With a counter in the bottom-right corner of the screen relaying that just four minutes remained until the moment of truth, the commentators in China introduced the final pre-launch commercial break. Unbeknownst to Dan, the upcoming two minutes would be the most expensive in advertising history by an order of magnitude. The reasons for this were manifold: everyone was watching the same thing at the same time, they were a captive audience, and — crucially — they were in a state of heightened anticipation which also heightened their susceptibility to the effects of advertising.
Of the four commercials which were broadcast to the largest audience in American history, three featured Dan McCarthy. Everyone around him cheered when his face appeared on the big screen. Dan had little more idea than anyone else what the ads were going to be like; he remembered his lines for each of the three, but they were nothing more than basic testimonials. Emma had seen the final cuts and told Dan it would be funnier if he didn’t know what to expect. He vehemently disagreed but had no recourse when she refused to budge.
The first of Dan’s three ads to air was for Mansize Clothing, a behemoth of online trading which catered to the big and tall market. Big usually meant fat, as Clark liked to remind Dan at every opportunity, but Dan’s height just qualified him for the lower end of Mansize’s tall range. In the CGI-heavy ad, a tall shadowy figure appeared outside Dan’s window in the dead of night.
“Clothes,” an alien voice croaked through the open window.
Frightened, Dan pointed to his drawer unit. Seconds later, shirts and socks and everything else began floating through the air and out towards the alien.
“Finally,” the alien said, its voice an octave higher and its tone much friendlier. “This is the fifth shirt I’ve tried on tonight. Everyone else’s were too small!”
“I shop at Mansize Clothing,” Dan said. The camera zoomed in on his face. “And so should you.”
Clark slapped Dan so hard on the back that it almost knocked him out of his chair. Dan instinctively thrashed an arm to smack Clark in the head, but Clark was already doubled over in a fit of laughter.
The next ad, Beanstox Coffee’s, was more low-key. Dan entered a quiet branch overlooking a meadow and sat down in a luxurious armchair. The table in front of him was scattered with newspapers featuring mocked-up headlines like “Aliens Real!”, “Shield Gets Go Ahead!”, and “Nothing Will Ever Be The Same!”.
A smiling female barista handed Dan a warm cup. He took a sip and revelled in the flavour.
“To your taste?” she asked.
Dan took another sip and looked into the camera. “Some things never change.”
The third commercial, to everyone’s surprise, was for Blitz News. It featured a rapid-fire montage of their coverage from the last five months, highlighting all of their exclusive reveals and blockbuster guests. “This is airing on ACN,” Emma whispered as the ad neared its conclusion. “Imagine how pissed they must be.”
This struck Dan as a stupidly expensive way for Blitz to get one over on their rivals, but it didn’t surprise him.
The fourth and final pre-launch ad was for Lexington Cola. Lexington were known for sparing no expense when it came to maintaining their brand’s position, so Dan expected something good. What he didn’t expect was for Hollywood megastar Kaitlyn Judd to appear on the screen.
The camera quickly panned right from Kaitlyn and landed on a football player that even Dan recognised. From there it continued along a line of nine genuine A-listers before landing on Dan. He hadn’t met any of these people in the studio.
“Taste both and tell us which you prefer,” a friendly voiceover instructed the celebrities, who were now all in one shot in a completely white room.
The camera zoomed in on Kaitlyn again. “Lexington,” she said. The other eight celebrities and Dan all said the same.
“There we have it,” the voiceover said. “Lexington Cola. It’s the—”
“Wait…” another voice begged. The camera panned right to show an alien standing beside Dan. It was a textbook Grey; head too big for its body, eyes too big for its head. “I prefer Pickerman’s Cola.”
“Get out of here,” Kaitlyn Judd called from the other end of the line. Her fellow celebrities joined in the heckling until the alien skulked away.
The triumphant voiceover returned: “Lexington Cola. It’s the best!”
For the final shot, the camera focused on Dan. “Ten out of ten earthlings agree,” he said.
Clark finally got enough control of his laughter to squeeze out some words. “You earned every fucking penny,” he said, setting himself off again.
The old drive-in’s big screen faded to black and the Global Shield Commission’s logo appeared for a few seconds before the live pictures from China returned.
00:01:49.
00:01:48.
00:01:47…
D plus 27
JSLC Launch Area 4
Dongfeng Aerospace City, China
William Godfrey cut a statesmanlike figure as he looked out at the Límíng module and the rocket which would imminently send it into orbit. It went without saying that this first launch would be the most important of all that would soon follow, marking a seismic shift in world politics.
Understanding the power of imagery, Godfrey had put his personal history with President Slater to one side and now stood at the building’s massive window flanked by the leaders of China and the United States.
These leaders’ unity had calmed their citizens, and the Límíng launch would settle the last few remaining nerves once and for all.
