"Delegates from the renegade states, among them Israel and Kuwait, are unexpectedly present, not in their old seats, but next to the speaker's tribune.
"Christiana, can you tell us if any Sirian delegates are in the building now -"
"Wait, Tom - I'm being told the Security Council members are entering the hall. I can see Carl Sayers, head of the ECT, with them now. The U.S. council member, I mean the President, is talking to the Secretary General. Wait... the President of the United States takes the speaker's chair... he calls for order..."
"Members of the General Assembly... fellow humans... this is a moment of utmost significance to us all, and I ask you to gather all your strength of character. Carl Sayers has demanded to make an official statement. In the light of recent events, the U.N. Security Council has been forced to allow him to disclose a recent claim from the Sirian visitors at Alien Beach. The issue at hand is so important, that the Security Council has decided to let Carl Sayers speak. You be the judge.
"Please welcome astrophysics professor Carl Sayers, Field Director of the international Extraterrestrial Contact Team."
"Thank you, Mr. President...
"A few days ago, the extraterrestrial visitors of Alien Beach imparted to us new facts about their culture, which they have kept secret until now. Rumor of this has leaked out, and caused misinterpretations... that have led to several tragic suicides in certain fringe cults. This statement aims to put an end to such misinterpretations, and to force us to confront an issue whose moment of truth has come - if our civilization is to go on surviving and developing.
"This much the Sirians have just told us. After thousands of years of research, a collective cultural effort that began at the dawn of mankind on Earth, they learned that... there is no such thing as a natural afterlife.
"No organic life form, in its natural state, can transfer its consciousness into another form. There is also no evidence, in spite of the beliefs that even Sirians used to hold, that any supernatural force can, or has ever extracted a living consciousness - a 'soul' - from a dying or dead organic life-form. In other words, when a living structure is irreversibly destroyed, it stays dead - forever.
"However, this research led the Sirians to another breakthrough in the science of life. I cannot go into the technical details, because the Sirians are not yet prepared to give them away. All I know is the summary I give you now.
"What is life? All living things are made up of elementary particles, but the particles themselves are dead. It is the way the particles are connected into larger, self-aware structures, that constitutes life. Life literally is order, structure - beginning with the double-helix program of the DNA molecule. The Sirians, by the way, also have DNA in their cells, very similar to ours - because the same laws that govern all atoms, also decide the workings of life throughout the universe. Break the structures, and the life ceases to be - back to dead atoms.
"The Sirian scientific breakthrough has a long, long history, which I will have to try and summarize...
"When overwhelming evidence forced the Sirians to give up the idea of having naturally indestructible souls, they sought desperately for a remedy - beyond mere longevity. They have developed several techniques of suspended animation, which they now use during extended space travel. But those techniques led further still. Since life equals certain structures, Sirian scientists attempted to emulate organic forms using new materials, such as metals and silicates.
"They managed to create organic machines out of these - pseudo-life, if you like. These organic machines now live in perfect symbiosis with Sirians, who exert a great deal of control over them - for instance, the Sirian lander vessel is such a giant pseudo-life organism. Each such machine consists of billions or more cell-like robots, locked together, each having a program resembling the DNA molecule in function, but not in form.
"Eventually, thousands of years ago, some Sirians embarked to remake their own organic structures in these new materials - to regenerate their exact forms from flesh into living metals and silicates. I don't know how much time was spent to accomplish this... but apparently they had some sort of success. There are no such reconstructed Sirians - you might call them 'androids,' artificial humans - on Earth now. From what I've been told, it seems a huge segment of the Sirian population underwent this reconstruction, then sort of... branched off from the rest of their kind. They moved off into space, never to be heard from again.
"I suggest a 20-minute break now, before I continue... "
"The remaining Sirian culture concentrated its efforts on going further in their search for alternatives to organic life. They developed new ways of scanning and storing enormous amounts of information, in the hope of being able to regenerate the newly dead from the atom level and up.
"But here the laws of nature put a halt to their efforts. For a long time now, the Sirians have had a working technology that in, a fraction of a second, can record and store all the information that makes up a living being, such as a human. But the energy concentration of that 'scanning' process annihilates the subject - melts his atoms into energy.
"Compare the process to that old TV series 'Star Trek,' where humans are routinely teleported from their spaceship to a planet. Remember, at the speed of light it took only about nine years for the original Star Trek episodes to reach Sirius! One moment you see a whole man being disintegrated into energy - then the next moment, he is instantly re-created, thousands of miles away! We can only 'teleport,' if you put it that way, single particles today.
"In fact, even the Sirians cannot destroy a being, and then perfectly re-create him somewhere else - it's scientifically impossible. Because if the information that makes up the disintegrated being is moved - even measuring something involves 'pushing' it with particles of light - it will be irreversibly altered in the process. So a reconstructed being will be a slightly altered copy, never a continued existence of the original.
