wasn’t like some terrorist attacks, where it’s all whispers until they get footage; Fox, CBS, NBC, they all had people on the streets with cameras. They all filmed the smoke, they all got as close as safety or the police would let them. Honestly? For a second, it just felt good having something else to talk about. I know that’s an awful thing to say, but I had spent every minute since that first static wondering why I didn’t hear it, and this … It was something that I could relate to. I used to live in New York City, before I moved to Des Moines. I had worked there, and every bit of it had memories. And the bomb itself, I got that; I had been a street cop for a few years, back before the office job, before I knew what I wanted to actually do. I had worked bombsites, standing there, keeping the crowds back. I recognized the faces of the guys working the scene, in the background of all the footage. I was back in the bar, because I didn’t have anywhere else to be, but this time everybody was asking me questions, about protocol, procedure. Would they have known it was gonna blow? Max asked me. I don’t know, I said. How did it get through? Why didn’t they catch it? That was the biggest question; the next was about who was responsible, and I didn’t have an answer for either.
I hadn’t said anything about not hearing The Broadcast. I didn’t know what it meant, and nobody else would know either. Most people assumed that it was God, and I suspect that they wouldn’t have been thrilled that I didn’t hear him. I kept asking myself, if it was God, what did that mean? I’m not a bad person; I’ve never ruined anybody’s life. Mostly, I’ve stayed quiet, to myself. I had one vice, and it was nowhere near as bad as those some people who had heard The Broadcast were walking around with. I kept quiet about that, and concentrated on the bomb, and that filled about two hours, then the news cycle began flitting between the two: on the one hand we have a specialist telling us what the presence of a God might do to our evolution as a species, our progress; on the other, we have the shocking footage of the inside of the Apple Store, the hole in New York that left numerous people dead, footage of the smoke, the rubble, the bodies. The news channels flitted between the two as if it was a tennis match.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
We had POTUS ready to speak to the nation within the hour. I wrote the speech for him, because it had to be ready to go direct to air: we, America, have to stay strong until we have answers. The grotesque act of terrorism toward us will not go unpunished, and right now, we’re closing in on the perpetrators. We’ll do our best to keep you safe, America.
Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City
Leonard was furious, watching the President give that speech. They’re going to attack somebody, he said, they’re going to attack somebody, you just watch. I made him go to bed early that night, because he was so on edge, and he was making me irritable, but I couldn’t sleep because he wouldn’t stop grinding his teeth.
Mei Hsüeh, professional gamer, Shanghai
We went down to fourteen when we lost a Goblin Wizard called Stryfe, because he said there was something happening in New York, something about the emergency services. He was lucky we weren’t on a role-playing server. On those games, you even mention a real-world place, you can get banned, or at least shouted out of town. He quit halfway through killing the dragon, leaving us one healer down, but we weren’t angry with him. He told us that there was a bomb or something before he quit, so we knew what was going on a few minutes before the news channels even did.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
The most important thing is to keep control. In a situation where you could just lose it, where it’s ready to slip away at a moment’s notice, you cling on and pray. Straight after his TV statement we were in The Danger Room asking if there were any more coming; we had every informant we knew reporting in with what they knew. We have to know who’s responsible, POTUS kept saying, because this cannot go unpunished. He sat at the table as we all told him what we knew, and he acted like the sort of President you see on TV, gritting his teeth, his hands in fists on the table. Calm down, I told him. You can’t do anything if you’re this stressed. Somebody asked if we should get the Vice President along. Does he know about what happened? I asked, and they said that he did. Well, that’s good enough, I told them. Last thing we needed was him storming the hallways; that would have sent POTUS’ blood pressure through the damn roof.
We knew a lot about the attacks, because of the delivery, the trigger we found at the scene, the body. I call it a body; it was shreds of skin burned into the flame-retardant belt that the IED had been strapped to. DNA markers told us that the attacker was from Iran, or the region; we just needed to know who he was working for. Over the few years before Iran had become more of a problem, or their people had, the amount of smaller attacks attributed to cells started in the country had grown exponentially. Nothing serious – car bombs here and there, more threats than actual successful attacks – but Iran, they were the buzzword. Twenty years ago it was all Iraq and Afghanistan; now it was Iran. We didn’t announce where he came from. People were making assumptions, and they were assuming correctly, but assumptions were still far less dangerous than them actually knowing.
We had moved up to Orange alert as a reaction, without us having to even make an announcement when we heard The Broadcast, just in case. Then the bomb went off in Nevada, and the ones in Omaha and Baltimore, and before we could even breathe we kicked it up to Red. (But as the press pointed out, we’d never been at anything less than Yellow, not since we introduced the scale back at the start of the century, so it shouldn’t be a shock that we were so willing to move on it.)
Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia
We all had friends in the Nevada office; most of us used to work with guys who were stationed there. We didn’t know what they were working on, but as soon as it blew we were told that we weren’t to say a word to anybody about it. We were all under the heaviest NDAs that ever existed anyway, so it wasn’t like any of us were in the habit of casually speaking to the press. If anything leaked out of that administration, it was meant to. The rest of the stuff? It never made it to the public. When we saw POTUS making a statement a few minutes later, he said that the Nevada office was a basic science lab; he didn’t mention the links with the army it had. He might not have even known; so much was run without going through POTUS, so that he had plausible deniability. I mean, Jesus, stuff was run through with Brubaker’s knowledge, if it had the right clearance. Sometimes, everybody had to be kept in the dark. Even then, when everything was in danger of going to shit, the most important thing was that we kept our secrets in place.
Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC
We lost a town hall in Baltimore, a (mercifully near-empty) mall in Houston, injuries not deaths. And we lost a research facility in Nevada, so there were clean-up crews sent in to deal with that. Why those targets? We had no idea. The MO was different at each one, as well; if they didn’t all hit at the same time we’d have questioned whether they were even related. One of the joint chiefs suggested that whoever did the attack – meaning, the organization rather than the individuals – that they had been waiting for this, or that they were all in place already, waiting for something. If they were responsible for The Broadcast, he said, this was superbly orchestrated; if they weren’t, it was just incredible. We’ll worry about those, he said, and he put a staffer on it. They’ll need clean-up crews; you’ve got bigger things on your plate. I did.
We’re at Homeland Security Level Red, POTUS told the people, which means that there is a severe threat of terror upon our great nation. Our freedom is being threatened, but the terrorists will not hold us down. Until we have caught these criminals, we will not rest. He announced that the terror level changing meant that all forms of public transport were to be locked down; that all municipal