Jury Duty (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  “I don’t buy your argument,” Brad says. “We made our own decisions. No one forced us to do anything.”

  “And yet, here you are,” Nick says. “No one came here willingly, did they? Like me, you were all threatened with solitary confinement.”

  Bao says, “Petrovich is right. We are here to do our duty.”

  “Our duty?” Nick asks. “Or are we pawns in a game of chess being played between countries?”

  “This is absurd,” Bao says. “We are the jury. We make the best decisions.”

  Nick says, “You get pushed into decisions.”

  Looking at the women before him, it’s clear they agree. They’re sick of losing arguments to these guys. From what Nick can tell, the women have been talked down too many times. Oh, he knows precisely how it would have happened. He did this to his girlfriend all the time. Nitpick a point. Get angry at some other insignificant detail. A raised voice is not an appeal to reason, but it gets the same result. Before long, Sandra started caving. And Nick knew it. He knew precisely what he was doing. He reveled in it. Gaslighting her was a sport. He could read the exasperation on her face. Arguing became too hard. Arguing with him was like talking to a brick wall. It’s strange, but being on the other side of this, Nick can see it all too clearly.

  Bao is angry. Of course he is. That’s par for this particular golf course. He says, “If you’re so smart, then why are you here?”

  “Oh, but I’m not smart,” Nick says, tapping his chest. “Do you want to know why I’m here? Like all of you, I was picked by a committee in another country. The Russians picked me because they knew I’d be a pain in the ass for the Americans. They wanted to disrupt the US agenda. And they were right about me. I’m an ornery, cantankerous fool.”

  Nick looks over at Jazz. Her eyes fall away from his. She stares at the floor, biting at her lip.

  “I’m here because I’m an asshole.”

  Brad says, “No arguments there.”

  “Father,” Bao says. “What level of agreement is required for this proposal?”

  The answer echoes from the speakers in the ceiling.

  “A change in the fundamental operational priority from recovery to rescue requires a unanimous decision.”

  “And what, exactly, would rescue look like?” Bao asks Jazz. “What are you proposing?”

  “They need tritium.”

  “Do we even have that?” Brad asks.

  Jazz speaks with dry deliberation. “It’s a component of the bomb.”

  Brad explodes. He’s on his feet in an instant. He points at Jazz, shouting, “You want to give them the bomb? As a goddamn present? What are you? Insane?”

  The two men at the back of the amphitheater are fuming with anger.

  “Father, this is Bao Xi. I vote no.”

  “Bradley Haggard. I vote no.”

  The women are quiet.

  Father says, “I need a vote from each member of the jury to complete documentation for this decision.”

  Anni shakes her head. Kalia buries her head in her hands. Samira is on the verge of crying. Even Julia is sad.

  Jacques is silent. His defiance angers the other men. They glare at him. Although only one vote of dissent is required to break the proposal, the tension between the men is obvious. Jacques tightens his lips. His nostrils flare. Even if he doesn’t agree, he could go on the record by voting yes. His silence reveals his shifting allegiance. This isn’t about the vote. He feels betrayed.

  “He knows,” Nick says, pointing at Jacques. “He’s not fooled by this charade.”

  Jacques gets to his feet. He turns to face the others. “Nick’s right, isn’t he? The women were brought here to be patsies. But us? Us men? We are the assholes. We’re here because of our loyalty. Only loyalty means being egotistical. Prideful. Predictable.”

  “Horse-trading,” Nick says.

  “Yes. Even within the jury selection itself. We are compromised. We shouldn’t even be here.”

  Bao gets to his feet, yelling from the back of the room. “We are the jury! We have a duty—a responsibility!”

  “To who?” Jacques asks. “To our country? Our people? Or to be honest with ourselves?”

  Bao snaps off his words. “Do not question my integrity.”

  “Are you making your decision out of reason? Or anger?” Jacques asks. “Is it humanity you serve or your own ego?”

