Here Comes Earth: Emergence (2 page)

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It
was about at this point that my reality kind of started snapping back into
place. I’d spent the last number of months in a mental fog (could it have
really been three months since I’d left the University?), and for months prior
to that I’d felt a hopeless sense of dread as I watched many of the normally
sane people around me give in to The Crazies.

That’s
what they were calling it: the tendency for otherwise normal people to just
stop doing what they were doing and start doing something else. In an eighteen-month
period as much as 17% of the working adults in North America, Europe, and much
of Asia changed careers. My banker became my gardener and Uncle Jim decided he
wanted to be an Alaskan tour guide – not that there’s anything wrong with that
but he was a stock broker from Manhattan and had never been to Alaska. I wasn’t
terribly surprised to hear he’d accidently shot off his foot some time later.
Auto racing seemingly overnight became the largest sport in the country (with
the majority of races utilizing street legal vehicles). Turn on ESPN4 and you’d
have a good chance of catching Mini-Vans fighting for position or SUVs bouncing
through a Moto-Cross track. It wasn’t that people weren’t working (they still
had to eat), it’s just that they were working on less productive things in a
less than organized manner. I seem to remember the President addressing the
nation urging people to think through their career decisions carefully before
making a change.

It
was especially tough on me because (no matter what the President said) I knew
this was just the beginning. We were going through culture shock on an
unprecedented scale. So maybe I’d let my priorities become a little less
defined as of late but I couldn’t really think of a reason to get too worked up
about it…
except
… except for that look Julie had given me several times
at breakfast. It wasn’t disdain and it wasn’t judgmental, it was more like
disappointment and mild surprise. The third time she looked at me like that was
after I’d just finished explaining to the table that culture shock was
unavoidable; that what we were getting ready to go through would make the
unrest we experienced after the Yuan replaced the Dollar as the world’s reserve
currency look like a garden picnic (or party, or whatever that saying is). It
was almost as if she didn’t care that I was a highly trained professional and
that this was my area of expertise; it was almost as if she somehow expected
more from me… 

Mission Brief

Operation: Broken
Star

Classification:
Ultra Secret
Black Diamond

Authorization Status:
Approved

Operational Priority:
Level 1

Background:

(Excerpt from the report of the lead
investigation team for the US Government):

What precipitated the Crazies was the
most significant, shocking, bizarre, and tragic event in human history…

 By 2014, the U.S. government had
finally authorized the privatization of boosting cargoes into low earth orbit
(LEO). Over the next decade as costs came down and commercial demands for low
gravity, perfect vacuum manufacturing environments rose, several multi-national
corporations cooperated in replacing the International Space Station with the
world’s first truly permanent space station,
Laze Fair One
. Home to
almost 300 people, the huge construction was mankind’s greatest achievement and
source of pride – until it disappeared.

It didn’t break up. It didn’t crash
or burn-up in reentry. It just… disappeared. Telemetry monitoring stations
sounded ‘lost signal’ alarms designed to warn bored technicians to pay better
attention and re-align their dishes…  all to no avail. The station was simply
gone.

It was almost two full days later
that weak communications signals started coming in to radio receivers all over
the planet. On open circuits with the whole world listening, station personnel
reported an incredible story that was only believed because of the accompanying
video, telemetry, and the 54 minute 12 second delay in two-way communications;
the station was now in orbit around Neptune.

The station was designed to be as self-sufficient
as possible, but at 30 AU from the sun and with solar panels designed to
operate at only one AU (note: one AU = the distance from the Earth to the Sun),
battery charge that was critical for heating, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and
other life-support dwindled quickly. Top priority was given to reporting how an
alien spacecraft had appeared next to the station, somehow ‘bubbled’ it and
then proceeded to tow it (at incredible speed, invisibly, and with no change in
inertia), and then abandon it at Neptune.

There was no possibility of rescue.

Once all the data, subjective
observations, and informed speculation had been transmitted from the station,
the remaining few hours were spent with 279 people each taking time to tell the
rest of us goodbye. It is this investigator’s recommendation that when the
world gets around to erecting a memorial, this should be a looped video
memoriam.

Additional Data:

 (Highly Classified – Unknown to the
public)

Major David Johansen, second in
command of the station, managed to transmit a short burst of encrypted data
using a cipher that was only known to a close friend back on Earth. In this
burst, Commander Imbibe and Major Johansen forwarded a video communication that
was received by the station immediately before the alien ship left them at
Neptune. This transmission was received over the Commander’s supposedly secure
emergency channel. Fortunately, no other station personnel were aware of the
message or its contents. It was only 23 seconds long, but what was interesting
was that the background contained voices of what was unmistakably a heated
disagreement.  Everything in that background was unintelligible and definitely
of an unknown language. The foreground was dominated by the head and shoulders
of an apparent female human being that mouthed one word before signing off. It
was Commander Imbibe’s opinion (which has subsequently been verified to 87%
accuracy by linguistic experts) that the one word mouthed by the alien was,
“sorry.”

Subsequent Events:

(Highly Classified – Unknown to the
public)

The leadership of six different
countries (see addendum III) have been contacted by representatives of the same
race that abducted our space station. Citing another faction of their race as
the culprits of the abduction, this faction offers peace and friendship.

Mission Stipulation:

Despite appearances, this race is
deemed alien with unknown intentions.

Mission Mandate:

A multi-national team is to be
assembled under the mission name: Broken Star.  It is the mandate of this team
to travel to the home worlds of the aliens and evaluate:

The scope and
sincerity of the offer.

