The Final Call

by Craig A. Falconer

  de Clerk signalled Dan’s right of reply.

  “You know, I reluctantly support giving these idiots a platform,” he said. “Bad ideas fester and spread in the dark but they get exposed in bright light, exactly like a lot of smarter people than me have said in the past. I was ridiculed back in the day, but it went beyond that; some people tried to silence me, and other people supported it because they thought I was crazy. So banning anyone from speaking, even the GeoSovs, would set a dangerous precedent. Because if you don’t support free speech for people and ideas you hate, you don’t support free speech at all. Maybe something could or should be done about the paid ads the GeoSovs have used to target kids with anti-contact memes, because kids are—”

  “Garbage,” Poppy interrupted. “No such thing has ever been proven to have come from an official GeoSov account.”

  Dan tried not to let any annoyance show. “As I was saying… kids are kids. But this kind of situation, for me, is clear. This is a current affairs show for adults and no positions should be banned on principle. In the political sphere, if all speech isn’t free then no speech is free; at best it would be conditionally free-for-now, until someone in an office somewhere might decide that it offends their sensibilities and has to go. I hate these people, but they should be allowed to speak.”

  “Dan, hate is a strong word for a man with such a warm and cuddly public image,” Poppy mocked, shaking her head indignantly.

  “I despise you,” he hissed in reply. “I detest you. You and your people tried to kill Timo and Emma, and the one good reason you shouldn’t be on this panel is that you should be in prison!”

  Poppy began to reply, but de Clerk promptly stepped in with a firm insistence that Dan had agreed to come on the show with the intention of talking about more than the GeoSovs. She of course had no idea just what Dan was planning to reveal about the GeoSovs themselves later in the show, but for now she had heard more than enough from Poppy Bradshaw.

  “The floor is yours, Dan,” de Clerk announced. “The Zanzibar triangle’s discovery coming on the anniversary of Contact Day has raised all kinds of questions, and the precise timing — during the GCC’s inauguration — has proven just as controversial. No one can come at this from either side with a more complete perspective than you, so please let us in to your mind.”

  “The first thing I want to say is that there aren’t really two sides here,” Dan began, following Emma’s advice to hit the political nonsense first. “The way I see it, there are three sides. There are a bunch of politicians in Beijing, there are a bunch of politicians in Buenos Aires, and there are seven billion people who wish those politicians would all get together, join hands, and jump into the nearest volcano. So let’s all try to keep that in mind when we’re talking about sides. And just quickly on that, this isn’t even about normal politics. The ‘sides’ these politicians have created in their own minds are so binary — but again, only in their own minds — that John Cole, a hardline Western conservative, is going to live in Cuba where they’re probably going to treat him like a king. This is a return to the old Cold War logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’… if you can even call it logic.”

  Appearing surprised by both the strength of Dan’s opening comment and the direction he had moved in, de Clerk pushed him back in the direction she wanted the discussion to go. “But of the two ‘bunches of politicians’, as you put it, which do you see as the more legitimate in their claims to represent humanity as a whole?”

  “Neither,” he insisted, “and that’s the whole point. I see what you’re getting at, though, so I’ll say this: while I will never formally endorse the GCC or the ELF, what I will do right now is unreservedly condemn the ELF’s leadership — Ding Ziyang and now, apparently, John Cole — for the pathetically divisive rhetoric they spouted earlier today. It reminded me of the posturing during the IDA leak, when Cole and Godfrey were on the same side and were more concerned about making President Slater’s life difficult than they were about the contents of the leak. And I know for a fact that Godfrey didn’t even think the leak was real at first, he just jumped at the opportunity to get one over on Slater and distract from his own problems. Obviously we all found out that it wasn’t real in the end, but the point is that Godfrey pretended like he believed me long before he actually did, and purely because it was politically expedient to do so.

