The Last President (47 page)

“Over the next few days, it disgorged rovers ranging in size from about a shoebox to a small car, and the mining robots came back over the ridges and began to work with the newly arrived rovers.”

Tang took up the story. “We watched it for more than a year afterward. Before the ground link failed irretrievably due to the EMP from the superbomb at Shanghai, the aliens had constructed a strange sort of glass pyramid almost 30 meters tall. We did not know but we were watching them build the re-entry vehicle for their first shot, the one that silenced KP-1 and destroyed so much technology.”

“But who are ‘they'?” James asked.

Rezakhani nodded eagerly. “Well, as you might guess, we were curious about that. No one on Earth had that kind of technology—they had to be from another star system. If you take the generally accepted date that the British radar experiments in 1936 were the first radio to reach outside Earth with a signal that was at least possibly detectible, and if whoever it was took a while to locate us and get ready, and they were advanced enough to build such machines, it did not seem incredible that they might have dispatched ships as long as fifty years ago. And remember, back before, the Priestley satellite had found a dozen planets in habitable zones with free oxygen in their atmospheres.”

“More than that, I thought,” Leslie said. “I was a nerdy pop-science fan, I thought it was like a hundred?”

Tang nodded. “It was. But the Priestly actually reached out to 180 light years. And with planet types, it depends on the cube of the distance; if you double the distance, you get eight times as many planets of a given type. Anyway, out to fifty light years, there were twelve candidate planets to be the home world of the device we now know as the moon gun. At the time, we thought it was some sort of an extraterrestrial exploration mission, though we were very puzzled by how it had taken over our mining robots, and we were going to mount a secret expedition to investigate the Fecunditatis site in 2025. And then Daybreak hit.”

James asked, “How could they send a mission that must have taken decades to get here, and know we would build supply robots for them, apparently exactly what they needed?”

Tang nodded. “That was where I came in; my specialty is automated reverse-engineering, which is why, if you could still look through the files where Lake Washington is now, you'd find me on several lists of people not to be let into the United States, ever, and high priority for recruiting for defection. Also why they bombarded me with English lessons from an early age.

“Here's what I realized—not that everyone agreed with me, but as the sole survivor, I get to be right, eh? As long as you thought of them hijacking our system, it made no sense. The robots were not even designed till 2016; if they somehow dispatched a mission at light speed the instant they could possibly have heard of the robots, they'd still have to be almost on top of us—closer than Alpha Centauri, which is not one of the systems with a habitable world. So the mining robots weren't compatible because they hijacked them; they were compatible because they designed them.”

“But
you
designed them—”

“Three engineers did. And when we investigated those engineers, we discovered something else that made little sense to us . . . we discovered Daybreak. We were tracking it too, like your Heather O'Grainne and her OFTA, back before. We only got so far with it, for the same reasons you didn't get very far—Daybreak day arrived too soon, and we lost our capabilities before we had all the pieces of the puzzle. But in the five months we were looking into it, we established that it went far, far back—all the way to before 2000.”

“Arnie Yang always thought it was at least that old,” James said.

“He was right. What a loss that we don't have him here, but, well, life is long, perhaps someday we will be able to pick his brains about this. Anyway, when we arrested the three main design engineers, two suicided right away. The third claimed that Daybreak had simply begun sending them these marvelous designs, magnificent leaps in coding, all sorts of useful advances, always calling itself the ‘anonymous friend' or the ‘friend of good computing' and asking them, if they liked the software, to pass it off as their own. Once we knew what to look for, we found a dozen other researchers who had all had experimental proposals that seemed to sail right through the review process, and whose work looked like once-in-a-lucky-century breakthroughs. You see? It was the way that it not only won us over but made us dependent on it. Our rapid progress of the last few decades, every time Daybreak could plant an algorithm or a pattern, made us easier and easier to read, made our networks easier for them to penetrate, gave Daybreak more hooks to attach to—”

“Daybreak grew in our Internet,” Leslie said, “but the seed it grew from was . . . extraterrestrial? It was planted here?”

“It was friendly soil,” James said. “I keep going back to what Arnie Yang said about it, that he thought Daybreak had grown from human self-hatred, from the way that so many people were unhappy, back before, with things about ordinary modern life, whether it was the way the Third World got screwed, or how ugly all the parking lots were, or how bad they felt for the animals being crowded out, or the way that media got in everywhere and undercut their religion. But he always wondered how it managed to cross over from the people who hated tech to the people who lived to make tech. Now, I guess we know.”

Tang nodded. “I think we know a lot more. I'm guessing this is the root of the Fermi Paradox.”

Jamayu Rollings coughed and said, “Some of us may not be nerdy enough to know what that is.”

“Sorry to admit I'm one of them,” James said.

“You had company,” Ihor added. “Mister Rezakhani had to explain it to me.”

Leslie said, “The Fermi Paradox was in one of the more recent NASA documentaries we had for the schools, back before. The physicist Fermi pointed out that there were probably a lot of habitable worlds—and it turns out he underestimated by a lot—and no reason to suppose intelligent life wouldn't grow on all of them given enough time, there were billions of years of time available, times billions of livable planets, and technological progress is so rapid once it starts that on the geological time scale, basically all intelligent species should be leaping from the caves to the stars. So why hadn't dozens or hundreds or thousands of intelligent species in our own galaxy made the leap and come to visit us? As he put it, where was everybody?

