Jace wasn’t sure when he crossed onto HAARP property. As a testament to its non-classified status, there was no security fence, guards, or perimeter road, only open black spruce forest. Eventually, he came to a clearing and knew where he was, outside the IRI.
The Ionospheric Research Instrument was the heart of the HAARP project. One hundred eighty crossed dipole antennas were laid out in a grid on an extensive gravel pad that was the size of twenty-five football fields (10 FIFA-regulation soccer fields). Each antenna was composed of a metal pole two stories high, with four spars near the top in the shape of an X. All together, the array looked like a city of tent poles and guy wires but without the tent covering. Scattered among them were thirty white trailers that housed the radio transmitters.
Jace’s GPS told him his destination lay inside the antenna array. Right. There was a little problem with this. Two problems, actually. First, unlike the facility-at-large, the IRI was fenced in. The thirty-three-acre (13-ha) gravel pad was surrounded by a high chain link fence topped with three strands of razor wire. A pair of signs were posted along it every few yards. The first sign read:
WARNING
U.S. Air Force Installation.
It is unlawful to enter this area without
permission of the Installation Commander.
And the second sign identified Jace’s next problem:
DANGER
and depicted a man sliced in half by a bolt of electricity. The fence wasn’t energized, the antennas were. At that moment, enough electricity was coursing through the array to power a small town. Jace knew this was so because he could hear the low thrum of the power plant not far away. Its plume of exhaust rose like a white pillar into the frigid arctic air. Ordinarily, the facility drew its electricity from the local utility. Jace had crossed the power lines on his way in. It was only during research campaigns that they fired up the five 2.5 megawatt diesel generators in the Operations Building in order to drive the transmitters. A research campaign might last for a week or two during which time scientists from around the world congregated in Gakona to conduct their experiments. During its campaigns, HAARP became one of the largest producers of electricity in the state, and its thirsty diesels consumed six hundred gallons (2271 l) of fuel per hour.
No, Jace didn’t think he was going to jump that fence. It wouldn’t be prudent.
His phone chimed.
Throw orb over fence. Aim for shed or antenna.
Right. Sure thing. The “orb” weighed more than an Olympic shot put. Like he could get it over the fence, let alone hit an antenna or transmitter trailer inside. “What do you think I am,” he said, “a striver?”
The plain truth of what he’d just spoken smacked him in the head. No, he wasn’t a striver, only just a puny human. And yet the strivers couldn’t do this job by themselves. The meaning of the tracks in the snow became clear. The raven had been tasked with delivering the BB to the array. It could have set down on any shed or antenna of its choosing. But something had knocked the bird out of the sky. So Missing One must have sent human strivers in to retrieve the BB, Masterson and Bertolli. But they’d only been able to get so close before they too malfunctioned. So it seemed that strivers, for all their superhuman strength and immunity to poisonous gasses, were vulnerable to radio waves. And Turdboy had been forced to rely on a mere, unjiggered Homo sapiens like himself to get the job done. This was a very good thing to know.
Dressed as he was, Jace could sit on a snow berm just as comfortably as on his couch. He opened his wallet and spilled the golden BB into his mittened hand. The little bugger was heavy. That it was also so small just confounded the mind. And since the sky was clear, and the time was early afternoon, the little orb caught the sun and flashed like flames in a campfire. This was truly something alien, all right. Anybody could see that, including any of the commanding officers on any of the many military installations he could drive to on the Richardson Highway.
Alaska was the land of military installations, of forts and bases and remote training ranges the size of Texas where the Air Force could execute live bombing runs and the Army could stage live-fire war games and no one would even notice except for the moose and caribou. On the Richardson Highway alone, between Gakona Junction and Fairbanks, Jace had his choice of two military training facilities, an Air Force base, and two Army forts, one of which was studded with hardened silos for twenty-five ground-based, mid-course, anti-ballistic missiles, part of President Reagan’s Star Wars initiative.
And here in his hand he held incontrovertible proof of a non-terrestrial presence, exactly the proof he had been seeking, and he hadn’t even had to knock down a tulip or little boy to acquire it. Now he could go to someone. But who?
Not the Air Force. The U.S. Air Force was notoriously too slaphappy for conducting alien autopsies. Not his employers — he had to assume that striver Masterson already owned the NPS and Bertolli the FBI. And Nabor? If Nabor was also a striver, he probably owned the rest of the federal alphabet.
The Army? They were just up the road at Fort Greely. A little further, next to Fairbanks, was Fort Wainwright. Yes, he could turn it over to the Army. Let them handle it. If Missing One was an advance scout for a turd-headed invasion force, the Army could figure it out and take appropriate defensive measures.
On the other hand, what if Missing One really was an innocent spacefarer forced to ditch its ship (or whatever) on the first handy planet it could find? It said it needed roadside assistance. That could be all there was to it. If that was the case, wouldn’t it be to our planet’s advantage to forge a friendship with this advanced species rather than imprison it in a military hoosegow and leave it to generals and bureaucrats to start a war we cannot win?
