Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth Read Online Free

AND EVERYONE ON IT
     
     
    He wouldn’t say this later, because he’d be dead along with everyone else, blasted into a cloud of comparatively warm ash swirling around in what had been Earth’s orbital plane, but it wasn’t his fault. Really. Or, if there was any fault, it was that he was human in the first place, a species built specifically, it would seem, to push buttons clearly marked D ON’T P USH , a species that had only evolved in the first place because it kept reaching up to that next level of the beach instead of being satisfied with where it already was.
    Given the chance, of course, Billy Hanson might have blamed the political situation of the lab he was with on a three-year grant, a political situation which was purely typical of any money-driven research setting, and beneath mentioning here except to say that there was the usual amount of pressure to collect some data, which could then be cribbed down into a prospectus for an article, dropped into whatever mailbox was marked for the latest pickup.
    So, yes, had he had the luxury of time, Billy Hanson might have tried to shift the blame from himself, say it was the lab’s fault, the same way he used to blame his older sister for grape juice he’d just spilled on the beige carpet, but, at the same time, had he not destroyed the Earth that fine June evening, then of course all the acclaim would have been his and his alone.
    Because, almost on accident, he’d finally done it.
    Not scheduled some prime observatory time—that had been scheduled for months, by some process Billy assumed involved darts—but decided, half on a whim, to let the computer cycle the telescope through one of its lighter diagnostic routines, which involved settling its crosshairs on some arbitrarily-chosen but rigorously-mapped set of coordinates, so it could fine tune itself, compensate for continental drift, smog, and all the rest of the usual variables, then hum and mutter to itself in binary for a while, finally give Billy the greenlight to redirect.
    Which, to his credit, Billy Hanson almost did, thereby saving the Earth and everyone on it.
    Except—and this is where the political situation of the lab he was working with comes into play—instead of automatically redirecting, Billy first did a manual check of the computer’s date and time, as that was what was going to get stamped onto each image he was about to record. Last week, either as a joke or to maliciously corrupt everyone else’s data (the latter, surely), some joker who’d pulled an early AM shift had set the date back enough years that the days and month-numbers still matched up, meaning nobody caught it for about thirty-six hours.
    Luckily, nothing Billy had recorded that night was going into an article.
    But that was just luck.
    So, to be thorough—in a hostile environment, paranoia was just survival—Billy tabbed down to the clock, and, in doing so, happened to glance at the coordinates the telescope had already focused on.
    It wasn’t one of the naked-eye clusters.
    Billy thought it was a joke, at first. Another joke.
    It had to be.
    But his face, it was so hot. And his heart, there in his chest. And he was even crying a little.
    He had been right.
    To back up a little: eight years ago, Billy Hanson had been halfway through his first post-doc gig, and, following the advice of his dissertation director, was already sketching out a series of questions which he could then narrow down into a legitimate research proposal. The key of it, his director said, was that he had to come up with something revolutionary, or at least revolutionary sounding . Because all those boards of directors, they wanted to be discovering the next big thing. Failing that, however, at least give them the promise of a valiant, newsworthy effort, with a data set that could possibly be recycled, even, so long as their foundation’s name was still attached to it.
    So Billy gave it to them.
    His idea was that, if gravitational lensing was