Second Contact, page 49
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Emma coached Dan for two solid hours before he was set to go live on Blitz News via a video call in her home office, where she promised to stay right by his side in case he needed any help at any point or came too close to revealing exactly what they were going to show the world the following day.
Henry, who had been at New Kergrillin’ for several hours discussing things with Walter Byrd and Phil Norris, wouldn’t know that Dan was going to be on live TV until he either saw him on screen or heard about it later. Dan and Clark had briefly discussed whether they should tell Henry about the plaque and footage between hinting at them on TV and revealing them to the public the next day, and both agreed that they should.
Neither brother raised the prospect of Full Disclosure — telling Henry or anyone else about the hoax at this point could have done no good whatsoever and wasn’t even on the table as a rational option — but the last thing either wanted was for Henry to endure the embarrassment of only learning that his sons had been keeping their possession of the fourth plaque from him at the same time everyone else found out about it.
When the time came for Dan’s interview with Marian de Clerk, he looked into the small webcam above Emma’s computer and couldn’t help but imagine the tens of millions of people watching live and the hundreds of millions who would eventually see his interview.
He thought he was ready.
“Hello, Dan,” de Clerk said. “The world has been waiting to hear your take on…”
All of a sudden, the words stopped registering in Dan’s mind.
As his heart pounded in his chest like it was trying to burst out, time seemed to stop and the world seemed to fall silent. Without any real thought and without knowing how many seconds had actually passed, Dan covered his face with his hands then stood up and stepped out of the webcam’s line of sight.
“I can’t,” he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Emma, I can’t do it.”
Emma instinctively sat down in the empty chair and told de Clerk that she would take over from here.
Clark, watching live on Blitz News in the adjacent living room, quickly hurried through to check that Dan was alright. He saw Emma in the chair — she hadn’t yet sat down when he left the TV, so he hadn’t known she was going to take over — and quietly encouraged Dan to leave her office so she could continue without too much distraction. Dan shook his head. He wasn’t leaving, so Clark stood at his side.
“The reason people wanted Dan to do this today is the same reason he can’t,” Emma said to de Clerk and her untold millions of viewers around the country. “He didn’t want to do this… I talked him into it because I know that his words have meaning to a lot of people. But I think all of you in the studio know as well as I do that Dan isn’t built for this kind of thing. He’s not built like us, with our effortless ability to switch between emotions as the situation demands, with our endless supply of snappy one-liners, with the way we can brush things off with a dismissive laugh while our stomachs are in knots.
“But the main difference between Dan and us is that Dan can’t lie with a straight face, like it’s nothing. I wanted him to come on here today and tell everyone that everything is going to be okay, because that’s what people need to hear. But Dan couldn’t do that — he couldn’t say that — because it’s not true. What people need to hear doesn’t change the objective reality that everything is already not okay, and where Dan McCarthy differs from us is that he doesn’t share our ability to pretend that it is.”
Emma quickly qualified her statement about nothing being okay by explaining that she was talking in terms of societal stability rather than Earth’s long-term safety. She stressed that the word coming from Argentina was positive on that front — precisely the kind of white lie Dan had ultimately realised he wouldn’t be able to deliver — and went as far as to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt in saying that fear itself posed a greater danger to humanity than the “eminently preventable” apocalypse that everyone quite understandably feared so much.
As Dan watched on, more in awe than ever, Emma proceeded to answer every question de Clerk asked. Much of the detail of their conversation passed him by, however, as his mind remained unfocused and overwhelmed. He had never felt anything like this, even when standing at the drive-in a year earlier and directly addressing the world’s media. In fleeting moments of mental clarity he reflected that this was probably because the previous year’s task, however difficult, had been straightforward in terms of what he had to do: pursue the truth and share it with the world.
This wasn’t the first time that Dan had internally or vocally lamented how much more complicated everything had become since Ben Gold came clean on Walker’s hoax, but it was definitely the most acutely he had appreciated the difference.
The trickiest part of Emma’s fairly brief appearance came when she had to inform the world that Timo would be hosting a press conference in the new Fiore Frontiere headquarters in Colorado Springs the next day. It wasn’t easy to get across the point that Timo had something important to say without inviting angry questions about why he hadn’t said it already or why he couldn’t at least say it today, but Emma called on her years of high-level PR experience to get the job done. In hindsight she was beginning to realise that this really would have been a lot for the far less experienced Dan to handle, and with that realisation came guilt for putting him on the spot in the first place.
As soon as the interview was over, Emma disabled her webcam and apologised to Dan for not insisting on doing it herself all along. She hugged him; but although he reciprocated and told her not to worry about it, she sensed that his mind wasn’t quite there.
“Are you doing okay with this, man?” Clark asked. “You’re allowed to say no.”
“I think this might make a difference,” Dan replied, giving a slight nod that required more effort than he let on. “I don’t exactly know how, or why, but I’ve got a feeling that Timo’s press thing with the plaque is going to speed things up somehow.”
