The Genetic Imperative

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  Their technology wasn’t enough to bring nature back or to save much of their natural world, but it did allow them to build artificial environments which let them thrive. On Ray’s planet, forests and seas teeming with life were myths and legends or simply part of history. Once, Ray told Chase that it was doubtful that the Grays would have saved their planet even if they could. That simply wasn’t their concern. The Grays accepted things as they were, not as they wished them to be. They became pure scientists, space-farers, and explorers. They discovered the Advocates, the Humans, and the Silicoids nearly six-thousand Earth years ago. They made contact with the Advocates nearly a millennia ago, but their interaction with humanity was forced upon them only a century before that fateful first delegation. Detente took a couple of decades. The Grays had much experience observing life in the galaxy.

  Many in the Group argued that the Grays were cold and heartless; that they could not experience love. Chase did not believe this. He reasoned that Love was such a vast concept and, if anything, what little the humans were learning about life "out there," was that forms and expressions of love were fairly common. The more he learned about Ray, Chase began to reason that the Gray’s expression of love had evolved along with their art, science, and technology to a point where the arc of their existence became love in a general sense.

  No creature can perfectly embody love. Chase believed that condition was reserved for God. And in his way, Chase did believe in God. Some force like God was an obvious universal factor in his system of belief. He couldn’t prove it, of course, and he didn’t care what anybody else believed, insofar as they kept that belief away from coercion or bloodletting. There would be gaps in the developmental arc of any species. Sometimes those gaps end up in horror.

  Over the years, Chase realized that his simian threats on that day of the first summit, more than forty years prior, could have easily been challenged and overcome without much effort from the Grays. Had they wanted to, the Grays could have adapted their technology to defeat the newly-acquired Advocate defenses. They could have reduced both human and Advocate alike to puppets, drones, slaves or worse. It would have cost them time, blood and treasure just as any war might, but this was not the point. The Grays heard a human voice express something they struggled to understand. They paused, and they accepted that human voice.

  In response, the Grays gave humanity the service of one of their finest scholars. They understood "no," and they changed their behavior. It was that simple. It doesn’t matter that they still may not understand why humans want it that way. In Chase’s estimation, that basic respect made the difference. They did this even when faced with the highest stakes imaginable. Their evolution simply didn’t predispose them to the kind of violent response the Human/Exile alliance was prepared to offer. That fact alone led to acceptance.

  The Grays could not conceive of warfare the way that Humans and Advocates could. It turns out that few known species in the Galaxy have that ability. Hence, the Advocates. It certainly was not the result of incapacity. The fact was that warfare was too far outside the arc of their experience. So they worked with the Humans and Advocates to find another way to exist with knowledge of one another.

  On a camping trip one evening, deep in the Canadian Boreal Forest, at the lowest extent of the arctic circle, Ray turned to Chase, dropped his redundant eyelids in the moonlight and stared at him for a good long while. Chase stared back and waited before Ray finally said, “When you die, I think I will be unhappy.”

  Ray leaned into the fallen log on which he propped his back as he sensed a flood of emotion from Chase. How could he explain to Ray, the pride he felt? It was very much like the feeling Chase had when he let go of his young daughter’s bicycle seat, and the training wheels rattled on the ground past his feet. Shoulders hunched, feet spinning like a dervish on the pedals, she took off and didn’t look back.

  Chase thought for just a moment.

  “Ray, I wouldn’t want you to be sad, but I’d be proud if you were,” he said.

  For once, Ray didn’t understand something of which Chase had perfect command. He wasn’t sure, but Chase thought he saw Ray smile.

  Chase sat and wandered through his memories of Ray as he waited. It would be good to see him again after more than a decade.

  The bright, white sands of New Mexico that gave this place its name glared at them inside the bunker. The team sipped water to counter the desert heat that the straining air conditioner had trouble combating. The gray concrete walls of the low bunker were dug down into the sand and peeked out just above the desert floor. The wall behind them held back a large white dune that piled on the bunker’s roof like a combat helmet and a single door to their right was the only exit from the little room.

  Six technicians were lined up along folding tables that were pressed up against the bunker’s front wall. They tapped away at their laptops and checked the bewildering displays of instruments that covered nearly every inch of the tables. Sometimes they peered through the low, narrow slit of a window at the desert that stretched across a blisteringly white plain to a range of low mountains on the horizon. Long mirages winked suggestively at them when they stared long enough. They chattered busily into headsets and among themselves. Chase leaned back on the legs of his chair in the corner by the door and monitored the situation through the chatter of his staff. The lead technician, a Navy Lieutenant, casually gave the group the standard run-down.

  “Highway and White Sands National Monument closed for the day. Kicked the Zoomies out of their laser test site. Got some grumbling from the other branches. Unit tactical and security confirms nobody else is out here either.

  No air traffic for a hundred miles for the duration of our time window. We are good and dark. Looks like just another missile test to John Q. Live feed from SoHo 2 shows solar activity consistent with imminent incursion. We appear to be on schedule.”

  “What’s the internet chatter like?”

  “Delay circuits are holding. There is some talk on social media about the sun flare activity being outside regular patterns, but we are seeding the discussion with pretty decent science to explain it away.”

