Sleeping Giants

by Sylvain Neuvel

  I don’t wanna talk anymore. Can you take me to see Kara?

  —I understand. It will only take a minute. You can ask any question you want afterward. It is important that you tell me everything that you remember.

  —Kara and I tried walking for the first time. We just wanted to get to the end of the room.

  —Yes. Your legs were weakening…

  —Oh. I told you…I…My left knee folded about three steps from the end of the room. Kara was quick enough to raise her hand to the side to stop us from falling headfirst into the wall. I fell forward, both hands on the console. It was the strangest feeling. When my hands pressed against two buttons, I realized we hadn’t tried that before, two buttons at the same time.

  I was getting excited and trying to calculate how many combinations were possible, when I realized I had a hard time concentrating because of the noise. I hadn’t noticed it a second before, but it was getting louder.

  —What noise are you referring to?

  —Hissing. The pitch was getting higher and higher. It was like a camera flash charging, only much, much louder. Then the hissing stopped.

  It was complete silence. Everything turned white outside the sphere. It got so bright we had to cover our eyes. After a second or two, I felt the room darken slowly through my fingers. I looked around. It was as if we’d been transported to another place.

  There was no roof anymore. I realized it was the sky above us. We were in the middle of a perfectly round crater, maybe half a kilometer across. Kara looked up; I saw the head tilt backward above my head. The ledge was at least five hundred feet higher than we were. There was a large plane, right on the edge. It was missing the tail end.

  My legs felt perfectly fine as I spun the robot around to take a look behind us. There was a large building that stopped where the crater began. Most of the lights were out, but we could see the neon sign from our bar. It was Terminal B, most of Terminal B. Minutes went by before Kara told me to look up. There were three or four helicopters circling above us. I don’t think they were military.

  —No, they were not. Those were television helicopters. Our little secret is now on every television station in the world. What did you do after you saw them?

  —We got out of our controls and sat on the floor in the middle of the room. Kara wrapped her arms around me and helped me lie down. We held each other for…I don’t know, it seemed like hours, without saying a word. I must have fallen asleep. How did we get down?

  —A Delta team took you down with a tower crane.

  —It seemed like a long time…I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. We just…I thought you wanted us to move faster. I thought Rose did too, but she would never say it. I don’t…We lost everything, didn’t we? All our notes, everything…I don’t know what to say. I’ll find a way to make this right. We can fix this.

  —I do not believe this, as you call it, can be fixed. We can only try to move forward from here.

  —The helicopters. Is that gonna be a problem?

  —Will it be the end of our project? I do not know. I know things will become…complicated.

  —Now can I ask where we are?

  —This is the base hospital at Fort Carson. You were flown here after they took you and Ms. Resnik out of the device.

  —I don’t remember flying. I don’t remember anything after we lay down on the floor.

  —They gave you a sedative. You were in shock. You became agitated when they tried to take you out of the sphere. They had to restrain you.

  —Where’s Kara? I wanna see her. Is she OK?

  —She is fine. She is in a room a few doors down, sleeping. She stayed by your side for a few hours, but she fell asleep in her chair. I found her a bed.

  —A few hours? How long have I been here?

  —About sixteen hours. It is almost dawn.

  —Wow. Where’s Rose? Is she here too? She was…She…

  —She was in the lab.

  —In the lab? The lab is…No! She wasn’t there. She went to get more cinnamon buns. She said she would.

  —She never left.

  —No! No! She said she would get more cinnamon buns! She went to get some. She said she would get more for Kara. You see, Rose and I, we ate all the pastries. Kara was mad at us. Rose said she would go and get some more. She wasn’t in the lab.

  —Mr. Couture…

  —Rose, she…She cared about the little things. She cared about us. She made sure we knew we were appreciated. Every day. Little things, you know. Coffee, cake. She found some Kinder eggs somehow. She knew they reminded me of home. She would drop one at my station every now and then.

  She could have left them in my locker, anywhere really, but she took time to take the elevator up to the sphere before I’d walk in, just because she thought it would make a better surprise. So, you see, she would have made sure Kara didn’t stay angry. She would have gone to get more pastry.

  —Mr. Couture…

  —She said…

  —VINCENT!…She’s gone.

  FILE NO. 211

  INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT WOODHULL, ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS

  Location: White House, Washington, DC

  —I feel as though I have been summoned by the principal.

  —The reports are in. I thought you’d like to know how much damage you’ve caused.

  —It was an accident, admittedly a foreseeable one, but an accident nonetheless.

  —Let’s talk infrastructure first. You have obliterated two buildings on Vandriver Street, just about half of Runway 17L-35R, as well as the east end of Concourse B. Fortunately, there were no planes leaving out of the east-end gates. They estimate the damage will be around 300 million.

  —I am not very good with numbers. I assume this is a lot.

  —How about this number, smart-ass: 311. That’s the number of people you killed.

  —How could there be so many? You said there were no departures in the portion of Terminal B that was destroyed.

