The Final Call

by Craig A. Falconer

  The ACN host reporter returned to the screen for her sign off: “And while few are seeking John Cole’s views on this first anniversary of Contact Day, with so much uncertainty about how this GCC-ELF stand-off will play out and just what would happen if the Messengers were to return… it’s difficult not to wonder what Dan McCarthy must be making of it all.”

  Trust me…, he thought, sighing as he positioned his body for whatever sleep it could manage, …you don’t want to know.

  V minus 87

  GCC Headquarters

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  At long last, the day had come.

  After the better part of a year of planning, almost all of it under the radar and much of it entirely secret, the day of William Godfrey’s formal swearing in as inaugural Chairman of the Global Contact Commission was finally here.

  Godfrey hadn’t had any formal say in the US security services’ sensible decision to close down Birchwood for the day to eliminate the risk of fatal overcrowding, but he was pleased with the decision nonetheless. With the key site of Contact Day’s ground zero out of the media’s reach, their attention had to turn somewhere else; and Buenos Aires was just the place.

  An altogether less welcome security operation at the nearby Gravesen hotel had threatened to derail the inauguration gala before it began, but Godfrey most certainly did have a say on the matter of whether the event should go ahead as planned and found ready agreement on this point from President Slater and his other key allies.

  When the show was as big as this one, it quite simply had to go on.

  Until at least the following day, the true nature of what was found at the Gravesen — and more importantly how it had been found — would be kept between those who truly needed to know. The items discovered in the room pinpointed by intelligence agents included an array of firearms and a flag proclaiming support for the risible GeoSov movement. Godfrey’s in-house security agents informed him of the discovery, revealing that intelligence pointed towards a foiled hostage-taking plot against President Slater and the Japanese Prime Minister, and his understanding was that no other leaders aside from Slater and her Japanese counterpart had yet been informed.

  Unsurprisingly, the scale of the early-morning security operation proved too vast to stay under the radar. As far as the media knew, though, it had simply been sparked by a tip-off about a potential time bomb planted within the hotel. The official line held that nothing had been found, with many reading between the lines to speculate that the GeoSovs themselves had called in a fake bomb threat at the Gravesen as a means of disrupting the day’s GCC gala given that several guests of honour were staying there.

  Now, well into the evening and with many formalities behind him, Godfrey was minutes away from the speech that would formally establish the GCC as the organisation through which many of the world’s most prosperous nations had committed to channelling all contact-related efforts.

  If the Messengers came calling within the borders of a GCC member state, or if a previously placed artefact was discovered, the matter would immediately fall under the GCC’s competence. William Godfrey, leader of leaders, would be humanity’s official point of contact.

  This in itself was not controversial; indeed, both direct polling and Social Media Meta Analysis had consistently highlighted Godfrey’s position as the individual deemed the second most appropriate representative of humanity in a future scenario involving direct contact. Godfrey knew that second place to Dan McCarthy was no bad place to be, even though he ultimately wanted to be in first position in the public’s collective opinion, and he took heart from the fact that he was head and shoulders above any other Western leader.

  Predictably, the data showed that citizens of many countries believed that their elected national leader should take the reins. This was less true in the United States and United Kingdom than anywhere else, due to Godfrey’s success in having positioned himself as a relatively safe pair of hands during his challenging stewardship of the GCC’s predecessor organisations. When the world needed to be united, Godfrey had done as good a job as the public seemed to believe anyone else could have.

  On the issue of future contact, however, global unity was in distinctly short supply. Feelings ran high in China in particular, where it was generally felt that Godfrey would always exhibit a Western bias and discount Chinese interests. Other nations felt similarly, with the Russian President stating that a new organisation with Godfrey at the helm might as well be called the North Atlantic Contact Commission and move its headquarters to Washington to be done with the charade of inclusivity. Before long, dozens of countries with strong economic ties to Beijing and Moscow had formally stated their collective concerns.

  Fortunately for Godfrey, he retained sufficient support among Western populations to win the backing of Western leaders, and he emerged as the clear choice in an advisory straw poll conducted at the first of several UN meetings dedicated to the new organisation’s formation. When Chinese Premier Ding Ziyang withdrew from the discussion process and stood alongside the Russian President to announce a competing organisation to be known as the Earth Liaison Forum, Godfrey didn’t blink despite the immediate exodus of several dozen other countries from the GCC discussions.

  Instead, he held the situation up to his increasingly tentative backers as an example of what would happen if they allowed their countries to be tied into an organisation with nations apt to behave in such a childish way. The Chinese and Russians had revealed their hand, he said, showing beyond doubt that they were willing to play geopolitics even over an issue as important as future contact. Godfrey warned that any contact-focused international organisation which included such countries, even if it was initially led by a Westerner, would ultimately fall into the hands of a spiteful individual like Ding. The strength of Godfrey’s words surprised no one given his historically proven penchant for controversial statements, but they did have the desired effect.

