Second Contact, page 55
part #2 of Not Alone Series
For the life of him, he couldn’t believe what he saw. “Is that…”
“Yeah,” Emma said, beaming widely without turning away. “He did it!”
Staring at a bona fide alien craft just a few miles from the hospital and having missed most of Dan’s speech, the doctor neither shared nor understood Emma’s joy.
Tara, meanwhile, watched on with some degree of trepidation. She understood the desperation behind Dan’s actions and supported what he had done, but she couldn’t help but fixate on the part of the story about the Messengers’ repeatedly expressed desire for the hoax to stay under the carpet.
Unilaterally, Dan had brought everything out into the light.
Tara kept her concerns to herself, hoping beyond hope that the aliens would be surprised rather than angry.
C plus 40
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
The drive-in descended into absolute chaos as a discus-like alien craft gracefully landed just beyond the entrance gate.
A small ramp then rapidly extended from the craft’s main body to the ground, causing many of those in its vicinity to follow the countless others who had already fled in terror.
It was a small craft, its diameter appearing no greater than the length of a commercial jet, and it rested flat on the ground. Both of these physical characteristics placed it in stark contrast to the enormous mothership-like craft Dan had encountered in Lolo National Forest, which had dominated the valley and rested upon a retractible metallic pillar at an odd angle.
In the seconds before the visitors from another world emerged from their vessel, a question crossed Dan’s mind:
What if these aren’t the same ones?
Around a third of those present in the drive-in were already gone, running as fast and as far as they could. Dan looked beyond those who remained and watched disbelievingly as two bipedal aliens, side by side, smoothly walked down their gently angled ramp and touched down on Earth.
Even across the full distance of the drive-in lot, he could tell: it was them.
The Messengers stopped at the base of their ramp, both of their gazes trained firmly on Dan. Some reporters flashed their cameras, while the largest number yet turned and ran to join those who had already fled. The aliens, just as Dan remembered, wore a seamless white fabric which covered all of their bluish silver skin other than their bulbous heads and slender hands. Those reporters brave enough to have remained near the ramp could now make out the large, primate-like eyes which dominated the Messengers’ neotenous faces.
One of the Messengers raised a hand — it was composed of two wide finger-like divisions and one highly dextrous thumb — and at this, the remaining mass of humanity within the drive-in lot immediately began dividing into two sections. Dan watched as everyone else directly in front of the Messengers, including Clark, covered their ears and ran one way or the other.
Forcefields, Dan realised. They’re clearing a path.
Even the assailant who Clark had flattened with a stiff blow now rose to his feet and stumbled out of the otherwise deserted zone as quickly as he could, leaving a totally empty area between Dan’s elevated position and the two Messengers. Some cameras and other recording equipment littered the area, but the intensity of the sound waves within the zone prevented anyone from trying to get back in.
Anyone, that was, except for Clark, who gritted his teeth and made a laudable effort to reach the stairs and protect Dan. But for the first time in Clark’s life, pain truly got the better of him; the intensity of the sensation he experienced on the wrong side of the threshold forced him to retreat and left him standing helplessly at the edge of the vacant walkway along with everyone else… stuck on the outside looking in.
Even more clearly than had been the case at Lolo, this forcefield was explicitly marked by the effect it had on those who tried to cross it. And while the walkway was relatively narrow, perhaps only fifteen feet in width, Dan’s perspective made it impossible not to think of Moses and the Crossing of the Red Sea.
As the Messengers began walking towards Dan, he made his way down the stairs and took a few tentative steps towards them. When he was past the first of the abandoned cameras, he knew that he alone was permitted on this side of the mysterious threshold. He stopped again and watched the expressionless Messengers walking slowly but steadily towards him.
They were here. They were really here.
Dan’s expression, however, was not the most welcoming.
They were here — a day after Timo and Emma had almost been blown to pieces. They were here — weeks after indirectly warning Dan of an approaching comet without doing anything to help humanity deal with it.
They were here — far too goddamn late.
“Where were you yesterday?” Dan yelled, the anger boiling over in his voice and expression. “You can come to stop Walker from talking, but not to stop Emma and Timo from being blown up? And the comet! Why won’t you just stop it?! Divert it! Why the hell would you only tell us about it when you know there’s nothing we can do about it?”
And with that thought, Dan’s walk turned into a run.
The Messengers continued, still expressionless, until Dan came within reach and lunged forward to lash out.
At that point, one of the Messengers raised a hand, bringing forth a sudden force which pushed Dan backwards through the air and sent him to the ground with a rough thud.
“Vee pat… laa. Mees loptak… soo,” the same Messenger vocalised. Its tone fell abruptly at the end of each short and melodic phrase, in precise keeping with the vocal pattern Dan recalled so vividly from his prior meeting with the Messengers at Lolo.
Dan tried again to lunge forward, displaying a near-vitriolic rage at the Messengers which he hadn’t expected for one second. But unlike the path-clearing threshold which Clark had been able to cross for a few seconds, this was a hard barrier more in keeping with the forcefield Clark had run into, face-first, in Richard Walker’s house. Dan’s hands pushed against the invisible barrier in a manner akin to a performing mime.
