Sequence Six: Early Edition

The New York Horn had once had an editor-in-chief. The paper had also once had an ombudsman, separate editors for national news, international news, business, and entertainment, and a team of three in-house movie critics and four theater reviewers. Now, Producing Editor Gary Grace reflected in his usual sour mood, they were lucky to have a small staff of reporters, a single graphics guy, two photographers (even if they were at-will rather than staff), two sections editors -- news and arts -- and him.

Oh, and that six-person fiefdom of know-it-all, insufferably superior twenty-somethings under that snide bastard Nilsson, who headed up the paper's online division.

And, God help them, one more staffer: Giles DuBront, a cub reporter so dumb that in ordinary times he would never have been employed as a stringer, much less given a three-year exclusive contract.

But if DuBront lacked intellectual wattage, he made up for it, brainwise, with an unusual cortical structure -- so unusual that only one man (or woman) in two hundred fifty million were thought to possess it. Moreover, it was a trait that seemed to run in families... so if this new technology turned out to have any of the world-changing potential that some claimed it would, it was people like DuBront who would belong to a new dynastic class.

Grace sat down heavily in his creaky old chair, rested his elbows on his scuffed old desk, and folded his arms into an impromptu nest into which he lowered his throbbing head. God almighty, this job was getting to him.

It wasn't that DuBront was such a bad guy, Grace admitted to himself, as he tried to deep-breathe his way out of this morning's tension headache. The kid was nice enough, and he tried his level best. Every scoop he brought in gave him such a kick, such a hopeful surge -- clearly, he wanted to bring Grace stories that would do just what his uncle, Adrian DuBront, had promised to the paper's owners, the powerful multi-national cereal company Knobble Foods. Knobble had diversified into a number of different fields in the last twelve years, including telecommunications -- they had bought Dennimann Tech, the leading manufacturer of PCDs, and also purchased Twyduk StarSat, the communications company with the lion's share of contracts from government and private interests for communications satellite manufacture, launch, and ground maintenance. Part of that telecommunications acquisition push had included the takeover of Rythe Publications, Inc., with its slate of a half-dozen magazines, two softcover imprints, a highbrow literary brand, and, yes, The Horn.

One of Knobble's more recent acquisitions was Druther Electric, which included subsidiaries that manufactured electric cars, commercial drones, spy-flies and other monitoring and security devices, and Grueber Research Laboratories. Adrian DuBront had managed to hold on to his post as CEO of Grueber, probably because he had eighteen basic patents to his name and a lot of clout with the government. The grapevine had it that Adrian DuBront also had his fingers deep into black-box defense projects, with his company supplying any number of innovations and new gizmos for the armed forces and the NSA.

But DuBront also had a stunning new piece of technology that only people who were hard-wired in a certain way could use. He called it the Precogitator, though that, Grace gathered, was not the machine's official or scientific name, but rather a joking moniker that Adrian had come up with to give the machine a little panache.

The Precogitator didn't need panache, though. It needed to be put back into whatever technological bottle it had been coaxed from. Like all genies, of course, now that it was out, it was going to stay out; but at least the Precogitator was being used for profitable, and fairly constructive purposes, probably because no one in power really believed that it worked.

Grace had not believed it either, at first. A machine that allowed its user to see ahead in time, as much as thirty hours? That was incredible enough. But the claim that only a very few individuals had the necessary brain structure -- what Adrian DuBront called the precognitive prefrontal cortical nexus, along with an extensive glial structure all throughout the cortex and neocortex that allowed the brain to both withstand and decipher the machine's signal? That sounded all together too priestly, and for a society that had only thrown off the yoke of theocracy fifteen years before, anything that smacked of mysticism -- even scientific mysticism -- was instantly dismissed as bullshit.

Adrian DuBront must have approached his defense department overlords with his nutcase machine first, and been summarily laughed out the door, Grace reflected. He couldn't fathom how else the machine had been offered to Knobble's executives, who should have laughed also, but who had been persuaded by two things. First, Adrian DuBront argued, there was money to be made in celebrity scandals and big news headlines that hadn't happened yet, but that were about to -- meaning that the stories could be readied in advance, and the morning editions, ink still wet, would beat out the electronic outlets, bloggers, citizen journalists, and others who had been driving print journalism into the ground for years. In short, this was a way to restore newspapers -- honest to God news on paper -- to practical relevance, not to mention give it renewed buzz.

But the machine needed an operator, and the only person anyone knew of who could make it work -- other than Adrian DuBront himself -- was his twenty-one-year-old nephew. Hence, Giles and the Precogitator were a package deal.

Maybe, Grace theorized, it was all much simpler than that. Maybe Giles just wanted to be a reporter, and this was his uncle's way of forcibly carving out a career path for the kid. Adrian DuBront had a reputation as something of a wild card and an iconoclast: He'd probably do this for his nephew less from filial devotion than because it amused him. For that matter who knew whether Adrian DuBront had even clued the NSA and the DOD about his new machine? It was just as likely that he'd approach the suits at Knobble straight off the bat and cut the spooks out of the loop. He was probably getting a jolly old chuckle out of standing back, letting his machine dazzle the world, and watching to see how long it would take the brass and the black-ops chieftans to figure it out.

But it wasn't so amusing to Grace, who had to endure the horrible messes the kid made, and do his best to clean up after him. Most days, Giles wasn't able to pinpoint anything specific for the following day's news cycle; either he got vague stuff without any names or locations, or he got trivial stuff -- kittens rescued from burning fish farms, that sort of thing.

