Second Contact, page 3
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“I’m fine.”
Emma then gently ran her hand across the back of Dan’s neck and stepped behind him to take a look. “Dan, it’s bright red.”
“I was kind of clawing at it,” he said. “Pretty hard. It felt like the scar was going to burst open. I was just sitting at my desk and suddenly it was like…”
This time it was Dan who trailed off. He then opened his right palm very suddenly, fully extending his fingers. “You know, like the scar was going to do that. My legs, my arms, everything felt stiff. And I couldn’t scream. When I opened my mouth to shout for Clark, it was like my jaw was locked shut. Then it all stopped, just as quickly as it started. Did you really not feel anything?”
“Nothing at all,” Emma confirmed. “I just saw the news and I ran here to make sure you were seeing it, too.”
“Listen, Dan…” Clark began, his ordinarily gruff voice evidently trying to be softer than normal. “I’m not saying you’re crazy, okay? I know we got into some crazy shit last year… but this? Feeling it in your neck? This is batshit. Are you sure you didn’t have the radio on or something? Are you sure you didn’t see or hear a little snippet about a meteor at Kerguelen and it set something off?”
Dan shot a disappointed glance at Clark before turning to Emma. “We should talk about this in the basement,” he told her; only her. “It’s more secure than the kitchen.”
“Come on, man,” Clark said. “Don’t be like that. Just try to be rational. Why would you feel something but not Emma? They put the same kind of neural cable thing in her neck, right? So if you think you’re gonna feel something if they come back, why wouldn’t she feel it, too?”
“Who did they call to the cornfield?” Dan snapped, anger crossing his words for the first time. “Who did they call to Lolo? They didn’t even let you on the craft! You didn’t even see them, so don’t talk to me like you know how they operate.”
“Enough,” Emma said, quietly but firmly. “We’re on the same page here, and we’re the only three people on this page. We’re in this thing together. Why don’t we just sit down right here, turn off the TV and talk through the possibilities?”
Dan shook his head. “Basement. It’s more secure.”
Emma shrugged and followed Dan as he stepped towards the closed basement door.
“Leave your phone up here,” he said.
“Why?”
“Security.”
With Dan’s expression giving little away, Emma glanced at Clark. He was already in the process of taking his own phone from his pocket and placing it on the arm of the couch. He silently encouraged Emma to do the same, thinking there was little point in getting into any arguments over small things when there was a much bigger thing to worry about. Somewhat reluctantly, Emma switched off her phone and placed it beside Clark’s, locking the front door to make sure it would be safe.
Having never been inside Dan’s ordinarily off-limits basement, Emma was surprised to see a second door made of thick metal after he opened the first. She was even more surprised as she watched Dan unlock this inner door by placing his fingertips on its surface. The metal door then slid sideways into a recess in the wall and he set off down the stairs.
Combined with the phone issue, this was too much for Emma to let slide. “Okay…” she said. “What exactly do you have down there? Why do you need so much security?”
Dan turned around and called up the stairs in reply, answering both of her questions at once: “This is where I keep my research.”
C minus 96
Fiore Residence
Varese, Italy
Alone in his stately home, Timo Fiore sat wrestling with a time-sensitive decision.
For years, Timo had been seen by the general public as little more than an unrelatable fat cat; a playboy billionaire who had been born into wealth rather than having earned it. Recent beneficial market fluctuations, allied with some good advice he wisely followed, now placed Timo as the second wealthiest individual in the world by most measures; by other measures which weighted liquidity over complex stock arrangements, he was comfortably in the lead.
Understandably, not everyone held particularly fond opinions of Mr Fiore.
But within communities of space enthusiasts, astronomers, and especially those involved in research relating to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Timo had long been held in high regard for his consistent and significant investment in their fields of interest. While other rich individuals had at times funded telescope time for researchers, Timo — now a personal friend of both Billy Kendrick and Dan McCarthy — had built several state-of-the-art observatories around the world, with a particular focus on providing facilities for researchers engaged in SETI: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
A year earlier, Timo had hit the headlines harder than ever when he put up a $100 million bounty for any government employee willing to leak concrete evidence which could eventually lead to Disclosure. That bounty ended up proving unnecessary and going unclaimed, but since then Timo had stepped forward once more and offered an even more generous reward for the discovery of the elusive fourth and final alien plaque.
Despite these highly public actions, Timo knew without doubt that his next space-related move would be by far his biggest yet. His eyes flicked back and forth between a small calendar and a wall-sized television, considering the circled date on the former in relation to the potentially world-changing event being replayed on the latter.
After much deliberation, the decision was made: the circled date was too far away.
“Alessandro,” Timo said, speaking into his phone after calling the main office of the Cavalieri Observatory just a few hundred miles east of his home. “Why are you in the office? Where’s Louisa?”
“In bed. Do you know what time it is, Timo?”
Timo chuckled slightly. “Oh, of course. But you are working hard, I trust? Taking in the news, I imagine?”
