by Lee Baldwin
“It has escaped none of you, I am sure, that every web page on the Internet has been replaced with a single page, showing a photograph of the intruder at full height, holding a sign inviting visitors to click. On your screens now is that very page.
“When Internet viewers click on the image, they see other content, expressed in suitable local languages and times of day. We will review the meaning of that message later in this meeting.
“Our best people have discarded all hoax and hacker theories. No hacking group is adequately funded to accomplish this. It is not a virus, not an illusion, it is not a hoax. The entire Internet has been replaced with this single page of information.
“It is the opinion of many psychologists and a number of leading physicists that this message is delivered by a supernatural being. A real being, not a fake, not an hallucination. That is currently my opinion. We do not know why it is here, or why it selected the Pentagon. If this represents an adversary, it may be entirely beyond the reach of our military forces. It is also my opinion, though others may differ, that aggression against this force is pointless and dangerous. And completely unnecessary.
“There has been much contentious debate as to whether we should adopt a military strategy. I for one do not believe that this is an attack upon the United States by a foreign power. Please watch this video with me.”
The general brings to the screen a video montage, a series of slow dissolves beginning with the image of Lian at the Pentagon, followed by an identical figure towering above the onion domes of the Kremlin, another looking down on Tiananmen Square, and others in familiar scenes throughout China, Asia, the middle east, Africa. There are appearances of the tall winged lizard at the South and North geologic poles, across many islands of Indonesia, beside temples, churches, mosques and cathedrals. Lian is everywhere. They are not duplicates, they are not statues. They move and speak independently. Possibly, Solberg believes, they think independently. They are avatars of Lian.
“These images are courtesy of various world governments and our own reconnaissance. There are 623 recorded sightings as of thirty minutes ago.”
Solberg displays the web page with Lian standing tall above the Pentagon, holding the flashing neon SALVATION sign. He clicks on the sign and the view switches to the announcement text.
“This message is simple and to the point. It claims that as of 1800 hours EST today, approximately six hours and forty minutes from now, every person on Earth will go to sleep for up to 24 hours. According to this announcement, all sleepers will be safe. It points out that anyone wishing to remain awake may do so, with certain consequences.
“Those who elect to sleep are asked to ponder a simple question, and I quote. ‘Are your immediate wants more important than the destiny of all life on Earth?’ Psychologists and scientists learned in mass psychology and theology have yet to provide a useful explanation. One dream researcher suggests it is a pre-sleep suggestion designed to elicit unconscious choices. How those choices might be used in an outcome is sheer conjecture.
“There is a warning for those who remain awake. It warns of a rise in shared hallucinations, possibly more severe than those we have so far seen. It suggests that our own inner drives will create physical reality. In short, that a shared waking nightmare will be set loose on the planet.
“So we have two groups, Sleepers, and Wakers. We also have our visitor’s assertion that no weapon will harm it. Although there have been many discussions on the merits of attacking the visitor or its protective field with escalating force, it is well to point out we have been entirely unsuccessful in all such attempts. I believe that the merits of launching a nuclear or any other weapon at the so-called vortex of the protective shield are nil at best, excessively dangerous at their worst.
“The United States is the most deeply fortified nation on Earth. It is senior command’s firm agreement that we take advantage of the means at our disposal. In conference with the Joint Chiefs and the heads of all our military, we have directed VIP personnel and forces to take shelter at key locations. Everyone on this call is either in command of or part of an expeditionary group. What we are after is survivability of the United States, her government, and her military.
“My final word of advice is brief. Go to sleep. I believe it is the only reasonable way to pass the following thirty-six hours safely. For the benefit of everyone.”
Solberg takes a sip of water. “I’ll now open the floor for questions. Please raise your hand in the discussion queue and we’ll take those in the order received. Ah, is Doctor Friedman on the call? I would like him available to answer particular questions.”
Doctor Friedman is not in the meeting. Outside the building, densely surrounded by armored military forces and multiple checkpoints, Arnold Friedman pleads desperately with two Pentagon police. His name is not on the attendee list, the Security list, the evac list, it is not on any white list. His name has appeared on a DHS watch list. If he doesn’t move along immediately, he will be arrested. Reluctantly, still protesting, Friedman does move along, but is detained by two lurking FBI Special Agents and taken away for questioning in a black van. After an hour they let him go. His name shows up on General Solberg’s meeting roster and private calendar twelve times in recent days, he was the one who walked the shadow at the Pentagon, and the FBI has insufficient manpower, evidence, or political will. And, time to the Sleep is getting short. A cracker congressman’s political attack.
Again on the sidewalk in the shuffling crowd, Friedman tries to call his wife. It’s no good. All of the cell phones in the Northeast went down three hours ago. Gail is waiting. He wants to be home. Friedman takes off running to find his car.
Into the Night
Soon after Lian’s Salvation page hits the Internet, sixty thousand people across the country tune in to Good Morning America and develop a severe rash during a cooking segment in which the guest chef prepares strawberry flambé. One hundred forty-one are hospitalized. Three have so far died.