“Stop hiding behind your stupid forcefields,” he yelled before unthinkingly running towards them again. Unlike Clark, he had a reason to see the impact coming and should have known better than to collide with the equivalent of an invisible brick wall. But just like Clark, the collision earned him a bloody and likely broken nose.
Dan fell backwards, clasping his face, before pushing himself to his feet once more and staring at the approaching aliens with fury in his eyes.
Dan’s injury prompted Clark to dash forward again, momentarily forgetting the ear-splitting pain he would bring upon himself by doing so. As before, he only made it a few steps. The same Messenger that had created the initial forcefield then held an open palm towards Clark, freezing him to the spot on the safe side of the threshold.
Clark couldn’t talk, but the awkwardness of his stance and the utterly static expression on his face left no one in any doubt that he had been involuntarily immobilised. Reacting to this, an attendant police officer attempted to raise his firearm in the Messengers’ direction but found his hand unable to grasp it; he too was frozen and silenced, but no one was paying enough attention to notice.
As he looked across the drive-in lot in the direction of his helpless brother, Dan couldn’t believe his eyes. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled at the Messengers. “What do you—”
Mid-word, Dan’s body was similarly paralysed by the same Messenger’s outward facing palm. He tried to move and tried to talk, but nothing happened. He could look around and he could blink — his eye muscles were unaffected — but that was the full extent of the physical control he could now exert over his own body.
“Lesh nam tee… coo,” the Messenger said, its singsong-like tone somehow soothing Dan’s intense discomfort. “Benno slaad… heek.”
The second Messenger then placed its hand on the leader’s back — footage would later reveal that it was reaching into a small pouch-like opening in the apparently seamless fabric of the full-body garment — and produced a thin metallic cable.
Dan knew what was coming next, but the moment when the cable was connected to the back of his neck was far more painful than last time. He couldn’t move or talk, but he could certainly feel… and never in his life had he felt anything like this.
Many of the remaining crowd, terrified of what they were seeing, could no longer look.
But when the leading Messenger connected the other end of the cable to its own hand, all of Dan’s pain disappeared. The world disappeared.
Now, it seemed like there was nothing in the world but him and the extraterrestrial being which stood not three feet from his face.
C plus 41
???
???
Be calm.
Dan McCarthy was standing in the Birchwood drive-in, but he truly felt as though he was nowhere. Time and space were nothing; the only thing in the world was the Messenger standing before him.
And immediately, after just two words, Dan realised that he could hear this Messenger’s thoughts far more clearly than he’d been able to last time. He had already noticed that the cable was smaller, and it now seemed apparent that the communication interface had been greatly refined.
Like the out-loud alien vocalisations he and Emma had heard on the craft at Lolo, Dan had written extensive notes on the nature of the pseudo-verbal two-way communication he had experienced. He had ‘heard’ everything in his own mental accent, as though conversing with himself or recalling thoughts that weren’t his own. During that first conversation a year earlier, he had grown into the flow of it and come to realise that asking questions with yes or no answers was the best way to get a reply that wasn’t a jumbled collection of thoughts he would struggle to comprehend.
But this time, already, it seemed very different.
Still, the alien’s words came to Dan as though he himself was thinking them. There was effortless clarity, however, where once there had been a cloud of confusion.
That was our first ever direct communication. Improved understanding of human brain activity and speech processing, through analysis of the first attempt, has improved our interface.
“You can say that again,” Dan replied. Strictly speaking it was a thought rather than a reply, but in this situation the terms were atypically synonymous. The relatively long but perfectly clear ‘thought’ he had just ‘heard’ from the Messenger — these really were the only inexact terms in which his human mind could frame it — was markedly more vivid than any he had heard at Lolo. “But where the hell have you been?” he pushed.
We recognise that the path of the comet is highly unfortunate.
“And?”
And this is why we alerted you of the path of the comet. We recognise that it is highly unfortunate. This is why we alerted you.
“Stop repeating the same thing,” Dan said, again feeling as though he was saying the words while actually only thinking them, but now starting to wonder just how improved the interface actually was. He would take repetitive and clunky over vague and evasive any day of the week, however, so he continued on the path of asking questions more complicated and direct than the ‘yes or no’ kind he’d had to settle for at Lolo. “Why didn’t you just divert it?”
This is an extremely complicated intervention.
“No it’s not! We could do it if we had the tech. Kinetic bombardment and gravity tractors might sound complicated, but you’re telling me that slightly changing the course of a comet is more complicated than making forcefields? You’re telling me it’s more complicated than freezing people to the spot?”
It is complicated in a regulatory sense, not difficult in a practical sense.
“Regulatory?” Dan asked, starting to get the impression that some of the words and phrases he was hearing weren’t entirely precise, almost like those he’d encountered during attempts to translate Spanish sentences one word at a time while studying for school exams. This time, of course, the linguistic chasm between his native language and the Messengers’ was more than a little wider. “What does that even mean?”
We have intervened to assist as fully as we were permitted to do so. We led you to the plaque and showed you the comet’s path. We flew this small uncloaked craft overhead and allowed a recording to be made. We have intervened to assist as fully as we were permitted to do so.