All he had to do was throw the orb through the fence. One small act of kindness that could cement intergalactic relations for centuries to come.
THE ARMY IT was.
Jace started to retrace his steps to the pickup. Immediately, his phone chimed with a new text:
Return fence throw orb leave
“Or what?”
The trek out was only slightly less arduous than the way in. He passed the spot where the bird had melted the snowpack down to mud and moss. He passed the splintered trees where the groove in the snow started. Apparently, this was as close to the science facility as strivers, bird or man, could safely venture. It marked the boundary of a sort of striver exclusion zone. Indeed, when he reached the power line easement, he spied a man-like figure trying to hide behind a utility pole. Probably there to ambush him. So he backtracked to the safety of the exclusion zone to assess the situation.
Clearly he could return to the highway while staying in the exclusion zone merely by hewing close to the HAARP facility, but that would entail breaking new trail the entire way. To lighten his load, he hung the metal detector from the branch of a tree for later retrieval.
Jace followed a diagonal bearing through the woods and emerged a half hour later near the HAARP entrance. His pickup was parked on the highway about a mile back toward Gakona. No doubt a striver or two lay in waiting along the way. He scanned the highway in the other direction and saw a highway sign that said the Canada Border was 211 miles (340 km) away. Maybe he could hitchhike to Canada and turn the BB over to Canadian authorities in Whitehorse. But after standing in the cold for another half hour with no traffic on the road, he abandoned that plan.
Before he could form another, his phone rang.
“Hello?”
Hello, ranger. This is Missing One.
“Um, okay, if you say so.” The caller sounded nothing like the alien he’d spoken to the previous night.
This one is concerned that you did not complete the task set out for you.
“Who is this really?”
This one has already identified itself, but your confusion is understandable. In the last few hours this one has made a special effort to improve how this one communicates with cis-humans, such as yourself. Your language and thought processes
are tricky for an outsider to master, but if this one hopes to build trust and rapport with you — well — it wouldn’t hurt to at least try to speak properly. This one is shooting for colloquial English. How is this one doing so far?
“Good. I guess.”
Cool. Now to return to the matter at hand. This one really needs the tiny orb in your possession to be placed at the coordinates this one has provided you. Was there some problem that prevented you from accomplishing this?
How condescending can you get? Could this be the same turdboy? “Well, it’s very heavy, as you probably know, but I suppose I could have managed to get it inside the fence.”
Then why didn’t you?
“Tell me, new and improved Missing One, how’s Ooo-Zee doing? He reach the Lake of Fire yet?”
The striver Uzzie has successfully transported his orb to a magma chamber of sufficient energy output to supply this one’s immediate needs.
But this one detects a note of sarcasm in your voice. As this one tried to express to you yesterday, this one deeply regrets recruiting the young human. Please understand, this one was desperate for energy. There are too few acceptable energy sources in the mine complex without depriving the humans there of all of their supplies, and this one was literally starving and close to death. This one simply did not understand local Earth values and customs sufficiently and acted out of a desire for self-preservation. Surely, you recognize the instinct to survive at all costs, do you not?
“Of course I do, but I’d never kill a little kid to save myself.”
Ah, this one is beginning to see the misunderstanding here. You think this one killed Uzzie. That is an incorrect assumption. This one has never killed — that is, put an end to the life of — any human. A few forest animals, yes, but no people.
That was a surprise. “You didn’t? Uzzie was already dead? How?
This one didn’t witness the event, but the Prophecys say that he drowned in the large cistern they use for their drinking water. As best as this one can piece together, the young human was playing next to the water and fell in. This one did not harvest Uzzie, but once he was no longer viable, this one did recruit his remains to serve as a striver.
There was that word again. “Tell me, what exactly is a striver?”
A striver is an autonomous entity that always strives to do its best. Strivers come in an almost infinite variety of forms, substrates, and functions. In the case of Uzzie, his organic chemistry was replaced with a more exotic recipe of semi-organic and non-organic compounds in a very robust architecture.
“Is striver Uzzie still human?”
If you mean human in a bio-evolutionary sense, no. Uzzie is not “living” in the common sense of the word and cannot mate or breed with other humans.
“And what about those two federal agents and my park service colleague? You did kill them, right?”
As this one has already stated, this one has killed no humans but only recruited them after they were already dead. The agents and Masterson were given to Missing One as gifts. Or at least that was how this one interpreted the act at the time.
“What? As gifts?”
Before Uzzie. Before this one remembered about the sanctity of human life, this one was a fugitive in the Prophecy mine, injured, starving, confused, and hunted by psychopaths. This one was able to elude the Prophecys, but the government agents were much more proficient in their detection techniques, and they succeeded in locating this one’s hiding place in a tunnel spur. But then, before they could complete their capture, one of the Prophecy offspring unexpectedly harvested them, and the patriarch left their bodies behind in the tunnels. This one had a much more primitive grasp of the human psyche at that point, and the best explanation it could come up with was that the patriarch sent the boy to save this one’s life and that he left the agents’ bodies behind as a peace offering.
