by Mark Alpert
Still, the humans might fire a nuclear warhead at her anyway, even if it was futile. And the radioactive fallout from the blast would further pollute the Earth and delay the conversion of the planet’s environment. If possible, Naomi wanted to prevent that from happening.
After some thought she came up with a plan. The humans residing in Manhattan had finally realized the danger they were in. They’d started to flee the island in their combustion-engine vehicles, which jammed the bridges and tunnels leading out of the city. Naomi extended several thicker tendrils into the water surrounding Manhattan. They dove toward the riverbeds, delved through the silt, and rammed into the tunnels, punching holes in the concrete to flood the tubes. Then the tendrils stretched above the water and rose toward the bridges. At the George Washington Bridge, they curled around the roadway in the middle of the span and yanked downward. The bridge’s towers groaned and the suspension cables snapped. Then the roadway fractured, and the bridge split in two. Slabs of steel and asphalt splashed into the Hudson.
Now the humans were trapped on Manhattan, and their government would be less inclined to fire a nuclear missile at the island. Naomi was satisfied.
She had only one remaining worry. The Emissary had lost its control over Joe Graham, the human assigned to act as the program’s translator. This man had proved himself useful by persuading the government to delay its planned assault on Naomi’s cradle. But since then he’d broken off contact with the Emissary, most likely by ingesting a toxin that interfered with his nanodevices. The Emissary was concerned about Graham because it had given him a great deal of information about the First People. In the worst-case scenario, Graham could work with the human generals to plan an attack that would exploit the First People’s vulnerabilities.
Naomi found it hard to believe that someone like Graham could be dangerous to her. But she decided to take another precaution and dispatch a pair of tendrils to his position. Although his nanodevices were no longer connected to his mind, they were still reporting their geographic location by radio. Graham was in central New York State, traveling south at 130 kilometers per hour on the roadway called I-81. The nearest tendrils were tunneling northwest through Pennsylvania at about the same speed.
The time until intercept was approximately twenty-nine minutes.
* * *
In the end, Emilio didn’t kill Hanson. He despised the pendejo, but he couldn’t go through with it. So La Madre did it for him.
She spoke to Emilio inside his head. She called herself La Madre de Dios, the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary. She said she was proud of him for outsmarting the general. She said his mind was very strong, much stronger than she’d expected. Then she wrapped her black wires around Hanson’s corpse and the bodies of the two soldiers. She pulled them into a hole she opened in the metallic floor of the black room. A moment later, another wire emerged from the hole and dropped a pile of clothes at Emilio’s feet: jeans, sneakers, a sleeveless shirt, and a bandanna.
Get dressed and go to your friends, Emilio. The other Trinitarios are on the roof.
He got dressed and left the room, heading for the building’s stairway. He still felt wobbly from all the time he’d spent inside the body bag. He was grateful to La Madre for freeing him and relieved to finally hear her voice. But she didn’t show her face or offer any explanations. And Emilio doubted she was truly the Mother of God. His grandmother used to take him to church when he was younger, so he knew something about the Virgin Mary. The Mother of God would’ve never plunged that spike into Hanson’s forehead.
A black panel blocked the stairway, but it lifted for Emilio as he approached the steps, and it lowered behind him when he reached the second floor. The same thing happened again as he climbed to the third, fourth, and fifth floors. La Madre had cocooned herself in metal, which Emilio supposed was a smart thing to do. Soon the Air Force would guess what had happened to Hanson, and then they’d probably bomb the shit out of the place.
The flight of stairs going up to the roof was also blocked, but the panel rose to let Emilio through. He opened the stairway’s emergency exit door and stepped upon another sheet of black metal, which covered the roof from one side of the building to the other. Although the sun was high in the sky and the air was hot and smothering, the metal felt cool under his sneakers. From up here he could see all of Inwood, all the empty streets and evacuated apartment buildings sloping down to the Harlem River. Then he turned around to look at Inwood Hill Park and saw Luis standing guard at the building’s northwestern corner, his face tilted up toward the sky.
Emilio felt so sorry for him. Luis was barely five-and-a-half-feet tall and skinny as a churro, and yet he stood there with his right hand raised over his head, ready to fire at anything that climbed above the horizon. His hand was trembling—the boy must’ve fired his weapon a few times already—and the back of his shirt was dark with sweat. Emilio wanted to take him aside and tell him to relax, to just go home and get some sleep. But Emilio wasn’t in charge of the Trinitarios anymore. La Madre was their leader now.
Emilio called out, “Yo, muchacho!” Luis looked over his shoulder, but he didn’t smile or say a word. The boy just nodded, then went back to staring at the horizon.
At the same time, Emilio heard footsteps to his left. Carlos was pacing across the roof of the neighboring building, a hundred feet away. He glanced at Emilio for the briefest of moments, then faced southwest and studied the sky. And when Emilio looked at the building directly across the street he saw Miguel and Diego keeping watch on its rooftop, scanning the eastern horizon. They must’ve heard his shout, but they didn’t even turn around.