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Alessandro Bonucci replied. “Even leaving aside the peculiarity of the location, the size of the blast is remarkable in itself. We see something like this only a few times per century.”
“It is a truly remarkable event, for sure, but it is not the reason I am calling at this time of night. Well, it is the reason, but it is not my focus. Do you have any update on my delivery?”
“The delivery?” Alessandro asked, surprised Timo was talking about this when something so much more pressing was going on. “It’s here. It arrived this morning.”
“Is it finished? Completely?”
“To our exact specification. But why the sudden urgency? We have eight days until the reveal.”
Timo gazed again at his calendar. “That’s the reason I ask. I’m moving the announcement forward.”
“Why?”
Timo ignored the question. “I need you to contact whoever puts the details together and ask them to get everything ready to do it on Friday.”
“Friday?! Timo, you do realise that it’s Wednesday night?” Alessandro asked, glancing at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. “In fact, to be more accurate, we’re already into Thursday morning! The media invites went out weeks ago. The turnout will be terrible if we move it forward with so little notice.”
“They will come, don’t worry about that.”
Alessandro stayed quiet for a few seconds. “Are you talking about moving the announcement forward, or are you talking moving everything forward? And whichever it is… why?”
“Everything,” Timo replied, once again dodging the other question. “I’ll see you on Friday,” he added with a smile. “In fact, to be more accurate… since we’re already into Thursday morning, I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Alessandro sighed. “See you then. But I have to ask you one more time… why don’t you want to make the announcements next week, like we planned all along?”
Timo couldn’t help but grin slightly at Alessandro’s persistence, even though the answer to the question he kept asking wasn’t exactly positive.
“Well? There must be a good reason? After all, you’re the one who picked the original date and it’s only a week away.”
“There is a good reason,” Timo said, relenting at last. “After what just happened at Kerguelen… in a week’s time, I fear the world will already be a very different place.”
C minus 95
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
The first thing Emma saw when she walked into Dan’s basement was a long digital display mounted at the top of the wall in front of her. Known as a trend-ticker, it looked almost like a ticker from the stock exchange. She had seen similar things for sale and knew that they could be set up to display all kinds of online feeds and personalised data. Judging by the current content of Dan’s, it was evidently set to the default setting of displaying exceptionally popular comments from any online discussions which matched his keyword list.
The message currently running along the trend-ticker’s display was a popular comment suggesting that the Kerguelen meteor might have been a guerrilla marketing stunt to promote an upcoming blockbuster movie about the search for the fourth alien plaque. Dan had been approached to make a cameo in this movie — imaginatively titled The Fourth Plaque — with the studio hoping that his previous appearances alongside Hollywood A-lister Kaitlyn Judd on Focus 20/20 and in a Lexington Cola commercial would sway him towards accepting the lucrative offer. They didn’t.
Back when Emma first showed up uninvited at Dan’s door as a strictly-business PR representative, she had expected to find newspaper cuttings stuck to the walls and pizza boxes littering the floor. During her first descent into his newly converted basement as a very close friend, she expected the same thing. But like she had been back then, when Emma reached the bottom of the basement’s stairway she was pleasantly surprised to see that the whole place was clean and tidy.
The sterile decor — or more precisely the complete lack of decor — wasn’t to her taste, and she didn’t like the air. But the perfectly made bed was large and comfortable looking, which momentarily made her wonder what she could do with this extra space in her own identically shaped home next door. She then noticed that Dan had an open notebook and pen at each side of his bed, as well as another on his desk and several eye-level whiteboards with magnetic pens attached.
“Why so many pens?” she asked.
“In case I have to write something quickly,” Dan said.
“You mean a message? Have you ever had to? Since Lolo, I mean.”
Dan shook his head and held his hand out towards a giant desk which looked something like a dinner table crossed with a meeting-room table, encouraging Emma and Clark to each take one of its four seats.
As Emma pulled a seat out from under the desk, she belatedly noticed the extensive security centre which filled the door-side wall. Several large screens not only relayed live footage from the house’s many external cameras, but also footage of cars passing by the old drive-in lot on the main road in and out of town. Emma knew the McCarthys were close to the lot’s owner, Phil Norris, and also that he was enthusiastic about security, so the origin of this remote feed was no mystery.
“Phil gave me a hook-up to the drive-in’s cameras,” Dan said, mistakingly reading Emma’s concern at his paranoia as confusion over the feed’s source. “He gave me a lot of advice on this place, especially the caging.”
Emma hesitated, almost afraid to ask. “Caging?”
“Yeah. When I got this place done, Phil said that if I wanted privacy I should look into having the whole room shielded against all kinds of signals. Anti-eavesdropping measures, EMP resistance, everything like that. All of my security and computer connections are securely wired to a control box in the corner of my dad’s new bedroom upstairs. There’s no Wi-Fi or phone signal down here. It’s safer that way.”
Clark shared a brief glance with Emma. Having heard all of this before, he wasn’t surprised or concerned by Dan’s borderline obsessive living arrangements. He understood why Emma might be, but they both knew there were more important things to think about right now.