  “Damn you,” Bao says. “You’re a traitor!”

  The women on the jury cringe. They’ve all known their own Bao over the years. They know when reason is gone.

  Jazz says, “Let’s just cool it for a moment.”

  For all Bao’s bluster, her ability to remain calm speaks of authority. In the midst of the heated argument, she’s relaxed. It seems all Bao understands is brute force. Although Jazz doesn’t threaten him, it’s clear she could, which is something the other women couldn’t do. He sits, slamming his hand on the table in disgust.

  “We need to debate,” Anni says. That she’s the first jury member to speak following Bao’s outburst is significant. The Chinese delegation is divided, but that was always the intent. Nick doesn’t know if Bao and Anni were selected by the Americans, the English, or the French, but they were picked to ensure chaos for the Chinese. From what he can tell, it seems only one juror in any pairing is loyal to their country. No one selection committee trusted another country enough to pick a balanced pair of jurors. If humans are good at anything, it’s trolling each other. This time, though, it might actually be for the best.

  “Debate is good,” Anni says, repeating her point, speaking over Bao as he mumbles and swears under his breath.

  “I agree,” Samira says.

  “Me too,” Kalai says.

  “Let’s do this properly,” Julia says.

  Nick nods and remains silent. Now is the time to shut the fuck up. He missed this point far too often with Sandra, but the tells are the same—an appeal to reason, a desire to be heard, a yearning for justice and equality.

  Nick leans against the wall and slumps to the floor. He rests his arms on his knees, ready to listen.

  Brad says, “I don’t see the need for this.”

  Jacques says, “I do.”

  Bao folds his arms over his chest yet again. He may try to shut them out, but he can’t. Everyone gets a vote. His is only one voice. Technically, he’s already blocked the resolution, but the women will have their say regardless.

  Petrovich may shake his head, but like Jacques, he has not cast a vote either way.

  The Debate

  Jacques addresses Brad and Bao, saying, “Stick to your vote if you must, but we need to discuss this before finalizing our decision. There must be proper deliberation.”

  Kalia says, “I would like to hear from the scientist.” She turns in her seat, looking toward Bao and asking, “If there’s no objection?”

  Bao flicks his hand in the air. His head sinks. If he had a smartphone, he’d be staring at the screen in defiance. As much as he may want to ignore the discussion, he can’t. He too is curious, he just won’t admit it.

  Adrianna says, “From a scientific perspective, that spacecraft is buried treasure. It’s something that will spur on research for decades, if not centuries to come.”

  “But?” Samira asks, sensing Adrianna’s reluctance to unduly sway the jury.

  “Science is full of uncertainty. Questions drive us on.”

  “And?” Anni asks, following Samira’s lead.

  “We may not be able to learn that much at all.”

  “I don’t understand,” Julia says.

  Adrianna clarifies her point. “Imagine if an F-22 fighter was sent back to Roman times. How much could they learn from it? They’d be impressed by what they saw, but they’d have no idea how to replicate even the most basic parts, like the glass canopy or the rubber wheels. Oh, they could copy the shape, but they’d never master the construction techniques. A computer circuit board might as well be a piece of jewelry to them. No one in t
hat age would be able to refine fuel for an F-22 or fly it. It’s doubtful it would change their technological progress at all. If anything, they’d worship it. Within a hundred years, it would be a relic. Just a bunch of rusting spare parts bouncing between monasteries like the bones of the saints.”

  Jacques asks, “And you think that’s what will happen here?”

  “It’s not inconceivable,” Adrianna says. “Oh, we can learn from their metallurgy and basic design, but the gap between us and them is probably measured in tens of thousands of years. They can fly between stars. We can barely make it to the Moon. It could take hundreds of years to unlock the fundamentals behind their technology.”

