The reveal of the third plaque was less polished than the reveal of the first two. There were no countdown timers and no more specific timeframe than “within the hour.” Because of this, the sudden appearance of an image at the top of Emma’s news feed came as a huge surprise.
“Dan!” she said, clicking on the plaque to make it full screen and holding her phone forward so Dan could see it, too.
The voice on the radio simultaneously announced that the plaque had just been revealed and did his best to describe its two panels.
“That’s them,” Dan said right away as he looked at Emma’s phone. “That’s who we saw!”
Sure enough, the right-side panel of this new plaque contained a detailed physical representation of two aliens identical to those that Emma and Dan had encountered the previous day.
One faced forward, the other faced the side.
The alien facing forward held a plaque in its hands, providing a clear scale which allowed its height to be calculated.
Underneath the anatomical engravings, there was a small linear representation of the same alien solar system seen on the first of Kloster’s plaques. As before, New Kerguelen was underlined. This time, however, the planet found itself intersected by a crosshairs-like marking similar to the one which had caused so much fear by intersecting Earth on the second plaque.
New Kerguelen was also touched by a familiar dashed line. But in contrast to the asteroid-panic-causing line which touched the top right of the circle representing Earth at a 45-degree angle on the second plaque, this line touched New Kerguelen’s top left.
“I get it,” Emma said, relief coursing through her veins.
The panel on the left displayed four spheres, each next to a plaque. Below these spheres was a familiar linear representation of Earth’s solar system. Earth, predictably underlined, was again intersected by the crosshairs and touched by the dashed line.
Dan smiled. “Me too. It’s showing that they sent the plaques from New Kerguelen to Earth. Obviously everyone already knows that, but the crosshairs thing being on New Kerguelen too shows that it isn’t a threat… it’s just a mark to show that Earth was their destination. A destination, not a target.”
“New Kerguelen’s not real, though,” Clark said. He wasn’t being facetious, just thinking out loud.
“The real aliens live somewhere,” Dan shrugged. “New Kerguelen is just what people call the aliens’ home planet. It doesn’t have to be Gliese 667 Cc and it doesn’t have to be somewhere Kloster made up, but it is somewhere.”
With his eyes focused on the road, Clark tried to paint a picture from Dan’s reaction. “You think it’s enough?” he asked. “Will that really calm people down?”
“I think so,” Emma answered. “But they’ve got another plaque up their sleeve if it doesn’t.”
Dan nodded. “Minimal necessary intervention: they won’t tell us any more than they have to. But I don’t think they will have to tell us anything else. Remember when the first two plaques came out? Billy Kendrick said a hostile force wouldn’t tell us anything about itself, and people said the aliens hadn’t told us anything about themselves… not even what they look like. Well, now they have.”
“Yeah,” Emma agreed. “The dashed lines being at opposite angles really makes it look like they represent a journey, not an asteroid or an attack or anything else. You could make a serious case for the 280-year timescale being a journey time, which is what a lot of people were already thinking. Besides, context and timing are everything. I’d bet good money that this is enough to convince people there’s no threat, but like I said: they’ve always got the fourth plaque up their sleeves if it’s not.”
Clark was still unconvinced that the new plaque met the stated goal of appearing decisively peaceful, but Emma had been right on the button when it came to gauging the public’s reaction to so many events that he didn’t feel too worried. If she and Dan thought it would work, it probably would.
The immediate and hopefully representative reaction on the radio bulletin was positive. “Aside from presenting an incredible insight into the Messengers’ physical appearance,” the newsreader said, “this new plaque appears to suggest that the “crosshairs” seen on one of the initially discovered plaques merely marked Earth as their intended destination. The implications of this discovery could be extremely far-reaching.”
“I still can’t get my head around the fact that these real aliens are pretending they sent the two fake plaques,” Clark said.
“Walker and Kloster wrote them into a corner,” Emma said. “No one can change what’s on the first two plaques, so this is the best way out. It’s pretty much the only way out.”
Media outlets around the world rushed out features and articles on the new plaque as well as the woman who discovered it.
It was odd for Dan to watch on from afar as Martina Brunner fell under a sudden and intense media spotlight, albeit with none of the widespread doubt Dan had faced nor any of the character assassinations from the likes of Richard Walker or Blitz Media. Dan didn’t envy Martina Brunner’s position as the new media darling; he’d spent more than enough time under that microscope for one lifetime.
As he had for Dan, Billy Kendrick quickly rallied behind Brunner. Despite taking a lot of flak for being the most publicly insistent “hostility denier”, as some had termed it, Billy resisted the urge to say “I told you so” and instead called on William Godfrey and other world leaders to invest in peaceful space exploration.
Emma noted via her SMMA app that within the last hour, the percentage of Americans who supported an increase in GSC funding had fallen from 88% to 72%. More tellingly, only 9% of new posts on this topic within the same one-hour timeframe had been supportive of an increase. She expected the overall figure to plummet below 50% in no time.