  “And now with this triangle,” Dan went on, “you have Ding telling us with one breath that it’s the most important thing ever, but then what does he do with the next ten breaths? Makes it about the same old pointless political games and his stupid power struggle with Godfrey. That’s one thing I want to clarify, in fact: I don’t hate China… of course I don’t. But I bet most people there like Ding about as much as I do, which is about as much as I like Slater. That’s the point: this isn’t ‘China equals bad’ any more than it’s ‘America equals bad’ or even ‘Britain equals bad’, since Godfrey is still such a big part of things. This is tails wagging dogs, with great nations being led by petty children.”

  “And regarding the triangle itself…” de Clerk probed, trying to move things along while staying out of the way as much as possible.

  “Do you mean what do I think of its origin and what do I think should happen next?”

  de Clerk nodded. “Precisely.”

  “I’ll start with the second point,” he said, always cognisant of how crucial Emma had told him it was to save the revelation of his recent contact experience and the clue regarding the triangle’s markings until near the end, leaving just enough time to close with the revelation of the GeoSov plot that President Slater had given him permission to expose.

  “If you wish,” de Clerk said, holding out a palm to encourage him along.

  “Okay, well I’m not in a position to make any ‘formal’ declarations,” Dan said, “but if Ding Ziyang and John Cole don’t share access to the Zanzibar triangle within the next few days, I will be prepared to make a very firm suggestion of what the leaders of other ELF nations and the citizens of all ELF nations should do in an effort to convince them to change their minds. And whether Cole in particular likes it or not, my word carries a lot of weight among real people with real lives — from Birchwood, all the way to Beijing.”

  “You’re half-right, Dan,” Poppy interjected. “You’re not in a position to make any formal declarations, so you’re correct there. But you’re also not in a position to make any requests of anyone. Proactive contact is a foolish road for humanity to take and it leads only to ruin and regret, but one thing that can at least be said of the GCC and ELF is that they’re composed of people who one way or another rose to positions of national authority. But you? You’re just a gullible fool from Nowhere, Colorado who fell for a hoax and dragged the rest of us into it. There wouldn’t even be any talk of contact if you hadn’t done what—”

  “None of us would be alive if I hadn’t done what I did!” Dan snapped defensively. “But we all know that’s exactly what you and your demented Welcomer friends would have wanted, so you can just spare us all the crap and keep your mouth shut.” He immediately took a deep breath, scolding himself for taking the bait; blame-apportioning talk of the hoax had long been his primary sore spot, and Poppy almost certainly knew this.

  de Clerk stopped short of admonishing Dan directly, but did issue a general call for civility.

  “And I wasn’t requesting that they grant open international access to the triangle,” Dan continued. “Request isn’t the word. So everyone everywhere, if you’re looking for a headline on what I’m saying about this triangle, here it is: this isn’t a request, it’s a demand. Ding, Cole, and everyone else at the ELF… open up the scientific analysis just like Argentina did with the sphere, or my words are going to get a lot firmer and your lives are going to get a lot more difficult.”

  “A demand?” Poppy scoffed. “So tell us, oh mighty one, who exactly put you in a position to make—”

  “I’m the only one the Messengers talk
to,” Dan interrupted. “Out of seven billion people, I’m the one. We’re talking about a triangle here… well, how about thinking about a contact triangle? There’s the GCC, there’s the ELF, and there’s me. Two of the sides don’t even matter. The Messengers have used one point of contact, and we all know which of the three it is.”

  Poppy raised a hand and repeatedly opened and closed it in a dismissive ‘blah blah blah’ gesture.

  “I’m not even talking to you,” Dan said, just as dismissively. “I’m talking to Godfrey and Slater, to Ding and Cole, and I’m telling them this: you can have your little contact clubs and keep fighting over countries like they’re tiles on a board, if that’s how you want to spend your lives. But the truth none of you want to hear is that this is a game you can’t win. And do you want to know why? Because when the Messengers want to contact Earth, they don’t call Beijing and they don’t call Buenos Aires. They call Birchwood. They contact me... and all you can do about that is learn to deal with it — it’s not going to change if one of you ‘wins’ and ends up in charge of an organisation that really is ‘global’ or really does represent ‘Earth’, because the Messengers still won’t want to talk to any scheming politicians.”