  —There were only a few employees in the terminal: concession-stand workers, janitors, some ground crew on the tarmac just outside. Forty-two people in total, all of them Americans.

  There was, however, an Icelandair Boeing 757 on the runway when it happened. I think it goes without saying that all on board have perished, since the plane itself doesn’t exist anymore…The flight was almost full, 193 passengers dead, 6 crew members. Most were Icelanders. Icelandic? Anyway. Eighteen were Americans.

  There was also a Dash 8 taxiing to Terminal B, fifty-one dead. And you took out the tail end of a United Airbus 320, that’s another nineteen. They were lucky, only the last three rows of passengers were vaporized, along with one crew member.

  Three hundred eleven people in total, three hundred twelve with your scientist. One hundred nineteen Americans, about two hundred Ice…people from Iceland, two dozen Canadians, and a few people from nine more countries whose governments are publicly blaming us—rightfully so, I might add—and demanding an explanation. Some of them will get over it, but you can definitely add Iceland to the list of countries that want bad things to happen to us.

  —Do we really need Iceland on our side?

  —Well, we need someone on our side.

  —Perhaps.

  —That’s it? One snide remark about Iceland? No expression of remorse, no apology, not one word about the people you killed?

  —Could I erase 312 deaths with a few heartfelt words?…Then, no, I do not see the point.

  —It might make you at least appear like a human being. In any case, you’re probably the only person on the planet who doesn’t want to talk about it.

  There’s pretty much nothing else on television anywhere in the world. Strangely, most channels are going the human-interest route.

  —Why is that so strange?

  —Giant robot magically dematerializes everything for half a mile. I just thought…

  —People will not understand that part. Crying mothers are acces
sible. I find it rather typical.

  —Maybe you’re right. Heartbreaking stories though, you should hear some of them.

  Husband surprised his wife and three kids with tickets to Paris for their anniversary. There is a fourteen-year-old girl in Memphis who will die in the next few hours because the heart she needed was on the Dash 8 that vanished. Lots of twin stories, both twins on the plane, one twin on the plane. There was a young couple, coming home from Thailand, with the daughter they’d been waiting for…

  —You can stop. What are they saying about the robot?

  —Anything and everything. Speculations range from a giant Mayan statue to…well, to pretty much what it really is, but everyone is completely baffled by whatever made that hole. The best explanation they came up with so far is some amazingly fast cover-up on our part. The press is suggesting we somehow got rid of all the debris from a large explosion, in less than ten minutes.

  Regardless, we’re gonna have to come up with something. I’ll meet with the president this afternoon and figure out the best course of action.

  —That will not be necessary. The president already knows what he will do.

  —What are you talking about?

  —He and I met this morning and we are in agreement.

  —How dare you talk to the president without speaking to me first! I tell you what he wants, not the other way around.

  —You can take it up with him if you want. He was not, in any way, obligated to talk to me.

  —I will. As soon as this meeting’s over.

  —That will not be possible, I am sorry to say. He is in New York, meeting with the Security Council. He will make a public announcement this afternoon.

  —What’s the cover story?

  —There is no cover story. He is going to tell them exactly what they saw.

  —You mean he’s gonna tell the world that aliens left giant robot parts on Earth thousands of years ago, and that we’ve been secretly assembling them in an underground base, all in the hopes of keeping it to ourselves?

  —He will probably want to reformulate the last part, but if you turn on CNN at 3:00 P.M., that is more or less what you will hear.

  —He’s completely lost his mind.

  —He seemed coherent enough when I met him this morning.

  —He’s gonna sound like a goddamn lunatic!

  —Seventy-two hours ago, a giant robotic figure, about twenty stories tall, was seen by just about every living soul on this planet after it created a half-mile-wide perfectly spherical crater, obliterating part of Denver International Airport. What would you suggest? Routine military exercise? Weather balloons? I should also point out that the leaders of several countries already know that we did not build it ourselves since we had to steal the pieces from them.

  —He’s going to end his political career.

  —He is trying to prevent World War III.

  —Do you really think the other governments are just gonna say: “Oh! It’s an alien thing! Never mind, then. Carry on!”?

  —They will have questions, I have no doubt. They will want reassurances. But they will also have to come to terms with the idea that we are not alone in the universe. The president is hoping that realization is enough to bring everyone to some sort of agreement.

  —OK, so we tell the Russians, the Chinese, the French government. Why go the extra mile and tell the whole world? Don’t you think the population might react, let’s say, unfavorably to aliens and a giant government conspiracy to boot?

  —I do not believe the election is foremost in his mind at this juncture.

  —I wasn’t suggesting he might lose votes. I was thinking of something more along the lines of mass hysteria.

  —That will not happen. People have been sufficiently desensitized.

  —What?

  —Desensitized. Made less sensitive. People have seen too many alien movies to be completely shocked by their existence. You expose someone to something long enough and they become…desensitized.

  —We’re talking about the real McCoy here, not some guy in a rubber suit on television.