“Let’s hope it turns things around instead of just speeding them up,” Emma said with a slight chuckle. “I mean, what with all the looting and the financial crash and all of this mass panic, I’d say things are kind of speeding towards the edge of a cliff right now.”
Dan saw the funny side and smiled for the first time in a while. “So I guess you and Timo should probably start thinking about how tomorrow is going to go down, right?”
“Yup,” Emma said, squeezing Dan’s hand before kissing him on the cheek and opening the door to head out towards Timo and Tara. “No rest for the wicked…”
C plus 22
10 Downing Street
London, England
Not before time, Jack Neal’s identification of Trey Myers and illicit bugging of his house had finally delivered something tangible.
Thanks to the bugs and the audio recording they provided, both Jack and his boss John Cole were now in the uniquely privileged position of knowing several incredible truths.
It had been remarkable enough to receive confirmation of their previously discussed idea that Dan McCarthy may have been in contact with the Messengers. The revelation that Trey had travelled to Montana not to film the falling satellite but to film an alien craft was more explosive still, but even that didn’t come close to the key takeaway: the fourth plaque had been found, and the idiots in Birchwood were preparing to share it with the world.
Cole was greatly affronted by the way Trey spoke about him, taking particular umbrage to his “fuck that guy” comment, but Jack remained laser-focused on the task at hand.
With Cole’s political career in tatters and Jack’s credibility inexorably tied to it, the nature of this task was urgent damage-limitation.
Although Emma Ford’s announcement that Timo Fiore would share something important with the world in Colorado Springs meant that Jack didn’t have to wait for another conversation between Emma and Trey to know where the reveal would take place, the news that it would occur so soon gave him precious little time to think of the right move, let alone to set the wheels in motion.
His ultimate suggestion was for Cole to steal Timo’s thunder by spoiling the surprise of the plaque’s discovery — something he insisted he could spin into a beneficial narrative — but Cole was having none of it.
“We have to stop them,” Cole said, straightforward and decisive. “This is the only way back. But spoiling the surprise is no good; we need to steal the surprise. If we can find out what the engraving signifies then we can be the ones to come forward with something huge, but first of all we have to get our hands on that plaque. If we can do that, we can—”
“They’re hardly going to give it up,” Jack cut him off, speaking in a higher-pitched tone than normal.
Cole stared at Jack for several seconds, amazed by the temerity of his interruption.
“I’m sorry,” Jack went on, “but really, boss… they’re not.”
Cole took a long, slow breath. “Call your man in Colorado and tell him the bugs were all well and good, but that we need to step things up. If he’s not the man for the job, find a man who is. Understood?”
Jack gulped.
“Understood?” Cole pushed.
After a long and uncomfortable pause, Jack eventually gave a reluctant half-nod. “Understood.”
C plus 23
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
Throughout the day, both Emma and Timo were contacted by a lot of people. Media outlets reached out to Emma in the hope of securing their own interviews or even an inside scoop on the following day’s press conference, while Timo received many calls from his staff asking what exactly it was that he knew but they didn’t. Neither engaged much beyond offering cursory canned answers intended to downplay what was coming.
They had wisely preempted inevitable questions from political leaders, with Emma reaching out to representatives of both President Slater and Chairman Godfrey to stress that the event was more of a morale-booster than anything else and would primarily involve Timo publicly sharing some details of one ambitious survival plan that had been developed in his South African facility and discussed in Buenos Aires.
Pragmatism came before truth here, as had necessarily been the case only too often in recent times, as Emma wouldn’t even entertain the notion of letting anyone know about the plaque ahead of time for fear of how they might try to spin it to serve their own agendas. Neither Slater nor Godfrey were on the John Cole level of selfish irresponsibility or even close to it, but when push came to shove they were still power-driven and image-conscious politicians.
The day’s most surprising request for conversation came not to Emma or Timo, however, but to Tara.
Michael Feather, the younger and bolder of the brothers who had assisted with the group’s treasure hunt in Salida, reached out to Tara online via a direct message when he had no success in getting hold of anyone else by any other means. His message, inspired by the rampant speculation about what Timo was going to show or tell the world the next day, contained a double question about whether the plaque had anything to do with what was going on and whether that was what Timo was going to reveal.
Tara wisely took these questions to Emma, who wasted no time in calling Michael.
Emma began by thanking Michael, and his brother, for keeping everything so quiet during a very difficult and uncertain period. She assured him that neither he nor his brother would be mentioned at all in public and confirmed that the event at Fiore Frontiere HQ would involve a public presentation of the plaque.
Keeping Michael in the dark regarding how Dan located the plaque was no longer a viable option given that the truth would be revealed so soon, and to this end Emma was actually glad that he had reached out.
She told him that she and Dan had misled the Feathers for their own good, to keep them out of a complicated situation. The story they spun about an old diary written by Karl Heilig wasn’t true, she said, before stating as calmly and nonchalantly as possible that Dan had been directly contacted by the Messengers more than once and that they had led him to the plaque which had in turn led Timo’s astronomers to the dangerous path of Comet Conte-Abate.