"But the laws of nature, the Sirians discovered, contained a tiny loophole. If the information that made up that being was to remain in the exact same place, not moved even the smallest measurable distance - then that information, whatever its form, essentially is the same being! A being made up of living energy, the structure of the organic person recreated as pure information - which is to say photons, light.
"Of course a being made up of photons would normally disintegrate, because light has no mass and photons do not attract each other. At the present level of human knowledge, this would be a dead end of the hope for immortality.
"Here we come to the point where Earth scientists are no longer able to follow Sirian thought, at least not yet... The amphibians have told us that they have found a way to instantly re-construct a living being, from this inconceivably brief state as pure information, into something our language cannot describe.
"The actual process, the technology involved, remain secret to us - but we assume they carry it with them on a long space journey such as the one to Earth. The ECT scientists have made this crude model...
"Picture this: You take a whole living being, excluding the bacteria in his guts and on his skin. Then you isolate him completely from the outside world in some kind of force-field bubble. No information can reach outside or inside - the bubble is, for a very short moment, like a miniature black hole. Then, triggering multiple nuclear devices contained inside, the being is instantly exposed to an energy concentration we cannot even imagine - and when I say 'instantly' I mean the shortest interval of time that can be measured. Due to the energy density created, the fabric of space and time ceases to exist inside the bubble. The laws of nature can no longer be accounted for inside it - no one, no Sirian, can rationally describe what happens inside, or if anything truly exists there.
"But in the next instant, the bubble collapses - the energy burst that has been concentrated inside, ruptures the force field. And the organic being that had entered the bubble now appears transformed into a new state - something that has no definite size, is neither mass
nor energy, cannot be directly seen, but can emit real energy and move through space at nearly the speed of light.
"This... entity cannot be communicated with directly, because it exists under conditions totally different from ours. But it may, and I say may, contain all the information that made up that disintegrated being from before. It can receive new information, such as ordinary light from the normal world, and absorb energy the way we eat food. This entity, once created, cannot be destroyed... unless it plunges straight into the heart of an exploding star... or unless an infinity of time passes.
"On the screen behind me you now see video footage from yesterday, when these beings appeared to manifest themselves on Alien Beach.
"The process which I have roughly outlined here, the Sirians have been performing on their old and dying for several millennia. Hundreds and hundreds of generations, hundreds of billions of beings moving through space by their own force, riding the solar winds...
"Excuse me...
"I... I understand this is much to digest so quickly, but it's paramount that you learn the rest of it. Please take note...
"I have already asked the Sirians if they are willing to disclose the full technology of this... 'afterlife process' to us. Their response has been not unfriendly, but negative so far. I was told, that they sincerely believe the process creates immortal entities - they chose the word 'Ancestors' to name them - that not only contain all the information of the former beings - but also all their previous memories, their entire lives.
"And that's not all. Given the added abilities of such 'Ancestors,' these can also gain access to virtually all light in the universe - the ability to see what happens to one's relatives, see every person one ever met in one's earthly life, follow the thread of consequences from every act previously done. The Sirian belief is that if they do not lead near-perfect lives, their 'Ancestor' existence will become an eternal hell of remorse. This can of course be disputed, but the Sirians feel that our species are not ready for that kind of commitment to an afterlife -
"Wait - please! Hear me out! Quiet! Let me finish -"
"Christiana, what's happening there?"
"Tom - total chaos is breaking out in the General Assembly. The Israeli delegate, screaming and cursing, is trying to storm the podium and attack Carl Sayers. The Secret Service men are restraining him now... the hall is in an uproar, Sayers tries to shout over the noise but it's impossible to hear him.
"Some delegates are starting to fight each other with their bare fists... other delegates are blocking the podium, shielding Sayers from further attacks... furious, screaming delegates are throwing their pens, documents, even shoes at Sayers, who is pulled away from the podium by Secret Service men... the Secretary General steps up, calling for order... Security personnel are asking us to stop - keep shooting! Get away from me -"
"Christiana? Can you get the camera back..?
"Eh... It seems the Secret Service has just cut off all television teams in the U.N. building. We will return to the U.N. incidents and keep you updated... after this."
"News and information are essential for today's travelers. Make sure you choose one of these and other fine CNN Partnership Hotels, next time you travel..."
Chapter Twenty-Five
The battleship was bustling with activity in the middle of the night. The handcuffed soldier was led past metal corridors into a small room with a bunk, and allowed just an hour or so of sleep in his cell. He was awakened when a general, flashing his NSA badge, entered with two guardsmen. The brass grinned at him.
"Good morning, soldier! I'm General Harrod of the ECT Security Committee."
The soldier didn't recognize Harrod; they had never met before, as far as he could remember. He sat up on his bunk, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, not quite sure what to say. He hardly expected his mysterious benefactor to help him out of this mess, and he did not deserve more help.