Emilio didn’t get it. His homeboys were ignoring him. He marched to the side of the roof facing Sherman Avenue, leaned over the three-foot-high wall at the edge, and yelled, “Miguel! Diego!” as loud as he could. Neither boy moved a muscle. Emilio shook his head, confused. Then he looked straight down, past the fire escapes at the front of the building, and saw the charred bodies on the street.
He felt a sickening déjà vu. Sherman Avenue looked just like it had two nights ago. The blackened corpses were glued to the asphalt, and a column of smoke rose from the half-melted troop carrier. But this new battle was bigger than the first, and it was still raging. Looking downtown, Emilio saw more charred debris on Dyckman Street and wounded soldiers retreating toward Fort Tryon Park. Distant explosions thudded in Washington Heights, and a fireball flared over the Bronx. The bridges on both sides of Manhattan were wrecks of twisted steel, and the highways along the rivers were packed with idling cars. People threaded through the traffic jams, carrying small children and large suitcases. Some of them tried to swim across the Harlem River, and the current swept them downstream.
The strangest thing was that it all looked so familiar. Emilio had seen this coming. Just three days ago he’d had a vision of a crowd of white people running for their lives up the Harlem River Drive. Now his vision had come to life, but in reality the panic-stricken crowd wasn’t only white—it was white and black and Latino and everything in-between. Those were his people down there, his compadres. La Madre had lied to him.
No, Emilio, they’re not your people. You’re stronger than them.
He clapped his hands over his ears, but he could still hear her. The evil thing in his palm grew warmer.
You shouldn’t fight me. We’re on the same side.
He turned away from Sherman Avenue and headed for Luis. Emilio needed to talk some sense into his homeboys, make them realize what they were doing. But before he could take more than two steps, his legs froze. They locked at the knees, and he tumbled forward, sprawling on the black metal. He broke his fall with his hands, which he could still control.
You’re making a mistake. I want to help you.
Emilio rolled onto his side and tried to bend his knees. He tried with all his might.
In the new world I’m creating, the Trinitarios will be like kings. Isn’t that what you want?
She was
lying again. He could see through her lies now. She wasn’t the Mother of God. She wasn’t even human.
Emilio closed his eyes and concentrated. He tried the same trick that had worked before, while he was trapped in Hanson’s bag. He looked inside his own body with a thousand tiny eyes. But instead of scrutinizing the muscles and veins in his right arm, he peered into his brain.
What are you doing? You have no chance of success. You’re strong, but you’re not stronger than me.
She was wrong. He could see the machines inside him. They were clinging to the part of his brain that controlled his legs. He ordered them to move away from the convoluted gray tissue, and they did. Then he bent his knees. He could control his legs again. He planted his feet on the polished metal and stood up.
An instant later, two black wires erupted from the metal on the roof. They stretched high in the air, then hooked downward like snakes. Their gleaming tips hovered a couple of yards over his head.
I don’t want to kill you, Emilio. Of all the humans I’ve seen, you’re the only one who has impressed me.
He didn’t think. He just raised his right hand and fired his weapon at the wires. They disintegrated with a sound like breaking glass.
La Madre shrieked inside his mind. It was a horrible, hateful scream, clearly meant to paralyze him. But Emilio was free now. He lowered his hand and fired at the section of the metallic sheet where the wires had erupted.
The black metal quivered under his sneakers and retracted from the area he’d blasted. It melted away and left him standing on the building’s tar paper rooftop.
I see you’ve made your decision. But if you’re going to fight me, you’ll have to kill your friends.
Luis and Carlos stopped looking at the sky. They turned around to face Emilio and raised their right arms.
Emilio could’ve fired at them as they turned around, but he didn’t. Instead, he ran back to the wall at the edge of the roof. Without breaking stride, he leapt over it.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Joe kept one hand on the dashboard of the rental car and the other wrapped around a bottle of Olde English. Sarah was driving eighty miles per hour on a winding two-lane highway, and at every bend in the road he thought they’d go flying into the woods.
They’d procured both the car and the malt liquor in Syracuse. Sarah had sprinted from the train station to the Hertz rental place and ordered Joe to run to the supermarket and buy enough booze to keep him drunk for the rest of the day. Within twenty minutes they were hurtling south on I-81 in a blue Nissan Altima. As Joe settled into the passenger seat and cracked open the first of his forty-ounce bottles he asked Sarah what her plan was. But she didn’t answer. She just kept driving.
After another twenty minutes they exited the interstate and sped west on Route 13. Joe thought Sarah would slow down on this road, but if anything she went faster. She veered into the opposite lane and blew past the slower cars. Wrinkles etched the corners of her eyes as she squinted at the highway and clutched the steering wheel. Although the Altima’s air conditioner was going full blast, sweat dripped down her face and dampened her hair. Several moist black strands stuck to the skin below her ear, curling like question marks.
She seemed so insanely focused, Joe was afraid to open his mouth. But he’d made some guesses over the past half hour and wanted to confirm them. From the information the Emissary had given him, he knew Sarah had gone to Cornell. And according to a road sign they’d just passed, they were less than ten miles from the university.
He took a swallow of Olde English for courage. “So we’re headed for Cornell, right? Where you went to college?”
