It was almost seven AM on the east coast, and the sun was not so much as kissing the sea as it was slobbering all over it, and the light lit upon die-hard joggers trotting along the shoreline, kicking up dust clouds and dripping perspiration off their noses; it would have been a peaceful scene, with its gleaming seashells and seagulls (who would have been pretty if only they weren't sea gulls) but for the atomic bomb that went off at 7:01 AM.
Major General Howard Cruntz was having a bad day. He was in charge of, among other things, storing leftover missiles from the cold war under a mountain in a remote corner of Colorado. Somehow, a particularly large and powerful piece of Uncle Sam's apocalypse delivery system was aimed at Rhode Island around three fifteen the previous afternoon, or so said the computers. A little before seven, it had somehow gotten fired at the aforementioned state, which was largely obliterated before its residents had any chance to wonder what had hit them. Someone had been horribly, unforgivably incompetent. Apart from any directly responsible parties, whom he assumed would be jailed if not executed or lynched, he knew that someone in the top brass would have to take the blame. Yes, someone's military or civil service career was ruined, and he desperately hoped it wasn't his. It wasn't, he thought as he stormed down a hallway trying to look busy, it wasn't as if I meant to shoot the thing. What has Rhode Island ever done to me? I'm not in charge of the computers. I haven't even looked at the launch codes in years.
He decided that one of the engineers or computer programmers, one of the scientists, had to be to responsible. It must have been one of those egg heads, he concluded and continued down the hall. Most of the computers got their original programing during the cold war, he remembered. Maybe those professors of computer engi-whatever can say someone who's been dead twenty years actually made this awful mistake. I guess people will be angry they didn't fix it, but at least they'll have some kind of excuse. He walked into his office, picked up a ream of blank paper, and stuffed it into files marked “classified” in large, orange letters. He walked back down the hallway, trying to seem like he was doing something to remedy this awful mess.