  Brad says, “But we can reverse-engineer this stuff, right? I mean, once we’ve got our hands on it, we can figure out how it works.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Adrianna insists. “We have to reverse-engineer entire industries, not just individual components. Imagine a Bedouin tribesman in the Arabian desert. He could be as smart as Einstein, but he’s not going to be able to reverse-engineer an iPhone because an iPhone is a conglomeration of technology backed by numerous different industries. We need to understand how these parts were made. Most of the components on that thing represent breakthrough-physics for us, so it’s not going to be easy.”

  “But we can do it,” Brad insists with the kind of confidence and ignorance Nick once reveled in.

  “Can you reverse engineer a wooden ax handle?” Adrianna asks.

  When no one replies, she says, “It’s not just a stick. It’s a very specific piece of wood. The length, the thickness, the run of the grain, the strength of that particular type of wood, the absence of knots, the lathe process, the curve of the handle, the width of the head. These are all important. Why don’t splinters form on the handle when it’s under stress? I have no idea.

  “You see, none of these points are accidental. They’re all by design. Get just one of them wrong and the ax will break.

  “Even simple things are a lot more complicated than we think. Can you describe the mechanics of how a toilet flushes? There’s a lot more engineering involved than you realize.

  “When it comes to the alien spacecraft, there are millions of parts to consider. The problem is, each one of them has so many factors, we don’t know which points are important and which aren’t. Get that wrong and we’ll run into a dead end.”

  “But?” Samira says, wanting to draw more reasoning from Adrianna.

  “But a working version—with some kind of crew—that’s different.”

  “So,” Julia says, “from your perspective, this improves our position.”

  “Slightly.”

  “And yet?” Samira says, coaxing Adrianna on. Nick likes her style. Samira may not say much, but when she does it carries weight. Like him, she senses the complexity lying beneath the surface of this discussion. She genuinely wants to understand the scientific position.

  Adrianna swallows the lump in her throat. “We have the ability to take what we want, but do we have the right?”

  “Oh, please,” Bao says from the back of the room. “Spare me your liberal morality. We need to make a rational decision here.”

  Brad agrees. “Next, you’ll want to sit and hold hands and sing Kumbaya around the campfire.”

  Adrianna shakes her head.

  Jazz says, “Hang on. Disagreements between a couple of drunks leads to a bar-fight. Between nations, it leads to war. Between interplanetary species, it leads to what? Extinction?”

  “It’s a real concern,” Adrianna says. “You have to remember, to them, we’re an alien species.”

  “But this is our world,” Bao says. “Our planet. They came here.”

  “But it’s not our world,” Adrianna says. “This is not about us. Think about our history. For far too long, we assumed the cosmos revolved around us. We could see the stars turning above us, the sun and moon passing over our heads. We thought we were the center of the universe, but we were wrong.

  “This is not our world by any measurable definition. As a species, we’ve only been around for a couple of hundred thousand years. Cyanobacteria have been here for at least 2.4 billion years! That’s over ten thousand times as long as us!

  “We’re one animal species among roughly nine million others—trillions of others if you count archaea and bacteria. Every one of them has a stake in calling Earth its home.

  “Our civilization is a few thousand years old, and yet we only just harnessed electricity in the last hundred and fifty years. We’re the snotty-nosed punk kid that won’t be told what to do. We know it all. Only we don’t. We’re not even close.”

  “They have no right,” Bao says.

  Adrianna replies, “They have every right to their own autonomy. They came here long before we emerged as an intelligent species. They may have struggled to survive beneath the ice, but they predate us on this planet. Remember, we’re not dealing with aliens down there. Regardless of whether there are biological or mechanical entities resurrecting that craft, we’re dealing with remote descendants. They’ve adapted to suit that environment just as we did on the African savannah.”

  “This is bullshit,” Bao says.

  Jacques says, “Personally, I’d rather not start a war over technology we may not even be able to harness.”

  “We’re at a crossroad,” Nick says. “Right now, this decision is confined to these four walls. We’ve got to think about what happens beyond here. Whatever we decide, it changes everything out there—for better or for worse. Once Pandora’s Box is open, we may never get a chance to close it again.”

