by C. J. Odle
Jake tried to think of a way to locate the download, and remembered the images cascading across the ethereal screens in the control room. There had been stock market data from New York and a time lapse of orchids flowering. He selected the orchids and began to visualize their delicate purple petals and long stamens.
The luminous grid swirled, and he dropped through it, skydiving into a sapphire mist lit by blanket lightning as his consciousness plunged downward. He raced down the stack of grids until without warning, he flew high above a grid identical to the first. To the far right, he could see a tiny point of light pulsing more brightly than the rest.
Jake navigated to it and then moved downward until directly above it. The point of light enlarged, and he could see the purple orchid opening within it.
He reached out for Sarah and Marina.
“I think I’ve found it,” he sent.
“Great,” Marina replied, “but… are you sure this is such a good idea?”
“You’re asking now?”
“I’m worried. Your messing with a machine you don’t understand, and Billy and Adam and god knows who else are doctoring the net. Then there are those psychic aliens who must be aware something is going on. There’s a real chance of messing this up. Certainly of getting caught.”
“There’s no time to explain, but we can’t make anything worse than it already is. We’re doing this. Ask Gemini about deleting the file.”
“What does the file look like?” Sarah asked.
“Like a circle of light pulsing brightly, on an impossibly large grid of what must be millions of other points.”
“Jake,” Marina eventually sent, “we all agree that the only way must be with some kind of psychic command to the Pyramid.”
He looked at the pulsing point of light below him, focused, and sent a clear instruction to the alien computer to delete it. Nothing happened. He tried again, concentrating for longer before pulsing the instruction as strongly as he could. The circle of light continued to pulse unaltered.
“It’s not deleting,” he said aloud.
“Maybe,” Sarah suggested, “you could visualize it, make it happen in your mind, and then the Pyramid might respond.”
Jake studied the point of light and then imagined its diameter receding. Immediately minuscule flares of phosphorescence shot out from the circle as it reduced in size. Encouraged, Jake kept visualizing the circle reducing, until with a final fizz of phosphorescence, it vanished completely.
The entire grid shimmered and rearranged itself, and a new point of light took its place. He visualized the orchid again as well as the stock market chart, and received no indication that the data those images represented were anywhere within the alien machine.
Jake lifted his hand from the Pyramid and blinked open his eyes to see Sarah waiting for him. He collapsed into her arms.
“Not your average day in the office,” she said, smiling.
After a minute or so, Jake stepped back and stroked her hair. “Let me update Marina, and then we just need to wait for Gemini to green light the download.”
For the next witness in the courtroom, Vega eased its body off its narrow seat to step forward and call Amita. She got up from her simple chair and walked gracefully to the front in her purple sari and bangles. Amita took the crystal necklet from the three-fingered hand of the alien, and hesitated before placing it around her neck. She glanced at Paige, who gave her a reassuring smile, and then stepped onto the stand.
“Amita,” Vega sent. “So far we have heard from experts and leaders. You come from a small village in rural India, and are a mother with two children. There are many mothers in your country and beyond who share the same concerns and challenges. Can you tell us what you think of the world, please?”
Amita tried to figure out what she should say but then realized it would be better to just be honest.
“Mostly, I do not think of the world,” she said. Her words immediately relayed in English on the feed from the wide screen. “I know that perhaps I should, but there is no time to do so. Mostly, I must think of my sons, my husband, and the people around me. I must find a way to make a living, when life is hard. I think… I think perhaps governments, those with power, spend so much time thinking about big solutions, they sometimes forget about people.”
Vega nodded. “You live in what the developed countries might consider very poor conditions, don’t you?”
Amita knew in absolute terms this was probably true. Her family possessed no land, and her husband worked as a laborer. Certainly, her youngest child, Sanjay, talked a lot about money. “It is all I have ever known. Sometimes, you just have to try to do the best you can.”
“But you must be angry about the conditions you live in? That sometimes there is not enough money to buy food or medicines,” Vega sent. “You must hate the people responsible, or those who are rich enough to buy everything they need?”
“Who should I hate?” Amita asked. “Should I hate all the people who have more than I do? Should I hate anyone who comes from a different background?”
“But some of your politicians blame the rich and privileged for widespread inequality,” the alien sent, its large black eyes narrowing.
Amita smiled and shook her head. “Politicians, mostly they are looking for someone to blame because they can’t make things better. It’s easier to make people angry than to help them. Generosity and meanness are found in all castes and in all parts of our society.”
“You have heard the evidence presented here about the damage to the environment. Do you believe you should be doing more to save the planet?” Vega asked.
Amita spread her hands as her bangles jingled. “How much do I take from the planet? Perhaps it is too much, but no one has shown me a better way.”
“But what about mankind as a whole, should your species be doing more to look after its environment?” Vega asked.
“Yes, we should care for nature as she cares for us. The problem is that we take more than we need and don’t give enough back.”
