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now? Professor Moody here, at your service. Although I’d like to officially tender my request for a new assignment, preferably one more fitting to my profession.”
    Junior gets up off the floor and trots past us. I turn and see Jimmy standing behind us in the doorway.
    “You guys all right?” he asks.
    “Well, well,” the professor mumbles. “If it isn’t Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”
    “Who?” Hannah asks.
    He waves her question off.
    “Just some old story.”
    After introducing ourselves, we circle up on the floor and discuss our situation, passing a water bottle and a welcome bag of algaecrisps produced from a cabinet by the professor. He shifts between manic rants, which he quickly apologizes for, and depressing claims that we’d all be much better off if we’d drowned along with the others. And although it’s clear that he is slightly unstable, he proves very willing to submit, especially looking to Hannah for reassurance when answering questions.
    We tell him all about the wave and about Dr. Radcliffe’s apocalyptic doomsday plans, including flooding the Foundation, which happened, and flooding Holocene II, which didn’t. He listens and nods and seems surprised by none of it. He says the water should drain back to level in time, and that we need only wait. And he seems little concerned about the lack of power, insisting that the flow of electricity from Holocene II where it’s generated is constant, and that the batteries are capable of powering the Foundation for many years, even if there were an interruption. I ask why not use the dam for hydro power locally, which seems to impress the professor. He explains that it was used as such once, but that the turbines proved too costly in time and materials to maintain when the rail tubes between the Foundation and Holocene II proved to be a perfect transmission line for the power collected by us there from the Earth’s magnetic fields. When we begin debating the advantages of Magnetohydrodynamics over geothermal power generation, Hannah and Jimmy begin to moan with boredom until we move on to discussing our more immediate plans. That’s when I ask the professor how to stop the drones.
    “Stop them?” he asks. “Why?”
    “Because that’s what we intend to do,” I answer.
    He scratches his chin, lost for a moment in thought. Then he turns to Hannah.
    “Do you agree with this? Are you officially abandoning our mission statement?”
    “I certainly think it’s time to review it,” Hannah replies.
    He furrows his brow and nods.
    “Well, then, I never was a big fan of old Radcliffe’s radical ideas. I’m happy to leave the politicking to you three.”
    “But you did go along with Dr. Radcliffe’s plans,” I say. “You sure didn’t protest if you maintained the fleet of drones.”
    He nods.
    “I did, I did. But you might have, too. He could be very persuasive, Robert could. Especially if you were here to see the destruction and horror mankind leveled on itself.”
    “Still, how do we know we can trust you?”
    “Kid,” he says, sighing. “I’m really, really old, and now I’m dying. I don’t care two hoots what you do.”
    “Okay. Then tell us how we stop the drones?”
    “That’s no easy task,” he says. “We’ll need to wait for the power to come back on and reboot the system. Then we’ll see what we can do.”
    “But you’ll help us?”
    “Keep me off the shock table, and I’ll help you.”
    “Shock table?” I ask.
    “Yes,” he says, shaking his head and shivering at the very thought. “They claimed that it helped with my moods.”

CHAPTER 3
Sorry, Jimmy, I’m with Hannah
    The power does turn back on.
    But I almost wish it hadn’t.
    For three days, we collect bodies. The dead scientists float bloated to the surface, or are exposed trapped in their rooms as water is pumped away. Jimmy and I use the boat to patrol the underground bay in the dim, gray glare of LED lights, towing the floaters back to shore where