It was especially tough on me because (no matter what the President said) I knew this was just the beginning. We were going through culture shock on an unprecedented scale. So maybe I’d let my priorities become a little less defined as of late but I couldn’t really think of a reason to get too worked up about it… except… except for that look Julie had given me several times at breakfast. It wasn’t disdain and it wasn’t judgmental, it was more like disappointment and mild surprise. The third time she looked at me like that was after I’d just finished explaining to the table that culture shock was unavoidable; that what we were getting ready to go through would make the unrest we experienced after the Yuan replaced the Dollar as the world’s reserve currency look like a garden picnic (or party, or whatever that saying is). It was almost as if she didn’t care that I was a highly trained professional and that this was my area of expertise; it was almost as if she somehow expected more from me…
Chapter 2
Mission Brief
Operation: Broken Star
Classification: Ultra Secret Black Diamond
Authorization Status: Approved
Operational Priority: Level 1
Background:
(Excerpt from the report of the lead investigation team for the US Government):
What precipitated the Crazies was the most significant, shocking, bizarre, and tragic event in human history…
By 2014, the U.S. government had finally authorized the privatization of boosting cargoes into low earth orbit (LEO). Over the next decade as costs came down and commercial demands for low gravity, perfect vacuum manufacturing environments rose, several multi-national corporations cooperated in replacing the International Space Station with the world’s first truly permanent space station, Laze Fair One. Home to almost 300 people, the huge construction was mankind’s greatest achievement and source of pride – until it disappeared.
It didn’t break up. It didn’t crash or burn-up in reentry. It just… disappeared. Telemetry monitoring stations sounded ‘lost signal’ alarms designed to warn bored technicians to pay better attention and re-align their dishes… all to no avail. The station was simply gone.
It was almost two full days later that weak communications signals started coming in to radio receivers all over the planet. On open circuits with the whole world listening, station personnel reported an incredible story that was only believed because of the accompanying video, telemetry, and the 54 minute 12 second delay in two-way communications; the station was now in orbit around Neptune.
The station was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible, but at 30 AU from the sun and with solar panels designed to operate at only one AU (note: one AU = the distance from the Earth to the Sun), battery charge that was critical for heating, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and other life-support dwindled quickly. Top priority was given to reporting how an alien spacecraft had appeared next to the station, somehow ‘bubbled’ it and then proceeded to tow it (at incredible speed, invisibly, and with no change in inertia), and then abandon it at Neptune.
There was no possibility of rescue.
Once all the data, subjective observations, and informed speculation had been transmitted from the station, the remaining few hours were spent with 279 people each taking time to tell the rest of us goodbye. It is this investigator’s recommendation that when the world gets around to erecting a memorial, this should be a looped video memoriam.
Additional Data:
(Highly Classified – Unknown to the public)
Major David Johansen, second in command of the station, managed to transmit a short burst of encrypted data using a cipher that was only known to a close friend back on Earth. In this burst, Commander Imbibe and Major Johansen forwarded a video communication that was received by the station immediately before the alien ship left them at Neptune. This transmission was received over the Commander’s supposedly secure emergency channel. Fortunately, no other station personnel were aware of the message or its contents. It was only 23 seconds long, but what was interesting was that the background contained voices of what was unmistakably a heated disagreement. Everything in that background was unintelligible and definitely of an unknown language. The foreground was dominated by the head and shoulders of an apparent female human being that mouthed one word before signing off. It was Commander Imbibe’s opinion (which has subsequently been verified to 87% accuracy by linguistic experts) that the one word mouthed by the alien was, “sorry.”
Subsequent Events:
(Highly Classified – Unknown to the public)
The leadership of six different countries (see addendum III) have been contacted by representatives of the same race that abducted our space station. Citing another faction of their race as the culprits of the abduction, this faction offers peace and friendship.
Mission Stipulation:
Despite appearances, this race is deemed alien with unknown intentions.
Mission Mandate:
A multi-national team is to be assembled under the mission name: Broken Star. It is the mandate of this team to travel to the home worlds of the aliens and evaluate:
The scope and sincerity of the offer.
How advanced (in technology years) this civilization is.
Identify and prioritize desirable technologies.
The cost and limits (if any) on technology transfers.
Identify what we have (if anything) that they want?
Chapter 3
Major Mathew Reagan, US Army
My headache just wouldn’t go away. My tolerance for pain and discomfort is high but after about 30 hours of intense throbbing I just physically start to wear out. I’ve occasionally suffered through these things for about twenty years now and I knew that I would be fine sometime within the next 24 hours but that didn’t make this precise moment of exquisite pain any easier to handle.