The short alien paused and then pulsed its next question softly.
“You have heard the story of humanity’s origins and of its place in the greater galaxy, and you have seen the evidence presented against it. Given all the facts, do you think humanity should be saved?”
Amita took a breath. “I think it is easy to talk about humanity as if we are all one entity. It is easy to cluster us together and forget about the individual. But even when you have billions of people, each one of those still counts. Each life is precious, a gift to be cherished and nurtured. Having lost two young daughters to illness, I know that only too well.”
Amita rested her hands on the top of the metallic witness stand. “Before this trial came along, my fears were not about what would happen to the world a hundred years from now. Perhaps they should have been, but instead, I worried about my sons, and how they would turn out. I worried about what kind of lives they would have and if they would be happy.”
“And how did you think their lives would go?” Vega asked.
Amita smiled. “I had hope. That is all a mother can do sometimes. It is all anyone can do. We have to believe the past is only a record, and not a prison, because if we do not, what is the point of even breathing?”
“So you believe humanity can change?” Vega sent.
“I believe people are always changing,” Amita said. “If you give them hope, they can achieve great things. I think that, every day, often in difficult conditions, people do what they can to lead a good life. Many want to change, they just need to have direction to know how.”
She kept going. “The question is not whether they can do it but whether you will help them, whether you will even give them the opportunity.”
“Thank you, Amita.” The alien turned to the Supreme. “I have no further questions for this witness.” Vega walked back to its seat as Sirius stepped forward to stand in front of the witness box. Amita frowned slightly as she watched the alien appro
ach.
Sirius gave a small nod. “You have talked to my colleague about the past being just a record, and about how life can change. You have hope for the future, despite the evidence from the past demonstrating that nothing has changed.”
The alien glanced at the other witnesses before turning back to Amita.
“Is it not true that your family comes from a farming community?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Can you tell the court what happened to your uncle two years ago?”
Amita’s eyes watered and she gazed downward.
“You may take your time,” the alien sent.
“Well… he committed suicide.” She wiped her eyes with a fold of her purple sari.
“And why was that?”
“The debts had piled up, and his harvests failed.”
“What crop was he growing?”
Amita sighed. “Cotton.”
“Do you know why his debts had piled up?”
“Not all the details, but everyone knows the seeds are more expensive now, and unlike before, you can’t save them. You have to buy them every year.”
“Yes, that’s right. A world bank structural adjustment forced your country to allow foreign seed producers to sell their products. These seeds are genetically engineered to produce plants with nonrenewable traits. In many places, yields have fallen. In addition, wealthier countries have given billions of dollars in subsidies to their own cotton farmers, undercutting global prices.”
The alien turned toward the Supreme. “During the last twenty years, over two hundred thousand farmers have taken their own lives in this witness’s country due to the exploitative behavior of other humans. Although this witness has hope for the future, the data argues against her. I have no further questions.”
The sphere of the Supreme glowed gently as a rainbow of colors flickered across its surface. “The witness may stand down.”
Amita walked back to her chair, the blip of light circling around her necklet. The president of the USA looked uncomfortable, and Paige stood up to greet her with a hug.
As midnight approached, the feeling of pressure inside Gemini’s tent began to lessen as they received encouraging updates on the massed attempt to doctor the web. Coupled with Marina telling them sometime earlier that Jake had managed to delete the previous download, the mood of their small camp had become increasingly buoyant.
Still, she wondered if the impossible really was achievable.
“How can we delete enough information to make a difference?” she asked Adam while standing and combing her fingers through her short hair. “There must much be so much out there.”
“Think of it this way,” Adam said. “Many of the guys working on this have links to all sorts of organizations and—”
“Like who?” Marina asked.
Billy coughed. “Mafia and stuff. Triads, drug cartels. Even terrorists. These days everyone’s online.”
“And these organizations use the net to run their businesses and store info.”
“Which means,” Billy went on, “right now in the USA, Mexico, China, Russia, or wherever, zillions of techies are finishing deleting files. Many had already put viruses in place to wipe out evidence in case of a raid by the police, which only needed to be activated. Some machines were just turned off.”
“Too true,” Adam said, smiling. “Whole server farms in the Ukraine have been completely shut down.”
Billy blinked from underneath his messy helmet of hair and looked up. “We’re trying to sway things by just over 1 percentage point.”
On the floor under the picnic table, Marina saw a cable connection blow in a shower of sparks. A small horde of geeks descended on it, duct tape in hand. As they finished and got up from the floor, Adam and Billy studied the screens of their laptops before turning to each other and slapping a high five.
“We’re nearly in position,” Adam said. “Just give us thirty minutes.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The shaman slipped out of his gossamer hammock a few seconds before Vega edged from its seat and stepped to the front of the courtroom. The shaman walked slowly toward the alien and accepted the crystal necklet willingly. He put it around his neck with the grace he might have used in one of his ceremonies and then waited calmly in the sinuous metallic stand.