“Twenty seconds,” the media liaison officer said, for the benefit of the rocket-facing trio who couldn’t see any of the room’s large screens.
Godfrey took a deep breath. “The three of us standing here when that rocket takes off…” he whispered to Slater, sounding almost childlike. “It’s going to be some picture.”
He wasn’t wrong.
D plus 28
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
The rocket cleared the tower and began its ascent without incident, bringing excited cheers and applause from most of the crowd at the drive-in. For some, like Dan, the overwhelming emotion was closer to relief than joy.
A large cascade of fireworks erupted from Hawker’s Hill, inviting still more cheers.
“How long do we have to sit here?” Clark asked after another minute or so spent watching a rocket soar through a sky so clear that it almost looked like nothing was moving.
“Yeah,” Emma said, rising to her feet. “That’s pretty much it.”
Dan rose to join Emma and Clark. A particularly loud triple-booming firework caught his attention. But while Dan’s eyes were focused on the sky in admiration of the source of the bangs, his ears discerned what was by far the loudest and most synchronised collective gasp he had ever heard.
“No,” Emma whispered breathlessly, her eyes fixed on the screen. “No….”
Clark instinctively threw his arm around Dan and pulled him in close.
Dan had to manoeuvre his neck to see the screen. He immediately wished he hadn’t.
Because there it was, hurtling to the ground in the middle of the Gobi Desert: DS-1’s core module, engulfed in a stomach-churning fireball.
D plus 29
JSLC Launch Area 4
Dongfeng Aerospace City, China
In near-poetic contrast to the violent chaos in the sky, the world’s most powerful political leaders watched on helplessly from a room more still and more silent than anyone could bear.
William Godfrey stood frozen to the spot with his hands on his head. President Slater remained by his side, watching through her fingers. The sudden sound of sharp nasal breathing broke Slater’s focus on the sickening sight outside. She flicked her eyes towards Godfrey without moving her head and saw a tear trickling down his cheek. Without giving a thought to how it would look, Slater put a hand on his shoulder.
Godfrey didn’t recoil. His breathing slow
ed.
Slater left her hand there.
The silence and stillness in the room was then broken as Ding Ziyang decided he had seen enough and slowly walked away from the window, his eyes glued to the ground.
Jack Neal hurried over to Slater and Godfrey. “Damage limitation,” he told them, maintaining an admirable focus. “We need to get out of here right now and think about what we’re going to say and how we can come back from this.”
“Jack,” Godfrey sighed, finally turning away from the fireball to meet his eyes, “there is no coming back from this.”
D plus 30
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
“I have to see Miguel,” Dan said.
“We’re going home,” Clark insisted, leading him towards the car.
“Clark,” Emma said. “He said something weird.”
“Miguel?”
She nodded.
“About something bad happening?” Clark asked, already curious enough to have changed course.
“I think so.”
“There he is,” Dan said. “Miguel!”
The old man spotted Dan coming towards him. Before Dan even got there, Miguel was waving his hand horizontally in a clear “no” signal and repeating the same two words over and over again: no accidente.
“Terrorists?” Clark asked him.
Miguel shook his head and said something in Spanish, too fast and unfamiliar for any of them to understand.
“What does that mean?” Dan asked Sofía, vaguely recognising only Miguel’s final word.
Sofía repeated the Spanish phrase as a question to make sure she had heard Miguel correctly over the panicked muttering of the crowd around them.
Miguel nodded absently and said it again to avoid any doubt. Dan made out the same word — oso — but still couldn’t place it.
“What the fuck is he saying?” Clark snapped.
Sofía turned away from Miguel, flicked her eyes between Dan and Clark, and said the last thing either of them wanted to hear:
“We poked the bear.”
Part 7
Disaster
“All truth is simple...
is that not doubly a lie?”
Friedrich Nietzsche
D plus 31
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Within an hour of the DS-1 launch disaster, many of the media’s pessimistic pre-Disclosure predictions came true.
Dan McCarthy could only watch on helplessly from his couch as fear-induced looting swept the nation throughout the night. Bottled water, batteries, and ammunition — all of the things which had been temporarily cleared from shelves by eager buyers four months earlier — were now ripped down and fought over in crowded aisles.
Irresponsible news reporting of the first few such instances ramped up hysteria levels and encouraged copycat scenes across the country. Many large stores had already closed their doors to keep the mobs at bay, but this only served to agitate them further. Local police forces were quickly overwhelmed.
Blitz News devoted the left side of its screen to footage of looters in Chicago and the right side to the immeasurably more sombre scenes at the launch site in China. In passing, the anchor wondered out loud what kind of fallout there would have been had the launch failed sooner than it did and the blast or falling debris reached the onlooking world leaders. The only consolation that Dan or anyone else could take was that neither those leaders nor anyone else had been killed.
In that narrow sense, the DS-1 disaster was inexpensive. But in terms of international morale and planetary security, the cost was unprecedented.