William Godfrey, still in China, was yet to a make an official comment. News sources suggested that he was “aware of and encouraged by” the recent developments, and Emma knew this wouldn’t have leaked out if Godfrey didn’t want it to. The fact that even Godfrey seemed swayed by the new plaque was the best news she could have heard.
Emma clicked out of her SMAA app and checked her recent calls. “Woah. My phone is going crazy with people looking for interviews,” she said. “ACN, Blitz, everyone. Do you want to do a sit-down with Maria tomorrow or will I just try to content them with a statement?”
“Why not gather everyone at the drive-in one last time, say something, and that’ll be it,” Clark suggested. “Draw a line under everything.”
“Dan?” Emma asked.
He nodded semi-committally. “If you think it would be for the best.”
“I do. And I’ll be right beside you, like always.”
“You better call Phil,” Clark said. “It’s not an empty lot anymore, so he’ll have to stop customers from parking in front of the screen like he did for the launch.”
Emma called Phil Norris as Clark suggested and asked if he would be on board for “one last hurrah” at the old media outpost.
“When are we talking?” Phil asked.
Emma looked at the GPS to see how far they were from Birchwood. “Uh, just over an hour.”
“I didn’t think you meant today! Jeez. I could maybe clear half the lot…”
“As long as it’s the screen’s half.”
“I’ll try. Pretty short notice for the press, though. You want me to let ordinary folks in this time to swell the numbers?”
“Good idea,” Emma said. She turned to Dan and whispered: “What else do we need?”
“We need Trey,” he answered, loudly enough for Phil to hear. “For the projector and everything.”
“You got his number?” Phil asked.
“We’ll take care of it from here,” Emma said. “Thanks.”
Dan then proceeded to call Trey personally, apologising for bothering him at home and for making such a big request at such short notice. Trey, as excited by the news from Austria as anyone, said he could set e
verything up in no time.
An hour or so later, with Dan half-paying attention to the passing scenery just a few miles from Birchwood, Clark took an early turn off the main road.
“Uh, Clark,” Emma said, looking up from her phone. “Where are you—”
Emma cut herself off as she realised which narrow road they were now driving along and which farmhouse they were now approaching.
“What the hell are you doing?” Dan asked.
Clark replied flatly: “Taking Rooster home.”
D plus 55
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Clark knocked three times on Richard Walker’s front door while Rooster spun in excited circles.
Richard opened the door. “Well, well, well,” he said. He was the only person smiling.
Rooster, seeming to understand that he was being returned, rubbed his nose against Emma’s knee. She reached down to pat him on the head. “Good boy. In you go.” Rooster briefly brushed against Dan and Clark then ran inside, hopping and barking like a puppy at the park.
“Tell me you’re the ones who took the camera recordings,” Richard said, his expression turning serious. He focused on Emma having fairly assumed that she was the brains behind their troublemaking operation.
“We are,” she said.
“Good. What did it show?”
“A flash. Nothing else.”
“So how much do you know?”
“We have your blue box,” Clark said. “The plaques are gone and we’re going to burn the paper, but we saw everything.”
Richard shook his head disdainfully. “I should have guessed Benjamin would spill the beans before he checked out. I knew I should have gone with Raúl. A word to the wise: never trust a coward to do a man’s job.”
“How can you be so cold?” Emma snapped. “Ben defended you to the end, right until your lie drove him to kill himself.”
Richard turned up his nose and shrugged. “Weakness has a way of weeding itself out.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“The word you’re looking for is pragmatic, Ms Ford. This was bigger than Ben. I will give him credit for going to you instead of the press, at least. He had a soft spot for all three of you. But that’s always the problem with people like Ben: too many soft spots.”
No one said anything for a few seconds. Clark didn’t know whether to punch Walker or pity him; Dan didn’t want to display any emotion that might give him the satisfaction of getting under his skin.
“Do you know anything else?” Walker asked, his voice unusually tentative.
“You mean about the hoax coming true?” Dan said. He turned his back to Richard and lowered his collar, pointing to the ever-fading mark on his neck. “About you being abducted? About how it’ll happen again if you try anything disruptive?”
Richard waited for Dan to face him again then looked into his eyes. “Touché, McCarthy. Touché.”
“When did you last see the news?” Emma asked, discerning from the surprise on Richard’s face that he quite possibly didn’t know about the third plaque. “Have you seen what they left in Austria?”
“Who?”
Dan smiled. “You’ll see that in a minute,” he said, very matter-of-factly. “But right now, before we go, I’m going to ask three questions and you’re going to answer them.”
“Go on,” Richard replied, sporting a patronising grin.
Dan asked his first question: “Are the people who made the sphere and the plaques definitely dead?”
“Yes. Hans saw to that.”
“When you were on the craft, how long did it feel like you were gone? Days?”
Richard shook his head. “I know I was gone for four days, but time didn’t seem to pass. It was like a dream; not the best dream, but by no means a nightmare. I’ve certainly been held by worse creatures,” he mused, stroking his scar. “So… last question?”
