The Peacemaker's Code

by Deepak Malhotra

  Director Druckman came up with the idea of sending something “non-electrical, non-mechanical, and non-living” toward ET-1. “We need something that can enter and exit the kill-zone, something that doesn’t have a brain or an engine, and doesn’t need to be controlled from the perimeter. The only option that I can think of is ballistic—something that will follow its own trajectory once we launch it. I suggest we have a sharpshooter fire a single bullet through the kill-zone and to the other side, so that it passes maybe fifty yards away from ET-1. We place the sniper’s target on the far side of the perimeter and see if the bullet gets through and hits it.”

  This proposal was met with vigorous debate, but ultimately, Whitman approved the idea.

  At 11:25, the shooter was in position and armed with a McMillan TAC-50 sniper rifle. Three minutes later, he took aim and fired. Approximately two seconds after that, a clang was heard as the bullet struck the target on the far side of Touchdown-1. Cheers immediately rang out at HQ-1, HQ-2, and in the Situation Room. No one could have articulated precisely what they had learned from this experiment, or even what they were celebrating, but it felt like progress. A lead. A ray of hope. A first step. There was no visible reaction from ET-1 or the reserves. The sniper’s bullet had not precipitated war. ET-1 might not have even noticed.

  At 11:55, Whitman told the team to keep their cell phones on but to go and get some rest.

  “If nothing has changed by morning, we take another step. I will want your ideas on what that should be.”

  Silla accompanied Kilmer back to his new office so that he could gather some things and lock up. As they were standing by his desk, he reached for her hand.

  “So, what do you think?” he said. “What’s your read?”

  “I don’t think we can reach too many conclusions with such limited data. I think we need to wait for the aliens to make a move. I mean, they’ve come all this way—they must have planned to do something after they landed. Then again, maybe they’re already doing something, and we just can’t tell that they’re doing it. How about you? What do you think?”

  Kilmer frowned. “I hadn’t really considered the possibility that they’re already doing something to communicate or engage with us, and we just can’t detect it. It’s possible. But if that’s the case, waiting around doesn’t really work. The good news, I think, is that we can afford to be more proactive. I mean, they’ve already exchanged messages with us; would they really be offended if we went ahead and knocked on their door? Sure, they might not have doors—and maybe knocking on doors is how they declare war on their planet—so we would need to think this through. But they did land exactly where we told them to. It shouldn’t be a complete shock to them if we try to engage.”

  “True. But can we do it safely? We don’t even know if humans can survive the kill-zone. Although, maybe if we stop calling it the kill-zone, it won’t scare us as much.”

  Kilmer smiled. And then his mind latched on to something. “I just had a thought. Tell me if this sounds crazy.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Think back to high school, when you went to your first dance.”

  “I went to my first dance in fifth grade.”

  “Oh—really? Wow… Did you go with a date?”

  Silla let go of his hand, looking mildly offended. “I was ten years old. What exactly are you implying?”

  “Huh? Nothing. No… What?”

  “What are you talking about, Kilmer?”

  “Sorry. My point is—” He took a deep breath. “My point is you didn’t go with a date. Nobody did, right?”

  “Right. Well, except for Michael Feldman and Kimmy Paxton. But that’s a whole different story.”

  Kilmer was intrigued but decided not to inquire about the details of the Feldman-Paxton Affair.

  “Did you dance very much that night?” he asked.

  She thought about it. “Just a little. Later in the evening.”

  “Why just a little? Do you not like to dance?”

  “I love to dance, actually.”

  “Me too,” Kilmer said, smiling and reaching for her hand again.

  She let him take her hand, but only half-heartedly. “Is this going somewhere?”

  “Yes, sorry. So, you like to dance, but you hardly danced. Why not?”

  “Because no one else was dancing.”

  “Exactly. Now describe the scene to me—at the dance. What did it look like? I bet I’m envisioning the same thing as you, and I wasn’t even going to dances at the age of ten.”

  Silla rolled her eyes and then conjured up the memory. “Let’s see. School gym. Dark, but not too dark. Some decorations, but not many. Strobe lights. A few tables with pizza and soda. Large, empty dance floor. All the boys on one side, all the girls on the other.”

  “Bingo.”

  Silla looked at him. And then she saw where he was going with this. “You know what, Kilmer? I don’t think this is crazy at all. I think you’re on to something.”

