For today, with an apparently alien artefact having been discovered in an ELF-aligned country, the mood in China was very different.
More news crews were arriving by the minute, in scenes reminiscent of those Maria had encountered in Birchwood, Colorado when Dan McCarthy and the IDA leak had transformed a disused drive-in lot into the world’s most iconic media hotspot.
If her stay in Beijing ended up half as exciting as her time in Birchwood, Maria would be very glad she came.
And if what she was hearing about the Zanzibar triangle from her low-level contacts within the ELF turned out to be true, the ride was just getting started…
V minus 72
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“What do you want?” Dan spoke into the phone.
“Mr McCarthy!” Chairman Godfrey replied, his tone reflecting his pleasure that Dan had taken the call. “Before we continue, I should let you know that you’re on speaker-phone.”
“Why, who else is there with you?”
The world’s most familiar female voice answered: “Hello, Dan.”
Dan turned to Emma. “Slater’s there,” he mouthed silently.
Emma gave him an ‘okay’ hand gesture. She couldn’t hear the other side of the call live but knew Timo’s phone would have similar recording software to her own and that she’d be able to retrospectively analyse every syllable in due course.
“And we’ll get right to the point,” Godfrey continued. “I understand you rejected an invitation to appear on the live episode of Focus 20/20 this evening, and I’d very much appreciate it if you would reconsider. I imagine Billy Kendrick will make a fair fist of shutting down Cole’s nonsense, but he lacks a certain gravitas. Crabbe meanwhile… well, he can’t be relied upon to do anything. And needless to say, whichever GeoSov rat crawls out of a sewer to say their piece will prove to be an obstacle rather than an ally.
“One of Valerie, Timo or myself would gladly do this ourselves if we could,” Godfrey went on, “but as you might already know, GCC members are currently prevented from making substantive individual comments on anything within the Commission’s explicit remit. And in more general terms, we really don’t want this to become a shouting contest between the GCC and ELF. This isn’t about two sides, Mr McCarthy, this is about one planet’s security being endangered by two extremely foolish men.”
Dan felt like asking if Godfrey was talking about Ding and himself rather than Ding and Cole, but he left this disdainful thought unshared. “You know I made a decision to stay out of the spotlight and leave everything to the people who have been elected to lead,” he said, “and you know I didn’t make that choice lightly.”
“Dan,” Godfrey said, slipping into first-name informality in a deliberate attempt to emphasise his concern, “that ship has well and truly sailed.”
“He’s right,” President Slater chimed in. “And I know this is a lot to ask after everything that’s happened, but everyone would benefit from your appearance, Dan. Your presence is unifying in a way the rest of us can only dream of. I encourage you to talk openly about everything, including and especially your recent vision and the role you played in stopping a GeoSov plot that the rest of the world doesn’t even know we foiled. My only request is that you don’t mention what happened immediately following your vision, with the unfortunate actions of the ground agents or indeed the fact that they were alerted by a chip in your neck. As I said, that can be removed whenever is convenient, and if you are understandably concerned about further surveillance and by the security issues that might come with a re-heightened public profile, I’m entirely prepared to grant you full Secret Service protection. Your relationship with the Messengers makes your wellbeing a national security priority, Dan, and in a personal sense I’m very grateful for what you prevented. Whatever you want or need, consider it done.”
“Okay,” Dan said.
“Okay?” Slater repeated. “So you’re in.”
“I’m in. But Godfrey, don’t start thinking we’re on the same side here. I don’t want there to be two sides and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And regarding the triangle itself, I—”
“Good,” Godfrey interrupted. “And you can say anything other than what Valerie has asked you not to. You’re a smart man, Dan. I know you don’t want to bring unnecessary problems on anyone; least of all yourself. Godspeed.”
The call was terminated before Dan could reply. He didn’t like Godfrey’s use of the word ‘can’, as though Dan had somehow agreed to be bound by their conditions, but this was a small annoyance in the grander scheme of things.
“Excellent!” Timo cheered. “Dan, you are a good man and this is the right thing.”
Emma held her hand out for Timo’s phone. Dan handed it over, and she immediately navigated to a recording of the call. “I’m going to listen back to this and see what I can read between the lines, as well as what we can read into what they actually said.”
Timo followed her, with permission, just as keen to hear it.
This left Dan and Tara alone in the living room. He sat down on the couch next to her and leaned back.
Tara lifted her knees up on to the couch’s surface and let her tired and slightly hung-over head fall onto Dan’s shoulder as ACN filled the wall in front of them. Talking head after talking head appeared to say their piece on the possible implications of the controversial recent comments from the ELF’s leadership, and more generally on the organisation’s evident finders-keepers attitude towards the Zanzibar triangle.
“I don’t think you should be doing the show,” Tara said after a few minutes, sounding as if she didn’t want to say it — like she didn’t want to make Dan’s next few hours any harder than they were already going to be — but like she really couldn’t keep it in.
“Emma doesn’t usually get things like this wrong,” Dan replied.
“I know,” Tara sighed, looking up into his eyes with visible concern in her own, “but I really don’t like it.”
