The Filter Trap (6 page)

Tsunami sirens wailed among helicopter buzz and growing echoes of gunshots. The competing sound waves coalesced into a high peeping whirl, barely audible to Allan’s old ears. The finer kept instrument
between
his ears calculated the tsunami’s speed at a healthy 200 miles per hour. It would reach the coast of Southern California in five minutes.

Allan trained the telescope on the beaches, thankfully deserted for the holiday, and then moved farther back. Occupants of gridlocked cars on the 10 Freeway, Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Sunset abandoned their vehicles, trusting their feet instead. Few made it more than a mile before the waves came down on the coast, devouring Santa Monica and Venice Beach in one foul gulp, not breaking until nearly half a mile inland.

Allan watched the water bustle up through West Los Angeles. Ordinarily, the waves would be armed with the foundations of uprooted homes, pushing cars like pebbles, but this high water hid the destruction. It wasn’t until the growling mash swam to the 405 that it slowed and grappled with man-made obstacles.

Tiny bodies dropped from the top floors of the high-rise on Santa Monica Boulevard that held Senator Feinstein's office before the top of the building surged upwards, lifted off its base, and pushed sideways as the water tumbled down the next hill towards Westwood.

The waves lifted the golden Angel Moroni closer to heaven from the top of the Mormon Temple before plunging it into hell on Earth. In Westwood the waves finally met high-rises they couldn’t break. Parallel rows of twenty-story magnificent blue-green glass and steel toppled into each other like gigantic dominoes pushed headlong into the Los Angeles Country Club.

The conquering tyrant gained strength as it rushed through the flatter areas of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, making a final push for Hollywood and downtown. Allan imagined a damage counter spiking as the water rushed by the mansions of the rich and famous. Billions of dollars of real estate vanished in an instant, delicate sandcastles swallowed by high tide.

Panning north Allan saw the water meet its match in the Santa Monica Mountains. Peppered with debris bubbling to the surface, the water filled the deep canyons where so many Angelinos went to sweat. Griffith Observatory momentarily became waterfront property, the gurgling maelstrom giving up an attempt to reach the old telescopes. Barnsdall Art Park, the Capital Records Building, Yamashiro, and other venerable landmarks weren’t as lucky.

The flood slowed as it rolled through the basin and into downtown, filling the streets and making Los Angeles resemble a Hollywood interpretation of Manhattan after a century of global warming. For once, the citizens rejoiced at the restrictions that handicapped their skyline for decades. An old ruling that all buildings over a respectable height must contain helipads left several teeming with frantic Angelinos competing for the few rescue choppers.

Allan frantically refocused the telescope on his home. Trees along the fringe of the residential area below the San Gabriel Mountains blocked his view. He moved the telescope slowly west along the empty suburban streets. All that remained were leftovers of lives suddenly abandoned: dogs wandering searching for owners, Christmas toys left behind by frightened children, and sprinklers spraying the manicured lawns of empty homes radiating out from the Huntington Library.

Allan watched helplessly as the water, moving as quickly as Grandma in the left lane, ran down Arroyo Seco. It filled the Rose Bowl like a kiddie pool, eventually eclipsing the press box and bringing pieces of turf up to greet the elegant streetlights of Suicide Bridge. The water soon subsided, spitting a torrent of debris along Paseo Colorado and draining off into surrounding neighborhoods.

Los Angeles’s reliance on automobiles at least moved the inhabitants of the suburbs to higher ground in time. The water ran down empty streets of Pasadena, Covina, and Azuza like tumbleweeds through a ghost town.

There were, however, visitors at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The door to the offices sprang open with a violent bang, even though Allan deliberately left it unlocked. The low, heavy churn of helicopter blades outside reverberated down the hallways.

“Dr. Allan Sands?” came a forceful and fear-inducing shout.

As the Chinook lifted up and away from the mountain, Allan caught a bird’s-eye-view of the devastation through a narrow, faltering Sunset. The crushed landscape became less submerged as they crossed over Palmdale. Water funneled up through the narrow Agua Dulce channel and dribbled into the deserted desert communities. Rows of cookie-cutter-gray homes sat vacant as the water slowly searched the streets for a final resting place.

As if sensing his concern, the winch operator proudly shouted, “Water won’t reach Edwards, there’s a secret sluice system built in case Big Piute Lake ever broke free and flooded the valley.”

“Won’t be a secret now,” Allan shouted back.

The operator grinned. “You won’t be able to talk about anything you see from now on anyway.”

“It’s horrible,” Allan screamed at the winch operator. “The devastation on the coast, have you seen anything like it before?”

“You should see San Francisco,” the operator coldly shouted.

Chapter 5

“When can we return to Hawaii, sir?”

“Lieutenant, there may be nothing for you and your squad to return to,” the major told Lee without a hint of sympathy. “Holidays or not.”

