They held that unspoken agreement until he died, and the first time her phone rang after 7pm it scared her more than the reports of the aliens landing in China. If her father was going to haunt her, that’s when and where he knew to find her.
It wasn’t her father, though, it was a reporter that spoofed her digital gatekeeper. Resources, both digital and real, spent tremendous effort to isolate Natalie Cho in a bubble away from the media after she returned to Seoul from America, the last Korean to do so.
The soldier had interrupted that quiet, now found only in her dreams, a second time.
“Let’s go, Miss Cho.”
It was a statement, not a question. He had a gun, but they all had guns. She wouldn’t have refused anyway, as excited to hear Kam’s voice as anyone. Sleeping on it helped her decide not to ask him about Doctor Tarmor, at least not with the American generals listening.
When they reached the control room it was clear it wouldn’t just be American generals listening, but the entire world. Screens filled the retrofitted amphitheater, some with locations of military assets, many more with faces of presidents and dignitaries.
No longer concerned with homegrown threats, the United States could pool everyone important in one room. Even the president and vice president sat in a box near the center, surrounded by advisors hurrying to and from nearby monitors.
To her surprise, the soldier guided Natalie to a seat directly behind that box. To her even further surprise, the president turned to shake her hand.
“You’re the young woman who set this all up, right?” his face betraying no emotion.
“I—yes, sir. That was me.”
“And I understand you know one of the Americans on that ship,” he pointed at one of the big boards, showing a blip on the end of a big white curved line, approaching Earth from the smaller interiorly orbiting planet.
“Knowin’ in the biblical sense I think, sir” Pith’s voice lacquered the air between them as he appeared on the president’s right and put his big palm on Natalie’s shoulder.
She gritted her teeth, wanting to slap the general, but not in front of the American president.
“If that’s right, even better,” the president said. “You can tell us if it’s really him or not.”
“Or . . . not, sir?”
The president nodded gravely. “With what we’ve seen the past few weeks, I’m not convinced this isn’t an elaborate trick of some kind. Our folks sneak onto an alien ship, get trapped there and another alien decides to bring them back?
“Why didn’t this godlike alien just stop the whole thing from happening in the first place? I understand the other aliens were slaves. Why let that happen? It’s an awful lot of effort for just a few people. I’d never say that in public, you understand, but I’ve had to make decisions every hour since the Event that pit the future of the human race against the interests of individuals. It seems like our new ‘friends’ didn’t do that. I need to know why. My trust in them is going to rely on you and the general here.”
“Because he ‘knew’ the other three?” Natalie quipped and sent the general an evil glance.
“Not as well as you did,” Pith said. “But I had the advantage of a full psychological workup, which I’m sure you did on Kam in your own way-din’cha?”
“General.” The president put his hand up. “Whatever reason caused you and Doctor Douglass not to get along I need you to put it behind you.”
“Fine with me, sir, though I think I might have some competition for that position.”
“General!” the president fumed. “This is not Camp David! Do you see a cigar in my hand? If everything goes well today Miss Cho may have had a hand in saving our species—our planet—from . . . well from what we’re not even sure yet, but what’s happened so far has been bad enough. If you can’t live up to your rank I’ll take it away from you.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Pith looked down, then back up and saluted before twisting and walking away, a stiff toy soldier just moved to the back of the toy box.
“I apologize, Miss Cho,” the president said. “Ever since I cut funding for the F-35s, things have been testy between us. That was his baby, something he worked on before I even became a senator, let alone his boss.”
“Maybe he’s worried you’ll throw out the bathwater too,” Natalie said.
The president smiled politely. “The big clock says we only have a few minutes left. If you hear anything abnormal from Doctor Douglass, a crack in his voice, words he doesn’t normally use, anything, you tap my shoulder, okay?” The president looked left and right at his Secret Service detail, making sure they knew to let her do it if necessary.
The president didn’t wait for her to respond and she realized it wasn’t really a question. She nervously sat in the small chair in her box. The room buzzed with more activity as the big board got closer to zero, but things in her area, the nucleus, seemed to move like primordial magma.
The president conferred, and the military men gave orders, a slow-moving chromatin just around her. Beyond that, well-dressed men and women shuffled and in many cases ran back and forth, talking into headsets and connecting the last dignitaries to digitally arrive.
Jong-un’s tired face appeared on a monitor on the far left of the big field in front. The president wasn’t kidding; this was the entire world uniting, if only for a few minutes. Jong-un looked ragged and thin, the Event hitting the hermit kingdom the hardest. Still, it would take a lot more to engender any sympathy for him in Natalie’s heart, a child of her father who fought against Jong-un’s barbaric grandfather.
‘Maybe these were the kinds of things the aliens will help us move past,’ Natalie hoped.