Churches are packed. People wave phones which bear Lian’s instructions, and desperately beg their priests for help. The priests can answer only with religious platitudes. By mid-afternoon however churches receive via email useful information from the Archbishop of Chicago, who posts to the diocese website the following advice:
Let yourself feel safe in the arms of the Lord.
Take seriously the published advice about sleeping.
Visualize and trust a world in which you do not have to fear.
Understand that you are creating the reality around you and let yourself feel at peace with whatever comes.
You are part of everything, you are cared for, your life is meaningful to God.
On wings of rumors from the priestly Conversation With The Devil, the rules spread quickly and ultimately allow many of the faithful to fall into the Sleep knowing that the outcomes will be as good as can be hoped for, given the outrageous circumstances.
The Tourette explosion propagates through the twittersphere, then abruptly ceases. People’s nervous systems get used to it, learn to filter out the stray brainwaves. Many sufferers, incoherent for years, speak for the first time coherent thoughts. They laugh, they cry, they get it.
Every person exiting an Amtrak train in the city of Wichita, Kansas vomits uncontrollably. Many watching a popular TV soap opera begin to bleed from the eyes but instead of anxious concern, a blissful inner peace glides over them.
A young girl on a school playground in Michigan grows to a height of nine feet and devours her best friend in three vicious bites. Two hours later, the friends are discovered in one’s bedroom at home, quietly reciting Rumi poetry which both understand. “Here’s what it means, Mom…” one explains, smiling and hugging her frantic mother.
In the afternoon, the Internet begins to creep toward normalcy. Pages other than Lian’s salvation recipe reappear. And most definitely outside the realm of psychic phenomena, hundreds of new websites pop up asking the question of the era, Will You Surviv
e? Yes You Can! And we accept VISA, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, PayPal. For only $99 you will receive a Downloadable Document that provides the True Recipe for your Family’s Salvation through the Looming End Times.
Similar websites are pitched via pricey email lists to movie stars, singers and songwriters, the ultra-rich, offering much the same content although with considerably higher price tags and thicker frosting.
The blogger Carrion Gray is never again seen, but a statue of him is found. The bizarre likeness, made of a metal no torch can cut, stands in the middle of an intersection not far from his home, which has burnt to a heap of fine black ash. In the sculptural rendering, the figure’s hands are removed at the wrist, poised beside the head, index fingers stuffed in his ears up to the second knuckle. In the statue’s wide-stretched mouth are crammed a laptop computer, a tablet, and several phones. His agonized eyes bug out toward the sky.
Carson Johnny, just before his programmers switch him off, is asked where he would like to spend eternity. The simulated voice replies, “Surprise me.”
Some people begin selling everything they own. Many stop wearing clothes. The sale of illegal drugs drops to zilch, people are tripping for free. Inflation hits about a million percent, money is pointless. In place of receipts, credit card machines begin printing excerpts from great philosophies. A fragmented barter system rises up. Looting takes over, but there is little to loot. All food is gone from stores. Many people sit in the streets, wolfing down anything edible they can find. A brief fad of cannibalism flares and wanes. It encourages many to select the Sleep option.
Several hundred college kids who remain standing near the end of an all-night outdoor rager see slender forms appear in the high corn which surrounds the area, motioning to those nearby. Several hazed-out revelers walk into the tall green, others follow. Finally the band puts down its instruments and likewise vanishes into the obscuring curtain. The only two left behind are a young man passed out with a mild overdose and a crippled undergrad who cries piteously because her wheelchair battery is dead. She is the only one who can provide clues to the disappearance of eight hundred college students and assorted runaways. That, and the ornate crop circles cut into surrounding cornfields. These crop circles are unique, in that they are composed of lengthy numeric sequences.
People everywhere begin losing their appetite for marijuana, medicinal or recreational, nobody wants it any more. Crack cocaine stops working. This does not mean that the addicts are cured. The addicted smoke pipe after pipe, while sinking helplessly into hallucinatory withdrawal. Many who won’t stop trying experience wracking coughs, heart attacks, and seizures.
Six women and four men emerge screaming from mid-morning choir practice at a church in suburban Tampa. Ripping at their clothing, they run from shop to shop through the business district, shaking people by the arms and yelling, It’s an indoctrination. Don’t listen!
Of course, no military power on Earth will prepare to lie down and go to sleep at the dictates of some upstart web page, no matter how overwhelmingly delivered by a supernatural being from another dimension. In spite of the calm reasoning of General Ralph Solberg, factions develop at the highest military levels, some pushing the notion that hackers are responsible. Several visible members of random groups are rounded up, Anonymous, The 2600, w00w00, LulzSec, TripleBlaze, others less well known.
But, other sides argue, who actually needs hackers to accomplish what was done? The information curtain has been so porous that many nations and stray billionaires with moderately-developed information technology, remote sensing satellites, spies, snoops, bugs bots and wormlets, all have a reasonably clear idea of what is going on within the United States Pentagon.
At the United Nations, the Pentagon remains Topic Number One, although the building itself is evacuated and sessions are being held via Webex, Skype, and GoToMeeting from remote locations, where consumption and fornication in mass quantities is visible in the background even as delegates address the assembly.