Dan tried to think of a reply that would ease Tara’s anxiety, but the truth echoed in the chambers of his mind too loudly to ignore, ultimately escaping of its own volition: “Neither do I.”
V minus 71
Seafront
Vila, Vanuatu
The morning had begun like any other for Liang Fu, and as 8am rolled around he was ready to head out the door and make the short drive to his workplace. A low-level diplomat, Liang had settled well in Vanuatu thanks to the tiny archipelago’s relatively sizeable population of Chinese workers.
Relations between the countries’ governments were ever-deepening, benefitting one economically and the other strategically. Liang’s work was purely administrative, but he had heard rumblings from some friends that a governmental building which recently closed for renovation had in fact been refitted as an ELF office which would be announced and opened very quickly.
The remarkable news from Tanzania — both the Zanzibar triangle’s discovery and the comments that followed about an expanded ELF presence around the world — certainly made Liang re-think his previous suspicion that his friends had been pulling his leg about an ELF office on the remote island he called home.
“Pin-Pin,” Liang called, encouraging Pinocchio, his large Alsatian, to come in off the beach so he could lock up before departing for the day. “Here, Pin-Pin, time to come inside.”
The dog didn’t come, which wasn’t unusual enough to worry Liang but was certainly enough to frustrate him. But when he stepped outside, all of his frustration immediately turned to concern.
To Liang’s horror, the typically water-shy dog was around twenty metres out to sea and still paddling away.
“Pinnochio!” Liang yelled in an altogether different tone. He removed his work blazer and took his phone and wallet from his pockets, running to the water and diving into the sea. “I’m coming, boy.”
The dog heard its owner and, as though soothed, made a slow 180-degree turn. Liang had hold of hi
m before long and hurried back to the shore.
“What were you thinking?” he boomed at the dripping-wet canine, as though expecting a response.
Another voice then filled the air, coming from the next house over as Liang’s neighbour and colleague, Zhou, sprinted from his home in pursuit of his own dog which was dashing towards the sea.
Inexplicably, the dog went straight into the water. Liang, already soaked to the bone, dived back in and recovered the much smaller dog within seconds.
“What the hell is going on?” Zhou asked, seeing that Pinnochio was just as wet as his own dog and had clearly done the same thing moments earlier.
“I don’t know,” Liang panted, exhausted from his exertions, “but I don’t like it. Go back inside and lock your door, Zhou… something’s not right.”
V minus 70
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
A piercing canary-like chime filled the living room within minutes of Dan’s eventual agreement to appear on the evening’s highly anticipated episode of Focus 20/20, the world’s longest-running current affairs panel discussion show and comfortably its most important. He could see that Emma had wasted no time in passing the message on to the network, and the instantly viral announcement came from the desk of the show’s much-respected host, Marian de Clerk herself.
Dan thought the wording was more befitting of a tabloid journalist than someone with de Clerk’s gravitas, but by now he understood how the media worked. Soundbites and punchy phrases were the currency of social media in particular, and this announcement was composed accordingly:
“Dan McCarthy breaks his silence — TONIGHT! Join me for Focus 20/20, live from New York, where it’s McCarthy vs Cole and the world will be watching…”
“It’s not really you against Cole,” Tara said, “… right? It’s more about you trying to, I dunno, contextualise Cole’s crap and calm everyone down?”
Dan nodded. “They’re just using the angle that works for them. But the point of doing this is to get people interested… and the more people who watch, the better it is, I guess. So if framing it as me vs Cole brings in even more viewers, it’s probably not a bad thing.”
Within no more than another twenty or thirty seconds, Clark burst in with a disbelieving look on his face. “What the hell is that?” he boomed, gesturing towards the trend-tracker whose counterpart next door had alerted him at the same time as the rest of the world. “Who talked you into this? Timo?”
“Emma did,” Dan said, telling the truth. He considered leaving it there, but in accordance with his continued drive against secrecy he decided to expand on what had come next. “Slater and Godfrey called to ask me to do it, too, but Emma had already talked me round. Cole is trying to drive the world apart even more than it already is, and the things he’s saying are going to cause riots all over the place because he’s blaming Godfrey for the triangle having to be kept from us. Remember all the first looting after the plaques came out, and then the much worse rioting when Cole leaked the news about Il Diavolo? We were stuck here, watching from the couch, hoping it would get better. This time I have a chance to stop things from getting that bad. This time everyone else is going to be on their couch watching me. TV is real life; everyone saw and heard Cole speaking from Tanzania and there’s going to be outbreaks of violence all over the world because of it. So when everyone sees and hears me coming at them with a different kind of message, maybe we can stop that violence before it gets out of control?”