It was strange to watch the faces on the big wall, almost 200 of them, move from guarded tension to near-fright as the clock got closer to zero. The United States was in the driver’s seat again. World War III was happening, and just as the conspiracy theorists projected it would be: against invaders from space. Many who regarded the Americans with jealousy or even outright enmity secretly wondered if the United States wasn’t in some collusion with the invaders. Even more speculated that they’d only been invited to this call so they could observe some kind of parlor trick.
As the final seconds ticked off, quiet overtook the room. What followed could be the end or the beginning, but the fragile world, already threatened and shaken, would never be the same.
Natalie blinked and couldn’t open her eyes again. The after-image of 00:01 burned into her retinas, but something else formed in its place. Stars glowed. Her eyes-and her mouth-were wide open.
Chapter 12
“Kam!”
Natalie ran to him. Once tight in embrace she saw over his shoulder into the star field. Half the glitter wasn’t from faraway stars, but eyes, shining in the dark. Concentric circles of bodies floated around and above them, drifting rings around a strange, small planet.
The rest were coming to terms with their own space.
“We’re together now,” Kam said.
“I’m so glad you’re okay. So happy to see you . . .” Natalie said with hesitation.
“But you’re wondering if you’re dead?”
“Or crazy, which is a return to form, I guess,” she said, as Kam turned her to face what they all orbited: the grey-green tube, slowly rotating.
Natalie knew what it must be before it spoke, but the rest of the floating bodies had minds full of confusion and fear.
“This is all in my mind, isn’t it?” Natalie whispered.
“Not quite,” Kam said. “We’re all in each other's mind.”
Natalie looked out across the concentric circles as they drifted higher and lower to form concentric spheres extending all the way to the stars.
“How many?” Her words drifted out with her gaze.
“Seven billion, four hundred fifty-three million, thirty-three hundred thousand, eight hundred eleven,” the tardigrade voice, taking on a new majesty, answered.
The eye
s of the drifting bodies turned to focus on the source of the words, even though the sound appeared in their own minds.
The voice went on to tell the entirety of the human race all at once the history, as far as they knew, of the universe and everything previously shared with Kam, Jill, Amanda and Lee. Then it went further.
“The Elders are very powerful, but not infinitely, not yet. Gravity is but one dimension, time another. To pluck these strings is a far easier thing than to directly manipulate planetary mass. Thus, they choose to corral intelligence that passes the filter of assured mutual destruction, only to pit it against others in a higher stakes game of mutually assured destruction between planets.”
“Wait,” Jill interjected. “Why aren’t the radio signals from this Filter Trap galaxy hitting other inhabited worlds?”
“As I mentioned earlier, the Elders took a billion years to propagate their quantum tunneling through the galaxy, but that doesn’t mean they waited until it was done to start filtering threats. They started locally. Thus, if you hadn’t guessed it before, you are now in the Elders’ home galaxy.
“This galaxy was one of the first to coalesce after the Big Bang. As the Elders proliferated further out into the universe, faster than its expansion, they caught new threats before the signals from their home could land. In fact, even if the Earth was left in place, because of the expansion of the universe known to us to a width of over a hundred billion light years, the original signals from the Elders would only reach your solar system billions of years after your Sun had long ago expanded and killed all life in the system capable of receiving them.
“Therefore the risk of the mutually-assured destruction between quarantined planets not working was eliminated. Any signals from new technology developed in the quarantine would travel out behind the technological darkness the Elders spread. Just like their own original signals, there would be no one to hear the new.”
A man on the first ring of Earth inhabitants raised his arm, and marveled at it. “Excuse me,” he said, marveling at his voice as well, freed from the clutches of cerebral palsy.
“Yes, Dr. Hawking?”
“I understand how nobody outside quarantine would hear us, but how is it that the Elders managed to overtake their own signals that left before their singularity? Wouldn’t that require travel faster than the speed of light?”
“Yes, but only if they were proceeding from the signal origin. They were, in fact, using members of my own species to tunnel through to many points far beyond the reach of those signals. As I stated earlier, we often reproduce asexually, essentially creating a batch of clones where no sexual reproduction is available. So it was my own species that had millions upon millions of years of drifting about the cosmos, and the Elders piggybacked on that.”
“So they somehow match the gluons in your identical DNA to sort of zip around the universe coming in and out of existence creating or destroying matter through your atoms?”
“Correct, Dr. Hawking.”
The rest of the humans began muttering amongst themselves, creating an awful hum. They were quickly getting left behind in the conversation between the most brilliant human and the godlike knowledge of the tardigrade.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s not really important right now,” Lee said. “It doesn’t matter how they move things, they’ve been doing it for an eternity. What matters is how we’re going to stop them.”
“We made our offer first to the tall ones, but they refused. As you’ve seen, this only hastens their destruction at the hands of another more malevolent species. In your new solar system’s case, this is represented by the enslavement of the tall ones by the bearantulas. We now offer the same choice to you as time hastens to a close the eligibility of any species to accept at all. You may be the last to have the opportunity.”
