Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Good,” he said, finally. “Keep me updated.”

  ***

  His quarters in the underground bunker were cold and harsh, almost like a monkish cell. It was a level of equality with the others in the bunker that a communist might have envied, although the communist would probably have argued that the President could have had the room upgraded at will and therefore there was no such thing as true equality. It wasn't the Lincoln Bedroom, but it would suffice. The President had slept in worse.

  He’d spoken briefly to the country after the first wave of alien fighters had retreated back into orbit, but he knew that it hadn’t been enough. The alien fighters had returned, broken off, and returned again, keeping on the pressure over the hours. The President had studied the Battle of Britain when he’d been younger and remembered how close the RAF had come to breaking. The British had been able to replenish their fighters over the weeks of war and train new pilots, but it took months to build a fighter jet – the Raptor production line had been dismantled after the project had been cancelled - and years to train a USAF pilot. The USAF might be worn down to nothing before the alien mothership entered orbit…

  And what would happen then?

  The President believed what Ethos had told him, because it fitted all the facts. One billion aliens were going to land on Earth and settle the planet, after sweeping aside humanity’s resistance. The entire world would be theirs if America lost the war.

  “Over my dead body,” he muttered, and started to consider contingency plans. The war wouldn’t be lost even if the aliens occupied all of America, or even the entire world. Biting off the entire planet might be beyond even their resources. There was still a chance for victory.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Area 52, Nevada, USA

  Day 40

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  Alex looked up from the comfortable, if ugly chair. “I’m doing what everyone else does when there’s a national crisis,” he said, dryly. “I’m watching television.”

  “Oh?” Jane asked. “Is it telling you anything you don’t already know from intelligence reports?”

  “Not really,” Alex admitted. “It just keeps reminding me of how much the world has changed over the past month.”

  The loss of the satellites had sharply reduced the number of channels available to American viewers, although most of the foreign channels had replaced their scheduled programs with updates on the war raging over America and the EBS overrides kept cutting in, relaying warnings of new alien attacks. CNN, Fox and WNN had fallen back on their contingency plans and were broadcasting as they’d done in the days before satellites had become so common, while talk radio and other sources of information were enjoying a surprising boost in popularity. Local channels carried more specific information on battles between the American defence forces and the aliens, updates on dead or missing people and a vast amount of nonsensical speculation on the course of the war. The military was restricting information and few broadcasters were willing to risk federal charges for revealing classified military secrets, but most people could read between the lines. The war wasn't going well.

  He flicked a channel to a British TV station, which was showing images of running street battles between French riot police and dark-skinned rioters. The commentary was reporting that the French Interior Ministry was preparing to deploy paratroopers and Foreign Legion soldiers to the streets of a dozen French cities in the wake of the massive economic collapse. The aliens didn’t need to invade Europe. It was coming apart quite nicely on its own. The news from China was even less encouraging. After some ritual fist-shaking at Taiwan, the Chinese Government had declared martial law and started putting troops on the streets. As those soldiers were unpaid, the results had not been pleasant.

  “I keep thinking that…you know, I’m suddenly redundant because everyone knows now that aliens are real,” he admitted. “I used to keep thinking that they weren't real, or that they were just classified military aircraft, and now…now, I feel useless. And then I remember that thousands of lives have been lost already and more will be lost unless we can figure out a way to stop them and…it all feels unreal.”

  He shook his head. “I felt the same about 9/11,” he added. “It was impossible to believe that someone could do that to us, not until I saw the footage and realised that it had actually happened. I walked around numb to the changes in the world until it finally sank in. Does that make me sound selfish?”

  “It makes you sound like a man,” Jane said. She stuck out her tongue at his expression. “The human mind isn’t capable of grasping big surprises all at once, even with the best of training. You’re down in a base that gives you an increasing sense of unreality; of course you’re going to question if this is really happening. I used to wonder if the whole alien crash scenario was just a test of how we’d react under the strain, until I saw the alien bodies. They couldn’t have been faked.”

  She placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I know what you need to cheer you up,” she added. “Come watch while I dissect the alien.”

  “And then we can make a film of it and sell it for big dollars,” Alex said, remembering several films that had claimed to feature aliens being dissected by military doctors. He’d had two of them analysed and they’d both proven to be fakes, with the alien bodies actually human children who’d been badly malnourished. It said more about the human willingness to be fooled than what alien anatomy might look like. “I’ll split the money with you fifty-fifty.”

  “We’ll have to put the data out on the web for free,” Jane disagreed. “The entire world will need to know what makes them tick. Come and watch from the observation lounge in an hour. I’ll have everyone ready by then.”

