“That’s what they used to call the Fermi Paradox,” said Harry. “If there’s intelligent life out there, why haven’t they made contact? Well, the answer is pretty simple. Among its many other functions, the machine is also an interstellar beacon. The beacon was initialized to zero. It has just been reset to one.”
“You mean it’s been turned on?” Jon asked.
Harry came to a halt and gestured excitedly ahead of them. “There it is!” he said.
Jon looked. The rows upon rows of black slabs converged on a semi-circular open area where a geodesic dome rose up from the floor. The dome was opaque, its surface color vaguely similar to the crystalline slabs. In front of it was a bench that seemed to be made of the same obsidian-like material.
Harry moved more quickly with the bench in sight. But Jon held back, fighting a sudden rush of sadness. He had recalled an event from his childhood. He remembered visiting his grandmother in the hospital. She had looked so weak and tired. She had assured him when he hugged her goodbye that everything would be fine and that he could come to see her the next day. Upon leaving her room, he felt a terrible certainty gnaw away at him. He would never see his grandmother again. A very similar sensation engulfed him now.
When Harry reached the bench he turned toward his friend. “You’re going to need these,” he said, holding out a set of keys.
“What do you mean?” said Jon. “What are they for?”
“If you go back the way we came, you’ll find a platform that looks sort of like a metal life raft. Just step onto it, and it will take you up to the outskirts of Tartan’s Crag. There’s a car waiting for you there. When you start the car, a GPS I programmed will give you directions to the safe house I set up for you. The property is in your name. It has everything you’ll need. You’ll be sitting pretty while the rest of the world sorts itself out.”
“What about you, Harry? Aren’t you coming with me?”
Harry looked crestfallen. Jon had never seen him quite like this.
“No, I’m not coming with you.”
“What are you going to do?” Jon asked.
Harry stared down at his feet. “I’m going to upload myself into the machine,” he said.
“You’re going to what?” Jon shouted.
“It’s something I came to understand once I had access to the higher level directories. I can actually transfer my mind, my consciousness, all that makes me unique as an individual into the machine.”
Jon was stunned. For a moment he did not know what to say. “But what’s going to happen to your body?” Jon finally asked.
“It will be disassembled and stored by nanobots. If I ever decide I need to come back, it could be reassembled and my consciousness could be transferred back into it.”
“But why do you want to do this, Harry?”
Harry sighed. “My whole life I felt like I was in a box. It was as if the world was an iron prison and I had a life sentence.”
Harry sighed and gazed toward the rows of black crystalline slabs.
“I had a small taste of it in the beginning”, he said. “It’s really hard to describe. It’s beyond category. There’s an incredible feeling of spaciousness. You’re suddenly swept away to another plane where the horizon extends outward toward infinity. There’s a naked awareness and everything is seen in a clear light. Anything your mind conceives becomes a palpable entity and you can turn an idea about in time in the same way you can turn a three-dimensional model about in space. The knowledge of ten thousand worlds becomes an open book. I could learn more in an hour than I could learn in a whole lifetime in the prison of my body.” Harry held out his hand. “It’s time to say goodbye, Jon.”
Jon kept his hands as his sides. “You don’t have to do this, Harry.”
“Yes, I do.”
Jon tried to keep the emotion out of his voice but was only partially successful. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything, Jon. But please just listen to me. It’s my last chance to fill you in. I owe you that much.”
For nearly twenty minutes Harry spoke and Jon listened intently as Harry told him more about the machine and its makers. He also told him what was in store for the world over the next few years. Never before had Jon heard his friend hold forth so eloquently. It was as though it had all been written out in advance and then memorized.
When Harry finished speaking, he held out his hand again. Jon took his hand and drew him in for a hug. Harry seemed surprised.
When they stepped apart Harry’s eyes were glistening. “Jon, you’re the only friend I ever had, other than my father and Doug Sanderson.”
For a moment Jon thought that Harry would burst into tears, but he didn’t. He turned slowly away from Jon and sat on the bench facing the geodesic dome. As soon as he was seated he took a deep breath and folded his hands together. His spine was absolutely straight.
A light shone out from the dome and surrounded Harry. It danced around him as though it were a living thing. The odd patterns in the beam of light appeared to be the same ones that flashed across the surface of the crystalline slabs.
In the very center of the beam of light a helical pattern emerged, flashing across a bridge of clear light into the dome. The light grew more intense and Jon shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the beam of light was gone.
