Jury Duty (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

Paramedics throw open the back of their vehicles, grabbing gurneys and rushing in toward them. Only one’s needed, but it seems they don’t realize that yet. Sandra steps back as they run to Nick’s side. To her surprise, the medics are wearing full hazmat suits. Thick yellow rubberized plastic squelches as they jog over. Oxygen cylinders bounce on their backs.

  “Don’t worry,” one of them says, hidden behind a bulky black mask. “We’re here to help.”

  “What is going on?” she asks, but no one answers. They’re too busy talking among themselves and focusing on Nick. Radios crackle with instructions.

  One of the medics climbs into her car, standing half in the footwell and half on the driver’s seat as he applies a neck brace. Medics crowd around, reaching in and raising Nick out of the vehicle and onto a gurney, handling him with care.

  Like her car seat, the gurney is set on an angle, allowing him to lie back but without laying him flat.

  Nick keeps his eyes facing up. Whatever he’s been through, he has the presence of mind to keep his head straight. His fingers slip out from beneath a white sheet as they wheel him away. Sandra takes his hand and walks along with the medics.

  Behind her, a convoy of military trucks pulls up. Soldiers climb out in chemical warfare suits. Some of them are carrying guns. Others unload portable barricades. They begin setting them up around her convertible at a distance of twenty feet. Someone’s got what looks like a fancy handheld video camera. They scan her car with a UV light.

  The speed with which everything is happening leaves Sandra bewildered. Shock catches up with her.

  Nick squeezes her fingers. This time it’s his turn to say, “It’s going to be okay.”

  Afterword

  Thank you for taking a chance on Jury Duty.

  Regardless of whether it’s Contact, Alien, ET, or The Thing, alien stories are about us. The Day the Earth Stood Still makes this abundantly clear in its title. We are the subject. Oh, we think these stories are about some creature that blends into the jungle or has acid for blood, but it’s our responses, our reactions, our limitations and emotions that are being explored. The unknown is a dark mirror. The reflection we see is that of ourselves stripped bare of the usual pretense and theater.

  Having written over a dozen stories on the subject of First Contact, I love exploring the motivation aliens might pursue and their potential nature, but these kind of stories always circle back to us and our behavior when confronted with the unknown. Jury Duty examines the dark side of humanity—how we abuse each other and troll ourselves. It’s also a redemption arc. The only way anyone learns to care about anything is by looking beyond themselves.

  One potential criticism of this story is that the protagonist perpetuates domestic violence. As someone who grew up dodging machetes and axes, this isn’t something I take lightly and don’t intend to glorify. We can’t fix problems we ignore. I hope this story goes some way to highlighting how domestic violence is normalized far too often instead of being dealt with honestly.

  Domestic violence doesn’t always end in murder—that’s simply the extreme that makes it into the news. It’s my ribs being bruised after being thrown across the kitchen and into the dining table. It’s being punched while on the phone to a friend. It’s someone screaming at you, telling you over and over that you’re a loser, a bastard, and a string of expletives I cannot bear to type. It’s knowing which floorboards creak in the hallway. It’s climbing out the bedroom window when you hear him starting to yell. It’s hiding under the bed in the spare room while he stalks you in a drunken stupor, calling out time and again, “I’m going to fuck’n kill you!” It’s waiting until silence descends before skulking out of your own home. It’s walking for hours in the dead of night to reach the safety of a friend’s house. It’s not something I take lightly. It’s also not something I can ignore.

  Too often, our heroes rely on violence to solve problems. It’s not difficult to see how domestic violence arises when violence is glorified for entertainment. Here in Australia, our equivalent of the Super Bowl is called State of Origin. When these games are played, domestic violence spikes by 40%. The same is true in England when the World Cup is being played, regardless of where the host country might be.

  These are games!

  They’re entertainment, that’s all.

  And yet, they become the catalyst for violence against women and children. For me, stats like this highlight how difficult it is for some men to separate fiction from reality. Adrenaline starts pumping and the lines become blurred.

  Violence is the failure of reason. Even when it comes to something like law enforcement where violence is often unavoidable, it should be the position of last resort, not the default reaction. When it comes to entertainment, it should stay on the screen or in the text of a page in a book.

  When it comes to domestic violence, the reality is that it’s too goddamn easy for assholes to get away with everything right up until the point of murder—and then it’s too damn late. Domestic violence stems from self-centered arrogance. It’s selfish. It’s the abuse of trust and the exercise of raw power over others. Is it unforgivable? Is it irredeemable? Can someone recognize and shed that toxic persona? That’s the question I wanted to ask in Jury Duty.