Dan spent a few seconds thinking of the best way to phrase it. “You are by far the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever seen in my life,” he eventually said.
“That’s not a question.”
Dan turned to walk away.
“McCarthy,” Richard barked after him.
Dan looked back. “What?”
“You didn’t beat me.”
“Whatever you say.”
Richard affected a shrug. “A broken clock is right twice a day, but it’s still broken.”
Before Dan could formulate a reply — “but still right” was on his lips — Richard Walker had already closed his door and gone inside.
“Fuck that guy,” Clark said. “He’s not worth it.”
“Exactly,” Emma chimed in. “You didn’t luck out and land on the truth by accident, you tracked it down and went after it. He’s just pissed because you found it.”
* * *
As Clark turned the car and sped away from Richard Walker’s house for the last time, Dan began to have doubts about what lay ahead at the drive-in.
Dan sat in the back seat, now spacious without Rooster. “Why did everything have to get so complicated?” he thought out loud. “I preferred it when the truth was simple.”
Emma turned to face him, wearing a soothing and patient expression. “Do you remember way back when we first met and you asked me why I always said your truth instead of the truth?”
“You said truth is a complicated thing,” Dan said.
“Right, because it usually is. But now? This truth could hardly be less complicated. You know for a stone-cold cast-iron fact that the message on this new plaque is real.”
“I know, but—”
“But nothing.”
Dan sighed. “I’m not having second thoughts, I’m just worried that I might say the wrong thing.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Emma said gently. “I’ll set you up like I always do. You’ve spoken live without a written speech loads of times.”
“Yeah, but I was always telling the truth.”
“Stop the car,” Emma ordered.
The strength of her tone ensured Clark did so as soon as it was safe.
Emma turned to face Dan. “This is the truth. You know that.”
“I know, but I’m going to be thinking so much about what I’m not supposed to say. The hoax, Ben, the real aliens… all of it. I feel like all those thoughts are in my mind, ready to trip me up. It wasn’t like that before; I used to just tell the whole truth as I saw it.”
Clark butted in: “What about the letter? You kept that from everyone because you thought releasing it at the same time as the rest of the files would have distracted from them. This is pretty much the same, just with higher stakes.”
Emma glared at Clark for bringing the stakes into it, knowing that this was the last thing Dan needed to hear. She looked back at Dan. “Let’s try it this way,” she said. “True or false: a woman in Austria just found a plaque with a message engraved on it by actual, real-life aliens who we just met on an actual, real-life spaceship.”
“True.”
“True or false: the world is going to be a better place than it was before you found the folder.”
Dan hesitated. “True,” he said, more quietly this time.
“Speak up.”
“Is it, though?”
“Of course it is,” Emma insisted. “You were happy when DS-1 was about to launch, weren’t you? Well, now we still have the benefits of all the most powerful countries coming together for a common goal, just without that tiny little existential threat hanging over us.”
“But that threat was what brought everyone together,” Dan said.
“Exactly. So looking back, I guess you could say it served a good purpose. But the GSC isn’t going to vanish just because the immediate threat does. Godfrey will adapt however he can to keep the GSC relevant. And aliens are still real, remember?”
“True,” Dan said.
“And you’re still the one who proved it.”
“True,” he repeated, more firml
y.
“You’ve got this.”
Dan nodded.
“I said: you’ve got this.”
“True.”
Emma turned to face the front. “Okay,” she said to Clark. “Drive.”
D plus 56
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
The old drive-in, now referred to by the media as Birchwood Plaza following Phil Norris’s successful rebranding of the lot, brimmed with almost as many bodies as it had for the ill-fated DS-1 launch party four long days earlier.
Short notice meant that far fewer national and international news outlets were present than had been then. Nonetheless, Dan saw a Blitz News satellite truck and dozens of smaller vans. As murmurs spread through the lot that he had arrived, Dan looked over to the right-side of the lot where Maria Janzyck and Kyle Young both stood beside an ACN-branded vehicle. Trey worked busily in the back of his Blue Dish News van in the next spot, checking everything was in order with the projector and speakers ahead of Dan’s speech.
Low-key wasn’t the right word, but this event had a less intense vibe than any of Dan’s previous pre-announced appearances. The last two had involved meeting William Godfrey and watching the launch — neither of which Dan had been overly keen to attend — and all of the pre-Disclosure occasions had been somewhat adversarial at the core as Dan fought first to be taken seriously and then to decisively convince his audience.
This was different.
Dan knew that no one watching today was willing him to fail and also that the magnitude of the new plaque’s discovery meant that he wasn’t the main news, anyway. Dan had spent so long out of the public eye that his views, though still relevant, were no longer the first that the news networks and their viewers wanted to hear; that responsibility once more fell on the Godfreys and the Slaters of the world.
In place of the many news crews who attended the launch but weren’t there today, scores of ordinary citizens congregated in the lot. Dan recognised many of the faces.
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