“Much better,” Emma interjected, ponderously looking at the table as she considered Dan’s words.
“Yeah,” he said. “What they have is better than what we have, but what they are isn’t necessarily better than what we are. Their breed of rationality is kind of indifferent… in the same way that nature is indifferent. None of the Messengers are going to be assholes like Cole or Godfrey, but none of them are going to be saints or martyrs or poets or artists, either. Their decision-making and permission-seeking processes are so linear and rational, it even stops them from saying simple things that could save all kinds of problems. I should know about these triangles by now, but I don’t. They had the chance to tell me, but all they did was make sure they can contact me again if they ever need to.”
“The main thing is that we keep this under wraps until we have time to really consider the implications,” Emma said. “Okay? And I’m not saying forever, just until we all agree.”
Dan took a deep breath. “Emma… this is so much power.”
“I know that, Dan, but so do they. And I think they must have had an idea this would happen, even if it was a side-effect, and they wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t think you could handle it. They trusted you with this because they know you.”
“Wait a second, though…” Tara chimed in, raising her head slowly in deep thought. “Dan, I could be talking nonsense since it’s the middle of the night and this is all so crazy that I’m not totally sure I’m not dreaming, but hear me out. I’m with Emma about them knowing this would happen. Maybe they couldn’t help you directly by telling you about the triangles, but they knew that doing this could help you help yourself? Like, they’ve given you the necessary tools, kinda thing. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: to find out what those ELF guys like Ding and Cole know about the triangles… couldn’t you just stand in front of one of them and read his mind?”
Dan and Emma looked at each other, simultaneously wondering how they hadn’t thought of this and silently gauging each other’s reactions.
“I’m just saying,” Tara went on. “Whether they meant it or not, the Messengers gave you this power, so I figure you might as well try to use it for good…”
SUNDAY
V minus 58
GCC Headquarters
Buenos Aires, Argentina
The early-morning streets outside the GCC building in Buenos Aires were bustling rather than chaotic, but the media turnout was by far the biggest yet. As the sun rose for the first time since a second triangle had been found in Vanuatu, of all places, and with Dan McCarthy having distanced himself from the GCC’s hierarchy just minutes before that triangle’s discovery, many expected a strong response from Chairman Godfrey.
“GCC delegates have so far been extremely tight-lipped about recent goings on in the building behind me,” an American news reporter spoke into his camera, “but rumblings overnight hint that we’re going to see a strong response today. I say see rather than hear very deliberately, because my sources are telling me that Chairman Godfrey feels that the time for words is over.”
The reporter was Kyle Young, an ACN newsman well known to the public for one broadcast in particular. On that famous occasion, Kyle had pursued a convoy of unmarked vehicles on their way to a midnight raid of Dan McCarthy’s empty Birchwood home, and his brave decision to chase the story at great personal risk had won many admirers. Chief among them were Dan’s inner circle, who had already been on friendly terms with Kyle’s close colleague Maria Janzyck following her discreet assistance in providing some seemingly incriminating video footage of Richard Walker.
Young in years as well as by name, Kyle was affable and well-presented yet lacking in a certain gravitas. His relatively high vocal register killed any hopes of a behind-the-desk newscaster role — he was at least grateful that the network bigwigs had been upfront about that, rather than giving him false hope — but the public’s firm mental association between Kyle and anything McCarthy- or alien-related had come up trumps in securing him this profile-boosting placement in Buenos Aires.
“The same source suggests that while senior GCC officials were infuriated by John Cole’s words on Focus 20/20, they would have been prepared to deal with that behind closed doors,” he went on. “But I understand that both triangles are now en route to China, where further and deeper analysis will be conducted by scientists from ELF-affiliated nations only. The door is closed to the GCC, meaning that the door is closed to the United States. President Slater is under growing pressure to break rank and condemn the ELF hierarchy, but it’s widely believed that Chairman Godfrey’s response — backed by the weight of the Western world — will go further than Slater reasonably could.”
Kyle’s line of work made it crucial that he stayed on top of public opinion and knew which points to focus on and which to leave by the wayside. Social Media Meta Analysis made it abundantly clear that members of the public weren’t quite so all-consumingly invested in the story of the triangles as they had been in the story of the original plaques, in no small part because all of their main questions had been decisively answered on Contact Day when the Messengers showed up and revealed their benevolent nature.
Despite this, however, Kyle knew that the public was far more interested in the triangles themselves than in the political machinations between two organisations that held no legitimacy in the eyes of many. His closing remarks reflected this:
“Of course, if we take a step back from all of the politics and focus on the bottom line, we’ll remember that there’s still another triangle unaccounted for. If this is a hoax, it’ll fall apart soon enough, so I’ll focus on the alternative. There could already be a third alien triangle out there somewhere, waiting to be found, or it could be just about to arrive. What I see a lot of the media doing right now is falling into the trap of over-focusing on two bald men fighting over a comb. The way I see it, the bald heads in Beijing and Buenos Aires should bear one name in mind while they’re scrambling over the comb of contact: Dan McCarthy.”
Kyle gazed into the camera.
