Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (35 page)

Tharcia tops up her coffee. The silver pot she pours from never seems to get
cold. Or empty. “You are righteously full of it. But let’s suppose we are responsible. How do we fix it?”

“Stop listening to me more than you do to
the Creator.”

“Lian, I already explained to you it’s you that confuses us!”

Lian sighs. “I’ll confide in you a little secret. I’m a teacher.”

“So you’ve said. What subjects do you teach?”

“Purity.”

Tharcia laughs. “You should do stand-up
comedy, Lian.”

“
I wanted something people would kill and die for, so I invented religion.”

“What? You are smoking serious bud. How did you invent religion?”

“Through the ego. It’s easily pushed too far. It can produce self-serving conclusions that life revolves around you. Ego is simplistic, wants the body to survive, which is an illusion in the first place. Ego cuts you off from each other, from nature, from your authentic self, and the Creator.”

“Well,
dude, what I’ve been telling you. The thing you need to help us with.”

Lian goes on.
“I invented possessions, so humans could know want, envy, jealousy. I invented the rapture of scarcity and greed, enemies of abundance. Can you imagine everyone sharing all that is here? There would be abundance beyond your wildest measure.”

By now there’s a song going through Tharcia’s head, but she can’t place it
,
nothing to kill and die for
. And far from feeling threatened or blamed, Tharcia is amused. Talk about the ego, this dude’s is out of control.
Surely he sees it?

“I suppose you are responsible for road rage.”

“No. Henry Ford gave me the idea for that.”

“You’re making things up.”

“Fact. I broke his contract as a reward. Inventing these was simple, after I got the ego perfected.”

Tharcia
is wishing she had some of Clay’s Scotch in her coffee.
Yes, and make that with him in our living room.

“
The ego does so much, it’s necessary for mortal survival, but is the least useful thing for living a spiritual life. My greatest invention. My own greatest stumbling block.”

“Wait a minute. You have flaws?” Partly she is kidding him, partly she is amazed at the admission.

Lian nods. “The ego brings the fear that life will be taken away, and keeps people separate from the Creator. It’s a perfect system, a perfect illusion. People will give up everything to attain heaven, when it is already within them. Not simply within their grasp, but within them.”

“Why did you do it?”

“What in particular?”

“All of it, all those stumbling blocks you threw in front of people.”

“Those are my lessons.”

“Chill dude, we don’t know they are supposed to be lessons, they just look like crap
thrown at us. Nobody tells us they are supposed to add up to something. You are a teacher? Get over yourself.”

“Tharcia, we are wasting time while people suffer. Tell me what you want so we can seal our bargain.”

Tharcia’s mind drifts, she ignores the question, forming other thoughts, thinking of Lylit’s idea of a vote. “I think most people want a nicer world. Where the sea is not ready to reach up and swallow all the poor countries.”

“La-de-da.”

“People need to access the Creator directly, not listen to prophets or preachers. Enough interpretation, let’s have the real thing.”

“No way.”

“Way. The next dozen prophets need to be women then.”

“You’re getting up my nose big time.”

“People have to know not to kill each other.”

“Tell that to
your Ten Commandments.”

“People have to be able to control their egos, and have empathy for others.”

“The ego thing I might be able to work with. But don’t make me laugh. People want good? Hardly. They want what they want in the moment. People operate blindly, on an instinctual level.”

“Bullshit. People have intellectual capabilities.”

“Yes, but used by so few. How else do you explain the ignorance you have now? I’m willing to bet that people will vote for things as they are.”

“Well if you are such a great teacher, teach us!”

“I am teaching you the difference between good and evil right now.”

“Which one is this?”

“Figure it out, if you’re so smart.”

“I figured out you’re an ignoramus.”

Six days after the Pentagon intrusion and the subsequent full evacuation, after the Annetka murders in NYC
, the Malibu Murders, and the rash of similar killings across the continent, after the sudden spike in violent crimes of all kinds, the Governors of 50 states and the President of the United States get on a closed video chat and make some determinations. The facts of increasing violence and social turbulence in the streets, random domestic crimes and escalating gang violence, the growing, ever-stranger public disturbances, are clear signs that a social catastrophe is in the making. But that upheaval is only one facet of the looming dread that rises like a tsunami over every human heart.

This morning, Stock Market
TV pundits are all abuzz over the announcement that twenty-one major insurance companies have re-priced their hurricane and flood insurance packages for the United States and Canada, raising the premiums as much as six times in some coastal areas and effectively putting coverage out of reach for most American families. Coverage of any loss traceable to a rise of water levels for any reason, or a deluge of water from above, will be, as of next policy renewal date, prohibitively expensive.

With insurance premiums poised to grow to the size of mortgage payments in some areas, a large portion of the country will, after only a few storm seasons, be effectively uninhabitable. “We’re going to rebuild,” brave tearful motto of many a storm-ravaged life, will make its way into history. One or two El Nino events and the Gulf Coast will be working its way back to undeveloped marshland.
Entropy.

TV commentators and pundits this day are interviewing every insurance company CEO they can find. Viewers begin to notice that
sound bytes from those discussions can easily be mistaken for the legions of climate scientists publicly interviewed on these same networks over the last forty years, and pooh-poohed by a majority of politicians. The results will not be quick, but there will be turbulence. The United States of America, home to a sixfold increase in storm losses over the last sixty years, is headed for another real estate meltdown. Widespread homelessness and suffering will follow in its wake. Chaos hits the stock market. Gold spikes. The smart ones, the special, privileged, connected ones, are already out. Unless these privileged ones happen to be enemies of Lylit come to Earth. In which case Lian has already caught up with them and turned them into mulch.

