Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “I told them that they’d pushed you too far and that perhaps there would be a private interview later,” Daisy said. “It wouldn’t go down very well if they caused you to collapse in public. You’re hot stuff, girl. Taking your jeans down and spanking you would look lousy on my resume.”

  Karen couldn’t believe it, but she actually laughed, as if it were funny. She hadn’t even realised that she could destroy Daisy’s career, just by saying the wrong thing to a reporter, or someone else now that she was famous.

  “I’m sorry about that as well,” Daisy admitted. She reached out and put a hand on Karen’s shoulder. “I should have prepared you more to face the animals. I just thought that they would show a little more decency to you. I should have known better.”

  Karen shrugged, dislodging Daisy’s hand. She’d grown up in a world where everything from the President’s bowel movements to what underwear the rich and famous were wearing was public knowledge. She’d seen how reporters could destroy lives with ease. They’d destroyed Princess Diana and her family, hounded every sitting President until the day he’d left the Oval Office and wrecked countless lives with false charges. The cost of fame was that her life would never be the same again.

  “You should have,” she said, bitterly. “There’s something else.”

  Daisy frowned, but waited for her to speak. “I took a look at the alien message and tried to decipher it,” she said. “I managed it easily. The message is in English.”

  She looked up into Daisy’s eyes. “It was easy to understand,” she said. “They’re asking for a meeting.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Area 52, Nevada, USA

  Day 21

  It was perhaps the most famous broadcast in history. President Roosevelt had spoken to the country in the days after the attack on Pearl Harbour and President Bush had spoken just after 9/11, but how could the two most infamous sneak attacks in history compare with the announcement that aliens existed. Indeed, not only did they exist, but they were also on their way to Earth. Alex didn’t envy the President at all. He had to reassure the people and try to prevent panic, yet also warn them that there might be dark times ahead. The Tiger Team had gathered in the communal lounge to watch the address.

  The President stood in front of a podium in the White House Press Room, flanked by two of his most senior Cabinet members. The Secretary of Defence looked grim as ever, while the Secretary of State was smiling nervously. Alex knew that planning cells within the State Department had started looking seriously at the implications of contact with aliens – particularly the long-term contact that the aliens had promised – and he’d seen some of their projections. Very few of them had been cheerful. Even if the United States was not invaded directly, the loss of much of the rest of the world would be devastating. The United States, like it or not, was heavily interlocked with the entire world – it was hard to find a place where the US had no interests – and the aliens would cause chaos by landing anywhere, even the South Pole.

  “My fellow Americans,” the President said. President Chalk wasn't known for long speeches, to the dismay of some of his political advisors and the glee of his opponents. He'd had the last laugh as the American people had evidently felt that electing a blunt, plain-spoken ex-soldier was better than electing a smooth-talking snake oil salesman. “I must confirm that government stations have detected an alien signal from space, transmitted by an alien spacecraft approaching the Earth. The human race is no longer alone.”

  Alex watched the reporters in the room staring at him. Many of them had clung, against all logic, to the belief that the alien spacecraft was a giant hoax. They knew better now, for there was no way that President Chalk would lie to the entire country about aliens. The panic was already setting in all over America, although it hadn’t turned violent, apart from a spat of nasty incidents. People were stockpiling food, supplies and weapons, often in defiance of calls for calm. Alex privately suspected that it would get worse when it settled in that a massive alien starship was approaching the planet.

  “There is no need for panic,” the President continued. “The aliens have asked us to meet with them to discuss the future. There are few reasons to believe that the aliens pose any kind of threat. However, in order to take proper precautions, I am – with the full concurrence of Congress – declaring a full mobilisation and recalling all reservists to their duties. The National Guard will be federalised and brought to full strength and we will consider recalling troops from overseas. If there is any threat, no matter how minute, we will face it as a nation of civilised people, not as savages who are afraid of the dark.”

  Alex scowled. He'd advised Jones to advise the President to admit the full truth, to tell the world how the aliens had invited him onboard their craft and offered to divide the entire world with him, but the President had rejected the advice. He could see the President’s logic – admitting the truth would cause a global panic, as well as destroying any hope of reaching a global agreement on how to counter the aliens – yet he had a nasty feeling that it would come back to bite them on the behind. The only advantage was that the President could take the mobilisation into the open and they would no longer have to worry about a reporter putting all the pieces together.

  “The orbiting space telescopes are attempting to obtain pictures of the visiting spacecraft now and we will make them public as soon as possible,” the President concluded. “This is a great nation, and humanity is a great people, and we will welcome our new friends to Earth together. I have faith that we will all meet the new challenge of encountering life from beyond the stars. I will now take questions.”

  Jones snapped the television off as the reporters began to ask questions. “The President will be busy with the scum of the universe for the next few hours,” he said, sharply. Alex smiled. If there was a life form lower than a reporter, it probably wasn't on the approaching alien mothership. “He will want to confer with us as soon as he escapes the zoo, so we need to have something to tell him. Alex, what do you make of the message?”