“Well, that only became more mysterious in 2021 when the Priestly Space Telescope started finding all those planets with free oxygen in the atmosphere and in the habitable zone; just from what you could find close by, they were estimating that the galaxy contained maybe seven billion planets with life, and even if intelligence and technology were both incredibly rare, there still should have been thousands of species that could have visited us by now. So we were back to Fermi's question, where was everyone? And I'm starting to see what Mister Tang is getting at.”

He nodded. “Suppose Daybreak is not an Earth problem, but a galactic one. Perhaps it started on one world, somewhere, once, but by now, it may have existed for billions of years.

“Suppose there is Daybreak throughout the galaxy, with listening posts everywhere, and probably industrial plants attached to asteroids or perhaps small airless moons, places where civilizations would not notice if they looked. And they wouldn't be looking for very long, because Daybreak would find them and collapse their civilization while they were still just struggling off the planet. Maybe Daybreak was once a weapon, or it might have been created by a civilization that was much more environmentally conscious than ours, or maybe all life in the galaxy really is one and Daybreak evolved, somehow, as the way that life protects itself against the disaster of intelligent technological species. So when Daybreak notices a civilization that has risen as far as radio . . . it knows there will soon be networked computers. . . .”

“And it gets into covert contact, finds its way in like a hacker breaking into a secure system, and shuts it down,” Whorf said, quietly.

Ihor cleared his throat. “Chinese and Americans are clever, and can even be devious, but they have mostly been happy nations with big successes. Now, nations like Ukraine and Iran, because we have lived by our wits, and done what we had to, or we would not be here, we understand more about treachery.

“Doctor Rezakhani and I were jamming about this too. Maybe Daybreak is just like Galactic Greenpeace and shuts down high-tech civilizations. But what if it is a softening-up weapon and in another hundred years the alien invasion ships will show up to hand out blankets and beads and herd us onto reservations, while they turn this planet into a resort. Or maybe they plan to harvest all the protein on the surface, and they didn't want us crapping all that protein up with chemicals. Whatever it is, we know three things about Daybreak: one, it's bigger than we thought, maybe bigger than we can imagine. Two, it's not our friend.
And three
, we've already lost almost everything we had to fight it with.”

James nodded. “And all this is assuming it has anything we would understand as a purpose at all. Maybe it has something instead of purpose; you know, a colony of ants doesn't do things for reasons and an oak tree doesn't grow from ambition.”

“But whatever it was,” Jamayu Rollings said, “it has just kicked our butt, and it is fairly likely that sometime not far in the future it will come back to do it again. So we should either get ready to be kicked some more, or get ready to kick back.”

“And
voila
,” Rezakhani, “we present these ideas to the headmaster of a school, and the former leader of a spy organization—”

“And the complete dupe who was fooled by Daybreak itself, and lost the war with it in his home country,” James said. “And though I suppose I am more experienced, I don't feel one bit smarter.”

“Well,” Leslie said, “We are who we have to work with.”

• • • 

Afterward, as they took their first-ever walk on a beach, agreeing that they would try to do this daily if they could, James said, “I suppose the program is obvious. Start steering the governments of the world toward re-unions and mergers, and give them as much truth as they can handle. Rebuild tech to get around the nanospawn and biote barriers. Produce a bunch of smart young people who will have the brains, training, and energy to do that; maybe we can get Patrick and Ntale down here, it'd be a better place for them than Pueblo. Keep going till whatever zapped us with Daybreak shows up, if it ever does, and then do whatever we can to take our own destiny back.”

Leslie took his hand and leaned against him. When they had walked a little way in a closer embrace than he'd ever felt from her before, he said, “Are we ready to, um, take things to the next level?”

“You already have,” she said. “And I love that we have something to defend.”

First of all, I want to begin by saying that Luann Reed-Siegel has done an absolutely brilliant job in copyediting a very difficult manuscript.

The difficulty of the manuscript is only partly a matter of its sloppy author; a problem throughout this series so far has been how to mix the more conventional Chicago style with the peculiar style variously called Federal, Federal Security, and Defense/Security that is used within the American federal government. Because public servants in the United States are required to be extremely mindful of the requirements of the Constitution (which I hope most of you will see has a great deal to do with the story and how things unfold), it has long been customary in Federal documents to capitalize nouns when they refer to Federal and Constitutional functions (as I just did there) and not when they refer to other matters, in effect supplying tiny warnings to public officials when they are in areas where they may have important legal responsibilities.

Thus the President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and the Vice President presides over the Senate, but the president and vice president sometimes order a pizza in and spend the evening watching the Three Stooges (who, curiously, have no Federal function).

Similarly, the United States has an army and a navy but the Constitution governs the relationship between the rest of the government and the Army and Navy. This can result in apparently inconsistent, yet correct, capitalization on the same page or within a single sentence, and I just wanted it clearly stated that Luann Reed-Siegel has in fact done an excellent job with it, and that since I reviewed and approved it, any errors remaining are entirely my fault.