by C. J. Odle
“What’s going on?” Sarah asked aloud.
Vega answered. “The Supreme is exploring possibilities, tracking the possible outcomes of the events arising from this proceeding. Each line represents a strand of possible future action.”
The pattern became more complex, growing denser, and more like a solid wall of light than strings of separate lines as the fragmentations of a being composed of pure energy began to meld. The witnesses watched, mesmerized.
On screens around the world, the only sight was of the Supreme as it analyzed and sifted information, filtering and recombining it in every possible way. It pulsed, making lines of light appear in the air, shifting holographic images around it. If someone had turned their TV on then—and there were still a few people yet to get the message—it would have looked like a weird graphics package put together by TV producers, to document, well… the history of the human race.
Billions watched the lines of possibilities and the shimmering holograms. They saw the witnesses in their assorted chairs, entranced and silent, the blip of light still tracing round their necklets. The shaman swaying in his gossamer hammock. Sirius and Vega working at the console touching buttons as ribbons of colored light spiraled upward in columns to be absorbed by the ceiling.
Around the Supreme, the flickering images and bright lines began to freeze and then slowly fade into the air, leaving a simple pulse of light emanating from the being in the judge’s chair. It pulsed up to brightness, then back down to an emptiness like a hole in space.
Across the globe, the religious vigils continued, and more and more people prayed. During the trial, plenty of religious leaders had asked for this, but not all of their followers had responded. As the Supreme continued its deliberations, people started to realize there was nothing else they could do. Their fate was out of their hands, and so they tried to talk to a god or higher power in the hope of making a difference.
Most prayed because they wanted to win the trial. Others were worried about losing and wanted to be ready for what might come next. With the pope’s absence, the next most senior cardinal led prayers in the Vatican. Buddhist monks made a last grab for enlightenment, and people talked to deities they hadn’t been sure they believed in. Some confessed their sins to the air and sought salvation, because it felt like the right thing to do. Some tried meditating, while others danced or sang in the open air. In temples across India, Hindu priests chanted prayers to Shiva, because who else was appropriate at a time of such potential destruction and change?
Many who weren’t religious sought comfort from one another. With calls to relatives, talks with friends, and declarations of love. They shared old memories and future dreams, held hands or sat close, each moment precious and poignant. Sometimes kissing, sometimes tenderly making love. Old slights were forgiven, because it all seemed too fleeting now, but a few unloaded their long-held grudges—the way partners snored in their sleep, the fact they’d both been hanging on because they were afraid of change.
There were end-of-the-world raves in England, Utah, and Singapore. Everywhere a sense of urgency encouraged people to shed their inhibitions. They lined up to base jump and bungee, grabbing the final adrenaline hit before the end. They burst into music stores because they’d always wanted to learn the drums, spreading cacophony. People lived out their fantasies, gathering together in blurs of music, sex, and drugs, determined to obliterate the world in their own way. People joined in a thousand different ways, freaking out quietly, or freaking out in mass disorder.
And somewhere through it all, a rumor started to form, fast as only a rumor could. It passed by word of mouth, by internet, by phone. It would be all right. Someone had done something to help. It became a prayer, a source of hope and comfort. People who didn’t believe there might be salvation from above spread the message and latched onto the prospect of a more earthly kind. They didn’t like being helpless and wanted to feel like someone had taken control.
In front of the giant screens in New York and Beijing, the silence became absolute. Time slowed to eternity until suddenly the Supreme flickered on the screen and burst into light.
In the courtroom, Jake felt the build-up of energy around the Supreme, saturating the air, thick as honey. His vision started to pixelate like thousands of tiny fireflies swimming in front of his eyes.
He turned to Vega to ask why, but before he could begin to send the question, the energy from the Supreme burst out in a flood of euphoria and connection and overwhelmed him.
He felt utter, instant unity and peace. The only way he kept himself together was because he’d felt this before, the sense of total connectedness to something more than himself. Of the universe stretching out over incomprehensible distances, and of being able to touch any of the points in between. Jake could feel the complete joy of being one with everything, and tears of bliss rolled down his cheeks.
He managed to focus long enough to look across at Sarah, and she shone with energy and possibility. He could see her, both as she was and might be, moments stretching around her in a cloud of potential and movement. He could see the bright beauty of her aura, wrapped around her, flowing in and out as naturally as breath. Jake tried to focus again but quickly became swept up as the waves of euphoria expanded outward.
He felt connected to everyone in the room. To the alien presences of Sirius and Vega. To the unfathomable otherness of the Supreme. Jake could sense the energies of the witnesses, from the bright hope of Paige to the hard determination of the US president.
He could feel the people the Supreme’s energy touched, the burst of power across the world flooding their hearts with bliss and connecting them to the universal consciousness in a moment of pure understanding. Within the illuminated tapestry spread out before him, he could feel the reactions of individuals around the world as their beings opened up. An older couple in France melting together in a wave of ecstasy they hadn’t felt in years. Monks in a Zen monastery sighing in understanding. He saw people wandering the wild areas of the Earth pausing as events they knew nothing about started to overtake them, tears streaming down their faces as they found themselves saturated with love and connection to vibrant nature around them. He saw people caught up in the middle of raves and parties, calming momentarily as something greater than themselves washed through their minds, bodies and spirits.