  Very suddenly, and without so much as a knock, Clark then burst through the door so quickly that he almost fell into the room.

  Dan didn’t think anything he’d said came close to meriting an intervention, much less one so far from Emma’s approved method of a text to her phone, but Clark’s face and body language were testament to the urgency of whatever he had to say. In a million years, Dan could never have guessed the words that came next:

  “They just found another triangle,” Clark panted. “Vanuatu. It was on the trend-tracker and it’s on every other station. de Clerk’s bound to mention it any second now, as soon as she hears.”

  Instinctively, Emma’s hand had already hit a button on her computer’s keyboard that muted Dan’s microphone and blacked out the camera feed. She pointed to the door and firmly mouthed for Clark to get out, pointing at the computer to remind him that Dan was currently going out live to an international audience well into the hundreds of millions.

  “You just heard it on the trend-tracker and our internet glitched,” Emma said, slightly unnervingly effortless in the lie, “and you think maybe there was a spike because of the news. No one is going to query it, so just say that. And Dan, whatever you do, don’t commit either way on this. Don’t say what you were going to say about the first triangle being real, okay? Not now. Vanuatu sounds too convenient to be real but it almost sounds too convenient to be fake, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he said, nodding for Emma to press the button to reactivate their outgoing broadcast.

  As soon as he returned to screens around the world and also the giant screen in the Focus 20/20 studio, Marian de Clerk turned her attention to Dan. “Did you see it, Dan?” she asked. “The second triangle?”

  In his focus on Clark and Emma, Dan had missed the moment when de Clerk heard the news and passed it on. He stuck rigidly to Emma’s suggested line about the trend-tracker and internet surge, also sticking to her advice to leave all speculation at the door.

  Dan was running on autopilot, adrenaline taking over and Emma’s typed words the only thing keeping him afloat. His mind was a confused mess, but so was everyone else’s; Billy Kendrick and Joe Crabbe looked bemused by what they were hearing second-hand via de Clerk, while Poppy Bradshaw appeared to find the whole thing extremely amusing.

  Poppy’s expression, which she seemed to be trying to conceal, told most of the world once and for all that she and her GeoSov friends didn’t oppose contact so much as they craved chaos.

  Marian de Clerk did a laudable job of listening for incoming details of a remarkable and ongoing global happening while trying to stumble through the last few minutes of the show. The unexpected development meant that this show would no longer feature the revelation of a GeoSov plot to take President Slater hostage or anything whatsoever about the vision in which the Messengers had warned Dan of the plot and also confirmed in hindsight their prescient knowledge of the first triangle.

  Whether the Messengers were back or something fishy was going on in Vanuatu having already swept across from Zanzibar as one perfectly timed ‘discovery’ followed another, Dan was glad he had spoken out about his views on the GCC-ELF split. He spoke again a handful of times as de Clerk and even Poppy fired difficult questions at him, and he managed to dissociate — as Emma’s autocue suggested — and focused on making it through some of the most difficult few minutes of his life by reading exactly what she wrote. If Dan’s mind had been clear in the slightest he would have wondered how Emma could remain so unflustered, but in that moment clarity of mind felt as out of Dan’s reach as the power of flight.

  As the ticker counted down and Dan realised he wasn’t going to have to speak again, he breathed a deep sigh of relief. Without his contextualising words — intended to disempower Buenos Aires and Beijing’s dual grip on public consciousness — he expected that this second triangle would have catastrophically ignited the gunpowder spilled by the first. Coming just minutes after John Cole’s mention of a soon-to-open ELF office in Vanuatu and his now-suspicious half-time departure, it was difficult not to jump to the obvious conclusion.