  —It does not matter. You train your soldiers to kill using video games. They blow enough people up on their computer and it becomes easier for them to kill with a real weapon. Why do you think your government funds so many war and terrorism movies? Hollywood does your dirty work for you. Had 9/11 happened twenty years earlier, the country would have been in chaos, but people have seen enough bad things on their television screen to prepare them for just about anything. We do not really need to talk about government conspiracies.

  —So what’s he gonna do?

  —My understanding is that he will offer a compromise.

  —Are you willing to share that thing? If they can’t have it, I don’t think they’ll let us keep it either.

  —That is what I meant by a compromise.

  —So we’ll share it with them.

  —Not exactly.

  —Then what? We’ll just get rid of it?

  —Precisely.

  —Seems a little stupid to violate every international treaty we signed, get a bunch of people killed, only to destroy the very thing we were trying to get. You’d be willing to do that?

  —I would not.

  —Didn’t think so.

  —In any event, I am not entirely certain that we could. Destroy it, I mean.

  —So what then?

  —My suggestion to the president was to drop it in the Puerto Rico Trench.

  —Where is that?

  —Near Puerto Rico…

  —Very funny.

  —It is the deepest part of the Atlantic, about five miles deep.

  —Could we get it back?

  —Not at the present. That is the idea.

  —You mean we couldn’t reach it if we wanted to?

  —We probably could. There are deep-sea vehicles capable of reaching these depths. James Cameron went 6.8 miles deep in a one-man submarine.

  —The filmmaker?

  —Yes, but “one,” “man,” and “submarine” were the important words. These are very small crafts, incapable of bringing back up anything that massive, even in pieces. We could reach it, but we could not bring it back. It is a solution drastic enough to meet the demands of our current predicament, but it is not a permanent solution. Someday, soon, new technology will exist, and we can revisit the situation.

  —…

  —You are atypically silent, my dear Robert.

  —You know what? I don’t believe you. You had me for a moment, but you’re not the type to give up on something so big so easily. No pun intended.

  —Dr. Franklin is dead. Over three hundred people died in Denver, and we are on the brink of a global conflict. Easily is not the first word that comes to mind.

  —See, I think you’re an arrogant, self-absorbed son of a bitch, but you’re also a cold, calculated son of a bitch. You’re the kind of guy who has backup plans for his backup plans. I don’t believe for a second that you’d walk into something that big without a plan B.

  —That is enough compliments for one day. I do have a plan B. Drop the parts in the Puerto Rico Trench and fetch them back in a few years when we are able to.

  —I forgot to mention, I don’t think patience is one of your best qualities, but whatever you say. Obviously, you wouldn’t tell me if you had a plan. What will you do with your team, what’s left of it anyway?

  —They will go back to their lives. Chief Resnik is already flying missions out of Lewis-McChord.

  —Wasn’t she grounded? Her file says she has a bad eye.

  —You should take another look.

  —You falsified her personnel file?

  —I did no such thing. Everything that was in her file is still there. Someone may, however, have gone slightly overboard with the black marker while redacting it.

  —How very nice of you. I didn’t peg you as a romantic.

  —I did not say that I did anything. I said “someone” may have. However
, I find it more productive to keep my promises. We may need her in the future, and I would not want her holding a grudge.

  —What about the French kid? I mean French Canadian…You know what I mean.

  —Mr. Couture, unfortunately, is on his own.

  —Not so romantic after all, I guess. After everything he did for you, you’re gonna send him back home?

  —It was his choice. I offered him counseling. I called in a few favors and found him employment at DARPA. He declined both. He is not in the best state of mind.

  —You think? Where is he now?

  —Probably over the Great Lakes. His flight left at ten o’clock this morning.

  FILE NO. 229

  INTERVIEW WITH CW4 KARA RESNIK, UNITED STATES ARMY

  Location: Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington State

  —How long has it been, Ms. Resnik?

  —Since we last met, or since Dr. Franklin died?

  —Would not the answer be the same?

  —Pretty much. And I’m sure you know the answer better than I do.

  —I meant to ask how long it had been since we last met. And I genuinely do not know. I would say six or seven months.

  —Nine.

  —I see you were promoted. I am happy for you.

  —I’m not…I barely get to fly since I made CW4. I spend most of my time planning missions. It’s funny, I never paid much attention to any of it before. I just went to mission briefings and I flew my bird. I never really thought about how long it took someone to work out all the tiny details of my five-hour flight. Well, now I know.

  I swear my head will explode if I have to spend another minute staring at a map. They’re all desert maps, too. I spend hours staring at gigantic beige pieces of paper, squinting to figure out if one little square is ten feet higher than the one next to it.

  —I take it you did not ask for that promotion.

  —God, no! They called me in one day and broke the news. They said I have good leadership skills. How does that make me fit to look at maps and weather reports?

  —People often confuse leadership with managerial skills. I agree with their assessment. You certainly have the ability to inspire people. Minutiae, on the other hand, might not be your forte. That being said, even if you are not the most organized person in the world, it would be a shame not to let everyone benefit from your experience and wisdom.