The Filter Trap (25 page)

“Doctor, you’ve used your own penchant for analogy to undo your logic. Remember your bug on the windshield? Do you think the driver cared whether the bug could understand his GPS directions? I don’t mean to dismiss all the hard work you’ve done on these signals in such a short amount of time, but all you’ve shown is that these harbor some type of intelligence, a mobile intelligence.

“However, we’ve got folks on the ground and in the air that need an answer. Does any of your work tell us anything useful
about
these aliens?”

“Yes. After our last meeting we were able to use the Wenchang satellite to learn more about our new solar system. We’ve identified multiple large objects in interior and exterior orbits to us around the same Sun. What’s more, the signals we’ve been observing are coming both from the craft in orbit, and from planets in higher and lower orbits than Earth. Orbital simulations can now show that our visitors may have started their journey from the higher of the two.”

Jill took it from there. “Mr. President, part of SETI’s search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe was to recognize pollution current or former civilizations might leave behind. One of the solutions to Fermi’s Paradox suggests that all intelligent species tend to destroy themselves through nuclear annihilation or environmental pollution.”

“The Galactic Filter,” Bolton interrupted.

“Yes, Robin Hanson’s
Great
Filter Hypothesis. A series of gates, the last of which being an apocalyptic event or economic depletion that would stop a species from colonizing the galaxy. Since we came all the way up to that last gate, it has always been assumed either mankind is an exception to the filter, or it still lies just in front of us.”

“Sounds more like we stumbled into a great big trap than a filter,” Pith puffed and pointed at a bottle of water on the table. “Filters let the good stuff through.”

The president raised an eyebrow. “Not to be unpatriotic, General, but God, guns, and country might not be the universe’s idea of ‘good stuff.’”

“Well, I think Doctor Tarmor was just telling us about how these guys up in orbit might be made of even worse stuff. Did I guess that right?”

“Sort of, General. At SETI we became very good at postulating on potential markers for those filtering causes, but never found them in spectral analyses of identified exoplanets. Until now.

“I would stake my professional reputation that our early readings of this planet in exterior orbit to the Earth, where our visitors may come from, show massive quantities of what we’d consider pollution, maybe even nuclear radiation. It’s possible that the inhabitants require this kind of atmosphere to survive, or adapted to it, but in light of Fermi’s Paradox and the Great Filter Hypothesis we have to consider the alternative—”

“They never avoided world war three,” the president finished Jill’s sentence. “That doesn’t bode well for their intentions here.”

“Maybe it builds a further case they’re refugees?” Bolton noted and pointed at Jill.

“Then why the silence?” Pith asked. “Refugees wave a white flag; have any of these signals been broadcast directly toward us?”

“Although it would be hard to answer definitively,” Kam responded, “there have been no apparent positive attempts at contact.”

“Doctor Tarmor,” Bolton continued, “you wrote the president’s rules of engagement for first contact. Did you not say that the lack of an announcement and number of beings would indicate a harmful intent?”

“Yes, I did,” Jill said coldly, her own research being used against her.

“Well, that’s enough for me,” Bolton said, folding his arms and leaning back in his chair.

“Dr. Sands, you said we’ve received signals from another planet as well?”

“Correct, Mr. President. There appear to be a series of much weaker repeating transmissions coming from another planet interior to our orbit. The transmission was thought to be code at first, but it seems more likely now to be a monotone repeating set of phrases sent in a wide range of frequencies.”

“A planet of monks?” asked Pith.

“You’re focusing on the wrong part, I think,” the president said, turned on to something. “I’m not immune to the intrigue of SETI’s mission. There’s a reason I already knew what names to put on my safe list before we found out other intelligences were behind all this. A wide range of frequencies is what we’d expect from aliens that wanted to be heard, right? Maximize your exposure across different types of receivers. Like emailing, texting and calling someone at the same time, you’re bound to get through somehow.”

Jill tried to be empathetic without talking down to the leader of the free world. “You’re right, sir. That may be what they’re trying to do. I also believe that was their intent. However, I’m sure Allan, an astrophysicist, would question whether beings capable of moving entire planets would send radio waves to say hello. To move a planet, in orbit, with so little effect on the surface, requires an intimate knowledge of that planet. That is why all three of us are convinced that none of these signals are from the same intelligence or phenomena that moved the Earth.”

“I see,” he replied, trying to be magnanimous in accepting his own logical misstep.

To prevent Jill from doing any more damage, Allan stepped in.