“It’s not even just that,” Emma interjected, announcing her presence as she walked into the living room from her kitchen. “We live in a bubble, okay? And that bubble kind of makes us forget how important Dan is. Yeah, his words can calm a lot of everyday citizens down and hopefully prevent any civil disobedience that we might have otherwise seen tonight. But it’s deeper than that. He’s your little brother and he’s my fiancé, but to half the world Dan’s a messiah and to most of the other half he’s at least some kind of prophet. Those aliens saved us all because of what he told them, Clark… we can try to get on with our lives and pretend that didn’t happen, but it did. So if Dan says something against certain ELF or GCC policies, or even against the national policies of certain leaders, that’s a serious amount of pressure. Everyone is worried about protests and riots because John Cole basically just called for people to pressure their governments into abandoning the GCC. And Clark, that’s John fucking Cole… one of the most hated men in the world! So, hypothetically, if Dan was to call for real international unity and encourage people to protest against leaders who stand in the way, it would be a brave and foolish leader who doubles down against him.”
“Dan?” Clark said, one simple word all he needed.
“I don’t like it, but this is my calling,” Dan replied. “The Messengers aren’t perfect, but you know what they told me: ‘When we can help, we do what we can.’ And that’s where I am, Clark; that’s where we are. This is what I can do. This is all I can do. So whatever it achieves, I have to try.”
Clark knew Dan’s mind was made up; even if he’d wanted to, there would have been no sense in trying to talk him out of it.
Within little over an hour, and despite the news that Dan would imminently address the world after a year-long public silence, ACN and every other news network was filled with image after image of the unrest that had already broken out in multiple locations.
Surprisingly to Dan, the worst pictures so far were coming in from the UK. Throughout the British morning and early afternoon, demonstrators had clashed with police outside both the American and Chinese embassies. Many of the primarily young demonstrators wore T-shirts adorned with the ‘Now Now Now’ slogan made famous during the heyday of the Now Movement and its calls for truth regarding a perceived alien cover-up.
Both were protests rather than demonstrations, with one set of agitated citizens directing their anger at the self-serving GCC and the other at the self-serving ELF.
The flash dual-protest had been organised on social media at short notice, with participants being encouraged to attend at one location or the other based on the first letter of their surname. The protests were equal in size and reporters on the ground at both sites got very similar comments from the demonstrators they interviewed. The common grievance was that an international rivalry — petty in the context of extraterrestrial contact — was derailing what should have been another incredible moment for humanity, while simultaneously delaying the decoding of a message that could be crucial for all kinds of reasons.
One protestor at the Chinese embassy made this point in simple terms, stating that the coded message on the Zanzibar triangle could be just as important as the message on the fourth plaque, which warned of Il Diavolo’s approach.
Another common complaint in London was the invisibility of British Prime Minister David Hearst, who lived in William Godfrey’s pocket and had done absolutely nothing to tell the rest of the world that the GCC Chairman spoke only for his own interests — and certainly not for those of the country he had treated with the contempt of vacating his position not once but twice.
Pictures from southern Europe showed oftentimes serious violence outside American embassies and consulates, continuing a theme so recurring that few batted their eyelids.
The only protests which made it to Western airwaves from an ELF-affiliated country were those in India, where a vast proportion of the city-dwelling population had always felt their government had made the wrong choice in affiliating with the ELF rather than the Western-dominated GCC. Now that the ELF was in possession of a bona fide alien object and Indian scientists had been quietly frozen out in favour of a joint Chinese and Russian analysis team, this belief was firmer than ever. Indian police and security forces were ruthless in cracking down wherever anger arose near buildings of Russian and Chinese significance, and that these scenes of police brutality played around the world only increased the growing anti-ELF sentiment.
One large banner lay on th
e ground in New Delhi, catching the attention of a local journalist who managed to evade the authorities and film everything on his phone. The banner featured three words and one image. Two of the words were written in red circles and each was scored out like a cigarette in a no smoking sign: ‘GCC’ and ‘ELF’. A third word lay between them, above a low-resolution but unmistakable image of Dan McCarthy physically connected to one of the Messengers who conversed with him at the Birchwood drive-in on Contact Day. The third word was ‘Unity’, and it represented all that the protestors were looking for.
Dan felt sick watching it all, and tried to focus on the point that he was going to do all he could to cool things down before they got too much worse.
For the several hours until Focus 20/20’s 7pm start time rolled around, Emma ran through all the pitfalls that could emerge and generated a plentiful list of effective lines Dan could use to get around them. It felt like old times, taking Dan back to his first appearance on Focus 20/20 when Emma — then a business-only ally — had done the same thing in a studio in Amarillo.
Exhausted after two nights to forget, Dan was in need of some cosmetic assistance before facing the world through the Ultra HD camera attached to Emma’s computer. Tara assisted in this regard, covering up the circles under his eyes and picking out a suitably smart shirt from his wardrobe, readying his physical appearance while Emma focused on readying his mind and his nerves.
The violent scenes he’d seen on TV steeled Dan’s resolve and settled any doubts that he was doing the right thing. His old life was long gone, and his year-long attempt to bring it back had run its course. Dan McCarthy had never asked for fame, let alone the level that the events of Contact Day had brought his way, but after much deliberation he was finally ready to step into his new life with no more reservations, accepting the responsibility that had been thrust upon him and using his often-uncomfortable level of public adoration for good.
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