  His words echoed a similar concern which had once been expressed by Richard Walker himself. When discussing the possibility of a sovereign one-world government, the old stalwart had insisted that the Cold War had never ended in the minds of the enemies of freedom, and that any supranational institution would inevitably come to be led by an anti-American and Chinese-backed candidate — nationality irrelevant — propped up by the increasing number of small countries who found themselves dependent on Chinese investment and trade.

  Today, though, the grand top-floor conference room of Godfrey’s GCC building had been refitted to receive political representatives from the countries who mattered: those on his side. There were no surprising omissions from this list, with India being the only nation Godfrey had seriously hoped to be able to talk out of its misgivings. His failure to do so had the frustrating and damaging effect of meaning that the ELF’s affiliated countries housed a slight majority of Earth’s human population, dealing a blow to the credibility of his ‘Global’ organisation in the eyes of many.

  But the eyes and minds of citizens in all countries were currently focused on the right place — Buenos Aires — and as Godfrey began his slow walk to the podium from which he would address them he knew he had one man to thank for the fact that the entire inauguration hadn’t been derailed by a disaster that could well have torpedoed the good ship GCC before it even left the docks.

  Without Dan McCarthy, things would have turned out very differently.

  Godfrey was particularly grateful that Dan had raised the alarm despite having been treated badly by American agents, if reports were true, but the broader point that Dan had been contacted again raised a host of new questions and concerns.

  Resentment wasn’t quite the right word, but Godfrey had always been envious of Dan’s communicative relationship with the Messengers. Dan had fallen into his important role, Godfrey considered; greatness had been thrust upon him. He hadn’t spent decades doing whatever it took to climb a political ladder that ultimately led all the way to the top of the GCC, as Godfre
y had, and he didn’t even seem to want the power he had been granted, much less appreciate it.

  The silver lining for Godfrey was that if the Messengers’ favoured point of contact had to be someone else, there were seven billion worse choices than Dan McCarthy. For not only had Dan shared the message he received and in doing so prevented utter pandemonium, he had also kept it out of the news. When it came to the crunch, Godfrey was pleased that Dan knew how to handle things with their effect on long-term stability in mind.

  Admittedly, Godfrey did consider it quite probable that Emma Ford, a truly formidable PR expert, was behind Dan’s recent history of good decisions. He knew that Emma had likely convinced Dan to meet him publicly in Birchwood before DS-1’s lifetime-ago launch, and similarly to attend Richard Walker’s high-profile funeral where he and Godfrey had shared a fairly cordial discussion about how much they both detested the crocodile tears of most of the other attendees.

  Godfrey and Emma had clashed considerably during his time at the GSC, to put it mildly, but Emma had readily laid personal vendettas to one side in pursuit of the common good.

  In this way and this way only, Godfrey’s complicated relationship with Emma and Dan wasn’t too unlike his relationship with President Slater, another individual with whom he had engaged in brutal public disagreement before they agreed to bury the hatchet when it was in their shared interests to work together.

  This had never been more apparent than earlier in the day, when Slater made an executive decision to personally loop Godfrey in on exactly what had led to the discovery at the Gravesen. Before their mid-afternoon meeting, Godfrey had known only one thing more than the public: that a genuine GeoSov plot to take Slater hostage had been foiled.

  It was thanks to Slater that Godfrey knew Dan McCarthy had been responsible for the tip-off. It was thanks to Slater that he knew the Messengers were back. And given that the foiling of the plot had saved his GCC inauguration, Godfrey’s mind made the somewhat understandable leap to consider that the Messengers had just quietly chosen a side.

  When they wanted to come back for real, he now believed more firmly than ever that they would come to him.

  As a grandfather clock chimed on the hour, Godfrey reached his podium. Not quite nervous but certainly feeling a kind of pre-speech excitement he hadn’t experienced in a while, he took a deep breath.

  Today was the day William Godfrey had been born to see, and the Global Contact Commission’s was the throne on which he had been born to sit.

  The GeoSovs would be dealt with in good time and the implications of the Messengers’ apparent return would be debated long and hard in days to come as other key figures were looped in, but for now nothing else mattered.

  Godfrey’s stage was set, and the one thing he was not going to do was let anything else get in the way.

  V minus 86

  Sunrise Palace Resort

  Zanzibar, Tanzania

  Forty minutes before the sun would wake for the day and rise over the idyllic island of Zanzibar, Hassan Manula made his regular pre-dawn walk to the beach. This was no leisurely stroll, but instead a necessary part of his work at a high-end hotel patronised mainly by wealthy Westerners.

  Recent years had seen an increase in Chinese visitors to the hotel as well as the island in general, and Hassan had made an unprompted step to improve his standing among the hotel’s management by taking Chinese language lessons on his own dime as soon as this trend became clear. His initiative and commitment to self-improvement had impressed the management, quite likely playing a part in Hassan having survived a corporate restructuring which saw several of his long-term colleagues lose their positions.