Major Britely bristled and looked out the window as he talked, as if expecting to see another wall of water overtake the hot little room next to the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Above his head, banners hung from a base Christmas party, ironic vestiges of a world blissfully ignorant of its fragility.

“Oh, God, he’s right,” Allan mumbled, gripping the steel bench under him with two sweaty hands, ready to jump under it at any moment like a child in an earthquake. “They must have been hit first, probably nothing left.”

In a smooth swoop the major grabbed the red fringe and ripped the banners down, tossing the coil on the cold floor.

“Mr. Sands!” Britely turned from the window to directly address the only civilian in the room. “I’d appreciate it if you kept your comments to yourself. The soldiers next to you are prepared to die to keep intact and secure the parts of the United States we do have left.”

He turned back to Lee. “I don’t know when you’ll be able to go home. I don’t know when any of us will.
Home
is an intangible for the moment.”

He took a long breath and steadied himself.

“I’m not even supposed to be the one telling you any of this. All the higher-ups were evacuated when the lights came on at 0200 and the folks at NORAD realized something was seriously wrong when Santa disappeared from his own flight path. We are in a scenario nobody anticipated, the nuke evac drills being the closest baseline. That leaves me in command of a ghost base, a pit stop for Pentagon reconnaissance and defense, while the generals hide in bunkers and watch.

“I’m aware that your duties have kept you in a cone of silence the past several hours. Through direct confrontation you learned of the Mexican government’s collapse, and I assure you it’s not the only one. However, with every satellite down and the Internet slowed to a crawl, the passage of information is extremely limited. We picked up Dr. Sands when he started squawking on shortwave.

“We’ve received many broadcasts from around the globe on shortwave that give us a better understanding of what happened and how everyone is faring. For the most part, most major world powers have instituted martial law and, for the time being, kept their casualties to a minimum. Since most Americans were already at home for the Christmas holiday, the country is remarkably stable. The worst of it for Middle America are a few riots for food. The bad news is, with this coordination we have others, like Dr. Sands, who have managed to get ahold of a telescope and point it up, creating more questions than answers.”

The major pointed his index finger directly up in a swift move. Allan silenced an urge to correct him: a telescope never looks directly up.

“The public might panic more when they
do
get communication networks back and start asking those questions.”

“Something easily quelled by a few M2-equipped Humvees and a man at the ready,” Nana quipped.

The major snapped his neck to stare at Nana.

“Sorry for the interruption, sir.”

“Despite yourself, you’ve got it right, airman. C-30s started making deliveries to places usually flown-over a few hours ago. They were offered ostensibly as protection, our own little gifts from Santa, but the local NRA members sniffed the threat of martial law and things got tense. Dropping a few larger gifts, soldiers and tanks, put a stop to that. However, this crisis is still young, and 300 million people haven’t been informed yet that our satellites didn’t disappear, we did.”

“Pardon me,” Allan started, hoping his assumptions were wrong, “what do you mean,
we
?”

“You. Me. Us. Everyone. We appear to have been moved out of our regular orbit. Since we’re in daylight in the Western Hemisphere we really only have sparse reports from the East to verify, but from what we’ve seen it’s undeniable.”

“I’m sorry,” Allan had to interrupt, “I just wanted to make sure the military came to the same conclusion I did. The Earth is definitely off course, or worse.”

“Hey! Why you lettin’ egghead interrupt?” Nana protested.

“Look, pilot, rank doesn’t grant either of us the privilege of the full story. If Dr. Sands chooses to run his mouth, and you don’t interrupt, we might learn something new.”

“What do you mean, ‘or worse?’” asked SIMI. “How could it get worse than the whole planet getting picked up and pushed around? I can’t even get my head around that.”

Allan bit his lip. “Our recent lack of geocentric orbiting material may have affected our new orbit much less than the gravitational effects of the nearest star, which has broader implications than a longer year.”

“Hold up, stop!” Nana put up his hand. “Doc, you know what a
green apple
is?”

“I’m assuming pilot slang.”

“Damn right. It’ll save your life in a pinch, but not if you don’t know what it is, and it ain’t a piece of fruit. What you know could save all our lives, but stop assuming we all have an astrology PhD.”

“Astronomy,” Allan corrected. “One is superstition and the other science.”

“Exactly!” Nana said with frustration, slapping SIMI’s arm for support. “If I tell you the
green apple
in your cockpit is gone, it won’t mean shit to you, but if I told you your emergency oxygen supply is gone you’d get the picture real quick. Pretend you’re explaining this to your kids or your wife . . . or the president.”

“The airman’s not far off,” Britely reminded him. “You made the president’s list for a reason, Doctor Sands”

“Well I hope I do get to explain all this to my wife. Is she here?”

“No.”

“Well where is she?”

