Night Talk (38 page)

Once again Greg had to admire Ethan's ingenuity, his cunning. Ethan had made it easy for a computer klutz like him to access the site without a hitch.

“Pretty clever, isn't it,” he told the young woman. “He hid it in plain sight where they'd never find it.”

She nodded. “If you say so. Uh, Mr. Nowell, am I going to get in trouble, go to jail?”

“No. Once this stuff is broadcast, there's nothing they can do.”

She leaned forward and whispered, “Who are … they?”

He whispered back, “You don't want to know. The guy who gave me these bruises wanted to kill me.”

“You're right, I don't want to know. Do I tap into this file that has your name?”

Greg hesitated. He didn't know how much time he had. He would have to send Ethan's “For Greg” file blind if Mond or other ops suddenly burst in. He decided he needed to get the file and the database linked and ready to send at the press of a button before he even read Ethan's file.

“We need to get into the charity Web site first.”

“What exactly are we going to do?”

“Link the file with the database and send the file to the people on the database after I check the file. The charity site has a list of hundreds of thousands of my listeners coast to coast and internationally. People who have signed up to receive the webcasts. The database is used to solicit donations but tonight we'll use it for saving the world.”

“We're saving the world?”

“Absolutely.”

“Epic.”

It came from the twerp who was going to call the cops.

Greg couldn't imagine that Mond or other ops would have included the charity site in places connected to him, but he was in a state of dread until the girl accessed it without a problem.

“I feel like I'm a real hacker. Oh my God, we are hackers.” She thought about that for a moment and then rolled her eyes at the group gathered around. “You are all witnesses to the fact that I was coerced into this.”

The barista who was going to throw Greg out earlier worked her way through the crowd. She handed him a small towel and a plastic bag with ice in it. “For your face. I remembered how you take your coffee.” She sat a cup down.

He smiled his thanks. They were into the database and had the file linked. It was now time to open the “For Greg” file and see what evidence Ethan had compiled.

The hands of the young woman with a wheat-colored ponytail flew on her computer. An “access failure” message appeared and she started to say something but he interrupted her. “You missed a digit.”

She redid it and opened the file. “It's a message for you,” she said. “Recorded.

“Also there's a file attached within the ‘For Greg' file.”

The file within the file had to be the top-secret one, he thought.

Ethan's voice came over her computer speaker.

“I'm glad you're still alive, Greg. I'm pretty sure it's you because the information I gave you was used to get here. I wasn't taking any chances on you having a problem getting in, so I gave you a simple password. If anyone tried to hack into the site I had it set up to self-destruct. You got this far and you're ready to get out the most important information to the world since the words God wrote on that tablet of stone for Moses.

“I know you think I'm crazy and hell, yeah, I had a few chemical cocktails in my system before I went on your show. You think all hacking is bad shit but, hey, the stuff that the government is up to is evil. I found out about the God Project when this good-lookin' woman approached me one night in a bar and laid it onto me about cracking a super-secret project that this hacking organization she belonged to had heard about.”

So much for Ali's story about learning of the project during an after-work drink with a guy putting the make on her. She was an Aaron who roped in Ethan to do the hacking.

“This God Project thing is being built and operated through the NRO because the NRO gets the most money and the least oversight from the government. What they are building is a system that's not only going to link other systems together like a super Internet, but a system that will link all people together.”

“What's he talking about?” the twerp asked.

“I think we're about to find out,” Greg said.

“Everyone knows how interconnected the world has become with computers and phones and everything else. I spend more time texting people than talking to them and everyone I know does the same thing. I don't know how people like my mother dealt with the world without using a smartphone. But here's the thing. They know we are interconnected, especially the younger you are. And that's what the God Project is all about. They want to play God, dude.

“Now you ask, who are ‘they'? They've been around probably as long as we humans have, but they're not from here. I've heard them called aliens, extraterrestrials and visitors. ‘Aliens' sound like something with big teeth that chased Sigourney Weaver, ‘E.T.s' sound like teddy bears, and ‘visitors' sound like they dropped by your crib to smoke a joint, so I'll call them what a smart woman described them as—invaders.”

Greg was sure the woman was Inez Kaufman.

“The invaders have been around forever, watching us for thousands of years, but then suddenly in no time we went from horse and buggies to nuclear bombs that could destroy whole nations and poison the whole world and space probes that have gone to the moon and Mars and beyond.

“You gotta understand, Greg, the invaders have always planned to take control of us and have kept themselves secret so we wouldn't be prepared. Now they realize that we're advancing so fast that they had to make a move. Why? What do these dudes from somewhere out there want with us? They're an advanced race who see us as higher on the food chain than zoo animals but lower than them, with violent tendencies and weapons to boot. They not only want to study us, but experiment with modifying our behavior so we're less aggressive and easier to manage. They now see a way to do it.

“Think the world has become tech crazy? These invaders sound to me like they have gotten so advanced with technology they don't even have real bodies anymore but engineer whatever ones they want. That's why you get so many different sightings, they're shape-shifters who don't have solid bodies.”

Greg took a quick scan of the crowd that had gathered to listen to Ethan's message. He saw blank faces, cautious interest and smirks. Few people would readily accept the concept of alien invaders, at least publicly.