Other stories were juicy, but potentially libelous: Grace had declined to run the one about a senior partner of Lonchman-Drexler strangling his wife with her own garters after finding a cache of steamy emails between her and the chairman's chauffeur. The story had broken on all the online newsfeeds at around ten o'clock in the morning the day after Giles, eyes sparkling, had announced it. The Horn could have had the story out there at 5:00 a.m., and the Grace's enraged superiors were less than mollified when Grace pointed out the delicacy of the situation, and the potential for major legal trouble had they gone ahead with the story and it had turned out to be false.

Well, now, Grace's superiors had responded, Grace had seen -- they all had seen -- the Precogitator's efficacy. Grace was officially on notice not to let another hot story slip through his fingers. But the stories Giles could pull from the mists of time future were often so garbled or incomplete that what he brought them was useless, and on the few occasions Giles had managed to nail down a solid through-line, complete with names and other specifics, something had always gone wrong. Two weeks before, Giles had reported on an impending event that even Grace thought would be a surefire thing: An early-morning police raid on the home of notorious mobster Vincente Strubowskas. Between the files the cops pulled --�or, rather, would pull -- from the mobster's hard drive, the boxes of incriminating evidence they would retrieve from a false-paneled wall, and a roster of witnesses the FBI had already groomed for months, it looked very much like Strubowskas was going away for a long, time time --�or maybe even getting the M-wave, now the preferred method of delivering the death penalty.

Except things had not gone as predicted. The place raid was scheduled to commence at 7:30 a.m., when Strubowskas was supposed to be in a meeting with his top lieutenants --�that way, the cops hoped to nab the whole crew at a single go. But Strubowskas was two things: An insomniac who frequently rose as early as 3:30 in the morning, and a subscriber to The Horn. The above-the-fold front page headline of June 29 must have struck the mobster as being of especial interest, because by the time the cops arrived at his address, the house was a nine-alarm inferno and the mob boss was nowhere in evidence. By that evening, four of the six witnesses identified in the article were murder victims, and the other two were missing, presumed dead.

Grace was still trying to figure out how to handle the police chief, the D.A., and the DOJ's specially appointed panel. Worse, the Horn had not accurately reported the news: The paper had become world news over the embarrassing leak of sensitive, privileged, police-related information. This was singularly bad for the paper's image and stock, given how militarized American culture had become in recent years. Anything that made uniformed public servants like the cops unhappy was, in the view of a perpetually incensed citizenry, worthy of prolonged and public flogging.

Grace didn't see how anyone could have handled the situation differently -- they were all still just learning here, after all -- but the farrago counted as Strike Two in the eyes of the paper's higher-ups. Thank God he'd killed the story about the seeing-eye dog that had singed its fur on the Olympic Torch. The story had come true, of course, but Grace had the feeling the animal rights activists who had swarmed out of the woodwork would have pinned the animal's injuries on him personally.

The last thing Grace needed now was Strike Three, but he didn't see how to avoid it. This whole thing had been such a goddamned imbroglio from the first, how could it not end badly?

To top it all off, the kid was late reporting on what his session with the Precogitator that morning had revealed to him about the following day's news. Grace had caught a scant glimpse of Giles as he'd raced out of the office, crying out about a major scoop that he wanted to verify before he reported on what it was. Well, verification was good. Grace was all for verification. But if it was a good story, Giles was going to have to get the details reported within the next fifteen minutes, or he'd miss the deadline. With his luck, Grace reflected, he'd end up missing out on the biggest story of all time.

Little did he realize how true that sentiment would prove to be.

Six minutes later, Giles raced into the office, as excited as he'd been when he'd dashed away three hours earlier. "Hey boss!" he cried. "Boy, have I got a scoop for you!"

"Where the hell have you been?" Grace demanded.

"I was at my uncle's lab," the kid panted. "I wasn't sure about what I saw for tomorrow, so I needed to go see one of the physicists... and when I described what I saw using the Precogitator, he explained it to me, and it's even bigger than I thought it was!"

"Okay," Grace said, half dreading what he was about to hear and half hopeful.

"Well," the kid rattled, "you know about quantum theory, about how energetically speaking, everything in the universe has a ground state?"

"No," snapped Grace. "I am not the science editor. Not that we have a science editor anymore. I can't believe you know anything about quantum physics."

The kid looked hurt. "My uncle has been telling me about quantum physics since I was little," he said. "I'm not stupid, you know."

Grace maintained a loud and carefully noncommittal silence.

"Anyway, it does. The universe has an energetic ground state," Giles continued, enthusiasm rapidly returning to his voice. "And tomorrow afternoon, thanks to a totally random quantum fluctuation, that energy state changes!"

Grace scowled. "What the hell kind of story is that? Who cares?"

"It's only the biggest story ever, in the history of ... well... history!" the kid cried indignantly. "This is a sure thing, boss! This is the big scoop I have been wanting to bring you! This is gonna pip all those weasely little news feeds! It's the story of the millennium!"

"Kid, what in God's name are you talking about?" Grace demanded. "What difference does this energy state business make for anything?"

Giles rolled his eyes, and actually seemed to be counting to ten. Then he burst out: "You idiot! When the universal energy ground state changes, all matter is annihilated!It's the end of everything! Every sun... every planet... every galaxy... every speck of dust. God rolls the dice, they come up snake eyes, and it all disappears!"

Grace stared at Giles, stunned beyond speech.

"See? I told you it was the scoop of the century!" Giles said boastfully.

Grace continued to stare, speechless.

"So -- I'm gonna go write this up now," Giles added, with a happy, proud grin. "You watch, boss: The papers are gonna fly off the racks tomorrow!"

With that, Giles trotted out of the room, and Grace dropped dead.