Far from worrying about the stock market and financial changes years away, Christopher Strand spends his time alone in the Next History offices, unpacking whale messages. He is systematic. First he
completed the stage of combining pairs of adjacent messages by removing blanks between them. Once joined, those pairs decoded into new, readable messages. More interesting ones. He then combined three adjacent messages into one, decoded those, and again found English text with useful information. He wrote a program to list all possible permutations, all six billion of them. Strand’s computers have so far decoded 768 messages, and he’s found much of it disturbing. Many of the messages bear dates in the future. He has ways to search, and reads through all that are of interest to him.

Midway through the evening,
Strand receives added stress, delivered as a terse SysOp Advisory from NOAA. They are diverting 60% of Next History’s computer cycles to weather predictions for the next 30 years. He knows this is bullshit, the world might not be here in 30 days, let alone 30 years. Knows they must be working another project for the military around the current situation. Quite possibly for General Solberg, who has grown intolerant of Strand’s stalling.

But the mathematician knows instinctively the information he’s developing is too hot to share. If revealed, people will first simply disbelieve it
, will not accept it as a glimpse of the future. Then, as proof or belief materializes, they will revolt violently against the outrageous view of reality. The future is a catastrophe to the past. It’s too soon, understanding must evolve in steps.

For now,
Strand must find a way to hide it, and time is running out. If he cannot give Solberg a believable account of what the Whalesong contains, it will become for the general, longtime friend or not, a simple matter of putting another team on it until he gets bankable results. His computer chimes. Another Whalesong article has completed. Strand begins to read.

“Oh shit,”
Christopher Walker Stand says, staring at his screen. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit shit shit.”

Martin Shackleford stands near a large LCD display at the front of a conference room in the swing space, gesturing
broadly to make his point. In the room with him is psychologist Arnold Friedman, who knows absolutely nothing about the physical sciences but who General Solberg placed in charge of the Intrusion Analysis Team. With them on the phone is Dr. Marina Kutsenova, professor in Advanced Physics at MIT. Besides Friedman in the room are two junior physicists hastily rounded up to staff Shackleford’s gravwave analysis team, and one of Friedman’s associates, another shrink, Dr. Louise Kraft. Shackleford finds Kraft disturbing, her bustline a constant distraction each time she speaks, which in Shackleford’s view is way too damn often. She’s said nothing useful yet.

Exasperated, Shackleford repeats himself. “I tell you the research does back this up.”

On the phone in her distant office, Dr. Kutsenova is ready to break in, but remembers Shackleford’s words to her before they got on the call. There could be a tasty consultancy available to her in the next couple of days. Besides the fat paycheck and signing bonus, she would like to get closer to this Devil in the Pentagon thing. She’d caught Carson Johnny’s
Take Your Medicine
show last night, had been highly intrigued by the photos and comments of the guest caller from the Pennsylvania women’s college. She’d even ordered two of the T-shirts, one for her and one for her young niece.

Marina knows Shackleford is edgy, sometimes fast and loose with his science. But if she can hold back until she’s on the team, she’ll have plenty of chances to bring him into line, in more ways than one. She recalls with some warmth their many times in the sack, while she was an advisor in his Ph.D. program.
He loves it when she ties him up.

“Martin,” Friedman says, “what you present does not prove to me that this is a portal. I consulted with the physics chair at Cornell, and he tells me that gravitational waves in proximity to a strong gravitational field do not have enough coherence to provide a stable corridor. In other words, this close to Earth…”

In her distant office, Marina mutters
shit
under her breath. The exact point she would have made. She’d already cautioned Shackleford about wormholes being unstable deep in a gravity well.

“Also,” Friedman raises his voice, aware he’s losing their attention, “have you examined the weather effect inside the field? The interior is dry, although it has rained steadily in that area for six hours. Both people in there are dressed lightly and appear comfortable,
although the outside temp is forty-six.”

Exasperated, Shackleford changes the slide, doing his best to ignore the psychologist. The large display now shows a time-lapse video of the courtyard force field during the time when the intruder vanished, and when the winged lizard reappeared with the girl.

“Look at how the vortex behaves at the moment the devil, I mean the intruder, returns,” Shackleford enthuses. “The vortex extends toward the west for a split second, three hundred yards or more, then returns to the usual shape. It’s an energy pseudopod that stretches toward the generator in the brief time it takes to transport the mass.” Shackleford looks hopefully toward his two team members. They are still coming up to speed on his papers and are unprepared to venture an opinion.

Shackleford again switches view. A photo of Lian, Tharcia, and Lillian graces the large display. “Within the last hour, there was another arrival. The girl returned with a companion. Let me show the field response during that event.” Shackleford allows everyone to linger on the image of the woman. She is exceedingly attractive. He starts a video playing.

“Now here watch closely. This is the time period when the two women arrive in the space. The field extends another energy pseudopod, but it is much more pronounced, almost violent. There is more mass, two women are transported, therefore greater energy is required.”

Shackleford nods assuredly to those in the room. He’s about to go into a deeper evaluation of the gravwave theory when the door opens.
Momentarily irritated at the interruption, Shackleford cannot believe his good fortune, as in walks the Secretary of Defense with a Congressman from California, followed by two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marines and Air Force, and a senior officer of the Air National Guard Bureau, which commands RPV flights over all U.S. territories.