  Alex watched her leave and looked back at the television. An announcer he didn’t recognise was reporting on an alien attack on an installation in Oregon and discussing the possible future implications for the state’s military spending. It sounded like the least of America's concerns to Alex and it left him wondering if Jane was right, if the announcer was trying to hide from an unpleasant reality behind nonsense. He clicked the channel and saw a talking head going on and on about protesters who’d been killed in one of the alien attacks, calling them all martyrs to the cause of interstellar peace. Alex had no such feelings. Most people who were caught up in war zones didn’t choose to be there. The protesters didn’t have to be anywhere near the military bases under attack. It was hardly the military’s fault that they’d been killed.

  An hour later, he found himself in the observation lounge, flanked by Jones and an Army Medical Colonel from US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. The concerns about an accidental biological holocaust had faded somewhat with the apparent discovery that the aliens had no qualms about exposing themselves to humanity, but no one was interested in taking any chances. It was possible, although unlikely, that something the aliens rated as harmless would be lethal to humanity, or vice versa. The entire autopsy would take place in a sealed environment and the medical researchers would take the utmost care to avoid infection. It wasn't an easy task. If any of them were touched by alien biological material, their superiors might never be able to take them out of quarantine.

  It grew worse. It wasn't hard to deduce that there would be a nuclear option – quite literally – for dealing with any biological contamination. The base was designed to allow the air to be pumped out, or flamethrowers used to sweep the entire complex clear, but as a final resort a nuclear weapon would be used to sterilize the base. Alex had never given much thought to working near jet fuel and aircraft weapons, yet the very thought of the nuke sent shivers down his spine, even though he knew that nukes were highly overrated. His one visit out of the complex only heightened the sense of returning to a death trap. Jane might have had a point about it being a test at the beginning. Missile crews in silos tended to suffer from similar cabin fever and other disorders.

  “This is EBE1,” Ja
ne said, her voice echoing oddly through the speakers. Everything she said would be recorded by very sharp microphones, to the embarrassment of some medical technicians. The microphones picked up everything. “There has been no change in the alien since first examination, including no biological decay. The reason for that remains unknown, but may be connected with the sterile working environment. The bodies were not frozen or preserved by any human agency. It may be that Earth-based microbes or other lower life forms do not find the alien biology palatable, or it may have another cause.”

  Alex watched carefully as she started to dissect the alien, taking her time. The original faked videos had suggested a hasty procedure, but Jane moved slowly, carefully exploring the alien’s internal organs. Alex was no expert on biology, human or alien, but it was evident to him that the alien had been designed for a specific set of tasks. He’d read several science-fiction novels in which aliens – or humans – had engineered castes that fitted various different roles, from warriors to breeders. They’d had societies rather like anthills, with the queens at the top and the lowly workers at the bottom. It was possible that the older aliens who’d spoken to the President and the UN were actually high castes, while the smaller aliens – or the big brutish aliens – were lower castes. The alien body actually looked less complex than a human body, yet there was a surprising amount of wasted space and seemingly useless organs.

  Or I could be completely wrong, he thought, reminding himself that he wasn't a doctor and, even if he had been, it was only the first exploration of an alien body. Without a live specimen, it was difficult to know for sure what every organ did, even though Jane and her assistants were making educated guesses. The alien seemed to have a rather odd heart - by human standards - that seemed to be merged with the liver and lungs. If, of course, they were alien livers and lungs. They could have been something entirely different.

  As the dissection proceeded, tiny sections of alien flesh and blood were cut away and passed to the sealed research spaces. There were hundreds of researchers who’d demanded a chance to look at an alien body – after the aliens had kindly told the world that the United States had a crashed ship and alien bodies – and Jane had been able to choose the best. They’d study the alien DNA – if they used DNA – and attempt to determine how the different alien subsets were related. Alex was inclined to believe that they were looking at different castes rather than different races, although he had no idea how such a system might have evolved. Humanity would have refused to try to engineer their bodies to fit a specific purpose.

  Or maybe not. The Soviet Union had tried to convince itself that it had created the New Soviet Man. It had been nothing more than a delusion, yet there were hundreds of unanswered questions surrounding their genetic engineering project and biological warfare capabilities. Others, the modern-day Nazis and other extremist groups, would have been quite willing to domesticate large swathes of the human race, converting those they considered lesser into slaves and breeders. It might even be possible, in the future, to engineer human slaves who literally couldn’t think of freedom as anything other than a word, worshipping the master race. It was the plot of thousands of science-fiction novels and movies – including a whole series of underground movies that were long on bondage and sadistic domination, but short on actual plot – yet with the alien technology, it might be possible to do just that. A human would be revolted, but aliens might not think like humans; they might think that it was a great idea.

  “The alien fingers appear designed for extremely precise work,” Jane said, her voice breaking into his thoughts. “They show a degree of precise control that is superior to the average human, although it is impossible to be sure without a live alien to examine. Despite their small size, they are apparently quite strong and would probably be capable of inflicting serious harm on a human in close-quarter battle. Combined with their other traits, including very sharp eyes and no apparent nose, I am inclined to wonder if I’m looking at a worker caste alien.”