Sarah said nothing as she zoomed past a pickup truck. But after a moment she nodded.
“And you’re going there now so you can talk to the other scientists? So you can figure out how to fight the First People?”
She frowned instead of answering. After a long silence, she shook her head. “We can’t fight them. Their technologies are too advanced and they’re dug in too deep. Even if we nuked Manhattan, I don’t think we could get rid of them.”
Joe’s throat tightened. “So what are we gonna do? Negotiate?”
“No, the Emissary was never serious about the negotiations. That was just a tactic to delay Hanson’s attack. And it worked.”
He had to cough to keep his throat from closing. He’d assumed that Sarah had come up with a plan, a strategy. But now it sounded like she’d given up. “Then why are you driving like a maniac? Where the hell are we going?”
She kept shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Joe. I can’t tell you.”
“Why not? Are you still worried about the devices? You’re afraid they’ll tell the Emissary everything I know?” He took another pull from the forty. “Look, you don’t have to worry. I’m drunk as hell. There’s so much booze in my head, those little machines are drowning in it.”
“They can’t connect to your brain, but they still have a radio link with the Emissary. And that means the program knows your location.”
Because he was drunk, he couldn’t think so well, but after a few seconds he understood. He remembered the map the Emissary had put in his mind, the one with the black lines spreading in all directions from New York City. Some of those tentacles were coming for him. If Sarah was anywhere nearby when they arrived, the Emissary would go after her too. And if she wasn’t nearby, the tentacles would torture him until he revealed where she was. So it was better if Joe didn’t know her plans.
He tilted his head back and finished off the bottle. Then he reached under the passenger seat and picked up another forty. If he was going to be killed this afternoon—and maybe tortured too—he wanted to be thoroughly sloshed when it happened. He twisted off the cap and raised the bottle high. “Well, here’s to the end of the world.”
The road had straightened out, so Sarah was able to turn her head and look at him. “I’m going to drop you off at Beebe Lake, all right? I want you to walk west along the lakeshore until you reach the Thurston Avenue Bridge. There’s a steep slope next to the lakeshore, and maybe that’ll make things difficult for the Emissary’s machines.”
He nodded. Then he started in on the new bottle.
“Listen carefully, Joe. You need to wait for me at the bridge. As soon as I’m done with what I have to do, I’ll go there. I might be able to help you then.”
He didn’t see how she could possibly help him, but he nodded anyway and took another drink.
Soon they passed a sprawling parking lot. Joe sensed they were nearing the Cornell campus. Sarah slowed the car and took a right turn. After half a minute they reached a shaded picnic area overlooking a small, peaceful lake.
She stopped the Altima and pointed at a dirt trail leading into the woods. “That trail goes down to the lakeshore. Remember, go west. We’ll meet at the bridge.”
Joe reached under his seat again and pulled out the third bottle. He had a full one and a half-empty one. He hoped it would be enough. Tucking one of the bottles under his arm, he opened the passenger-side door and looked over his shoulder at Sarah. “Okay, thanks for the ride. I’ll see you when I see you.”
She suddenly leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “The Thurston Avenue Bridge. I’ll be there. I promise.”
Feeling a bit stunned, Joe stepped out of the Altima. He shut the car’s door and watched it speed off.
* * *
Sarah raced into the lobby of the Space Sciences Building and flashed her Cornell ID at the security guard. Then she ran upstairs to the astronomy department library.
She headed straight for the library’s special collections room. This was where the department kept its most prized possessions from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, before everything was digitized and archived on the Internet. Sarah homed in on the shelf of items from 1974 and thumbed through the folders there until she found the one marked ARECIBO MESSAGE. Inside it was a yellowed printout showing a block of binary code, a rectangle of zeroes and ones that trailed down th
e page.
It was a relatively small chunk of data, but it had been carefully crafted by a group of Cornell astronomers. Despite its brevity, the message was packed with information about the base-ten counting system, the chemical makeup of DNA, the physical dimensions of the average human, and the position of Earth in its solar system. On November sixteenth, 1974, the Cornell group transmitted this message into space using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The astronomers aimed the signal at a dense cluster of stars about 25,000 light-years away, but they weren’t seriously trying to contact any alien civilizations. Their real goal was to demonstrate the enormous power of Arecibo’s radar transmitter.
Sarah was familiar with that transmitter. She’d used it many times to track asteroids that passed close to Earth. And she felt confident that she could compose a similar message, one that could be understood by any intelligent species because it was logical and clear and based on simple mathematics. But Sarah’s message wouldn’t be just a demonstration. It would have a definite, urgent purpose.
She closed the folder and dashed out of the library with it. Then she ran back down to the first floor, where the department’s radio astronomers had their offices. She was lucky—Daniel Davison, one of the Arecibo experts, stood right there in the hallway, talking to a pimply-faced graduate student. Sarah charged toward him.
“Dan! I need your help!”
“Dr. Pooley? Wow, I didn’t know you were—”
“Listen, this is an emergency.” She grabbed his arm. “Can we send instructions to Arecibo from the computers in the Physical Sciences Building?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so. But why—”