential warning from a colleague at the CDC. We immediately broke all contact with the outer world. Our labs are designed to be isolated, and those precautions can work both ways, of course. So as long as the seals hold, and as long as we can sterilize enough food and water and air ... well, we’ve probably got a few weeks, maybe even a couple months left....”

“Are you in charge?”

“What’s that?”

Gesturing at their surroundings, Jake explained, “This office of yours ... it’s really nice. I figured you’re the big scientist here, our family genius. Aren’t you pretty much running this place?”

Behind the transparent faceplate, his brother’s face colored. Then with a quiet, tight voice, he admitted, “No. No. What I am here ... I’m just a well-paid laboratory technician. And that’s all I’ll ever be.”

Here was news that took time to digest.

“You came a very long way,” Mark observed. “Just to see me?”

“I thought the world was coming to an end. And you’re my only family left. So yeah, I drove here.”

“How far, and how fast?”

Jake replayed the trip in a few sentences.

“Did you drink anything on the way?”

“Coke. Nothing else.”

“Get into any fights?”

“I behaved myself. And I can do that, regardless what you think.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“What did you mean?” Jake snapped.

Mark thought for a moment, and then said, “You should be infected by now. But we’ve been hearing rumors ... anecdotal mostly ... that maybe one percent of the general population is immune to the disease.”

Jake’s face grew warmer.

“Past damage to the limbic system seems to play a role.” Mark stared at his big brother with new eyes. “The thing is ... you’re pretty high-functioning, as these kinds of people go. You’ve never been in prison, and over the years, you’ve probably learned how to cope with your afflictions.”

“That’s a weak-ass compliment,” Jake complained.

“Here’s what I mean,” said his little brother. “Eventually, I’m going to get sick. I’m going to have spells of rage and impulses that might kill me. I’m going to have to deal with urges that I didn’t have even when I was fourteen. But you ... my dangerous sibling ... you’re going to be one of the steadier, wiser souls in our new world ... a source of advice and good counsel ... a man others will look up to for your temperament and your cool resolve....

“What do you think about that, Jake?”

He chewed on those words for a long minute. Then Jake rubbed his bruised chest one last time, rose to his feet, saying, “You look silly in that suit. Pull it off, why don’t you? Join the living, for a change!”