Jon gazed at Harry, still sitting on the bench. It was as though he had turned to stone. His body was rigid and completely motionless. Then something like a shiver rippled and millions of small gray dots swirled about him. Harry’s body began to dissolve, like a cube of sugar melting in boiling water. Within seconds he was gone. Harry had vanished completely.
Jon continued to stare at the empty bench, unable to absorb what had just happened. He tried to speak, but nothing would come from his throat. He coughed and tried again. “Harry?” he said in a high, reedy voice. No response. He was still surrounded by the eerie silence of the dampening field.
“Harry!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. The two syllables were clipped short and ended as soon as they left his mouth. Still no answer.
Tears ran down Jon’s face. There was nothing left for him to do except turn and walk away.
Chapter Forty-Four
Eight months had passed since Jon’s final conversation with Harry. Since that time the world had been turbulent place, to say the least. Events had occurred almost precisely as Harry had predicted, down to the last detail. Transportation had been completely disrupted. Oil prices had soared to unheard of prices and then fallen back to below the old market value as new energy sources began to replace the old.
The energy giants tried to use their enormous power to leverage events to their advantage, temporarily throwing other markets into a tailspin. Ultimately their efforts failed and their vast resources disappeared, almost overnight.
Politically, the fallout was even worse. Unstable regimes and dictatorships suffered the most. There was carnage in their cities and a total collapse of their economies. Democracies fared better as saner heads prevailed. After a temporary downslide into what at first seemed to be total economic collapse, a new entrepreneurial spirit caught fire. The money that had gone into exhaust fumes and enriched the coffers of the energy giants poured into entirely new generations of technology. It was a transformative event that could not be stopped.
The safe house Harry had set up for Jon protected him from the tumultuous events. Located about fifty miles from Tartan’s Crag, it was equipped with every necessity. It had complete energy independence and its own water supply. As usual, Harry thought of every contingency. The food supplies alone would last for years. In the basement, Jon found a pallet stacked six feet high with shrink-wrapped packages of hundred dollar bills. Next to this pallet was another of solid gold ingots, stacked even higher.
The house, set in the middle of a fifty acre lot, offered extraordinary views of the mountains and trails that ran through fields of mountain flowers. In the evening the nighttime sk
y was spectacular.
Jon and Lettie walked hand in hand down one of the mountain trails. They had been married for over a month. They did not speak, but each felt a quiet communion.
When they reached the end of the trail and the beginning of more rugged terrain, they looked up at the sky at the same moment. It was a deep indigo, like a velvet curtain.
“It’s hard to believe there ever was a place called HTPS Industries,” Lettie said.
Jon laughed. “I know what you mean. It feels so distant, like it all happened in another lifetime.”
“It was another lifetime. Life was never this wonderful.”
“Do you miss it?” Jon asked.
“Not for a minute,” said Lettie. “How about you?”
“Well, I miss Harry, but that’s about it.”
Lettie shuddered. “I still can’t believe he did what he did. It seems inhuman.”
Jon thought for a moment before replying. “Maybe what he did was trans-human.”
“Maybe so,” said Lettie. “But just think what he’s missing. He’ll never eat chocolate ice cream again.”
Jon laughed.
“And he’ll never experience this,” Lettie said, as she embraced Jon and kissed his neck.
Jon turned her around and kissed her lips. They clung together for nearly a minute before stepping away from each other.
Together they looked up at the heavens. Stars dotted the nighttime sky, winking in and out as the light cloud cover moved onward.
“Do you think there are intelligent life forms up there?” said Lettie.
“Definitely,” said Jon. He had not told her what he learned in his final conversation with Harry, thinking it best for her to adjust to events as they happened. Not only were there intelligent life forms up there, but they were almost here. According to Harry’s timetable, first contact was only days or weeks away.
* * * *
Richard H. Hardy was born in Glasgow, Scotland, during a week of relentless bombing raids just before the close of World War II. The day he was born an incendiary bomb fell on the church across the street from where he lived, so he is fond of saying that he entered the world with a big adrenaline rush.
His family later moved to England and then on to America.
After college Richard bounced through a series of temporary jobs as he traveled around the country, wanting nothing more than to write fiction. A job driving a library van allowed him free time to write several short stories and work on a novel.
He and his wife moved to New Hampshire, where he took an entry level job at a software company. He was soon promoted to the technical writing department and ended up producing over 500,000 words of online documentation. After a few years he was promoted to the programming department and ended up as the Senior EDI Programmer, creating EDI maps and writing UNIX scripts and troubleshooting on AIX systems throughout the U.S. and Canada.
After he retired, he started writing fiction again. The Infinity Program is his first published novel.
You can find Richard online at www.richard-hardy.com.
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