The general ordered the guards to free the soldier from his handcuffs, and began an all-too-familiar prisoner routine. The soldier remembered it from his old combat manual. He had no secrets they would believe, anyway. A brain-damaged vet talking about his 'visions'? Better to say nothing.
Over coffee and cigarettes, the general made the requisite small talk before getting to the point.
"You seem reasonably stable-minded, soldier," Harrod stated with less-than-convincing sympathy. "What made you join this... cult?"
"I was... curious. About the Sirians, too."
"Of course, who isn't. But... you survived the brainwashing and the rigorous controls of the cult. Could you explain how?"
"I have a thick skull."
The general laughed, too hard. "I see. I just heard about how they found you in the cult camp... this may come as a shock to you, but you're the only survivor the troops found."
The soldier realized that he must have been in a state of shock, for only now he felt anything like sorrow. Women and a few children, more than three thousand people, had drowned themselves. Such a pitiful waste... and he hadn't been able to save a single one of them. Patty was dead. He wondered why he didn't cry for her sake, and it slowly dawned on him: though he had tried, he had never really known Patty as a person - just as a brainwashed, sermon-spouting mouthpiece for the cult. He clenched his fist and pounded his other hand.
"I guess what you want to know is: 'How could such a level-headed person have joined that crazy cult to begin with?'" He sounded bitter. The general looked at him with cool appraisal, no doubt evaluating his body language. "I knew it was crazy, from the day I joined. I was looking for answers, okay? I wanted to get closer to the real aliens, get to understand them. Like you."
The general nodded thoughtfully: "Right. We have something in common. I've been briefed on your background... undistinguished service in the Gulf War, retired after possible injury from chemical weapons or antidotes to such... look, if you're bitter at the Army, I understand. I'm an Army man myself..."
"Did you ever see any action?" The question contained a unspoken accusation: Did you ever put your life on the line, or was it just deskwork and sending others to the slaughter?
The general blinked, revealing his unease. "Try to put old grudges aside for the moment; there are bigger things going on. The alien spaceship. Just a few miles from this vessel."
That got the soldier's attention.
"Your country, no, the world needs you," Harrod said, leaning forward and lowering his voice. "Right now, the Sirians have brainwashed the ECT to do their errands and gain the confidence of the President himself. Meanwhile, the Arabs and Iranians have for the first time united against a common enemy - the Sirians, whose technology could render their oil industry bankrupt. This is an extremely dangerous situation. An unexpected move from the aliens could trigger a nuclear world war."
The soldier went cold with anxiety; the general was telling the truth.
"But the Sirians can be talked to... I've seen it on TV... they can help us with their superior technology, right?"
Now it was the general's turn to show bitterness: "And if they had, the whole conflict would have blown over. But these are a devious, inscrutable lot. We're monitoring them as closely as possible - you couldn't drop a fart on Alien Beach without my people hearing it. They have revealed nothing that could be of use to us in the coming conflict - they don't trust us with their technology. Yet I know, I just know, that if I had one of their machines under my command, we could stop the approaching Arab fleet dead in its tracks..."
Gee, what a surprise, thought the soldier, seeing in the soft-faced general a two-bit Napoleon with little concern for the future of humanity. He couldn't believe Harrod hadn't drawn the obvious conclusion: the Sirians would not give us their machines because they knew us too well.
Harrod said: "If we had an insider on Alien Beach, who could withstand their mind-control like you did with the cult, he might learn about their real plans. But I should warn you - it's quite a dangerous mission. I wouldn't suggest this if we weren't so sh
ort on time and information."
"I've got nothing to lose," the soldier said.
"You start tomorrow. My staff will brief you until then."
As the general moved to the door, the soldier made a request. "Can you fix me a TV and Internet? I gotta catch up."
They quickly brought him a TV set with a browser, and some food. The CNN news explained, among other things, why the crackdown on the cult had come so late.
"In the middle of the night, on orders from the ECT Security Committee, American troops under the U.N. stormed the cult compound of the Church of Ranmotani. This move came after a wave of suicides in other cult camps over the world. The cult's lawyers had for a long time been able to stall an impending search warrant, and the local police authorities have confessed to taking bribes to allow more cultists. Unfortunately, the troops came just too late to prevent another, the largest mass suicide to date. Three thousand cult members had drowned themselves. No survivors have been reported found yet..."
The soldier thought of his invisible benefactor, who had been absent for so long, and who might or might not be connected to the alien visitors: If you can see all this violence and misery we keep inflicting upon each other, please don't judge us too harshly. Man is but an ape, that aspires to godhood... and so am I.
Alien Beach was finally within the soldier's reach. And the funny thing was, he could no longer get excited about it. Because he would still be trapped on Earth, and - was he the first one to understand something so obvious? - as long as the Sirians stayed on Earth, they too were trapped there, besieged by mankind.
I'll ask you to take me with you. I know you will have to say no. But I'll ask anyway, he thought.
Yngve, AR - Alien Beach Page 22