“The opportunity to what?” Amanda asked for all of exasperated humankind.
“Your own singularity. Specifically the same singularity of technology and thought that we coached the Elders into, fusing yourselves and artificial intelligence into one organism without need for space, but stretching infinitely with no boundaries of knowledge except those possible under the underlying structure of the universe.”
The cartoonish blob floated in circles, addressing all seven billion humans surrounding it. A short silence held, then was interrupted on all levels of all spheres. Shouts in every foreign language clashed with every other, the closest to the center easiest to hear. Natalie was happy at least that part of physics the tardigrade decided to keep, seven billion voices in her head at once would probably make it explode.
“We hear all your questions, and we will answer the most pertinent,” the voice assured, then stopped swiveling and looked at the German Chancellor, in the second concentric sphere.
“Will you guide us?” she asked.
“You will be guided by Natalie Cho. We encoded the instructions in her DNA, though only she knows where, and will only know in one week’s time.
‘They turned me into a ticking time bomb. I’m dead,’ Natalie worried. Then, putting her hand over her stomach, thought, ‘We’re dead.’
“Why did the tall ones refuse?” the Ghanaian President asked, from a few more rings behind the chancellor.
“They took an oath of pacifism, believing that would protect their way of life.”
“Does that mean the singularity will destroy our way of life?” a person shouted, from far back. Natalie couldn’t see him, but the voice had a definite southern accent; Alabama or Georgia perhaps.
‘Those with the poorest quality of life are always most interested in preserving it,’ she thought. She knew what her answer would be. The world’s brain trust had longed for the singularity. Natalie searched the rings for Ray Kurzweil; this was his Rapture.
“As you describe it, your way of life will end,” the voice confirmed. “Everything will change physically and mentally.”
“What of the dead?” an Indian delegate asked, three rings back opposite Natalie.
“They are dead,” the voice replied, confused.
“I think she’s asking if your technology will let us bring back the dead, or prevent death,” Jill clarified.
“On the scale of the universe there is no such thing as death; it is a concept you have invented to describe the ending of a single consciousness when the atoms that make up your thoughts are transferred to new purposes. In the singularity your individual consciousness will end. Thus, by your own terms, you will be dead, the same state as your ancestors.”
“They’ve come here to kill us all, am!” a frantic African general bellowed. “Planetary genocide, o!”
The spheres buzzed with contention over this. Could the human ego deal with the death of the self?
“Consciousness is a blip in evolutionary development,” the voice said, to calm them. “The loss of the self is merely an expansion of the awareness you feel now. A dog does not understand human comprehension, but you understand it would be better off if it could become smarter, to understand the world as you do, to not remain . . . ‘dumb’”
“But we have a saying: Ignorance is bliss,” the Canadian prime minister said.
“It is not for you to decide right now,” the voice said. “You will have one week, then Natalie Cho can show you if you choose.”
“What if we can’t agree?” a voice shouted.
“That does seem to be a problem endemic to our species,” the American president added from the first row.
“Life will take its course,” the tardigrade said.
“What in th’ hell does that mean!” an angry Texan spat from far back, renewing angry chatter among the spheres.
“Mister, are you God?” a small voice asked from far behind.
A cascading wave of bodies moved out of the way to look back through the spheres to find the child.
“Are you afraid?” the tardigrade asked her.
“No,” she smiled. “You seem nice.”
“Would you like to be God?�
�� the voice asked her.
The others held their breath, waiting for the innocent answer of a child to decide what they could not.
“Would I still be able to love?”
“Not as you understand it.”
“Mr. Caterpillar, I don’t think I want to live without love.”
Kam fought back tears as his eyes met Natalie’s.
‘We’ve denied ourselves this for so long,’ she thought. ‘And now I hold the key to deny it to the whole world.’
“Kam,” she spoke out loud to him. “I—”
He began to turn, then it all melted: the stars, the billions of people, the tardigrade, they all smeared into a blot that blurred until she closed her eyes.
Chapter 13
The capsule scraped the night sky, sizzling across in an ochre blaze before a boom rippled the water’s surface, miles below.
Chapter 14
As the navy rescuer pulled at the side of the large gray sphere floating off the Florida coast, four white fins peeked out of the water.
“There’s no handle,” the man shouted up to the chopper hovering above. “No door, no anything!”
“Look beside you,” the copilot radioed down.
The fins were feet attached to four bodies completely encased, like mummies emerging from a long sleep at the bottom of the Gulf.
“That’s gotta be them,” the rescue man said, and jumped off the landing craft into the water. He hoisted them into the big basket hanging from the chopper and signaled the winch operator to bring them up. He wondered how they got out of the sphere without any help, and perhaps without consciousness.
Chapter 15
The Filter Trap Page 46