  “Interesting,” one of the other observers said. Alex hadn’t even seen the USAF officer entering the room. “Is it actually intelligent?”

  “It is in fact a he, as far as I can tell,” Jane said, slightly nettled. “I have candidates for sexual organs on all five of the aliens and they’re all male-type. They may not be breeders, of course, but they are definitely male. They should be capable of the sexual act if given a partner.”

  Her voice tightened. “Without a live specimen, I cannot actually tell you if it is an intelligent creature,” she admitted. “It is true that it has a brain that is actually larger than a human brain, but I cannot tell you what level of intelligence it possesses, or even if it is intelligent in any sense that we humans would understand. We may be dealing with creatures that are capable of making tools and developing technology by instinct. Man needs to think to challenge and reshape the world; the aliens may not need anything of the sort. My gut feeling, however, is that the aliens are definitely intelligent, perhaps not that different from us. They don’t react to situations; they create situations.”

  Alex frowned, following her logic. A few years ago, a set of researchers had started to try to teach monkeys about the idea of money. It had sounded like a mad experiment when he’d first heard about it, but by trial and error, the researchers had finally managed to teach the monkeys that money had value, even though they couldn’t eat it. The monkeys had developed to the point where they’d been able to adapt to their new situation, inventing bank robbery, shopping and prostitution. It had raised a number of disturbing questions about how intelligent monkeys actually were, yet they had clearly not invented money for themselves, or tried to communicate openly with humans. Was their behaviour, once they had grasped the concept of money, a sign of intelligence or merely a sign of adoption? They had never invented money in the wild and there had been no need to invent it when they were in cages.

  But if the mark of humanity – or intelligence - was the ability to imagine, and then create, wasn't it proof that monkeys were not intelligent…and the aliens were? Humanity had imagined thousands of alien contact scenarios before a UFO had finally crashed, scenarios that Alex – among others – had used to prepare for possible repercussions. Others had imagined uses for materials that simply hadn’t been in existence when the writers had conceived them, yet once the technology was available, the dreams had flowered into reality. It seemed impossible to think of a race that couldn’t imagine, or existed as anything greater than…well, monkeys. The aliens had to have some form of intelligence.

  And had humanity gotten smarter? In the early days, brute strength and cunning would have been more important than brains, particularly in a weak body. Alex remembered the Special Forces soldiers he’d seen before they’d set out to Antarctica and knew that, in the past, they would have been far more important to society than any nerd, or a person like Alex. As humanity had developed, intelligence and imagination became more and more important…and when societies started suppressing innovation, they stagnated and eventually collapsed. The Dutch, the British, the Americans…all had prospered by rewarding imagination and innovation. The Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese…all had rejected freedom of thought and speed, freedom of innovation, and had suffered for it. The Germans had thrown out the men and women who had created the atomic bomb! How innovative were the aliens?

  He looked down at the half-dissected alien body, and then walked out of the observation room. There would be nothing he could contribute and he wanted to get his thoughts down on paper before they fell out of his mind. He barely realised where he was walking before he walked into the hangar holding the alien craft and stopped, looking up at its almond shape. There was no way that something so…elegant could be created by a race operating on instinct alone. The aliens had to be intelligent.

  “We need results now,” Jones was saying. Alex realised suddenly that he’d walked in on an argument between Jones and Frandsen, who looked tired and angry. “What
the hell did they use against our carriers?”

  “And I’m telling you that we only have theories,” Frandsen replied, sharply. “We don’t know what they did to those ships, only that the green fire seems to destroy electronic systems and ruin entire compartments! We thought it might be a focused EMP weapon, but if they had something like that, why aren’t they knocking our aircraft out of the sky with ease? Our best guess is that it’s some kind of electromagnetic field causing localised overloads and massive disruption.

  “The other alien weapon is easy to understand. It’s nothing more than bursts of superheated plasma, something we had under development ourselves in the labs. It moves very fast, but hardly at the speed of light and it can be dodged by our aircraft if they react in time. Its own nature makes it a very imprecise weapon, but they can spit out enough plasma pulses to make sharing the same airspace very unhealthy. We could even duplicate the weapon within a few months…”

  “We don’t have a few months,” Jones snapped. He sounded on the very edge of collapse. Moving back and forth between Area 52 and Washington was wearing him down. “We have 20-odd days before that mothership enters orbit and at this rate, the aliens will have smashed our entire air force well before they arrive! We need something we can use now!”

  Frandsen took a step forward, and then managed to calm himself. “It takes months, at the very least, to develop an experimental piece of hardware,” he said. “It takes years to put it into production once all of the bugs have been worked out. Even if we abolish safety rules put into place by people who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about, even if we get an unlimited budget from a Congress that is notoriously unwilling to fund new technology, even if we have all the advantages in the world, we’re still not going to be able to produce something completely new…”