And of course, when Lian grew to his full height, it was clear to military observers worldwide that American forces are well outside their operational effectiveness. Those same thinkers soon come to adopt the Pentagon presence as their own personal cross-to-bear no matter how far removed from Arlington, Virginia, as there appear the avatars of Lian at every political epicenter, capitol and major crossroads across the Earth, speaking with booming tones in local languages of the coming Sleep And What’s In It For You.
Members of the United States Congress naturally have a selection of cushy places to hang during the Sleep. Many swiftly remove to the famous Greenbrier hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where a data storage company is hastily evicted so that 193 Senators and Representatives can move into the extensive underground facilities constructed there in the 1960s. While some bring families, many also have in tow a collection of curvy younger women, thinking that the best way for civilization to survive a worldwide calamity involves energetic and numerous procreation. Of only the best minds.
Many VIPs find their way to one of several decommissioned Titan missile silos built during the Cold War of the 1960s, later converted into emergency living quarters for as many as 150 souls.
For Washington VIPs chary of venturing outside the Beltway, the obvious choice is the Capitol Visitor Center, located conveniently beneath the East Front plaza of the U.S. Capitol at First Street and East Capitol Street. With its robust disaster plan, supposedly bombproof skylights, and a tunnel system large enough for heavy vehicles, the CVC is the premiere refuge for members of Congress and their families, and/or their retinue of hot, fertile interns.
General Ralph Solberg, his immediate staff, and 30,000 troops make their way by heavily-armored caravan with close air support to Site R, the Raven Rock Mountain Complex known as the underground Pentagon near Waynesboro, PA. Along with General Solberg, his wife and two sons in this caravan, ride the Secretary of Defense and the senior command of the Air National Guard. With them are fourteen generals from all military branches, some retired and now consultants, along with two dozen technical staff, assorted family members, attractive interns and assorted girlfriends. Solberg secretly plans to unveil the tactic he feels will get his people safely through the night, due in no small part to the Whalesong article Strand showed him. It seconds his strategist’s intuition.
Other locations of safety, including the High Point Special Facility at Virginia’s Mount Weather and Mount Pony facilities, NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain facility in Colorado, and numerous other Cold War relics are brought into service as hidey-holes for the rich, famous, and connected.
During the long night that ensues, Lian’s warnings bear out. What the worthy political and military leaders did not fully reckon is that every individual has brought into the shelters his or her own personal terrorist, undetectable, in the form of submerged emotional drives, deep unfulfilled needs, and impossible longings. Not all of them are ugly, but all are powerful. Those who are successful at falling asleep pass the night peacefully, each safe inside a force-field cocoon, the same taffy wall that protects Lian. The others, who felt that talking, drinking and carousing were the best ways to meet the apocalypse, found arising from their own instinctive drives the most amazingly itchy desires. Some wanted to eat every food they could get their hands on. Some wanted to be immaculately clean, and used up all the hot water. Many experienced such bouts of envy that they formed Jealousy Clubs and devised a points system. An offshoot of this group, calling themselves the Klepto Klub, tried stealing everything in sight. Some were shot by the armed guards still awake and rational. Most at some point in time desired random sex, massive food and drink, and dirty jokes. Everyone got some. Or at least a little. It was all most tasty and lascivious.
Chester Porterfield drives a commandeered vehicle as close to Tharcia’s house as possible in the confusion, abandons it in a ditch, motor running. Runs as fast as aging lungs and legs can carry him up the dark winding roads. In the trees near
Clay and Tharcia’s house, the dark form separates, hides itself to wait. Porterfield falls face down, heart ruptured in his chest. His body melts, soaks into the earth a foamy gray patch where nothing grows again for years and years.
Throughout the massive military bunkers, groups of women quietly form. Thousands of them, wives and interns alike, walk out into the night, wearing their Goddess Culture shirts and sometimes little else. They have a purpose they do not disclose to any male.
It’s not the bomb Shackleford begged for that is targeted at the portal vortex, but it gets dropped anyway. The force field around the winged Pentagon intruder naturally grew to envelop his full height. Not because they should and just because they can, a powerful manned strike fighter is directed by ranking officers to fire a one-ton missile at Lian. The missile halts a half mile from his head, a dozen feet of the smoke plume frozen behind it, the rest blown off over Arlington. The missile hangs inert as darkness gathers.
General Ralph Solberg directs all under his command at Site R to follow to the letter his own classified plan to ensure the survival of his family, trusted friends, and 30,000 key men. He orders all to go to sleep.
Death and Desire
“We need to talk.”
Lylit is in the form of a small barn owl, invisible in the night sky. A thousand feet above Arlington she soars wings outstretched, tracing effortless arcs around Lian’s enormous head.
“I am so grateful you killed those angels.”
Around the far horizon, fires rage in towns and cities. On freeways in all directions nothing moves. There is nowhere to run.
Lian watches her glide past, not the slightest sound from her wings. “It’s because of you I was allowed to come here. There is one remaining.”
“It’s because of Tharcia you came here. I saw her intention and helped her carry through. Who is left?”