  Because even after his attempts at sweeping the gunpowder away, Dan knew that Vanuatu was simply too much of a coincidence to dismiss out of hand.

  He knew the Messengers were close — the Slater-saving vision told him that — but he didn’t know what they were playing at.

  If this was them, they had to stop… and if it wasn’t, they had to let him know.

  Without knowing what was happening, Dan was back to experiencing his least favourite feeling in the world: powerlessness.

  As de Clerk signed off in a far less attentive manner than normal, Dan instinctively scratched the back of his neck.

  Where the hell are you?

  V minus 64

  GCC Headquarters

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  By the time Focus 20/20 drew to a close, just a few minutes after the remarkable news that a second triangle had been discovered, William Godfrey’s office was a hive of activity.

  While he remained at his desk, frozen in rage at the sheer audacity of what the ELF’s hierarchy had just done, President Slater had risen to her feet and was in animated discussions with both her own aides and Godfrey’s.

  “Vanuatu…” Godfrey muttered. “Twenty minutes after that fat bastard mentions Vanuatu and disappears from the panel, that’s where they find another triangle? And just like last time, they find it literally during a huge live TV event? They’re not even trying to make it look real, they’re seeing how far they can push us before we call this out for what it is!”

  Slater rubbed her chin in thought, considering a suggestion she’d just been fed. She passed it on to Godfrey: “The only alternative, for the sake of exploring every angle, is that they might have found this triangle earlier in the day and decided to hold it back for maximum impact. Cole might have mentioned Vanuatu because the second triangle had already been found there. I don’t buy this, William, but it’s within the realm of theoretical possibility: the ELF could be setting us up to call this out as a hoax because they know it’s real. If we fell into that kind of trap, we would struggle to find a way out of it.”

  “And Chairman Godfrey,” one of Slater’s aides boldly interjected, “this theoretical possibility is one that we do have to give some consideration. The security implications of this second discovery are enormous, whether it’s real or not. If it’s real then that means the Messengers are interfering for what they deem a good reason, but for some wholly unknown reason doing so on the wrong side. The implications of these triangles being a hoax, meanwhile, are almost as serious. That would mean the ELF — or China, if you prefer — will stop at absolutely nothing to weaken our standing. And in this context, ‘our standing
’ means both the international standing of the United States and the global standing of the GCC.”

  “I’m not buying into this ‘theoretical possibility’ for a second,” Godfrey grunted dismissively, “so let’s not waste any more time thinking about it, shall we? Like it or not, McCarthy was right when he said that the Messengers would go to him first. There’s not a chance in hell they would drop gifts for those stains on humanity’s undercarriage to parade before the world. And as for leaks, there’s already a leak on your side,” he grunted. “How the hell did that GeoSov clown know about the chip your men put in McCarthy’s neck. Tighten up your damn ship, Valerie!”

  “I didn’t even know about the chip until McCarthy mentioned it,” she replied angrily.

  Godfrey threw up his hands. “What, and that’s supposed to make this better? An enemy of the state knows more about what your people are doing than you do, and you’re using that as a defence?”

  “Right now our real enemy is Cole,” Slater said, breathing deeply in an effort to dissuade herself from a pointless fight with Godfrey. “He’s the one attacking us in public and he’s the one who dropped the Vanuatu hint before he left the panel. And we’re all in agreement here: he’s doing this to rile you.”

  “I wouldn’t take it from anyone, but from him…”

  Slater, gazing out of the window, spoke in a slightly more measured tone despite her similar rage: “Are you even listening to me? They’re trying to rile us, William; you in particular.”

  “Well then they’re winning!” he snapped, slamming a balled fist into the surface of his expensive desk. “But they’re not just trying to rile me, they’re trying to trap me so that any move I make is a losing one. React in kind with a scathing attack on Cole and Ding that could anger the rest of the GCC? Let them keep making fools of us with these fake triangles, which would also privately anger a lot of our members? But no… I won’t let it happen. Valerie, I need agility.”