“You are the leader, both religious and temporal, of your village in Brazil, are you not?”
The shaman nodded, the horizontal lines of black paint on his face nodding with him.
“Our analysis of your tribe’s ancestral territories shows many changes during your lifetime. Can you give us your views on the world and of humanity’s place within it?” Vega sent.
The shaman waited for several seconds, but if the strangeness of the situation affected him, he did not show it.
“What shall I say?” he said, the words translated automatically. “Shall I tell you how there is less jungle every day? I go into it to connect with the spirits, and every time there is pain. I find fields of tree stumps cleared by fire or by machines. Every time.”
He made those final words sound like a curse as he spoke, but if there was anger, it passed quickly. He crossed his bare arms over his muscled torso.
“I have seen army ants hunting, running in a sea of red and pulling apart anything in their path. The ants know nothing of the destruction they cause, but they must feed the colony. Humans are like this too often today. Once, the jungle was vibrant, but people need to eat. They need to make money.” Another word that somehow became a curse when the shaman said it. “And so the wild spaces die.”
The shaman looked around. “For as long as there have been people, they have tried to control nature. A man from a palm oil company tried to explain this to me once, just before they burned a section of the jungle useless to them if they could not plant it in neat rows.
“It is how we are, as surely as the ants are ants. But saying they are ants and must live is no consolation to the creatures caught in their path.”
The shaman’s hands balled into fists. “Humanity is shape-shifting toward an uncertain future. I have talked with the forest and received visions of a barren world. Already, many animals of the world have started to die off. They have died from the poisons we have put out, from our voracious appetites, or simply because we need their space.”
“But is it really necessary to remove mankind from this planet?” Vega asked, frowning.
“People talk as if it would be some disaster,” the shaman said. “But our myths tell of a great cleansing that will lead to new life. I have also seen this possible future.”
“What else have you seen?” Vega asked, its obsidian eyes widening.
“I have seen life,” the shaman explained. “I have seen life flourishing on this planet. I have seen life on other worlds in visions and dreams. So much life, growing in ways most of us could not begin to comprehend.”
“But humanity—” Vega began.
“Is just one facet of the whole,” the shaman said. “If a part of a plant is diseased, then we cut it off to save the rest. Our biggest flaw is that we think we are something special. We act as though the universe is there for us. Yet it should be we who are there for the universe. We should be contributing to it, not only taking from it.”
The shaman looked around. “If the world is to be cleansed, there is nothing to be scared of. I have glimpsed the greater spirit behind the universe. If it is necessary for us to return to it so that the whole may live on, this is simply what must happen.”
He stopped then while the rest of the witnesses stared at him with a mixture of betrayal and understanding. Around the world people watched in silence, many feeling discomfort as they acknowledged that at least some of the shaman’s accusations might be true.
“We must stop,” the shaman said. “We must find a way, and if we cannot, then perhaps we must be stopped.”
He stepped down without waiting to be dismissed, and neither Vega or Sirius moved to halt him. It
appeared they had no further questions.
Vega cut a lonely and dejected figure as it walked back to its narrow perch.
In the circular control room of the ship, Jake and Sarah were watching the shaman finish his testimony on a single gossamer screen. After recuperating from deleting the downloaded file, Jake had managed to pulse a screen into being in midair and then search psychically within the room for a feed from the trial. It was a lot easier than entering the Pyramid.
Jake could feel Marina trying to contact him, and he wiped the screen away with a flick of his fingers.
“Jake,” Marina sent, her voice faint. “We’re ready. Start the fresh download.”
“It’s time,” he said to Sarah and then stepped forward to press his hand flat against the surface of the Pyramid. It felt like a living structure pulsing beneath it, shifting around the edges of his mind, existing in dimensions only his unlocked talents could touch.
“I understand it,” he said. “I can set this in motion. I know it.”
Sarah placed her hand on his arm, and again, her touch anchored him. She held a small fragment of his being safe simply through her point of contact, while the rest of him was free to flow through the alien machine.
The Pyramid blazed into life, and the sapphire-blue dimension filled his mind. He gazed at the thousands of stacked grids of light and then rose up to the top and flew as before, racing across the vast network of intersecting points. He swooped down through grid after grid, free-falling in azure mist and flashes of light, and then raced upward again, enjoying the exhilarating freedom of the pristine landscape.
Jake floated above the top grid of points and visualized beams of light flowing out of the Pyramid and through the pearly walls of the alien spaceship. He visualized streamers of energy exploding into the world, connecting to the networks in the desert camp, shooting beyond to telephone towers, and farther still, to the satellites high above.
His awareness was sucked back into the Pyramid as the grid of light points curved upward to envelop him in a tube of luminous intersecting lines. He raced through the tunnel, and it split into two, one curving to the right, the other to the left, and his consciousness streamed along both. The two tunnels became four, then eight, sixteen… and each time his mind split with them as it continued to fragment.