Jake surrendered to the experience, feeling Sarah doing the same beside him. Their closeness and emotional connection kept them floating together on what seemed like an infinite ocean of light. Other presences were swimming in this ocean—alien beings so different, so incomprehensible—yet now the waves of connection dissolved all barriers, and for a moment, Jake had a total awareness of other species, other ways of thinking, other ways of existing.
Drifting gently through the ocean of light with Sarah, he saw worlds as far from Earth as anything he could have imagined. Visions of what looked like cities, except these cities were intelligent and self-organizing. Ice fields made from methane, over which creatures moved in boneless locomotion. Beings living in the coronas of stars, light-years of distance away.
The power kept coming, not so much forging connections between them as simply opening up the connections already there. The walls of awareness tumbled down, revealing themselves as simply illusion. Jake forced himself to concentrate on Sarah, looking over to her with a mixture of joy and relief.
She obviously felt the same way. “It has to be good news, doesn’t it?” she asked. “They wouldn’t give us something this… this beautiful if they were going to destroy us, would they?”
Jake had to agree. This was too amazing to be anything but proof of mankind’s innocence.
They’d done it. They’d managed to save the world.
Jake was deep in the connection when the Supreme cut it. It felt like being dropped from an immense height, falling back to reality. Flat and empty, impossibly so, after the sheer level of connectedness and bliss that had flooded through humanity and beyond.
Af
ter a taste of such bliss, normal consciousness was almost painful.
An icy chill descended, and the Supreme became empty and dark, a hole in the world from which no light escaped. Everyone in the courtroom stared at it as they tried to work out what it meant. Certainty sat in Jake’s chest, heavy as lead, and he knew what it foretold.
“We’ve lost,” he whispered, then turned to Sarah as if hoping she could tell him he was wrong.
She looked far too pale as she whispered back, “Yes, we’ve lost.”
Jake rushed from the sofa to face the black void above the judge’s seat. If the Supreme had possessed a physical form, he would have tried to wring answers from it.
“Why?” he insisted. When no answer came, he gathered whatever psychic energy he could, flinging it into the darkness in front of him. “Why?”
The emptiness of the Supreme swallowed the energy. It pulled it in with a dense gravity capable of moving worlds. It certainly moved Jake. He felt his conscious mind slipping, falling into the darkness, and once again, the room around him gave way to something… else. Jake stood in emptiness, except the area around him wasn’t truly empty, it was the Supreme itself. The whole space enveloped Jake in something totally unknown.
Light flared into being, forming a roughly humanoid shape. Part of Jake knew this was just to give him something to focus on, while the Supreme still remained everywhere else. Even so, he addressed his question to the being of light.
“Why?” he demanded again.
“You did this, Jake,” the Supreme replied. For once, the words didn’t seem to simply come into being as reality. Instead, they echoed in all directions.
“Me?”
“You and thousands of others. The beings known as Sirius and Vega informed you of the close balance of evidence, and you tried to manipulate that evidence.”
His legs buckled. “You knew?”
“I am aware of everything taking place within this ship, including your messages to your friends,” the Supreme answered. “You were under observation the whole time.”
Jake thought he’d succeeded in shielding himself, but he’d fatally misjudged the Supreme.
“We had no choice,” he insisted. “We couldn’t just let you make decisions about the future of our whole species without acting. I had to try to save people.”
“You had to,” the Supreme answered. “You were given an understanding of the universal consciousness, a glimpse of your true identity. But you misused the abilities you’d gained.”
“So, what?” Jake said. “You’re condemning us all because I cheated?” He thought of all the people who might die. “You’re doing all of this because of me?”
“A decision would have been made anyway,” the Supreme replied. “Probably mankind would not have survived. This is just more data, more variables, and it’s not just you, Jake. But your species tried to subvert the trial, and this act must be taken into account.”
Jake swallowed as he realized what the Supreme was telling him.
“You’re saying this lost the trial?”
“We will never know what would have happened if your species hadn’t acted in the way that it did.” The Supreme briefly paused. “However, although the evidence appeared to be finely balanced, a difference of over 1 percent is significant and would have proved difficult to overcome.”
Jake wanted to argue. He needed to argue. But the Supreme gave him no opportunity. Instead, reality flickered, and he dropped back into the courtroom, just in time for the lights to go out.
Around the world, darkness fell. Where daylight shone, it was like the moon passing in front of the sun. Where night already reigned, streetlights failed. All light failed. Banks of LEDs flicked off. Computer screens shut off dead. Even fires guttered low, making only the barest impression on the night around them.
In the darkness, billions froze in place for long seconds, trying to work out what was happening. Many of them shivered, as the darkness brought with it cold so sharp it chilled them to the bone. The implications of the darkness sank in quickly. They’d prayed, they’d hoped. They’d heard the whispers of reassurance that everything would be OK.