“I hope to speak to my friend Dan soon,” he said, “and I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from him in the coming hours and days — wherever and whenever the final triangle turns up, and whichever political faction grabs it first. For ACN in Buenos Aires, I’m Kyle Young.”
V minus 57
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Having spent the hours before breakfast testing the limits of Dan’s extraordinary new ability, Emma and Tara both turned towards the evidently unlocked front door when they heard it opening.
“Just me,” Clark called.
Rooster immediately hurried toward him, as fast as his old legs would go. Although normally relatively aloof with the elder McCarthy brother, the dog now seemed to want Clark’s affectionate attention more than anything else in the world.
“What’s gotten into you?” Clark asked, crouching down to pat Rooster and smiling until it suddenly clicked in his mind. He stood up and called towards the kitchen, where he assumed everyone was: “Does someone want to tell me what the hell’s gotten into the dog?”
Dan emerged from the bathroom a few seconds later. “Hey,” he said to the decidedly impatient-looking Clark. “Uh, you might want to sit down for this.”
“Why couldn’t they just tell you who put the damn triangles there?” Clark moaned as Dan reached the end of the very short recap of his overnight contact experience.
“You do know what telepathy is, right?” Tara asked in return. “Dan can read minds!”
“Hear thoughts,” Dan corrected; after much consideration, this now felt like a very meaningful distinction. “But Clark, it’s just like I told you: they said there’s a problem with their Elders right now. It seemed like whatever has happened has just happened, so it’s maybe messed with pre-existing plans or it’s maybe just making them hesitant to say anything about anything right now. All I know for sure is they wanted to know they cou
ld reach me again if they ever have to. I don’t know anything new about the triangles and I don’t know if they even meant to give me this power, but I have it. And the three of us have an idea about using it to find out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. Because if I can sit down with Godfrey, with one of the GeoSovs, with Cole or even Ding… I’ll know what they’re thinking.”
“Do you think it’ll work in Chinese?” Clark asked, immediately stumping the others with a question they hadn’t even considered.
They all looked at each other for a few seconds, and could ultimately only shrug in response.
“We tested a few things,” Emma said. “So far we know he has to see the person directly to initiate it, but if they wander behind a wall or something that doesn’t necessarily cut it off.”
“We also know he can hear two of us at once,” Tara added. She turned to Dan. “Want to try three?”
Dan looked at Clark. “Are you ready? I can only hear clear thoughts you’re actively thinking about or things that are in your mind as something you’re trying to hide. It’s almost like a lie detector, I guess, but not really. So try not to think of anything you don’t want me to know, okay? I hear it in your voice, like you hear your own thoughts; so basically anything you know you’re thinking about, I’ll know too. Not memories or anything, unless they’re actually on your conscious mind at the time.”
Clark, striking Dan as surprisingly blasé about this, gave a casual thumbs up.
“Okay,” Dan said, doing his thing. “Tara, you’re thinking ‘of course it’s going to work’. Emma, you’re thinking about using Timo to test whether I can understand foreign languages. And Clark, you’re wondering if I want to tell Dad about this.”
Clark leaned back and chuckled. “You know, a tiny piece of me thought you guys were messing with me. This is big. It can’t have been an accident, man, and you did say they said something about noticing that you’d put yourself back out there by going on 20/20 last night. Maybe this is like a reward, or maybe it’s more like a weapon to help you slice through all the bullshit and calm things down? Because God knows the world needs that…”
“Maybe,” Dan said, but he was now preoccupied by Emma’s thought. “That’s a good idea about Timo, though,” he told her. “Could you maybe call him and ask him to get here as soon as he can?”
“On it,” she said, dialling right away. Barely thirty seconds later, she quickly relayed Timo’s comments that he’d been waiting for their call all morning but didn’t want to wake them, and that he would arrive from the city in no time.
The intervening minutes passed primarily with Clark addressing his own relative lack of amazement, which he explained by saying that this wasn’t really any more remarkable to him than some of what had gone before. “Those aliens made a forcefield in Walker’s bedroom door that smashed my nose into a dozen pieces, they froze me to the spot at the drive-in, and they talked to Dan through what looked like a damn USB cable connected to his neck,” he said. “Oh yeah, and they also changed the path of a comet. So yeah, this is flat-out amazing… but it would feel a lot more amazing if it was the first time these aliens have blown me away.”
Clark was looking forward to watching Timo’s face as he found out, since the Italian tended to be a lot more reactive than himself or indeed the others. But when Timo arrived, he jumped straight into some news of his own.
“I have two fresh pieces of information,” the affable billionaire began. “One more surprising than the other. First, my team’s preliminary investigation into Poppy Bradshaw and her GeoSov associates has led to some holding companies and shell companies registered in the Cayman Islands, and the people I have on this are telling me that it all looks intentionally obfuscatory — certainly beyond what you’d usually see in tax avoidance schemes. Rather than merely hide money, it seems that tireless steps have been taken to mask the origin and ultimate destination of every penny that passes through.”
Timo seemed to be talking primarily to Emma, and she was first to reply: “Do I even want to know how your people are able to dig so deeply into that kind of stuff?”
