Chapter 7

Zachary was annoyed. Mom and Dad were completely ignoring him, leaving him strapped in this stupid chair. He let out a loud yell.

"Zack!" Alicia admonished him. "Do you remember your promise? That you would behave and be quiet for one hour while daddy and I work?"

Zachary sulked. Usually he didn't have to be here where his dad worked. Nanna would always take him to the park and get ice cream. But Nanna wasn't here today. That troubled him. He knew that Nanna wouldn't stay away from him if she were okay.

"Why is Nanna gone?" he asked. "She won't come see me!"

Alicia sighed. Zack was almost four now. It had been four years since she had been forced to deal with death. Four years since her younger sister, Katie was killed in some freak explosion in Albuquerque. There wasn't even a body to bury. The fact that one of her true family had actually died shook her more than she cared to admit. Now, her son's caretaker was dead – killed in a stupid accident when her bus fell out of the sky.

Alicia knew that, for her son's proper development, she should take the next couple of years off and raise Zack herself. That would surely lessen the blow of his losing Nanna, and establish a deeper bond between mother and son that she would need later.

That was actually what she and Walter were working on this morning – her 'unofficial' retirement. For the last year they had been discussing it, and she should have taken these steps earlier, but Zack and his nanny were getting along so well that she had been unwilling to break them apart.

Now, she had to rush things through, hoping that there wouldn't be too big a crash when she turned her proxies over to someone else. Walter, her husband, was as anxious as she that the turnover occurred smoothly, but he was relieved to know that it would be Alicia that directly guided his son's development now.

Finally, they were finished, and had gotten the responses they were hoping for. There would be some loss of capital during transition, but everything should stabilize at ninety-three percent, and then begin expanding again.

Walter leaned back in his chair and sighed in relief.

"Well, that's it," he said to his wife. "You're now officially unemployed." He smiled as he realized that, even 'unemployed', his wife controlled more assets right now than he ever would.

"Can we go now," Zack whined. "Nanna always gets me ice cream after lunch."

"Lunch?" Alicia asked, sitting up. "Who's hungry?" 'I may as well start now with this new/old role of raising babies.'

"Me!" Zack cried out, holding up his hand.

"Well, then," she replied, picking him up and kissing his forehead. "We should go eat, then. What would you like?"

"Hot dog!" Zack cried out cheerfully. "We always get hot dogs! An' ice cream!"

"He's going to be very spoiled for a while, I'm afraid," she apologized to her husband and the two attorneys with him. "Gentlemen, I bid you 'good day.' What would you like for dinner, my love?"

"Um, anything would be fine," Walter said, caught off guard. "Is the cook gone, too?"

"No," Alicia grinned. "I was just curious about how the system works. But never mind, I'll pester the cook about it. That'll be my job now – pestering the hired help!" She laughed and waved 'goodbye' to Walter with Zack's hand, then carried Zack out the door. The three men watched the door close behind her.

"You're going to have to tell her, Walt," his oldest friend, Amos McCain, told him. "She deserves to know."

"I know, Amos," Walter replied, still staring at the door. "I just remember the pain in her eyes when Ethan was dying. I don't want to put that pain back in her eyes again. I like to think that I rescued her from a sorrowful oblivion. But the truth is, I think she rescued me. She deserves so much more than I can ever give her, now."

The other attorney, Marcus Edda, cleared his throat. "I think, perhaps, she already knows," Marcus suggested. "I notice that it was your holdings she liquidated this morning. Her control was proxied out. She can retake it at any time. And if she decides to, she could still take control of everything you own!

"Smart woman," he continued, chuckling. "She didn't get where she is by being sentimental. Ethan Hedron may have broke her heart, but she managed to keep everything he controlled in the family – most of it going to their first-born son, Jacob."

"You seem to know a lot about her, Marcus," Walter said, a little too politely.

"I do, don't I," Marcus replied, amused by Walter's typically protective stand. "She has ambition. And even 'unemployed', she has enough controlling power to try for a seat on the Supreme Board. I've been studying her for over a year, now. I'm thinking of nominating her. If she looks as good in two years, I'll give her my support in her bid for the next open seat."

"Well, I see why she suggested you for her counsel," Walter said. "But what she did or didn't do today won't matter in a hundred years, so why make a fuss?" He sounded tired and wanted to be alone.

"You wouldn't have said that six months ago, Walt," Marcus said, rising from his seat. "I'll take my leave, now. I prefer to remember you as a fighter." He shook hands with Walt and his lawyer friend and walked out the door, cane in hand.

Alicia and Zack sat in the park at the edge of the pond feeding ducks. She watched as his tiny little hands learned to tear the thick pieces of bread into crumbs small enough for the ducks to eat. 'He'll probably live long enough to see the decline and fall of all humanity, ' Alicia mused sadly.

Alicia was one of the very few people who knew what was happening to their world. Her first-born daughter, Jacqueline Burke, was head of Camden Research and Development. Jackie kept her informed on events and new developments.

But this development was out of their control. The northern lights, the Aurora Borealis, were easily visible even from the well-lit streets of Washington D.C. at night. The life giving sun was constantly eating away at the protective layers surrounding Earth. In a hundred years, maybe less, it would be completely gone. In the last two years alone, about fifteen percent of the planetary population had become sterile. And new cancers caused primarily by the unaccustomed radiation were becoming more common.

The truth, she realized, could never be told to the general population. If that ever happened, civilization would vanish overnight and all that would be left would be burning cities and millions of dead bodies. That would happen anyway, eventually. The only way to survive the changes that were going on with the sun was to dig a very deep hole, crawl in and pray.

That was what she'd begun two years ago. The abandoned strategic military facility in the mountains of Colorado was deep underground and large enough to house a small city.

In another eighty years, Jackie had estimated, half the population would be sterile. The 'normal' life expectancy would be somewhere around sixty years, and civilization would be in chaos. In a hundred and fifty years, only people living underground and people like herself who could regenerate fast enough to counter the effects of the sun's lethal radiation would still be alive.