Greg knew from his own abduction experience that the invaders had inexhaustible curiosity, that the world was a giant Skinner box of lab rats for them to play with. They did what he thought of as pure science, science for the purpose of doing science rather than seeking a cure for a disease or solving a human problem. They weren't unlike human researchers who cut off the legs of frogs to see how well they'd swim without legs or put a snake in a box of rats just to satisfy their curiosity.

“They know humans can be stubborn and violent, that they will be difficult to manage and are armed with everything from handguns to nuclear weapons. There are more assault rifles in the hands of civilians in the good old USA than any foreign army. Because humans would react violently to the invaders running the world, the invaders feel they have to take control in secret or they would end up with endless warfare that would devastate the planet when nukes start getting dropped.”

“They're watching our movies!” a guy in the crowd yelled and got a laugh.

Greg hit the “pause” button. “They don't have to watch movies, the whole planet's a reality show of violence and man's inhumanity to man. You can't blame the invaders for thinking of humans as a lower species. Besides the savage atrocities people do to each other, during the time that the invaders have been observing earth's civilizations, tens of millions of people have died violently from wars, from battles between this religion or that one or simply by the crazed hand of their fellow man. There has been no time in recorded history when people weren't dying violently at the hands of other people or when wars weren't raging somewhere in the world—and often many places at the same time.”

He hit the “play” button.

“Here's what they're up to, Greg. The invaders are building an electronic network that will eventually be everywhere and control everything and everybody. They've studied humans and know that they are molded by conditioning that begins in the womb and continues most of their lives. Hell, they know that from our behavioral scientists who proved it with dogs and rats and then people. The mind is most open to conditioning from a person's conception up to the late twenties. They want to shape the minds of humans to make them manageable and the easiest way to do it is by starting with the young. After thirty years old people can be conditioned but not as quickly and effectively as when they were younger.

“The invaders realize that during the past couple of decades advances in technology have created electronic devices that capture young people's attention for most of their waking hours. Dude, I can testify that I spend more time on my phone and computer than I do sleeping and all my friends are the same way.

“Since the brain is nothing but a computer it shouldn't come as a surprise that the invaders know that the minds of people raised in the Electronic Age are different than past generations', that young minds today don't work like their parents' minds do. The invaders believe that this is the first radical difference between the way human brains work from one generation to the next.”

Ponytail hit the pause button. “He's right—they're—the invaders are right.”

 

78

The young woman went on. “We—people my age—don't relate and interact much face-to-face anymore. My mother says she has more imagination that me because she had to imagine more when she was young because there was no Internet and social media stuff, no mind-blowing visual effects on TV and movies. She says I don't even talk to her anymore unless it's through my phone and I don't listen to her unless she says it in a text message.”

Greg realized that the difference between his generation and that of his parents had been things like the choice of music, movies and what to smoke. But there wasn't a difference in the way people thought or how they related to each other.

She hit “play” and Ethan came back on.

“A common trait of people my age is that we're often not comfortable dealing on a personal level with others. If you're like me, you've been relating to your best friend with text messages instead of face-to-face even as you sit together in a school cafeteria during lunchtime. That makes me a whiz with electronics but I have a hard time dealing with people face-to-face because I don't know how to read their body language. I am so used to dealing with people through an LCD screen that I've been out on dates where me and my girlfriend spent most of our time texting.”

Ponytail hit the “pause” button again. “Even texting the person right across the table. I'm guilty of it. It's more comfortable than staring into each other's eyes and trying to think of things to say.”

The changes in young people had been obvious but Greg hadn't really thought it through until tonight. How did you get empathy for another person, walk in their shoes, feel their pain, with the other person recognizing your concern if you'd never related enough with people on a one-to-one basis to have developed that social skill? He knew from experience that young people had more difficulty recognizing the emotional nuances and social cues being transmitted by others because those nontech skills had never been taught to them. Getting confronted with situations in which traditional social skills were needed could create anger and frustration for people conditioned by their electronics.

“The invaders realized that people born during the electronic age are not evolving the same as past generations because their brains are wired differently. And they know how to use it to their advantage. Much of the ability for social skills comes from conditioning that is stored in the frontal lobe which allows a person to choose between good and bad options and suppress socially unacceptable actions. And catch this, dude—the frontal lobe is not fully developed until a person is nearly thirty years old. So those of us who have been dealing with people through an LCD screen most of our lives won't ever develop the skills necessary to interact with people face-to-face socially or at work.

“These invaders from wherever the hell they flew in from know that people who have been electronically conditioned rather than through intimate contact with family and friends can be left socially isolated without the training that makes them comfortable as coworkers, friends and lovers.”

Even worse than feeling isolated was for the person to strike back, Greg thought. Too many young people reacted to a world they saw as vindictive toward them with a rage that sent them to a school or shopping mall with a gun. Not that the young had a monopoly on being crazy with a gun.

Along with social isolation, an overdose of movies and TV and computer games featuring never-ending violence desensitized the young to the effects of actual violence. That could result in a lack of sympathy and understanding for victims—and worse, it could cause young people to act aggressively because they didn't have empathy and a true sense of consequences.

“The invaders have started making their move now because we have advanced so much electronically that we have made it easy for them to shape our minds. They are doing the shaping by subliminal messages generated through the Internet. You know, advertisers have been putting subliminal messages in what we see and hear for decades but the invaders have electronic capabilities far exceeding what we've developed.