“So? What was the point of flying over Lolo? What was that supposed to achieve?”
To confirm the relevance of that particular location in your search for the plaque’s location.
“But Trey only had to see it. Why did you let him record it without doing the stupid interference thing you usually do? And why mention that as if it makes any difference to anything?”
Camera interference may have prevented others from accepting that you were correct about guiding them to the plaque.
“What are you talking about? What others?” Dan asked. “Everyone? Or Clark and Emma? Because they already knew. And who cares? Just stop the comet!”
We wanted to give you an option.
“Option? So now you suddenly care about giving us options? You really want to talk about options? How about the comet — how about leaving us with no options… with no chance to save ourselves? Why didn’t you just move it without telling us? How does what you did make any kind of sense? You caused way more disruption than you would have if you’d just diverted it at the beginning! You think all this crap was less of an intervention?”
Even in the heat of the moment, Dan wondered whether the number of questions he had asked at once would result in some being lost in the shuffle or none at all being understood.
“Why did you tell us but not save us?” he asked, focusing on the gist of it.
In regulatory terms, the physical intervention of altering a cometary body’s orbit is—
“Enough with the ‘regulatory’ bullshit!” Dan interrupted. “And all this minimal intervention stuff is your rule. You made it, so you can break it!”
It was not easy to justify our warning as a necessary intervention. We pushed for further permission to intervene directly, but influencing the orbit of a cometary body alters its effect on other bodies. Altering those effects, even slightly, was deemed beyond a reasonably minimal level of intervention in the views of the Elders. This is the source of our regulatory difficulty.
“Elders?” Dan asked. More than with any other specific word he had ‘heard’ so far, he got the feeling that this wasn’t an exact translation of the term the Messenger was trying to get across. “Do you report to these Elders? Do these Elders decide what kind of intervention you can make? Are they your leaders… your regulatory leaders?”
Yes. To all questions: yes.
“I want to see them. Take me to the Elders.”
Out of the question. It would not be physically possible.
“Then ask them this for me: why did they let you come here today and show yourselves now, but not last year? Why didn’t you just arrive and tell everyone you were peaceful?”
The Elders recently insisted that open contact could only occur when the truth about certain human-driven issues came to light. The Elders deemed that humanity’s confusion about the true nature of our existence was an obstacle to peaceful contact.
“Hold the show…” Dan said, disbelieving what he was hearing.. “Are you actually telling me that your Elders wanted everyone to know that the stuff we fell for last year was fake? Seriously? If they wanted the hoax to get out, then why the hell did you stop Walker when you did? He was going to spill everything that night!”
He was the source of the confusion. There was a firm edict that he must not be allowed to further cloud—
“But he wouldn’t have been clouding anything,” Dan interrupted, essentially cutting off one thought with another. “He was trying to clear it all up!”
That was the edict.
Although Dan had been looking directly into the Messenger’s eyes for almost all of the conversation so far, his gaze suddenly intensified. “Put him back,” he demanded.
He was very ill. He did not survive the removal from Earth.
“Put… him… back,” Dan repeated. “Dead or not, you’re going to put him back.”
Yes, he is dead. So why do you want—
“We might not be perfect,” Dan butted in, “but we lay our dead to rest. Even him. I don’t care how much trouble he caused for you or how much trouble he caused for me. And when Crabbe sees that there’s no body at Walker’s place, then what? Everyone will know you took him away. Is that what you want?”
For the first time, the fact that the Messengers or their Elders apparently hadn’t considered the issue of Walker’s missing body firmly planted a seed in Dan’s mind that they really didn’t understand humanity nearly as well as he had always assumed; they hadn’t thought about what Crabbe would or wouldn’t find, and they didn’t seem to have any concept of a funeral.
He will be returned, but he is not alive.
“You already said that,” Dan replied. “Anyway, thank you. But I still don’t understand why you stopped him.”
We had an edict to silence him, but that was before humanity knew of the comet. That was also before we knew that some humans would try to sabotage other humans’ defensive measures. That was something we did not expect.
“Then you really don’t know us very well,” Dan said.
Today, due to the truth now being clear among humans, we were permitted to return. We are now permitted to offer direct instruction on possible methods of disrupting the comet in an effort to—
“No! Screw your possible methods!” Dan snapped. His mind was now firmly on the galling point that Clark had forcefully made on several occasions, so he took the only chance he would ever have to raise it in a situation where it could possibly make any difference: “And you’ve got some brass neck talking about sabotaging our defensive measures! If you hadn’t destroyed DS-1 seconds after it launched, maybe we would have had a chance. Instructions are no good. We don’t have time and in case you haven’t noticed our society isn’t exactly doing very well at dealing with this. If you wanted to give us instructions, why weren’t they on the fourth plaque? Where were you with these instructions when I went to the cornfield with Emma, begging you to show up? Where were you then, before everything went to total shit and before it was too late for instructions to be of any goddamn use to anyone? None of this had to happen! I was trying to talk to you. We were trying to talk to you!”