Unsurprisingly, Michael Feather was stunned into silence for several seconds. “So let me get my head around this,” he eventually replied. “The Messengers knew about this comet way back when they left the plaques, and they knew which part of the sky it would be in when we would first be able to see it? Is that right? And then, now, when it’s almost here, they had to make sure the warning was out in the open instead of hidden away in a pile of old metal… so that we’d at least have some kind of chance of dealing with it?”
To Emma, Michael’s sensible questions summed up precisely why they had no option but to reveal that Dan had been led to the plaque by the Messengers; without the contextual revelation that the aliens had acted to make sure the fourth plaque was seen at this moment in time, so long after it had supposedly been left on Earth, it didn’t make a lot of sense for the engraving to point towards where the comet could be detected now.
The deeper context of Richard Walker’s hoax was one that no one had any reason to know; not even Trey, who unlike Michael Feather would be present at Timo’s press conference to introduce the remarkable footage he shot in Lolo National Forest.
When evening came, Dan and Clark belatedly told Emma of their firm desire to loop their father in on everything that was going to be revealed the next day. She understood their position and saw no problem with it. And given that the press conference’s early start would likely have left no time for Henry to be told anything in the morning, his late-night presence at New Kergrillin’ encouraged the trio to venture to the drive-in to tell him there. Dan also wanted to loop in Walter Byrd and Phil Norris, both of whom had helped him a great deal and both of whom he felt deserved to find out about the plaque before the general public, so this was a three-birds-with-one-stone kind of deal.
Phil’s bar was closed to the public but he threw the doors open with a wide smile when the trio arrived. Timo and Tara, who lacked local knowledge as to just how quiet and insulated Birchwood really was, were too reluctant to go out so late when further scenes of looting were already filling news reports around the country and instead opted to stay home with Rooster.
Walter Byrd was his usual welcoming self while there were no signs of any hard feelings between Clark and Phil over the incident with the revoked meal-card.
Dan wasted absolutely no time in getting to the point of his visit, rattling off an efficient retelling of everything that had happened from the moment a dream told him when and where something was going to happen — the alien craft’s appearance at Lolo, recorded so clearly by Trey — all the way to the eventual discovery of the comet-revealing plaque in Salida.
To Dan’s immeasurable relief, there was still no sign of any hard feelings. Instead of asking why all of this had been kept from them, the three men followed up on their initial reactions of silent shock by asking about Dan’s remarkable-sounding ‘message in a dream’ and only then asking Emma about the timing of their decision to go public with the truth.
Before Emma could deliver an answer, Dan jumped in. “It made sense to give the GSC a week to try to cook up a plan,” he said, “but from what Timo’s guys have said it doesn’t sound like there’s one specific idea that stands out as a surefire bet. Now, there’s not a whole lot to lose by revealing that we found the plaque and that it pointed to the comet. And maybe when everyone knows that the aliens warned us about this and when everyone is praying and begging for them to do something to help us… maybe, just maybe, they actually will. When everyone knows they’ve been here so recently and that they care about our survival enough to give us a warning, maybe someone will think of a way to persuade them into doing something.”
Given his previously growing pessimism over the prospect of the Messengers returning, Emma was more than a little surprised to hear Dan say this so convincingly. He had succeeded in safely delivering a conscience-easing partial tell — i.e. sharing the full truth of everything but the hoax — and he had done so in a surprisingly hopeful tone.
As Dan’s words of hope sank in, a hanging lightbulb above the bar flickered off and on. Seconds later, every light in the bar went out for a brief but disconcerting moment. Even when they flashed back on and stayed lit, a feeling of unease circled.
“I have a generator,” Phil said. “If that happens again, for longer, we’ll head to my vault.”
The TV behind the bar didn’t automatically turn back on. By the time Phil walked around to press the button, a reporter was relaying breaking news of widespread power outages in various parts of the country.
When Phil started talking about the possibility of this being the beginning of some kind of military or terrorist attack, Henry wasted no time in telling him to “pipe down with the paranoia.”
“This would sure as hell be the time to do it,” Phil insisted.
Live ‘heat spot’ maps, not unlike those which had been used to visually represent the most vivid sightings of the California Fireball, quickly appeared on the screen to reflect the regional concentration of social media posts which referred to blackouts or power outages.
“If that was an attack, it didn’t do a very good job,” Walter Byrd mused. “Lights flickering on and off? And if it was one of those EMPs you’re always talking about, no one’s phones would still be working, either.”
Large areas across the Pacific Northwest were very clearly the worst hit by the outages, and the news report quickly cut to incoming footage from several cities in the midst of full-on blackouts. Streetlights flashed back on during one live report, and within a few more minutes it seemed like everything was back to normal.
Fortunately the episode was merely unsettling rather than disastrous, but Phil Norris remained far from convinced that it was as innocuous as the others thought.