Emma took a deep breath, still uncertain about the quality of the air, and patted the desk twice with both hands to indicate that it was time for business. “Okay… nothing is off the table here. Anyone can say whatever comes into their mind, no judgement. Is that clear? No judgement.”
“Okay. So can someone tell me what the hell a ‘bolide’ actually is?” Clark asked, starting off in the spirit of non-judgement. “When the headlines say ‘Kerguelen bolide’, does that mean part of the meteor actually landed on Kerguelen?”
Dan was happy to field this easy starter. “Basically — very basically — a meteor is a chunk of rock that becomes visible when it enters our atmosphere. They burn up on their way in, and meteorites are the small parts that sometimes reach the ground. Some meteors can be so bright that they look like fireballs, but there doesn’t have to be an explosion for there to be a fireball. With me so far? A bolide, specifically, is a meteor that actually explodes in the air. The fireball from a bolide can look way brighter than the sun, even if it happens in daylight, and the sonic boom can be insane; the one at Kerguelen will be detected by instruments on the other side of the world, easily. But after an explosion like that, the meteorites that turn up are usually tiny.”
Clark looked like he more or less understood. “So does that mean there can’t be anything like a sphere or a new plaque lying on Kerguelen right now? I’m not saying I think that’s what’s going on here, but I mean in terms of physical possibility… nothing like that could reach the ground?”
“It looked like the explosion was miles and miles out to sea, anyway,” Emma chimed in. “I’ll be surprised if they find any meteorite fragments on land at all.”
“So what do you think is going on?” Dan asked her, straight to the point.
“The way I see it, there are four possible options,” she replied, positioning her hand to raise one finger with each point. “In no particular order: random chance, publicity stunt, false flag, and, you know…”
“Aliens,” Clark said. “You’re allowed to say it. But who would do this as a publicity stunt? And what does ‘false flag’ even mean?”
Dan interjected. “A false flag is when a person or group, usually a government, does something that forwards their goals and is done in a way that makes it look like someone else did it. Like bombing your own hospitals to justify a war you want to start for some other reason… stuff like that.” He spoke quickly and dismissively, evidently thinking little of this option’s credibility, then turned back to Emma. “And I’ll tell you in a minute how crazy it is to think this could be random chance, but as for the publicity stunt option… do you seriously think that a movie studio would, or even could, do something like this to promote a new release?”
“That sounds an awful lot like judgement,” Emma said.
Dan held his hands up, quite literally. “Sorry. But really…”
Emma accepted the apology. “But really… I didn’t even mention a movie studio. There are already posts from people saying Billy Kendrick might have faked this for publicity, to sell his tours. That’s obviously not what’s happening, but we are trying to cover all possibilities here. I think a publicity stunt is way less likely than a false flag, because the kind of people who would benefit from a publicity stunt don’t have the same resources as the people who could benefit from a false flag. For all we know, this could be Godfrey cooking up a new threat to justify more powers and funding for the GSC, or it could be someone who wants to make the GSC look weak by showing that it can’t even defend us from small meteors, let alone alien laser beams or whatever else. And if you’re looking for leaders of countries with a grudge against Godfrey, well, pick up an atlas and choose a page at random. Again, I’m not saying this is what I think. I’m just saying: don’t rule anything out. When you’ve seen behind the curtain, you learn not to rule anything out — however crazy it sounds.”
“Seen behind the curtain? I’ve been behind the curtain,” Dan said.
“Dan…” Emma said, trying hard not to smile, “for almost ten years, I was the damn curtain.”
Clark leaned back in his chair. “My mind keeps swinging back to random chance. It makes the most sense. Stuff falls from space all the time, right? Maybe this time it just happened to fall over Kerguelen.”
“Emma mentioned an atlas,” Dan said. “If I printed out a map of the world right now and gave you a hundred darts, you could throw them all night but none would land inside Kerguelen. Do you want to know why? Because the point of the dart would be too big. That’s how small Kerguelen is… and you’re telling me this is chance? One of the most powerful bolides on record — probably in the top five of the last century — and you’re telling me it just happened to show up at Kerguelen?”
No one replied.
“And none of this is even factoring in the point that I felt something,” Dan went on, slapping the back of his neck over and over again. “Are we all forgetting that part… the part when I felt a shooting pain at the exact moment this happened, and in the exact spot where the Messengers connected their interface cable? They wanted everyone to notice this, but they wanted me to know that there’s definitely more to it than meets the eye. That’s what’s clear here, more than anything else: this is important. This means something.”
“But what?” Emma said, genuinely asking. “What do you think this means?”
Dan tried to choose his words carefully. “It could be like a harbinger, or a beacon. Kerguelen makes everyone sit up and take notice, naturally. But I think something else is going to happen, and where it happens is what’s going to count. Equilateral triangles and squares were both used on the first two plaques. So if the Messengers give us two locations, we could then narrow the X-mark to one of two more locations, because obviously a triangle only has three points. But if they give us two more locations to go with Kerguelen and those locations form three corners of a square, we’ll know exactly where to look.”