  Is Nick a hero? Or is he a flawed human stumbling through life with excess baggage he desperately needs to unload? Should Sandra forgive him? Having lived through something similar, I don’t think she owes him anything.

  I think our idealized stereotype of the all-conquering seemingly-divine hero is a mistake. Too often, stories get caught up in a messiah-complex. Some authors are too willing to overlook flaws in their desire for an epic story. No one is perfect. Perfection is a trope we need to retire.

  My last few novels have been criticized for being slow, which I find comical. Movies have desensitized us to character arcs. These days, we’re expected to care about a character right from the explosive opening. Action! Action! Action! That’s all that matters. You’ll figure out the characters as we go—is the mantra. Personally, I think that approach is flawed. I struggled to care about anyone in Rogue One until I watched it a second time. Don’t get me started on Tenet.

  When I first came up with the idea for Jury Duty, I realized I couldn’t teleport Nick to Antarctica. It was going to take time to get him from South Carolina to Vincennes. Rather than seeing this as a problem, I realized it was an opportunity to develop some depth of character.

  Given the problematic opening, where Nick loses all respect in our eyes, his protracted journey to Antarctica was ideal. As his life slips further out of his own control, he begins to realize he was never in control anyway. When the action does come, it hits hard and fast. If you cared about Dmitri and Bear, then the opening chapters succeeded. If you worried whether Jazz or Nick might die, then the novel wasn’t slow—the pacing was just right and drew you into the story.

  Besides, I wanted to establish a sense of utter isolation in Antartica. Giving the reader an appreciation for how difficult it is to reach an inland base during winter helps give the novel a sense of claustrophobia on the ice.

  As with all my novels, I try to ground my concepts in realism. Fiction is, by definition, fictitious, but can be (loosely) plausible if based on actual science. It’s impossible to list every point in this book, but here are some of the more interesting facts woven into the narrative.

  The crashed UFO is based on an asteroid that exploded above the ice of Antarctica 430,000 years ago, showering the continent with tiny metallic debris. As this was an airburst event rather than an impact, there was no crater, but it left me wondering, what if that was more than a metallic meteor? The remnants were scattered across a large section of the continent. They were barely a hundred microns in size, no bigger than the width of a human hair, and buried beneath the ice for hundreds of thousands of years until we discovered them.

  In this story, the alien spacecraft is part of an automated sample return mission akin to the kind of device we would
use to retrieve rocks from Mars or Enceladus. Operating at extreme distances, it needs to be autonomous and able to conduct repairs/maintenance. It has AI decision-making capabilities when selecting samples, and this leads it to release Nick at the end of the novel when it realizes its dragnet has swept up a sentient being.

  Life on the ice is extreme. Explorers venturing into the Arctic wilderness of Baffin Island in Canada need between three thousand and five thousand calories a day. To reach this, they’ll eat sticks of butter. Danish explorer Mille Porsild said, ‘You actually get so hungry that eating a stick of butter or eating a piece of jerky with a chunk of butter in between is quite delicious.’ She even described sticks of butter as her ‘snack of choice.’ I can’t speak for you, but I think I’d be sick if I ate that much butter in one sitting.

  Living in Antarctica is like being on another planet. Summer is four months of unrelenting sunlight, while winter is four months of darkness. In between, the days grow shorter or longer at an astonishing rate. The last day of sunlight each year is only about 40 minutes long. Imagine sunrise occurring at noon and sunset happening just before one in the afternoon. Such rapid, extreme variations play hell with the circadian rhythms of the scientists and engineers stationed there.

  Nick’s story about the high school skeleton is one from my own life. As far as anecdotes go, it was macabre but human. Back in the 1980s, little thought was given to the ethics of using the actual skeleton of a teenaged girl killed in the flooding of Bangladesh to teach biology. I doubt the poor girl’s family consented to whatever process stripped her to the bone and saw her shipped to a high school on the other side of the world. We were told she was thirteen when she died. I couldn’t help but feel she’d been cheated twice. She’d died prematurely and then been sold to another country. With the heartache she endured, I’d like to think she would have enjoyed our impromptu tour of the school and the laughter that ensued. It sure beats being stuffed away in a closet. I wonder where she is now. I hope her remains have been repatriated to Bangladesh and buried with respect. If she’s still in a biology lab somewhere in New Zealand, I hope some other high school students take pity on her and show her some kindness. I’m sure she’d appreciate another school tour.