I vacillate in my thoughts; bouncing back and forth from one minute thinking I must be a wuss and that millions of people must experience pain like this and never show it, to the next thinking that I’ve got to be Superman because other people go home, turn off the lights, close the blinds and go to bed to hide from the world. How can we really compare what one person feels inside their head to what someone else feels?
I guess it’s a migraine. Yes, I get nauseas and occasionally see explosions of white light behind my eyes but unlike many migraine sufferers I can, if I really need to, focus on a task at hand and function reasonably well. Since I am apparently immune to the benefits of modern migraine medication I am forced to resort to an older highly addictive cocktail using Hydrocodone and Acetaminophen. I won’t allow myself to take more than 10mg of the Hydro at a time (that stuff will alter your brain chemistry) and they’re really only useful if I take one when I first sense the headache coming on. However, since not all headaches become migraines and since I hate the thought of taking medication, I play this waiting game with myself and hope I can figure out which type of headache it’s going to be before it’s too late to stop it. Yesterday I waited too long so here I am.
As usual this was afflicting me at a time when the world around me was demanding my full attention. I had been tasked by the government to head one of the scientific teams that was being attached to a highly secret Task Force; a Task Force that would affect the lives of every single human being on planet earth. Heady stuff.
By now, everyone knows the story of our abducted space station and the unrest this caused amongst the world’s population but the government, as usual, had information that wasn’t known to the general population. As far as the public knew there had been no further contact; we were waiting for the next shoe to drop. However, one of our most highly guarded secrets is that we are currently in contact with the aliens. Except that they’re not exactly aliens and we’re not really talking to the same group that moved Laze Fair One to Neptune…
Four years and 136 days after the space station event that shocked the world and four years and 135 days into the ‘Crazy Years�
� scientists noticed lights in the sky. You had to already be using a telescope in that general direction because they weren’t close, but the explosions must have each briefly released more energy than anything else in our nearby region of space. Mostly unnoticed except in scientific circles, speculation was rampant regarding the cause. Prevailing thought was that we shouldn’t project our own experiences and failings and just automatically assume that the energy releases meant a war was going on – prevailing thought was wrong.
“Ok, maybe war is too strong a word,” I explained to the members of my newly assembled, hand-picked staff. I had spent a week selecting them and then the military had taken an additional two weeks to get them security clearances, give physical exams and psych evaluations as well as making sure all of the proper releases were signed, witnessed and notarized. I only lost one of my picks to this vetting process and was told to feel lucky that everyone hadn’t been screened out…
“We’re being told that it was more of a police action where the good guys encountered resistance.”
My four-person staff and I were meeting in conference room 412 along with my four squad leaders somewhere deep below the Nevada desert. Even the name of the facility was a secret, but it was the largest underground complex I’d ever seen and we were told it would be our home for the indefinite future.
“We have no reason not to believe them, but then we have no reason to take their word as gospel either.”
I had already brought my team up to speed on the basics: two years after the fireworks display the President of the United States answered her highly encrypted, secure bedside land-line in the White House residence and made a same day appointment to meet with a representative of another world.
They call themselves Noridians and we obviously have common ancestry but there are differences. Imagine if you were a Viking and it was the first time you’d ever met a Chinaman; you wouldn’t be thinking alien but he obviously didn’t grow up next door. Noridians are of a slightly smaller frame yet with long legs that still fit within what our minds perceive as ‘normal.’ Their bodies are lightly muscular with low body fat, perfect skin, and the only visible body hair would be their eyebrows, eyelashes, and the top of their heads. The Noridians we have met so far tend to have high cheekbones and earlobes that developed with a subtly different yet non-distinguished set of folds and their faces are universally symmetrical. The females look obviously human and well-proportioned and albeit the males are slightly effeminate looking every Noridian we’ve met could be considered beautiful. They could walk down any street and garner little attention – and they’d be totally invisible in downtown San Francisco.
That initial meeting with the President took place at Camp David and the male and female Noridian representatives were there waiting when the Presidential helicopter arrived. This came as a complete surprise to the Secret Service and the military; apparently the Noridian’s had a ship in orbit (that nobody knew was there) and some type of shuttle on the ground (that nobody could see). Technologically, they are very advanced.
Language wasn’t a problem as they spoke English, albeit with a funny accent that became less and less pronounced the more they spoke. It turns out they speak other languages too although it still takes them a little time to get the pronunciations right.