  “Major Spivey must be busy.”

  “Yes. He’s in the trailer now directing all things. Check my feed for status.”

  “Will do.”

  “Did they give any indication on what they’re flying today? I really could use that info to anticipate sightings. Right now, I have quite a few scenarios ready to feed the media mill.”

  “Well, they didn’t say. This is an out-of-band incursion, so we anticipate a small personal craft.

  The problem is the flight plan—they’ll be coming straight out of the sun for a landing directly from blinkpoint, which we’ve never seen before. Shouldn’t be spotted though. Most of the optical satellites are in hibernation ahead of this flare and our middleman delay relays are solid.

  We should be able to intercept and divert just about any problem information well in advance. We’re truly dialed in on this one.”

  “‘Just about’ any problem information?” asked a new and nervous technician.

  “Well, there is always the outside chance of something going awry when dealing with Alien Invasion.”

  The technicians chuckled and continued their busywork.

  “Hey, I heard the head guy gave us a hard time,” someone quipped.

  “Yeah, they want their range back. We never hijacked it for this long and so completely. I heard their XO was extremely pissed,” he pronounced the abbreviation for "executive officer" with emphasis on each letter to distinguish it from the term "exo." The careful pronunciation was peculiar to their Unit.

  “Yeah, well you’d be pissed off too if you had our security and tactical guys swarming all over your house locking everything up. Those guys are fuckin’ cyborgs…”

  “Ease up on the sci-fi bro, you know cyborgs ain’t real.”

  “Fuckin’ Grays and flying saucers really exist and there can’t be cyborgs?�
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  The group broke up at that. The laughter died down and the banter continued.

  “Nah, it’s just that he didn’t buy the cover story this time.”

  “Shit, it was always flimsy story anyway.”

  “Focus, gentlemen. We are drifting a bit here,” Chase finally spoke up. He was glad that his staff was comfortable around him, but he didn’t want them too comfortable.

  “By the way, Sergeant, the "head guy" you refer to is Brigadier General Kirkpatrick, who is commander of the White Sands Range,” General Chase said firmly.

  “Yes Sir General Breslin. Thank you General Breslin,” The sergeant sat straight up in his chair and corrected himself.

  The General’s tone was calm and even—not a rebuke, just a reminder. The chatter was part of the technician’s normal process, but watching their activities gave Chase a clear picture of the overall operation. They were very important to his oversight. There were certain factors about this particular operation that smelled discreetly of a potential shit storm. Chase wanted everyone to be on their best game.

  “What’s our ETA now?” the General asked casually.

  “Between sixty and ninety minutes, General,” the lead technician checked his display and responded in a professional tone.

  The crew fell into purposeful silence as they worked. Chase gave a subdued sigh and waited. He studied their screens and paid close attention to the occasional responses into headset microphones.

  The flight plan was troublesome, almost more so than the uncommonly terse message received via the entanglement device just a few weeks ago.

  “Ambassador inbound unscheduled. Priority. Coordinates follow,” the message said, and then described where and when to wait.

  So here they all were in the desert, waiting on a particularly tricky daylight weekday visit on the North American Continent for a representative of an extraterrestrial race with an apparently urgent message concerning the balance of sentient life in the galaxy. Oh Joy, Chase thought.

  He had simply volunteered in 1962 to have a job, escape his drunk old man, for the G.I. bill and to maybe serve his country. So he ended up in Vietnam. Four decades later he found himself a permanent draftee and a lead figure in the joint command of an international military organization that represented humanity to life on other planets. Only ten thousand humans in the world were truly aware of their work, and most of them knew only half the story. Even presidents and prime ministers were on a "need to know" basis where his job was concerned. Moments like this really put things in perspective for him and the only question he could pose in self-reflection was "what the fuck." It certainly was interesting, these overtones of the surreal in his life. He rummaged in his uniform pocket for some antacid.

  More troublesome still was the fact that Major Spivey had some disturbing speculation about how the actual landing might go. Normally, blinkpoint translation would spit a spacecraft out of the sun like a watermelon seed at one-eighth the speed of light or more. No problem. Just a few solar flares of various levels of intensity and then a little trip through Earth’s solar system using planetary gravity to decelerate.

  The problem of inertia in near light speed travel was still huge even for the most advanced technology. Dealing with it involved forces measured on a planetary scale. Luckily, the universe supplied objects of such a scale in great abundance. The normal protocol was to simply coast the craft through a given solar system until the energies involved became more manageable with more modest effort. In the case of Earth’s solar system, this usually meant a week or more of travel while a spacecraft made a leisurely loop around Mars before visiting Earth.

  The Grays were describing a flight plan directly from the sun to Earth. This meant that whatever spacecraft exited the sun would have to decelerate from sub light speed to roughly the speed of sound before reaching the Earth’s atmosphere while turning.

  Blinkpoint travel was not predictable enough to plot a course from the core of a star to a specific spot on a planet surface. There was a reliable window of probability at the destination that safely predicted avoiding collision, but not a direct landing. This was their understanding, at least. Major Spivey didn’t understand how this particular landing could be done, but he was certain that it would involve the dissipation of a massive amount of energy. He wasn’t sure what this would be like, so his team was busy trying to anticipate something more than the usual cover-up. Breslin tried to imagine the scenario himself, but realized he was just a simple Marine. Physics was not his job. Shit storms were.