  Long before the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand, the Māori were fierce warriors, specializing in brutal ambushes that would wipe out entire tribes. Taking prisoners was rare. The haka developed as a form of deterrent—a way of warning against the devastating consequences of war. These days, the New Zealand All Blacks perform the haka before international rugby matches. Although these exhibitions honor Māori culture, there’s no doubt they also fire up the players for the game. Māori culture is built around the concept of mana, which can best be described as honor blended with humility. Māori society places emphasis on iwi and whānau, meaning the unity of the tribe and caring for family. I tried to show these attributes in the character Eddie, who’s loosely based on a couple of people I knew in New Zealand. I grew up hunting deer and boar in the Ureweras so I find the historical quote about the Māori songbird from that region fascinating.

  In this novel, a series of electromagnetic pulses are used to disorient the base staff, effectively putting them in a catatonic state. Although such an effect is fictitious, the idea is based on the use of (TES) Transcranial Electromagnetic Stimulation to alter brain activity in medical treatments. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union developed an electromagnetic weapon capable of inducing a variety of effects on the brain, including causing it to go into a dormant state. Side-effects included nausea, disorientation and confusion—which tied in well with this story.

  Ice is a type of rock. The design of the subsurface ice station was based on the US Army’s excavation in Thule, Greenland and the subsequent scientific research into the viability of tunneling through ice.

  The description of the sounds that were made during the descent through the ice were taken from a video made by Dr. Peter Neff who dropped a piece of ice 90 meters down a borehole on the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. The visual descriptions were based on the WATSON project, searching for microbes embedded deep within the ice in Antarctica.

  When it came to abseiling, I drew heavily on a number of online resources as well as some of my own experience climbing in the Rockies. As a writer, I had to decide whether to be glib and say they just hooked up and magically made it to the bottom of the shaft, or whether to go into detail. I decided on the latter as it is improbable such an undertaking would be taken lightly with civilians along for the ride. Also, I felt it helped the reader better understand the stakes and appreciate the danger involved.

  Life is resilient. Researchers in Antarctica were astonished to find a complex ecosystem well over a mile beneath the ice. Surveys conducted through bore-holes have revealed “small mobile animals such as shrimp and crustaceans called sea fleas… tube worms, stalked barnacles, [and] hydroids, which are related to jellyfish… In order to survive, these organisms would have to feed on floating material from other animals or plants… it is impossible for plants to photosynthesize in the sunless seawater… the direction of the currents beneath the ice shelf suggests the nearest plant life is up to 1,000 miles away.”

  Bioluminescence is astonishing. Yes, there really is a species of deep sea shrimp that vomits light. Remarkably, 90% of our oceans are yet to be explored. What we have seen is awe-inspiring. We humans are clumsy. We throw up lights everywhere, drowning out the way nature teases out the darkness. You can find bioluminescent waves in California and the Chesapeake Bay on the Atlantic. Allow your eyes to adjust to the darkness and you’ll find the water looks like something from Avatar.

  Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni is known as the Antarctic Colossal Squid. Although giant squid are real, the prospect of one attacking a human are slim to none. Large squid can be aggressive, though. The USS Stein was attacked by an unknown species of squid estimated to be upwards of 150 feet long. The squid disabled the ship’s sonar, forcing it back to port. Humboldt squid are known to attack scuba divers off the coast of California.

  Giant squid evolved to survive in almost complete darkness at immense depths. These are depths and pressures comparable to those found in the lakes beneath the ice in Antarctica, but as far as we know, those lakes have only ever held microbes and small creatures. There is, however, a network of canyons and lakes beneath Antarctica that dwarfs the Grand Canyon, so there’s plenty of room for biodiversity to occur on par with what we see in the depths of the ocean. Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni has the largest eyeball of any animal, reaching beyond the size of a dinner plate to that of a beach ball.

  I’d like to thank those beta-readers who have helped refine this novel: John Larisch, LuAnn Miller, Bruce Simmons, David Jaffe, Petr Melechin and Didi Kanjahn.

  Pavel Ananyev helped with the Russian translations, including the radio transmissions to ensure they were plausible.

  Thank you again for taking a chance on Jury Duty. Novels like this are not possible without your support. Please take the time to leave a review online and tell a friend about this unique science fiction story. If you’re interested in future releases, subscribe to my email newsletter.

  Peter Cawdron

  Brisbane, Australia