My immediate job was to organize my team, establish and assign priorities and objectives, and train the group in protocols and exigencies. In other words, I needed to turn a group of 32 disparate and independent thinking, mostly non-military individuals into a well-functioning team with common goals. A great working relationship was critical because mine was one of four such teams that were going to travel further away from home and safety than anyone had travelled before - I was taking my team to another star.
Chapter 4
Dr. Julie Schein
Julie had experimented with a number of different ways to handle men throughout her life. She knew she was smart but had undergone the common boy-crazy phases of adolescence that had taught her not to show it.
In high school she could usually wrangle a date with the team quarterback or the popular new transfer student or whomever… but second dates were rare. She just couldn’t find chemistry with boys that spent their days playing social games, their afternoons playing athletic games, and their evenings and weekends playing drinking games. She didn’t think she was stuck-up, it’s just that alcohol-addled brains that never gave a thought to the future… bored her.
Throughout most of college she changed her approach. She was enough of a realist to know that people (especially men) were attracted to her. She could look in the mirror and see that even though she didn’t have the classic sharp angled features of a fashion model all of her pieces were in the right place and her face and skin carried no obvious defects. What she couldn’t see was the totality of the package; the way she walked and carried herself made her the most dreamed about girl on campus – even if most boys were too intimidated and insecure to talk to her, let alone ask her out.
Maybe it’s because her mom had never been around or maybe it’s because most other girls were either intimidated or jealous of her, but Julie had had no one she could trust to get boy advice from. So in college she made a conscious decision to only hang out around the super-smart guys. Although much more intellectually stimulating there was still a lot missing. These guys were either oblivious to her or so intimidated that they could never relax around her.
She had even allowed herself a forbidden relationship with one of her undergraduate professors thinking he might be the perfect balance in what she was looking for in a partner – only to be severely disappointed.
Watching seemingly everyone around her enjoy happy relationships allowed those whispers of doubt that she’d always kept at bay to finally take root; what was wrong with her?
Perhaps it was no surprise then that once she was committed to a Medical Degree she gravitated towards Psychiatry.
Julie’s combination of intelligence and a dazzling smile helped her land a residency at the #5 ranked psychiatric hospital in the nation, Menninger Hospital in Houston, TX. She then spent a couple of years at John Hopkins before being offered a position at what is considered to be the top program in the world; McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA.
By the time she was offered a position on the Broken Star mission Julie had come to peace with her uniqueness – not valuing it as good or bad; simply accepting that relationships weren’t her strongpoint and finding satisfaction from a promising career.
She still allowed herself a few personality quirks left over from her defensive days; being a little acerbic or sarcastic with men – it kept them off guard and, well… it was fun.
∆∆∆
Once she’d agreed to join the mission, signed all the forms, received a leave of absence from the hospital, and passed the physical and psych evaluations (Come on, please…) the true nature of Broken Star was explained to her.
There was no question that not only was this so much bigger than just her; not only was it a tremendous responsibility; it was also a chance for her to contribute, to really ‘fit in’ perhaps for the first time in her life. The professional challenge of a lifetime, to figure out the psyche of an alien being. Especially an alien being whose brain physiology was very similar to ours but whose environmental stimulus had been totally different (exciting!).
Once she arrived at the underground Nevada base she was innerly thrilled to discover that she was assigned as a member of a close-knit team of seven (Blue Squad) which included six scientists and a security Captain. She determined on the spot that her first order of business would be to build a personality profile of her squad mates. She knew that recorded interviews with the Noridians were scheduled to start in two weeks so she needed to complete this quickly… and of course, discreetly.
Dr. Anzio Spelini was the first member of the team she met in person. The government had provided her with a smartpad that contained basic backgrounds on everyone in the squad and l
ike everyone else, Anzio was brilliant. Unlike many of the rest, however, he held a certain popular notoriety in much of Europe. As hard as that might be to attain for a mathematician and quantum physicist, he’d come by it honestly. With numerous international accolades awarded to him publically his ready smile and almost child-like naiveté and sense of humor won him a following. Like many brilliant people he could easily lecture math or physics to hundreds of his peers but put him in a room full of people at a party and he wouldn’t be able to remember his grandmother’s favorite pasta.
It didn’t take Julie very many days of hanging out with Anzio to realize that he was basically a good guy – someone with straightforward priorities, an honest willingness to help others, a healthy desire to be socially accepted and follow social mores, a high empathy quotient and an ego that was in check. Julie almost laughed when she realized that Anzio was basically the big brother that she never had.
Here Comes Earth: Emergence Page 2