“I don’t know, Doctor. If command says she’s safe, then she’s safe, and the only reason they’ve kept her safe is so you can answer questions like what this airman has posed. I’m sure you’ll be reunited with your family in due time, but we have more important things to worry about first, like the security of our entire nation-nay, the planet.”

Allan closed his eyes, pausing to start fresh and set his concerns for his family aside for the moment. “What I mean to say is that we’re not in our regular orbit around the Sun. This has several implications. Firstly, it means our biggest satellite, the Moon, has gone and we’re feeling the effects this morning. Those tidal waves weren’t from earthquakes, although that may soon come as well, but from the Earth’s water settling back into place since nothing tugs on it from both ends any longer.”

“Ordinarily there are a few different ways this
could
happen, but absent reports of a massive meteor strike from another hemisphere, and none of the ash drifting into our airspace, I think we can dismiss that. It is possible that we’ve been nudged by forces outside our full understanding, perhaps a shift in our magnetic field that caused the Moon to spin away and the Earth reacted in kind. However, again, we’d see signs of this, for one thing-it wouldn’t happen overnight.

“That leaves us with what may be the most improbable—but possible—solution. We’ve slipped down a nascent wormhole and landed somewhere else.”

“Slipped in a what?” asked Nana.

Lee rolled her eyes. “Don’t you ever watch movies, Nana? A wormhole is just about how every spaceship in any movie gets anywhere. Don’t make me get a pen and paper and show you the old cliché demonstration. Remember
Event Horizon
?
Interstellar
?”

“Oh, you mean when the guy bends the paper and explains physics to the other astronauts. I always thought that was weird.”

“Well, most astronauts are pilots first, and you didn't know either,
airman
,” Britely smirked.

“Not important y’all.” LARS waved his hands at Nana and Lee. “So where did the wormhole take us, Doc? Where are we?”

“Well, ironically, with our satellites gone, it’s hard to say just yet. At nightfall we’ll have a clearer picture of the sky, which is why contact with the dark hemisphere is vital.”

“So, wait, we just
happened
to fall through a wormhole?” SIMI asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, in both those movies everything got fucked up when they went through. Like
seriously
fucked,” LARS added.

“If you want to see seriously fucked, you need to see reconnaissance photos of lower Manhattan,” Britely scolded her.

“That’s not what I meant,” SIMI clarified. “The wormholes in those movies didn’t just appear out of thin air, we
made
them.”

“I see where you’re going,” Allan assured him. “A sufficiently advanced civilization might control wormholes at will. I’m sure the major has been informed that we may be presented with a first contact scenario shortly.”

This news excited Lee. “So you’re saying aliens pressed a button yesterday and activated warp drive for a whole planet? So first contact like in
Contact
?”

“Sort of, except they didn’t send us instructions for constructing a wormhole, they just built it around the planet. It seems unbelievable, I know,” Allan confirmed. “But we’re running out of other excuses.”

The major stepped in. “You’re damn right it sounds unbelievable. All the research says that it would take a huge amount of energy just to transmit a ship, let alone a whole planet. What you’re describing is essentially impossible.”

“Impossible for
us
, Major. Don’t forget, we’re newcomers to this old universe. We went from riding horses to riding rockets in one human lifetime. Sentience that developed alongside the dinosaurs would have a 200 million year head start.”

“Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Lee said.

Allan smiled and turned. “Yes. Yes, exactly, Lee! Arthur C. Clarke.”

“Like in
The Light of Other Days
?” She bit her lip.

“Not exactly. That wormhole only transferred information. And it wasn’t exactly a Clarke novel.”

Nana put his head in his hands and chuckled. “Apparently it took the end of the world to find someone for Raptor Fairy to talk shop with.”

“Like that fantasy book, your wormhole is pure speculation, Doctor,” the major grunted. “One that only leads to more reckless postulates. How would they have created the wormhole? What did they learn in that evolutionary head start?”

“That, sir, is not my specialty. However, recent work suggests control of quanta, localized events having impacts on a galactic scale through the manipulation of higher dimensions.”

“What?” Nana asked, with a worse look of incomprehension than before.

Britely sighed. “Doctor, I let you prattle on because I was hoping you’d put my mind at ease. Given my orders for you all I was hoping for a different explanation of this morning’s events than the one I’ve already been supplied. Instead, you’re talking about inter-dimensional beings and little green men in flying saucers. Speculation can be
dangerous
, and that’s where we’re headed now.”

“Major, I hardly think it’s dangerous to
—”

“Doctor!” the major shouted and pointed. “This is not the Cal-Tech debate club.”

Allan shrank back.

“What
are
our orders, sir?” asked SIMI.

“Go to San Francisco and evacuate Dr. Jill Tarmor.”

Allan’s jaw dropped. The rest looked at the major in befuddlement.

“Senior researcher at SETI,” he added.

“America’s foremost expert in astrobiology and exobiology,” Allan finished.

“Exo-what?” Nana asked.

“Little green men,” Lee answered.