Before that time, this one had only used ravens as strivers. Birds are able creatures, but humans are much more capable than birds in many respects. So this one accepted the gift of the agents’ remains and recruited them. Recruited, not harvested. You do understand the distinction?
“This is crazy. Are you telling me that one of the Prophecys murdered the agents?”
Exactly so, by breaking open their skulls with large stones.
“He stoned them to death?
Yes.
“Which Prophecy did this?”
The one with the eyepatch.
“Proverbs?” Obviously, it was Proverbs.
Yes.
“And what about my colleague, Masterson? Did Proverbs stone him too?”
No, he used a long gun on the ranger.
“And he committed these murders alone? Or did any of the others assist?”
The older sons and patriarch witnessed the killings, but no one assisted or intervened.
“What about the girls? What about Deut? Did she have any part in any of this?”
No.
If what Turdboy said was true, the case of First Contact between humans and whatever spacefaring race it represented had been much worse than he imagined. (But at least Deut wasn’t culpable.)
Jace removed the phone from his ear and waved his arms around to unknot his muscles. His whole body was clenching up during this conversation. His phone’s battery was down below 50%. Jace wasn’t cold, but he hadn’t eaten all day and felt a little lightheaded. If what Turdboy was telling him was true . . .
“And all you want is to ‘phone home’ for ‘roadside assistance’?”
This one now detects skepticism in your voice. Why do you doubt this one’s intentions?
“Oh, I don’t know. What if ‘roadside assistance’ is spy code for ‘Send the invasion force’?”
That’s what you think? That there’s an armada of Imperial warships waiting for an invasion order? Sorry to disappoint, but that’s not how things work in the galaxy-at-large. There are quadrillions of unoccupied planets and planetoids more richly endowed with resources than Earth. They are much closer to inhabited worlds and ripe for the picking. No one needs or wants to invade your solar system, and you’re welcome to it. This one’s only desire is to return to the embrace of its own kind.
“And apparently you need my help to do so.”
There was an extended pause, and for a moment Jace thought he’d lost the signal.
Please excuse this one’s ignorance of human culture, but this one has just reviewed what it has learned about person-to-person interactions, and it appears that you are asking for some kind of gratuity or bribe before you will consent to lending your assistance. Is that correct?
“No, not at all!”
Now this one detects it has offended you. Perhaps bribe is the wrong word to use, and this one apologizes if it has caused offense. Perhaps transactional inducement is more appropriate.
“Uh, still insulting.”
This one has observed your offer to Uzzie of a cutting tool in exchange for his orb. Was that not meant to be a transactional inducement?
The turd had him there. “Maybe.”
This one has surveyed the state of human knowledge and technology, and it possesses advances that your species may find valuable. It could trade one of these for help in calling for roadside assistance.
Jace felt insulted that Turdboy would consider it necessary to bribe him to perform a humanitarian act. Still . . .
“What kind of advances?”
Your species has a long list of desired tech. Take your pick. This one can offer you a cure for cancer or for all viruses. Is that something you would like? Or perhaps you’d prefer the key to cold fusion, personal quantum computing, relativistic-speed space travel, or whole-Earth climate control. On a more personal level, this one could provide you with an aphrodisiac elixir calibrated to any individual mate you desire.
Jace was gobsmacked. “You can do all this?”
Not at the moment, but this one can remember anything you like. Is there anything in particular you’d consider an equitable
trade for your assistance?
Again with the remembering.
“You can remember the cure for cancer. You remember what bad is. You remember the sanctity of human life. I think you’re using the word remember wrong. It’s like you already knew something and forgot it.”
This one only meant to say that the cure for cancer is already known, but not by this one at this moment. If you choose the cure or any of the other inducements on offer, this one will go about remembering the necessary knowledge. Is that acceptable?
Another half hour had passed without highway traffic. If he was going to Canada, he’d better start walking.
“Tell your striver to allow me to return to my truck, and I’ll think about it.”
Excellent. You return to your vehicle, give the striver there the orb while you decide which inducement to choose. Once you have chosen, he will give the orb back to you to take to the designated coordinates. Do you and this one have a deal?
“No, we don’t have a deal. I will not be your prisoner.”
This one is not holding you prisoner. But the orb does not belong to you, and you may not leave until you return it or, better yet, complete the task you agreed to perform and collect a boon to human civilization of inestimable value.
Jace had to admit, it was an impressive carrot. But what about the stick?
“And if I don’t?”
If you don’t, you will be condemning this one to a lonely life of exile at the hands of religious zealots.
So the stick was a guilt trip? Actually, it wasn’t a bad stick to use on Jace who was susceptible to guilt trips and went to great lengths to avoid them.
As Jace skulked in the cold and dark near the HAARP entrance, a new realization occurred to him: he didn’t need to take the alien artifact to an Army base or to Canada. Not if he could deliver it to NASA instead. Who better to deal with aliens than scientists?
Glassing the Orgachine Page 11