Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  Jules proved to be a strong-looking woman with long blonde hair, wearing a biker’s outfit. “No, I do not,” she said, firmly. Abigail admired her courage. She was only a handful of meters from protesters who might tear her limb from limb for daring to suggest that the craft should not be returned. “There are too many unanswered questions about the aliens and their activities that need answers before we agree to place our future in their hands.”

  She leaned forward. “They told us a great many things, but they haven’t proven a single one, apart from their mere existence,” she continued. Shelia looked as if she wanted to interrupt, but didn’t quite dare. Jules was quite formidable. “What do we actually know about them? Very little, beyond the fact that they have some kind of antigravity drive and a massive mothership that will be in orbit in less than a month – is there anything else? We know nothing about them and the protesting fools down there are asking us to trust the aliens unreservedly!”

  “But,” Shelia said, making a valiant effort, “you don’t think that the government was in the wrong for shooting down the alien craft?”

  “If they shot down the craft at all – which is something else that is unproven – the craft was certainly nosing around a defended area,” Jules informed her. “We don’t bother to station missile batteries in the midst of the Pacific Ocean where there is nothing to defend. If they were spying on a classified military base, for example, doesn’t that open their motives to question? They might well have been taking notes before launching the invasion, or scouting out our military potential. There are too many unanswered questions to trust them, yet.

  “No one would be happier than I if the aliens proved to be friendly, with gifts and technology we can use to reach for the stars, but I think that we should be more careful before we trust them. The government is a known evil. The aliens are not.”

  Shelia stared at her, as if she were speaking in a foreign language. “And don’t you think that people have a right to protest?”

  Jules looked over at the teeming mass of screaming protesters and scowled. “You don’t have the right to protest effectively,” she said, “if by effectively you mean harassing or even harming people who are trying to do legal things, even if you don’t like them. The protesters out there are harassing the entire city, for what? They’re making it harder for people to get to work! There are better ways to make their feelings known than disrupting an entire city.”

  She stalked off, leaving Shelia holding the microphone. “That was a well known writer,” Shelia said. “We turn now to…”

  Abigail sensed, rather than heard, the change in the crowd as something went badly wrong. It was impossible to tell what had happened, but the crowd seemed to be breaking down into panic, spreading out and clashing against the police lines. She peered down towards the barriers blocking the two groups of protesters and realised that the police had failed to keep them apart, allowing the two groups to clash with mindless violence. Both groups seemed to be coming apart, pushing the police back as they lashed out senselessly. Abigail caught her breath as she saw a young boy on the ground, bleeding from a head wound, before the panicking crowd obscured him from her gaze. The deafening chants had become howls of pain; the mob had become a wounded animal, screaming in pain. She saw a policeman shoved down and trampled and knew that others had been badly injured, or worse.

  The entire scene was dissolving into chaos, thousands of protesters pushing everywhere, trying to escape or fight. She knew from covering prior protests that there would be those who had gone to the protests specifically to trigger violence, or to fight the police if it came down to a fight. They’d get hundreds of their fellow protesters injured, perhaps even killed, and just so they could get their kicks. The police would have to deal with them, but how? The police seemed to be totally overwhelmed.

  “THIS IS THE POLICE,” a megaphone boomed, as a helicopter orbited high overhead. Merely seeing it there was a surprise. The White House was normally secure airspace, with only governmental flights allowed. “REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE AND WAIT! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE!”

  Someone threw a stone at the helicopter. It didn’t have a prayer of hitting the craft, but it came down among the protesters, knocking someone to the ground. The cry of pain seemed to drive the mass into a frenzy, sending them running everywhere. Abigail wondered why the police hadn’t ordered the mob to disperse, before realising that it would have pushed thousands of people into the side streets where many more would have been seriously injured. The only hope of preventing serious injuries was to break the crowd up slowly, but it was already too late for that. The violence was spreading rapidly out of control. Someone threw a Molotov Cocktail at a reporter’s van and it exploded into a fireball, sending hundreds of people fleeing for an elusive safety. Others produced weapons and turned on their opponents, savaging them in the confusion. She flinched as a group of protesters ran past her and realised that the reporter’s location – all protesters knew to leave a space for the reporters – was no longer safe. Such considerations were no longer on their minds. They just wanted to get away.