“Well, I know I don’t,” he replied without humour. “But moving on to the more surprising piece of news… and Dan, this one will interest you a great deal more than the first. I’ll understand if you’re sceptical, because I was, but I trust where this has come from.”
“Spit it out,” Clark urged, never the most patient in the group.
“My contacts in China think the triangles are real,” Timo said, straight to the point. “And trust me, Dan: these aren’t people who would lie to me, and they’re not in the habit of getting things wrong.”
V minus 56
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
“You guys would do yourselves a favour catching a flight to Beijing or Buenos Aires,” Phil Norris called to a news crew at the edge of his drive-in lot as he arrived to open New Kergrillin’ in time for the Sunday brunch rush. “Ain’t nothing happening in Birchwood today!”
Unperturbed, the reporter continued speaking into his camera, the shot framed by the world-famous backdrop of a lot where aliens had once walked.
Birchwood would have been overflowing with media types like in the old days if anyone knew how recently the aliens had been back in town, but Dan McCarthy was keeping those cards close to his chest for good reason.
No one could ever have imagined the power that the aliens had left behind just hours earlier, and nothing good could come of them finding out…
V minus 55
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“I’m not talking about political contacts,” Timo Fiore continued, trying to add weight to a point that Dan was understandably struggling with: that people Timo trusted in China, who had seen primary data from the initial analysis of the Zanzibar and Vanuatu triangles, believed that they were the real deal. “I’m talking about scientists on the ground who have worked with some of my Fiore Frontiere staff in the past. These people insist that everything they’re hearing in China suggests the government scientists who have actually gotten up close to these objects believe they’re real. My first thought was probably the one in your minds right now: that the Argentine sphere also seemed like it was real. The difference now, to my mind, is that the threshold for belief has surely risen. For these scientists to say the triangles are real, there has to be something decidedly alien about them… not just something that can’t immediately be explained away as a human creation. The burden of proof is higher than ever. Godfrey and Slater have heard this news, but they’re sceptical.”
“So am I,” Dan said. “We haven’t even seen any professionally produced videos of these triangles. Hell, we’ve barely had any clear photos. We have some amateur footage from the cameras on locals’ phones, and that’s it. Everything coming out of China could be a lie, just like it could be a lie if it was coming out of here. I don’t trust government scientists, wherever they are, because I don’t trust governments — wherever they are.”
Timo rubbed his chin, appearing surprised by Dan’s tone. “Well, short of any way of finding out who’s lying, the word of these scientists is all we have for now.”
“Funny you should say that…” Clark said.
As Dan recapped a remarkable story for at least the fourth time since his latest meeting with the Messengers, Timo’s surprise grew and grew. His shocked reaction was far more visual than Clark’s, even taking him out of his seat and leading him to pace the living room like a caged bear on a cold day.
Unlike Clark, Timo fully and readily believed the story of the Messengers granting Dan a measure of telepathic ability even before he received a personal demonstration. That demonstration quickly and unfortunately put paid to the idea of Dan being able to ‘hear’ thoughts in any language that he himself couldn’t speak, a regrettable development but one that wasn’t too unsurprising to Dan given his limited understanding of neurolinguistics.
More like Clark,
however, Timo didn’t spend much time pondering the incredible ability he had just witnessed. For his part, he was very confused by what the Messengers had said about their Elders and what they hadn’t said about the triangles, repeatedly insisting that Dan must have been forgetting something.
Dan, in turn, insisted that he had told Timo everything the Messengers had told him. He understandably struggled when trying to explain something that wasn’t clear to him, particularly given that the Messengers themselves had seemed like they were being very careful with the wording of the verbal thoughts they sent Dan’s way. He didn’t think they had been evasive because they wanted to keep something from him, and if anything he thought the opposite was true; that they had told him as much as they could, and perhaps even felt like they were edging dangerously close to an implicit or explicit boundary imposed by their problem-stricken Elders.
“How many people know about this?” Timo asked, shifting his weight and all of a sudden looking more concerned than ponderous.
“Just us,” Dan replied. “I haven’t even seen my dad since last night, so I haven’t told him.”
Timo nodded slowly. “You haven’t told him yet, or…?”
“Yet; I will soon. Mr Byrd and Phil, too. I’d trust either of them with my life, and they’re both smart in different ways.”
“We do need to be careful with this, Dan,” Timo said. “You need to fully trust everyone you tell, and they need to fully understand that it has to stay quiet. I don’t know how much attention you’ve paid to background developments over the past year, but the vocalisations the Messengers made at the drive-in have been studied endlessly all around the world. On the fringes, there are even scientists who claim to have some idea as to the meaning of the words they spoke among themselves. They have never shared those ideas, of course, and I agree with the prevailing scientific feeling that the Messengers didn’t utter anything close to the number of different ‘words’ we’d need to build any kind of understanding. Some scientists undertook their study with the goal of reverse-engineering the Messengers’ speech in order to send signal-based communications back into space for them to hear, and that kind of thing has been going on practically since the sun set on Contact Day.”
The Final Call Page 18