They’d been wrong.
The panic started, in a cacophony of noise growing ever louder, feeding into itself as people cried out, or begged, or howled in anger. In the total eclipse of light, people jostled one another and lashed out, shouting and arguing as they tried to find someone to blame. Others stood numbed in shock, some ran, screaming about the end of the world. People found themselves crushed as the crowds broke apart like startled shoals, bursting in a hundred different directions.
In the spaceship, Jake found Sarah by looking for the shape of her energy. She clung to him, and Jake could feel her tension.
“It was a trick,” he whispered to her. “They tricked us. We would have lost anyway.”
“We tested you,” Sirius sent in the dark. If Jake could have seen the alien, he might have lashed out then. The Supreme would probably have viewed an attack on Sirius as simply more proof of mankind’s violent nature. “When we knew of your intentions, we set the Pyramid to learner’s mode, a safe replica of the most basic elements, to evaluate the progress of your capabilities with the cosmic plasma.”
“It was all a test?” Sarah asked. Jake couldn’t see her face, but he could feel the shock and anger running in tremors through her body as she spoke.
“Yes,” Sirius sent, and Jake could see the flat energy of the alien even through the darkness. “But you can think about your actions on the way to the Pleiades. You will still be taken to ensure the preservation of humanity’s DNA, and to monitor the effects of the cosmic plasma.”
He would still be saved. That just made it worse. Jake had been the deciding factor, the one who had given the Supreme no choice but to condemn humanity. And now he was supposed to watch while the aliens destroyed his entire species. Sarah seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“We did this,” she whispered. “No one else. If we hadn’t intervened…”
“This is about the actions of your species over many thousands of years,” Vega sent. “Do not blame yourselves for this one moment.”
“How can we not?” Jake sent, crushed by the sense of responsibility.
“What happens now?” Sarah asked, her voice almost pleading for the chance to appeal, to find a way out.
Sirius quickly squashed that. “We carry out the verdict of the Supreme. Humanity will be removed from this planet.”
“Vega?” Jake pulsed.
Jake could feel its discomfort. “I’m sorry, Jake. There is nothing I can do. The Supreme has delivered this judgment, and we must follow it.”
“When?” Jake asked. Maybe with more time, they could prevent it from happening.
Sirius pulsed into him. “The Supreme has spoken. There will be no delay. The procedure will be implemented now.”
As the pall of darkness slowly lifted, a tribal chief drummed from the top of a sacred mountain in Ethiopia. The rays of the sun began to illuminate the vast tableland below, and the old man pounded the taut goatskin in a blur of hands, the ancient drum held secure between his knees as he perched on a rock at the edge of the precipice. When day had turned into night, he remembered the myths of his forefathers and lit a torch and climbed up the steep path holding the heavy drum. The dim flames of the torch spluttered in the dark, and he struggled to see, but the voices of his ancestors urged him on, and he could sense their spirits in the wood of the drum, burnished by their hands over many centuries. He planted the torch in the stony ground at the peak and looked out into the void. His right hand struck the drum to release a deep tone, and then his left, to slowly build up a rhythm. One, two. One, two. Faster and faster until he slipped into a trance and it was no longer him striking the drum but the lineage of his tribe playing through him. Sweat ran down his wizened face and the flexing muscles of his arms as he kept up the relentless beat. The sun finally returned and the sky god awoke, and now he pounded even harder
. The resonant tones thundered across the tableland and out into the world.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Within the ship, the walls became luminous again and lit up the courtroom. Sirius flicked its hand, and the necklets the witnesses wore started to glow brighter.
“What’s happening?” the president of the USA demanded. “I insist you—”
He slumped back in his seat, face blank, while beside him each of the other witnesses did the same. Jake watched, but he didn’t have the words. He’d seen this before when they’d been brought into the ship. He was more concerned with the role he’d played in their downfall.
“You weren’t responsible,” Vega sent, frowning.
“We were,” Jake insisted.
“And now you’re going to wipe us out,” Sarah said, clutching her pendant. Jake felt completely hollowed out.
“We have no choice,” Vega pulsed. “Sirius will play its role, and I must play mine.”
Sirius pointed a pen-sized laser at the forehead of each witness, zapping them briefly to put the eight humans into a semiconscious state. The short alien then prompted each zombielike witness to their feet by inserting its fingers under their shoulders and lifting. Once all eight were standing, the alien used their suggestible state to herd them out of the courtroom and down the corridor.
“What’s going to happen to them?” Jake asked. A sudden image flashed before him of the witnesses being taken out by Sirius and disintegrated, killed because their usefulness had expired.
“Watch,” Vega sent, gesturing to the wide screen above the console. The image showed the desert outside, the night lit by a combination of electric lights and the glow of the ship. Jake could see people milling around, some trying to press forward against the shields and failing, others arguing among themselves. He spotted Marina, Adam, and Billy looking dejected.