  Julia addresses Nick. “There is an argument to be made that this decision isn’t ours to make. You said it yourself. We don’t represent humanity’s best interests. We’re the result of infighting between nations. Perhaps we should leave this to the UN?”

  “So we abdicate our responsibility?” Jacques asks.

  “Is it really our responsibility?” Julia asks. “I mean, no one foresaw this damn thing awakening. Are we really capable of making a decision of this magnitude?”

  “And what rights do these creatures have?” Adrianna asks. “If you defer this decision, who’s going to represent them before the UN? What legal standing will they have?”

  “I say fuck those assholes,” Jacques replies, pointing at the far wall. “They played us. They used us like pawns. We have no reason to trust them. This is our time—our moment. This is our opportunity to prove them wrong. It’s our chance to make the right decision.”

  Nick says, “If we leave this to the UN, they may propel us down a path to war. I think Jacques is right. We need to decide this here and now, while we still can.”

  “They attacked us,” Brad says.

  “They haven’t continued their attack,” Jazz replies. “Best we understand it, they were defending themselves.”

  “We spoke to them,” Nick says. “We conversed through sign language. And then we left. They made no attempt to stop us.”

  “So they’re not going to invade our world?” Julia asks.

  “No. We invaded theirs,” Nick replies.

  Bao asks, “What about the treasures? Adrianna said it’s a treasure chest down there. Should we really give that up?”

  Brad asks, “What if it includes the cure for cancer?”

  Nick replies, “What if it doesn’t? What if we’re too pushy and things escalate into war.”

  “Forget about war with them,” Jacques says. “What if that war is between us? What would another world war look like? If we end up squabbling over the spoils of an alien spacecraft, billions will die.”

  Brad says, “So we solve cancer and kill each other in World War Three. Great. That’s just bloody great.”

  “There’s too much uncertainty,” Anni says. “How can we know what we should do? We cannot.”

  “Principle,” Jacques says. “We cannot be guided by a crystal ball we don’t have, but we can be guided by principle.”

  “Which p
rinciple?” Nick asks.

  Bao says, “We must seek what is best.”

  Adrianna replies, “Define best.”

  Brad says, “The best decision is the one that does the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

  “People?” Anni asks in reply, challenging his notion. “What about them? What about their best interests?”

  Bao says, “We cannot lose this opportunity. We have a duty to future generations to learn all we can from this spacecraft.”

  Jacques turns in his seat. “What about you, Petrovich? You’re quiet. Too quiet. What do you think?”

  Petrovich nods and speaks in Russian.

  “Правда многих злит”

  Kalia translates. “He says, the truth makes many angry.”

  “Не имей сто рублей, а имей сто друзей.”

  “His words are—it’s better to have a hundred friends than a hundred rubles.”

  “My English,” Petrovich says. “It is slow.”

  Kalia confers with him in Russian. “Petrovich understands what we’re saying, but finding the right English words doesn’t come easy.”

  “It’s okay,” Nick says. “I get it. The spacecraft. That’s the rubles. We have an opportunity to make friends instead of riches, right?”

  “Yes. Yes,” Petrovich says, grinning from behind missing teeth.

  He speaks to Kalia in Russian. “Никто не жалеет о новых друзьях”

  “Petrovich says, no one regrets having friends.”

  Jacques says, “That’s what we’ve forgotten in all of this. We’ve looked at this as a transaction. Either we take the spacecraft or we let it go, but there’s a third option before us. We could establish a relationship with another space-faring species.”

  “Hang on,” Adrianna says, holding out her hands. “This isn’t a trade. We can’t assume they’ll see it that way. We have no guarantee about how they’ll respond. For all we know, this is like a tribe in the Amazon returning a downed pilot to a US aircraft carrier. The US would be grateful, but they wouldn’t give the tribe an F-16.”