  Through committed nightly practice Hassan had since become fairly proficient in basic Chinese conversation, at least of the kind that tended to arise most frequently between a hotel’s employees and its guests. He was also now acutely aware of how the typical needs and expectations of a Chinese family could vary from those of a Western family, to the extent that he had recently been asked to start conducting informal training on this very subject with all new staff arrivals.

  To Hassan, the Tanzanian mainland seemed like a far more understandable destination for tourists than the admittedly pristine beach; with its unrivalled safari opportunities, not to mention the dramatic star-capped summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the country had much to offer that nowhere else could match.

  With a private stretch of white sand as photo-worthy as any other and a location off the usual beaten path, Hassan could just about understand why guests chose the Sunrise Palace Resort over similarly high-end hotels in other parts of the world. What he had far more difficulty understanding was why anyone would pay that kind of money to lie on a beach anywhere.

  But, aware that he wasn’t paid to ponder, Hassan was very keen to get his work on the beach done before any early-rising guests arrived to secure their spots for a full-day’s relaxation of which their unbeatable sunrise view was an important part.

  Hassan knew from experience that some guests didn’t like to see workers moving the fabric-covered sun-loungers and heavily weighted parasols to their correct locations in accordance with tidal patterns and weather forecasts, apparently preferring to think they arranged themselves by magic; and with a sick father and a second child on the way, a complaint was the last thing he needed right now. Even as highly regarded as he was among the management, there was no room for any guest-relations problems.

  Shining a flashlight ahead of his feet to ensure he didn’t step on any wildlife as he crossed the short walkway between the hotel’s garden area and the immaculately maintained beach, Hassan reached into his pocket to remove the key he needed to get the first batch of sun-loungers from their out-of-sight storage locker.

  But as he walked along the white sand in anticipation of a straightforward but physically exhausting half-hour’s work, Hassan’s flashlight beam landed on something that reflected the light back in a way he didn’t expect.

  What the…

  Wondering if it was a piece of plastic film or broken glass, both of which would have to be dealt with immediately, he walked towards the item and repositioned the flashlight to scan the surrounding area.

  As soon as the beam moved slightly away from the sea and further up the beach, Hassan got a pulse-quickening sense of the scale of whatever he had stumbled upon. He stepped up his pace, hurrying towards the huge object, then stopped in his tracks when both its true scale and the extent of its reflectivity became apparent.

  Everything in Hassan’s mind told him to turn around and run — to tell someone what he’d found, and to leave it for the authorities to deal with. But something deeper, whether in his heart or his soul, implored him to stay.

  For several seconds, he stood frozen in indecision. He then took a bold step forward and continued until he was just a few feet from the enormous object.

  Hassan shone his flashlight directly downwards, revealing an incredible and consciousness-altering detail he had missed from further away.

  The sight caused another instance of momentary suspension, but this time — having seen what he just had — Hassan Manula involuntarily dropped both his flashlight and his key and sprinted for the safety of the hotel.

  V minus 85

  GCC Headquarters

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  “The road was long, but here we are,” William Godfrey began, proudly addressing a room full of political leaders and media personnel.

  The day had been long, with countless formalities and photo ops with various national representatives having driven Godfrey to near-exhaustion, but the main event had arrived at last.

  Going out live on prime-time American television, the GCC’s official inauguration was set to reach viewing figures unseen since Contact Day itself, when billions of awestruck citizens had rushed to the nearest TV to see aliens walk on Earth. Whatever the next few days might bring as the full nature and implications of the Messengers’ recent reconnection with Dan McCarthy ca
me to light — and particularly if it leaked to the public once shared among the GCC’s full membership — Godfrey knew that the speech he was embarking on now would be quoted for years and decades to come.

  “We are gathered here today to formally initiate the cooperative union of our manifold member states,” he continued, deliberate in his matrimonial tone. “We are gathered here today in the spirit of breaking down barriers and extending our outreach, not only among our once-competitive nations but also between our new collective and the extraterrestrial beings whose intervention secured our future one year ago today. Indeed, the GCC will serve as the focal point of contact between humanity and any other extraterrestrial races we might one day discover.”

  This implicit point that humanity’s prior contact with one race of aliens didn’t necessarily increase or decrease the likelihood of future first-time contact with another drew nods from a small group of guests whose presence pleased Godfrey greatly. And although Timo Fiore himself had chosen not to attend and was instead wining and dining at a Contact Day anniversary party in Colorado Springs, the presence of three senior staff from Fiore Frontiere — his privately held space research and exploration firm — was hugely symbolic.

  The staff in question were Alessandro Bonucci, Timo’s right-hand man, along with the far more famous duo of Louisa Conte and Fransisco Abate. The duo owed their immense name recognition to their official listing as the discoverers of Comet Conte-Abate, better known as Il Diavolo. Only they, Timo, and a handful of others knew that Alessandro had been the true discoverer only too keen to leave the dubious honour of naming a potential planet-killer to his more senior colleagues.