How advanced
(in technology years) this civilization is.

Identify and
prioritize desirable technologies.

The cost and
limits (if any) on technology transfers.

Identify what
we have (if anything) that they want?

Major Mathew Reagan, US Army

My
headache just wouldn’t go away. My tolerance for pain and discomfort is high
but after about 30 hours of intense throbbing I just physically start to wear
out. I’ve occasionally suffered through these things for about twenty years now
and I knew that I would be fine sometime within the next 24 hours but that
didn’t make this precise moment of exquisite pain any easier to handle.

I
vacillate in my thoughts; bouncing back and forth from one minute thinking I
must be a wuss and that millions of people must experience pain like this and
never show it, to the next thinking that I’ve got to be Superman because other
people go home, turn off the lights, close the blinds and go to bed to hide
from the world. How can we really compare what one person feels inside their
head to what someone else feels?

I
guess it’s a migraine. Yes, I get nauseas and occasionally see explosions of
white light behind my eyes but unlike many migraine sufferers I can, if I
really
need to, focus on a task at hand and function reasonably well. Since I am
apparently immune to the benefits of modern migraine medication I am forced to
resort to an older highly addictive cocktail using Hydrocodone and
Acetaminophen. I won’t allow myself to take more than 10mg of the Hydro at a
time (that stuff will alter your brain chemistry) and they’re really only
useful if I take one when I first sense the headache coming on. However, since
not all headaches become migraines and since I hate the thought of taking
medication, I play this waiting game with myself and hope I can figure out
which type of headache it’s going to be before it’s too late to stop it.
Yesterday I waited too long so here I am.

As
usual this was afflicting me at a time when the world around me was demanding
my full attention. I had been tasked by the government to head one of the
scientific teams that was being attached to a highly secret Task Force; a Task
Force that would affect the lives of every single human being on planet earth.
Heady stuff.

By
now, everyone knows the story of our abducted space station and the unrest this
caused amongst the world’s population but the government, as usual, had
information that wasn’t known to the general population. As far as the public
knew there had been no further contact; we were waiting for the next shoe to drop.
However, one of our most highly guarded secrets is that we are currently in
contact with the aliens. Except that they’re not exactly aliens and we’re not
really talking to the same group that moved Laze Fair One to Neptune…

Four
years and 136 days after the space station event that shocked the world and
four years and 135 days into the ‘Crazy Years’ scientists noticed lights in the
sky. You had to already be using a telescope in that general direction because
they weren’t close, but the explosions must have each briefly released more
energy than anything else in our nearby region of space. Mostly unnoticed
except in scientific circles, speculation was rampant regarding the cause. Prevailing
thought was that we shouldn’t project our own experiences and failings and just
automatically assume that the energy releases meant a war was going on –
prevailing thought was wrong.

“Ok,
maybe war is too strong a word,” I explained to the members of my newly
assembled, hand-picked staff. I had spent a week selecting them and then the
military had taken an additional two weeks to  get them security clearances,
give physical exams and psych evaluations as well as making sure all of the
proper releases were signed, witnessed and notarized. I only lost one of my
picks to this vetting process and was told to feel lucky that everyone hadn’t
been screened out…

“We’re
being told that it was more of a police action where the good guys encountered
resistance.”

My
four-person staff and I were meeting in conference room 412 along with my four
squad leaders somewhere deep below the Nevada desert. Even the name of the
facility was a secret, but it was the largest underground complex I’d ever seen
and we were told it would be our home for the indefinite future.

“We
have no reason not to believe them, but then we have no reason to take their
word as gospel either.”

I
had already brought my team up to speed on the basics: two years after the
fireworks display the President of the United States answered her highly
encrypted, secure bedside land-line in the White House residence and made a
same day appointment to meet with a representative of another world.

They
call themselves Noridians and we obviously have common ancestry but there are
differences. Imagine if you were a Viking and it was the first time you’d ever
met a Chinaman; you wouldn’t be thinking alien but he obviously  didn’t grow up
next door. Noridians are of a slightly smaller frame yet with long legs that
still fit within what our minds perceive as ‘normal.’ Their bodies are lightly
muscular with low body fat, perfect skin, and the only visible body hair would
be their eyebrows, eyelashes, and the top of their heads. The Noridians we have
met so far tend to have high cheekbones and earlobes that developed with a
subtly different yet non-distinguished set of folds and their faces are
universally symmetrical. The females look obviously human and well-proportioned
and albeit the males are slightly effeminate looking every Noridian we’ve met
could be considered beautiful. They could walk down any street and garner
little attention – and they’d be totally invisible in downtown San Francisco.

That
initial meeting with the President took place at Camp David and the male and
female Noridian representatives were there waiting when the Presidential
helicopter arrived. This came as a complete surprise to the Secret Service and
the military; apparently the Noridian’s had a ship in orbit (that nobody knew
was there) and some type of shuttle on the ground (that nobody could see).
Technologically, they are very advanced.

Language
wasn’t a problem as they spoke English, albeit with a funny accent that became
less and less pronounced the more they spoke. It turns out they speak other
languages too although it still takes them a little time to get the
pronunciations right.

My
immediate job was to organize my team, establish and assign priorities and
objectives, and train the group in protocols and exigencies. In other words, I
needed to turn a group of 32 disparate and independent thinking, mostly
non-military individuals into a well-functioning team with common goals. A
great working relationship was critical because mine was one of four such teams
that were going to travel further away from home and safety than anyone had
travelled before - I was taking my team to another star.