“In fact, they may be closer to monks as Pith suggested, than those responsible for the Event. They’re much closer to us than the other planet, and we can get more detail from the Wenchang and even ground-based observation.”

Photos of the planet showed on the transparent glass in front of the meeting participants. The greenish ball hovered there, looking not unlike an Earth with shrunken oceans. Something looked familiar to Kam, even though Allan had no time to share the images with him before preparing for the meeting. Yet, on some base emotional level, Kam could swear he knew more about that planet than Allan. He couldn’t bubble his thoughts coherently enough to the surface of his conscious mind to say anything, so Allan continued.

“Our limited photography of the second planet shows little to no airborne particulates. However, where we would expect to see cities, we see nothing. If intelligent beings live there, they seem to be disguising their civilization, or long gone.”

“Hopefully that means they are not a threat,” Pith said. “Have they sent anything our way?”

“This is the interesting thing,” Dr. Tarmor said, “These weak monotone chanting tones
do
seem to be directed at us . . . or perhaps at the ships in orbit above us.”

“Collusion?” another general asked.

“Do we know what the chant says?” the president asked, hoping he’d be right they were saying ‘hello.’

“Unfortunately, we have too small a sample size to tell anything like that, sir.” said Kam, wondering if he was lying. He did, in fact, feel some recognition in that pattern coming from the planet, the same strange feeling he got when looking at the photo of the forest-covered world not so different than the one he saw in the last sparks of his dying neurons underwater back in Boston. If he said any of it out loud they’d laugh him out of the room. It would make more sense to say he believed in ghosts than what he felt now, connected—communicated to, even—in some way with another planet that no human being had ever visited-a planet, and its radio signals, invisible to every telescope or receiver humanity ever built, until a few days ago.

“Could be a warning or an S.O.S.” added Bolton.

“Or both,” cautioned Jill.

The president pointed at Jill. “I’ll meet you halfway. If those are refugee boats up there, I’m going to separate them from the beach for a bit and see how they react.” He turned to the Franks. “How far out are we?”

“Twenty minutes, sir.”

“Tell your bombers Operation Waking Desert is approved.”

Prologue: East

The banker knew about karoshi, the polite Japanese term for working to death, before his sister warned him during their airport goodbye. “Where do you think Wall Street learned how to burn out interns?” she asked rhetorically.

“Stanford,” he had replied with pride.

She rolled her eyes before giving him one last hug.

What he found on the other side of the Pacific was nothing like the accelerated graduate financial studies program at Stanford. There were no study clubs at Sumi Holdings to help struggling noobs catch up. The closest thing he’d found was a coworker that took him drinking and confessed his life story after too much sake. His peer was behind on his work as well, further than the hotshot American banker even, though the westerner would never let on. They were so cutthroat that even drinking was a contest to see who could bare his soul while sharing the least.

That coworker wasn’t here today to go drinking, not tonight, not tomorrow; he was long gone, fired and probably back in the old country. His description had sounded so peaceful that the American banker wanted to go someday, hopefully for different reasons than his friend. It might not work out that way, if he couldn’t catch up on all the work left behind after the layoffs.

The banker had barely looked up from his monitors in the five hours since eating lunch in front of them. It was a Saturday and despite karoshi, only the die-hards, or those on the verge of a pink slip, as he was, were in the confines of the multi-story complex in Nihonbashi with the red Sumi Holdings logo on top. The two intertwined triangles were confusing to his friends and family, but after working for the company for two months, the American banker found the name of a judo throw highly appropriate for the work done within.

Right now he’d like to sumi gaeshi his computer right through the window. Imagining doing so, he looked up and noticed the reflections of the sunset flittering through the other buildings of the dense financial district. The job wasn’t without its perks: this floor was high enough to see a quarter of the Imperial Palace, another place he’d go someday.

As much as he wanted to throw his computer out the window, he craved a nap even more. There was something dreamlike about the gently falling snow outside, twinkling orange in the setting sun. It was just out of reach from his world of spreadsheets, stochastic, and sobol sequences. Maybe he should gift himself with a nap; it was Christmas after all. They treated the holiday more like Valentine's Day in Japan, and he was more than happy to kiss the cool surface of his desk for a while.

Work followed into his dreams. Chaotic strings of glowing numerals cascaded into beautiful waterfalls leading to tranquil pools surrounded by falling purple and gold spreadsheet cells. He missed Ryunzu in autumn, putting off the drive until it was too late and the famous Dragon’s Head Waterfall was covered in snow and ice. The numbers swirled into a white mass, freezing the pool, a catalyst like Vonnegut’s ice-nine, continuing up the waterfall. A noise, like a gong from a Shinto temple, rang through the ice. The frozen cascade shook violently into shards, flinging crystal knives at him.