  She looked up as she heard the first tear gas canisters burst. Some protesters promptly put on masks, or wrapped wet cloths around their mouths, while others threw themselves to the ground or tried to flee the gas. A line of black-clad policemen, carrying riot shields and truncheons, were advancing from one corner of the scene, trying to break up the mob into smaller groups. They were followed by an entire army of policemen who secured the rioters as they were subdued. A handful of rioters tried to fight and were flattened by the police, before being arrested and dragged away…

  Everything broke down into a series of confusing impressions as the rioters surged back against the reporters and their assistants. She saw a mass of people coming right at her, slamming her down, and she distinctly heard Shelia scream before she hit the ground. Her entire body hurt as the rioters pushed on past her, screaming and howling their outrage, kicking and clawing at her body. She wanted to curl into a ball, but she couldn’t even do that, not with her body in such pain. It felt as if she’d broken every bone in her body and she wondered, suddenly, if it was the end. She'd thought that she would die in the Sudan, after making a report that was too honest for the local government’s taste, not on the streets of Washington. They’d be running red with blood after the riot…

  A pair of strong arms grasped her and rolled her over onto her belly. Before she could complain, her hands were twisted around behind her back and secured with a plastic tie. She tried to kick out before realising what was going on and was rewarded by a knee in her back and a harsh voice warning her to lie still and wait. The policeman straightened up and walked on to the next person, leaving her to stare around blankly. She couldn’t see much from her position, but it was clear that they were securing everyone remaining in the area, rioters and reporters alike. She managed to look over at where the vans with the cameras and other equipment had been, and bit off a curse. The rioters had completely wrecked them, along with other vehicles and lives. She heard Shelia screaming as a pair of cops tied her hands, as if she expected them to rape her at any moment, before she was unceremoniously dumped on the ground next to Abigail. Her eyes were wide with shock and fear. Shelia’s world had turned upside down.

  Abigail lost track of how long she and most of the others lay helpless on the ground. A medic gave her a quick check, pronounced her essentially unharmed, and left her there. A handful of seriously injured – including a reporter she knew from CNN – were carefully carried away to the ambulances, leaving the remainder alone. The area was swarming with policemen now, slowly separating out the protesters and escorting them to a series of police vans. When a policeman helped her to her feet and pushed her towards a long line of similarly-tied protesters, she didn’t try to resist. There was no point in trying to resist. She took the opportunity to glance around, memorising as much of the scene as she could before she was shoved into the van, noting the hundreds of dead or serio
usly injured scattered around. Several of them were children, she realised, or policemen. The riot had gotten badly out of control.

  “Let me go,” Shelia shouted, as another policeman helped her to her feet. She had come completely apart under the stress. “I’m a reporter! I’m not involved! Let me go!”

  “Shut up,” Abigail hissed, taking a risk. She felt a certain responsibility to Shelia – she was young, naïve, and hadn’t realised that the only reason she had the job was that she was too attractive for her own good. She couldn’t be allowed to irritate the police more than strictly necessary. “Follow me and be patient!”

  She ignored the odd look one of the policemen gave her, flushing slightly as she realised he must have taken her for one of the professional protesters who wanted to be arrested so that they could claim to have gone to jail for their cause. She wanted to scream that it wasn't like that, that she was only looking out for her colleague, but there was no longer any more time. The protesters were firmly helped into the van and pushed towards cold seats. There was no resistance. Those who might have fought had been separated or knocked out – or killed – during the riot. The remainder just wanted the whole nightmare to be over. They didn’t even pull or tear at their bonds.

  Abigail caught one last glimpse of Washington before the doors slammed closed. There were burning vehicles and bodies lying everywhere, thousands of policemen and armed soldiers littering the streets, blood and water lying on the ground, soaking into the fabric of the nation. It was something she would have expected from a Third World Hellhole, not Washington DC.

  It looked very much like hell.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Washington DC, USA

  Day 37

  “Seventy-one people killed, five hundred and nine injured and over six thousand arrests,” the President said, flatly. “What the hell happened out there?”

  The Director of the FBI looked uncomfortable. “The protest turned violent,” he said, carefully. The President’s authority over law enforcement was limited, but few would have denied the President anything if he had asked. “The riot was deliberately incited by known anarchists and troublemakers in the pack and rapidly grew out of hand. The Police attempted to break down the mob and prevent it from causing further harm and failed. Thirteen policemen were killed in the line of duty.”

  “I see,” the President said, coldly. “And what do you intend to do with the six thousand people behind bars?”

  “Rather more than that if you count the ones arrested at other protests,” Richard Darby said. The Director of Homeland Security looked tired and worn. Homeland Security had received thousands of warnings of terrorist plots over the last few days, ever since the aliens had dropped their bombshell. The vast majority of them would be hoaxes, but they all had to be investigated. The signal-to-noise ratio was very low. “I think we arrested well over fifty thousand people in all.”

  “The ones we have proof incited the riot or committed acts of violence against the police or their fellow protesters will be charged,” the FBI Director said. It was a weak answer and the President knew it. “We confiscated most of the video footage taken of the riot…”

  “You mean the video footage that makes American policemen look like Nazi Stormtroopers?”

  “…And we will analyse it carefully to determine who else should be charged,” the FBI Director continued. “The ones we scooped up who are not going to be charged immediately will be released over the next few hours, once we have compiled a list of their names and details so we can find them again if we decide to charge them later. We’ll probably discover that we did release a few hundred who should have been charged and…”

  “Very well,” the President said, tiredly. His eyes hurt and he needed sleep. “Can you guarantee that no further riots will take place?”