The official GSC footage replayed endlessly. When this footage was slowed down, the entire screen flashed white for an instant right before the Límíng core module became engulfed in a fireball. For a single frame of the recording, total whiteness filled the screen. It might have been a camera glitch or some kind of feedback, but no one could be sure; the remoteness and security level of the launch site meant there was no amateur footage to compare it to.
Emma stayed with Dan and Clark as they and everyone else tried to make sense of what had just happened.
“Why hasn’t Godfrey said anything yet?” Dan asked after mulling over the data in Emma’s SMMA app and seeing that the GSC’s Chairman was still the most talked-about person in the world. “He just has to say that everyone is still committed to The Shield. Do you think the silence means that maybe it was… you know…”
Emma shrugged. “He can’t say anything official until everyone in the GSC agrees what he should say. And whatever actually happened, a lot of people will be saying that the next launch, if there even is one, shouldn’t be from China.”
“Wait,” Clark said, standing up straight and narrowing his eyes in thought. “Isn’t that a pretty strong motive for someone to sabotage the launch?”
This thought had already crossed Dan’s mind. “That site is probably the most secure place in the world,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s literally no way anyone could have interfered. It’s not even like this launch was an international effort; China had it ready to go.”
“I guess,” Clark said.
Emma searched her app for “sabotage” to see if any high-profile figures had shared similar suspicions. “It’s getting even slower,” she said as the loading circle spun and spun and spun.
TIMEOUT ERROR.
“That’s weird.” She tried again. Ten seconds later, the same message appeared. She closed the app and opened her phone’s browser. It was painfully slow, but her last-viewed site eventually loaded. “Internet’s okay,” she said. She then navigated to the social media site’s homepage, where desktop users logged in. The blue loading bar crawled, stopped, stuttered, and eventually reached the end. Nothing else happened. “It’s down.”
Dan checked on his phone, launching the regular app. “Mine too,” he said.
“Shit,” Clark said. “Has it ever been down before?”
“Not for more than a few minutes,” Emma replied. “And not since everyone started depending on it as their main method of communication.”
When the service failed to return within ten minutes or so, the news networks took notice. A full screen “RED ALERT” appeared on Blitz News, complete with an unsettling drum beat. The anchors casually tossed around phrases like “communications meltdown” and “digital lockout.”
Talk inevitably turned to the prospect of a massive cyber attack. “But it’s a little early to talk about this being the start of an alien attack on our core infrastructure,” one of the anchors said. She then added, with no hint of irony or self-awareness: “so we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”
“Could it just be overuse?” Dan asked.
Emma nodded and told him there was a chance that the situation wasn’t too unlike widespread outages in the early days of cellular communication, when systems would often die at midnight as December gave way to January and tens of millions of people in the same time zone suddenly tried to make calls and send texts at the same precise moment. The infrastructure was much improved since those days, of course, but the data demands and sheer number of users had also increased; and however much server redundancy was built in, no digital service was truly built to cope with everyone accessing it simultaneously.
The service returned intermittently over the next half hour. Each time it did, Emma saw post after post from users accusing the police of shutting it down on purpose as they had in localised areas during unrelated instances of organised looting earlier in the year.
These accusations, as unfounded as they were, only worsened the atmosphere in major cities and heightened tensions between citizens and the authority figures who they felt were failing them.
Disturbances in some cities escalated throughout the night as police reactions to the initial looting prompted angry responses. At this point the problems became self-perpetuating.
Shortly before 1am in Birchwood, the news coverage shifte
d across the Atlantic to report on the enormous queues which had formed outside banks up and down the UK. ATMs in many areas had emptied overnight, the reporter said. In case the snaking queues didn’t speak for themselves, he added: “more than just fear and uncertainty, these scenes reflect a sudden and perhaps justified lack of faith in our core political and societal institutions.”
“All our money’s in the bank,” Clark said.
Neither Emma nor Dan said anything as the reporter for Blitz’s UK associate began to walk the queue in search of someone who looked interesting. Two police officers stood outside this bank on the outskirts of Manchester, but the queue was surprisingly quiet and orderly.
The reporter settled next to a man and woman in their mid-to-late thirties, only seven or eight places from the front. “Can I ask why you’ve decided to withdraw your savings this morning?”
“We don’t have much,” the woman said, “but we have to have it.”
Her partner nodded. “Before the shit really hits the fan.”
The reporter gave a stock apology for the man’s language and quietly wished he had chosen someone else.
SHTF — an acronym typically used in discussions of potential apocalyptic scenarios in which the Shit might Hit The Fan — had been all over many of the night’s most shared social media posts.
Hearing the Englishman in the queue say it made Clark think of someone else. “Phil is into all that prepper stuff,” he said. “Phil Norris. He has all kinds of stuff stored away. You know, in case things really do go to shit.”
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