  Alex looked down at the USAF-issue PDA in his hand. “It’s very informative and, at the same time, it tells us nothing,” he said. “Listen. To the people of Earth, we come in peace. We bring you greetings from a far star and offer you gifts to facilitate your entry into the wider community surrounding you. We ask that you allow us to speak with your United Nations as soon as it is convenient. We await your reply and look forward to a long and productive association between our races.”

  He put down the PDA and looked up. “That message was very clever,” he admitted. “First, the delivery; the message wasn't just sent in English, but in Russian, Chinese and French as well. It can’t be a coincidence. That’s the four languages spoken by all five members of the United Nations Security Council. The message isn’t just intended for wide distribution around Earth, it’s a subtle warning that they know us very well and won’t be fooled if we try something clever, like trying to mislead them. They also knew, I suspect, who would pick it up. Even if SETI had been closed down in the wake of the crash, other radio telescopes would have picked up the signal and it would have been out. They wanted the message to be detected.

  “Second, the message itself,” he continued. “They tell us, directly, that they come in peace. That very phase is part of our culture – we come in peace – and, again, it shows how much they’ve studied us. They tell us nothing about what they’re bringing, or what they want, but they promise introduction to a wider community, hinting that they’re not alone either and that there are other alien races out there. It may be true or false – we don’t have any way to tell. They phrase it as a request, rather than a demand, increasing the chances that we’ll accept their message without demur. And, finally, they put the ball in our court and ask us to reply.”

  Jones spoke into the silence. “The President has been talking with various world leaders, but some groups have already sent messages back to the aliens, hitting them with everything from prom
ises of worship to demands that they back off and withdraw from the solar system,” he said. “They’re looking at ways to prevent others from trying to communicate with the aliens, yet he wasn't optimistic. It won’t be long before lunatics like Iran’s leaders or Chavez start sending their own messages to the aliens.”

  “They’re probably going to be very confused aliens,” Santini said, lightly. “I had to spend a few months reading through NSA’s signal intercepts and much of it was the most boring old crap imaginable. If every nut with a CB radio starts trying to transmit to the aliens, they’re going to start thinking that we’re a planet of idiots, or fools.”

  “I’ve been looking at the text of the signal,” Gayle said. “They’ve given us nothing that we can use to speculate effectively – we don’t even know what they intend to speak to the UN about.”

  “A demand for surrender, perhaps,” Alex said. He’d been wondering about the same thing. “The offer of gifts will be attractive to many nations.”

  “Quite,” Jones agreed. “Gayle, you saw their computer models of human behaviour. How well do they know us?”

  Gayle looked down at her hands. “It’s hard to answer that question with any degree of certainty,” she said. “Humans have been attempting to model their own behaviour since the science of psychology was…”

  “Brought out of nothing by overpaid headshrinkers,” Santini said, coldly.

  Jones silenced him with a glance. “Carry on, Gayle,” he said. “I’m sure we can refrain from further interruptions.”

  “It rarely worked,” Gayle said. “In fiction, psychologists developed Psychohistory, the science of human behaviour in large numbers, to allow them to model out and influence the development of humanity for thousands of years into the future. The real world isn’t so neat and tidy. Even Asimov, the founder of the concept, admitted as much when he created the Mule, who wrecked the Foundation and the Seldon Plan. A low-probability event allowed a new tyrant to come to power and reshape the galaxy to his will, not that of the Foundation. It happens in real life as well.

  “Hitler was one such example, a person we were required to study carefully,” she continued. “Hitler was born in a world that could have avoided the First World War, yet chose to fight it instead. He moved to Germany to avoid serving Austria-Hungary, yet ended up in the German Army. He showed considerable physical bravery and narrowly escaped death when he was gassed. Germany lost the war – if Germany had won, Hitler might never have been anything more than yet another Corporal – and he found fertile ground for his poisonous ideology. The Great Depression comes along and provides him a boost forward, yet if a handful of German politicians had shown more backbone, or determination, he might never have risen to power.

  “And even then, he made decisions that could not have been predicted. It was Hitler, more than anyone else, who drove the world into war, yet what would have happened if he’d made the rational decision at any number of decisive moments? Or what if he’d been killed in one of any number of assassination attempts? Or if Japan hadn’t gone after us, therefore allowing Hitler to avoid deciding if he should declare war on us as well? I submit to you that the aliens do not have a valid science.”

  She ran her hand through her hair tiredly. “There are two problems they would have had to overcome,” she explained. “The need to predict irrational decision making and the need to account for every possible variable. The absence of the latter makes irrational – at least from their point of view – decision making more likely. I highly doubt that their models are as good as they claim. My own analysis suggests that they may have a point in the short term, but there are already feedback trends working to correct some of our problems. They may not have accounted for them.”

  “I think we’re getting a little off-topic,” Jones said, finally. “Should we agree to meet the aliens at the UN?”

  “I doubt that we have a choice,” Alex pointed out. “I don’t think that the President could order the UN to refuse to meet with the aliens, if they chose to do so. We could argue against it, but…hellfire!”