  “Of course not, Mr President,” the FBI Director said. “If you had spoken to the nation…”

  The President scowled at him, but took his point. He should have addressed the nation immediately after the alien bombshell, but he’d spent the time talking to other world leaders and trying to pull the united front back together. The aliens had shattered it with a handful of well-chosen words. The world seemed to be divided; half of them believed that America had shot down the alien craft, the other half doubted the alien words privately, but had little choice but to go along with them in public. It didn’t include the endless barrage of words from Tehran. The Iranian Government had informed its people that they were in communication with the aliens and with their help they would drive the Great Satan from the Middle East and establish true Islam over the Holy Cities. The President suspected that it was all bullshit, but there was no way to disprove it. America’s word had been called into question too many times.

  “Yes,” he said, finally. “I’ll speak to the nation immediately after this briefing.”

  He dismissed the FBI Director with a wave and turned back to his Inner Cabinet. “The aliens have been ingenious in placing us in a very unpleasant position,” he said, flatly. “The other permanent members of the Security Council are sympathetic in private, but publicly…the message they’re getting from their own people is leave America to face the aliens alone. We may continue to get intelligence from radar stations and other systems based in allied countries, yet there is little else they can do to help us, openly or covertly. We have one day left to respond.

  “The question is simple. Do we submit to the alien demands or fight?”

  The question seemed to hang in the air. “Let us be clear on this,” the President said. “The very future of our existence as a nation, as a people, as a shining light on the hill is in doubt. We may be facing a war we dare not lose, but cannot win. We may be facing the first foe who can outmatch us as badly as we outmatched Saddam or any number of other Third World barbarians. Our most advanced technology might be primitive in comparison to their technology. The decision we make here might determine the survival of the human race itself.”

  He waited for someone to speak, wondering who would speak first.

  “State has a bad reputation when it comes to considering the need for military action,” Hubert Dotson admitted, finally. “We get accused of representing other countries interests more than those of the United States. We get accused of accepting unpleasant compromises to avoid having to admit that we failed. We’ve done our best to reform the department over the last few years, yet we still face the inflexible realities of the world. We face another inflexible reality here.

  “Our great strength during World War Two was that nothing ever touched the Home Front. Our opponents and our competitors had their lands fought over, or their industries worn down by endless fighting. We were immune from the effects of the war, we became the arsenal of freedom and we turned that advantage into the world’s greatest industrial superpower. We might suffer limited defeats, or stalemates, yet we never lost completely. The last war that could have crushed us as a nation was the Civil War, where we fought each other. No nation had the power to lay us low.

  “It was also a weakness. We allowed ourselves to forget the underlying truths of war and peace and failed to concentrate long enough on any given problem to solve it. We abandoned Iraq in 1991, we abandoned Vietnam, we abandoned Korea and let’s face it, we came damn close to abandoning Iraq again in 2004. The American mindset doesn’t really allow for long commitments and so our allies constantly worried that we were on the verge of abandoning them. They were forced to make their own contingency plans, which put our relationship with them under stress and did immeasurable harm to our diplomatic standing. We never took war seriously. We never really believed that we could be defeated. We never were defeated. It did us no real harm, in any absolute sense, to lose in Vietnam. Our interests were not damaged.

  “But this is different. We are facing a foe that can carry the war right to our homeland. The aliens have massive superiority. They can pick and choose when and how they hit us. They can break through our defences at
will. We’re not emotionally capable of accepting that we can be defeated, but here we can be defeated. If we go to war against the aliens, we may lose – and if we lose, this time it means the end. We could have survived if the Soviets had taken Europe, we could survive if the Chinese gobbled up Japan, Taiwan and all of Asia, but we could not survive defeat on our home territory.”

  The President leaned forward. “So you’re counselling surrender?”

  “If it was just me and you, I’d suggest fighting to the last,” Dotson said, sharply. “It’s not just me and you, it’s the entire country, perhaps the entire world…and I am not going to lose all of that for a point of principle. The truth we Americans prefer to forget is that strength and the will to use it may not make right, but it determines what happens! We could lose this, Mr President, and that will mean the end of our existence as an independent nation.”

  There was a long chilling pause. “It seems to me,” General Wachter said, “that we are looking at the end of our existence anyway.

  “The aliens lied, either to us or the UN. They’re untrustworthy by definition. I think we’re looking at an invasion and they’re launching this offensive to soften us up. They’ve triggered a political crisis that will ensure that we are unable to rally the rest of the world to defend the planet against the new colonists and perhaps even topple the government. They stuck a knife in our backs…and I find that encouraging.

  “Why would they even bother launching this offensive if they could overwhelm us as easily as the Secretary of State suggests? I believe that they told us the truth the first time around; that they’re colonists and that they need Earth as much as we do. I believe that they cannot throw rocks at us and bombard us into submission because they need a place to live too. The only explanation that makes sense is that they know we can resist and they intend to hamper it as much as possible.