He awoke, shielding himself, but noticing the last qualms of a real earthquake. He’d never experienced a quake that strong in his short time in Tokyo, but he’d read minor tremors happened about once a week. Usually he couldn’t feel them at all. He wondered if his sister would soon call again in a panic. He didn’t look forward to reminding her again how hypocritical it was for someone living in Oakland to worry about earthquakes in Tokyo.

Looking outside again the sunset was gone and the snow had ceased. In fact, the Sun had already traversed the other side of the sky, leaving the Imperial Palace in the long shadow of the higher parts of Nihonbashi. The maze of zigzag streets after stretched all the way to Mt. Odake, its snowy peak plainly visible, thirty miles away.

It didn’t feel like he’d slept all night, but the new Sun was here, and was it so unbelievable that he’d worked all week with little rest between? If his lazy friends back in Oakland could sleep from noon to midnight and then play video games for another twelve hours, he could sleep from 6 pm to 6 am after hard work!

The only trouble was the clock on his computer. It took a nap as well, it seemed, still stuck in ‘pm.’ The banker cursed Bill Gates. Not only did the auto-updates mess up his apps every three days, now his computer couldn’t tell time. Perhaps it was an international conspiracy; the banker’s fancy GPS-updating Seiko couldn’t tell night from day either.

‘First World Problems,’ he chuckled and grabbed his iPhone. The conspiracy club was getting larger; Apple was in on the joke as well. He restarted the phone, but it refused to connect to the network.

He remembered his father’s advice to get three independent sources before confirming anything as fact. The computers could be explained, though not easily, with some kind of universal virus or glitch, but what about the old lobby clock? “Sixty years without winding or charging,” the HR manager had proudly relayed on his first day on the job.

After that rough nap he needed some coffee anyway, and there was a Starbucks only a block away. He could check the old clock on his way out.

The old clock ticked away like always, but was only minutes separated from his Seiko. He stood, staring at it for a time. Was he still dreaming?

If the banker was on the verge of worry already, the sudden siren outside pushed him over the edge. He imagined what that siren must have sounded like here in 1942, and what it might mean now.

People were running everywhere in the streets like a flash mob gone mad, hurtling in one direction: west. He understood rudimentary Japanese, but most of what he heard was either unintelligible or specific words he’d not heard before, like “Mokushi!”

The frantic footsteps turned the fallen snow to muddy mush as he followed the crowd to Nihon Bridge. A woman wept hysterically under the life-size lion at the entrance.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, praying she spoke English. “What’s happened?”

“Tsuki,” she whispered, afraid.

He knew that one, and looked up instinctively. “What
about
the Moo—”

Gone! Only yesterday he’d walked home under the light of it.

Sumi Holdings prided itself on hiring brains that could connect disparate data points faster than others. The American banker didn’t know where the Moon went, but it couldn’t have gone from full to new in one day. No matter why it was gone, he could be certain what would follow.

The mob ran for higher ground. The siren had nothing to do with bombs.

Tsunami!

He drifted away from the woman, walking, then running faster himself. An elderly man next to him babbled the same phrase over and over: “Sekai no Owari.”

“I thought Japanese people didn’t believe in judgment day.”

The old man turned, his deep black eyes studying the young foreigner who presumed to know so much.

“Theravadan tradition teaches of seven suns, one after the other, delivering the world into ruin. The first sun, our Sun, causes the Earth to dry up. This is what you in the west call global warming. I watched the old Sun set today, and a new one appear.”

“I’m sure it’s not the end of the world. Come with me, there’s a tsunami-we need to seek higher ground.”

“Look not toward higher ground, but to the water below us.” The old man tugged at the American’s arm, imploring him to look over the side of the Nihon Bridge.

“You see the water draining, the water level going down?”

“That’s what happens in a tsunami; the water recedes.”

“The coming of the second Sun, it is said, will dry the brooks and ponds. There is no need to run and hide. This age of destruction may be longer than many generations.”

“Suit yourself.” He patted the old man’s shoulder before turning to run with the crowd. As he ran south to cut around the Imperial Palace, en route to the higher elevation of Akasaka Palace, he couldn’t shake the contrast of the old man’s countenance with the rest of the frenzied populace.

Perhaps his time in Japan had been wasted. As the tsunami bared down on the island, the American banker wished he’d spent more time enriching his mind than his wallet.