  The General stood up and paced a while, still listening to the chatter. He stepped outside to get some fresh desert air. There wasn’t much to see but sand and boredom. After a while, he went back in and burned the remaining time asking for reports with and scanned the desert. And then things turned from boring to interesting.

  “SoHo 2 is blind! That flare was huge! Fifty-year record at least!”

  “Sir, the internet just exploded. Social media is going batshit. That was quick.”

  “I see that! I have relay trigger hits from significant science posts. Re-routing now. Spooling up the bullshit machine!”

  “We’re looking at major disruption to the power grid in Alaska, across Canada and possibly Washington State and the Dakotas over the next several hours.”

  “Ground station: report!” Chase barked.

  “We sight the craft on optical already, General. About six minutes to atmosphere but Major Spivey reports that this is not a confident estimate. It started turning while still inside the corona. That’s what made the flare so bad.”

  “Keep an eye on it soldier. Get me Major Spivey.”

  The general snatched the headset from the nearest technician. If the man noticed, he didn’t seem to care. The technician stayed focused on the laptop screen and his fingers flew across the keyboard.

  “Talk to me, Major.”

  Spivey’s voice came across the headset calm but with an underlying tone that told Chase the Major was barely hanging on. He knew the man well enough to tell Major Spivey was exceedingly worried.

  “It’s bad, General. Inbound ETA not certain. Looks like the blinkpoint exit was at very high velocity. Much more than we’ve ever seen. Outside instrument range”

  Out in the desert, something tugged at the General’s eyes. A tiny pinprick of white light appeared to the right of the sun. It was slightly brighter than the sun itself, and its presence was oddly fascinating by the sheer wrongness of it. It resembled a single, tiny, bright new star at the height of the day. The time was just past noon. The twinkling grew to a flashing. That new star is on its way here, Chase thought. Major Spivey’s voice became a faraway sound as the General held the headset to one ear with his right hand. A sickening realization brought his right hand to his mouth. He was no physicist, but many years of working with deadly things told him with certainty that something extremely dangerous was about to happen.

  “Cover your eyes! Take cover now!” He screamed into the headset. Nobody was fast enough. The technicians sat stunned in their seats, suddenly noticing the new star above the desert.

  Chase grabbed the nearest tech by the shoulder, slammed him to the ground and kicked him under the table. The other technicians followed suit, more from the desire not to be kicked than from any sense of what was about to happen. “Spivey! Secure your people! Do it now! Take cover now! Now! Now!”

  The pinprick suddenly flickered out. An instant later, another light showed up in its place and it was much, much larger. A blazing blue ball appeared in the sky with a flash. A streak of white light angled down to the desert and Chase covered his eyes with his forearm just as another flash of light nearly blinded him through his own flesh. He dropped to the ground with heat soaking his face. A moment later, the sound of every thunderclap ever made shook the world. His ears rang like a church bell.

  A strong wind was outside. It sounded like someone was sandblasting the bunker. He could hear the metal of Major Spivey’s trailer strai
n and creak and pop. He hoped desperately that the people inside were safe. His eyes were shut tightly and he could still see bright light even with his arm folded over his face.

  “What the fuck ... what the fuck…” a desperate, childlike voice repeated over and over again beside him. Heat filled the room.

  The General turned and reached out with his free hand and pawed until it found the shoulder of the terrified soldier. He squeezed it firmly and gave him a little shake before letting his hand grip that shoulder in reassurance. The touch said what his words could not in the moment; "stay calm, you are OK." The man’s breathing evened out and the shoulder beneath his horned hand relaxed. The unnatural light slowly faded.

  It was a while before his breathing slowed. Chase stood slowly and one of the techs was already rising with him. The General’s knees popped like two rounds from a suppressed .45. It was still too bright in the bunker, much brighter than the afternoon sun should have allowed. Heat did strange things to the world outside the bunker. There was a crackling sound like thin ice on a wide river. Something huge hissed, sizzled and popped not too far away.

  Convection currents stirred up the air outside. Still holding his hand near his face, he turned his palm to the slit of a window and peered around the shade his hand provided. A glowing, blue-white ball sat out in the desert about half a kilometer away. It was surrounded by a wide, shallow crater of black glass. The ball of fuzzy light was a luminous macaroon hovering above an onyx dinner plate. Tendrils of smoke and steam drifted around the object.

  The technician Chase kicked under the table for safety slowly stood and faced the window. He turned back to the general with a pale, drawn face.

  “Thank you, General Breslin,” he said, and gave a trembling salute before collapsing into his chair.

  The air conditioner rattled and blew warm air. The other technicians slowly and shakily emerged from cover. One of them registered surprise and jumped past the General, nearly brushing him aside. The general stood with his with eyes pointed at the desert until the technician got his attention again. He had retrieved a first aid kit and rummaged through it quickly. The technician turned to the general with a tube of ointment in his hand.