  He scowled down at the table, composing himself. “They’ve put us in a position where any attempt to refuse to meet with the aliens will become a political liability,” he said, angrily. “The offer of gifts…well, the aliens could give us something that would really upset the economy, so naturally the Evil American Government will want to prevent the rest of the world from getting their hands on it. It will make us look like the bad guys to the rest of the world.”

  “I see,” Jones said, slowly. “Why would they bother trying to make us look like the baddies?”

  “It splits up any potential alliance against them,” Alex said. “NATO is supposed to react as a group to any attack on any individual member nation, yet if the aliens convince the world that we’re the enemy, the other nations may refuse to become involved with the war. The problem with democratic politicians is that they won’t do anything they think will be unpopular…and helping us, if we’re seen as the bad guys, will be very unpopular indeed.”

  “It may not matter,” Santini pointed out. “What could the rest of NATO do to help us even if they wanted to help us? We’re not talking about the War on Terror or a skirmish along the Mexican Border, or even an outright invasion of Europe by Russia. We’re talking about an alien invasion force using advanced technology and a billion aliens who want to settle on our world. If they concentrate merely on us – on America – what can Europe do to help us?”

  “Very little,” Jones said. He shook his head. “Leave it for the moment. What other gifts can they offer us?”

  “Superconductors,” Neil Frandsen said, suddenly. He smiled at their expressions. “My team has been working away at the alien craft ever since we brought them into the base and one thing we’ve managed to identify is a working super-efficient superconductor system. I won’t go into details – I know you hate technobabble – but it should be fairly easy to duplicate and we’re working on building up experimental models that can be developed at another location. If we manage to get them to work, we could change the world – again - within a couple of years.”

  “Through superconductors?”

  “Oh, yes,” Frandsen said. “You see, with a really efficient superconductor, we could create – among other things – very good batteries, storing vast amounts of power. We could fit them into cars and cut our need for gas radically, or load them into tanks and other military vehicles. The pollution count would go down sharply, pleasing the greens, while the whole oil dependency would just vanish, pleasing the right. Most interestingly of all, a working superconductor could be used for a surge output, which could be used to power lasers vastly more efficient than anything we can deploy today. It seems a simple concept – batteries are hardly warp drive or matter transmission – but the effects would be radical.”

  He leaned forward. “And that wouldn’t really alter the power balance between us and them,” he added. “Even if we learned how to duplicate them for ourselves, it wouldn’t be something we could use immediately to build our own spacecraft or weapons. We’re still no closer to figuring out how to duplicate their drive, although we do have working computer models of their gravity fields now, allowing us to track their craft with greater efficiently. We couldn’t take what they gave us and use it to knife them in the back.”

  “Lasers,” Santini mused. “Could they have high-powered lasers as well?”

  “Almost certainly,” Frandsen said. “I would be surprised if they didn’t have them, although I don’t know if they use them as weapons.”

  “They probably would,” Santini said. He hit the table in sudden frustration. “Why are they just playing with us?” He demanded. “Why don’t they just invade?”

  “Perhaps because they can’t just overwhelm us like that,” Alex said, snapping his fingers. He was surprised that it was Santini who was showing signs of stress – his career had included dozens of secret missions in places most people would be surprised to le
arn that American forces had operated at all – but cabin fever was getting to them all. “It’s something to hope for.”

  “We’ve got the latest images of the mothership,” Jones said, in the uncomfortable silence. He clicked a remote control and put up the first image. It looked like nothing more than a handful of stars, were it not for the arrow someone had drawn on the image, helpfully pointing out the alien mothership. Jones clicked again and again, bringing the mothership into view. It was massive, yet somehow it was hard to make out real detail. “The best that NASA can suggest is that the spacecraft is surrounded by a force field that makes taking photographs of the hull tricky. No one has any idea of how they’re doing it or how to compensate for it.”

  “They’re using their drive field,” Frandsen said, with cool certainty. “They’re warping the fabric of space itself around their vessel.”

  Jones blinked, but waved the matter aside. “NASA was able to come up with some figures,” he said. “The mothership is big, the size of a large asteroid. It’s quite easy to believe that there are over a billion aliens on that motherfucker.”

  “No wonder they’re running out of resources,” Alex commented. “It might explain why they tried to bargain with us and then launched this…psychological warfare offensive. They simply don’t have time for a long struggle for dominance and they can’t risk destroying the Earth. They need the planet as much as we do.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Frandsen said. “It would be easy enough for them to establish bases on asteroids, on Mars, even on the Moon. They’ve certainly got the technology. And there’s something else to think about.”

  He smiled, without humour. “If the mothership was to be destroyed in orbit, the results would be unpleasant,” he said. “I read an article that stated – quite rightly – that the destruction of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi would have exterminated the little furry creatures on the planet below, with the wreckage falling into the atmosphere and striking the surface. We’re in the same boat. If that ship were to be destroyed…we’d all die too.”