  He smiled as she gripped his hand more enthusiastically.

  A few minutes later, they were walking toward the exit.

  “Hey,” said Kilmer, “do you think if I’d asked you to a dance—you know, back in high school—that you would have said yes?”

  She considered it. “I’d like to think so,” she finally answered. “But…” She hesitated.

  “But what?”

  “But… you really should have seen me back then. I don’t think you would have had the guts to ask me out.”

  Silla looked over and gave him an I’m-not-actually-kidding wink.

  Kilmer didn’t feel too bad about it, though. She was holding his hand now—and that was all that mattered.

  ~ 46 ~

  Kilmer walked Silla to her car, but when she leaned in to kiss him, he faded back just enough to avoid contact.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Is this about my comment earlier? I’m sorry. What I meant to say was that I would have leapt for joy if you’d asked me to the school dance.” She grinned.

  “No, it’s not that. I just worry that if I kiss you goodnight, you’ll think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “I see why President Whitman keeps you around. The way you piece things together. It’s incredible.”

  “You’re not nearly as impressed as I would have liked.”

  “And how impressed is that?”

  “Impressed enough to stay.”

  “It’s really late.”

  “We have time,” he reminded her softly. “Especially if you spend the night here.”

  She smiled, but then looked away. “You would have me do the walk of shame down the White House steps in the morning?”

  “You’re a CIA agent. Don’t you always have a duffel bag full of clothes and accessories in your car? Isn’t that in the handbook or something?”

  “You don’t know a thing about the CIA.”

  “That’s only mostly true.”

  She put her arms around him. “Kilmer, I’d love to stay. But I think we should both get some rest.”

  “You don’t trust me to let you sleep?”

  “It’s not you.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I don’t think I would trust myself to be with you in any room that has a bed.”

  They kissed again, and for longer. And by the time it ended, she had decided to stay.

  She reached into the back seat and grabbed a duffel bag. Kilmer was just about to make a joke when she cut him off.

  “Not a word, Kilmer. You don’t want to ruin this. Trust me.”

  ~ 47 ~

  Heirs of Herodotus by D. Kilmer.

  Excerpt from the Introduction.

  It is said that history is written by the victors. But like many aphorisms, this one does not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, the statement was rendered false from the very start. In the fifth century BCE, Thucydides—who many consider the first “historian of war”—gave a detailed account of the war between Athens and Sparta, an epic conflict in which Sparta ultim
ately triumphed.

  Thucydides titled his book History of the Peloponnesian War, a name derived from “Peloponnese,” the peninsula in Greece where Sparta was located. But wait… the Spartans could not have referred to the conflict by that name. For them, every war was “Peloponnesian.” Only an Athenian would call this “The Peloponnesian War.”

  Thucydides was an Athenian, and it is his story that we have all read—and in it, he does no favors to the Spartans. History, it turns out, is not written by the victors, it is written by the storytellers—and in most cases, each side has them, with each writing their preferred version of the tale. The versions might agree on many things, including who emerged victorious and who was defeated—but they will rarely agree on who was the hero and who the villain.

  We should always worry about bias, but the blame belongs, in equal measure, to all those who lift their pens, whether they write on behalf of victor or vanquished.

  Even the defeated get to tell their story—and in it, they are the heroes. For a while, they might even look destined to win. But poetic license has its limits, and no true historian will ever promise a happy ending.

  ~ 48 ~

  Day 16. 8:00 a.m.

  General Allen, Director Druckman, Secretary Strauss, and General Ramsey were in HQ-2. They were videoconferencing with President Whitman, VP Nielsen, Chief of Staff Perez, NSA Garcia, Kilmer, Silla, and Art, all of whom were in the Situation Room. The chiefs of the Army and Air Force were on the phone as well.

  Kilmer and Silla had both walked out of the Lincoln Bedroom that morning, but at different times. And they had arrived at the meeting five minutes apart. They shook hands when they saw each other in the Situation Room.

  After Strauss reported that nothing interesting had transpired overnight at Station Zero, Whitman asked for suggestions on next steps. The ideas ranged from throwing a rock at the spacecraft, to playing music, to delivering a sample of technological and cultural artifacts for the aliens to study, to releasing animals into the kill-zone, to sending an armored vehicle toward the spacecraft.

  Ultimately, five proposals were blessed—two on how to approach ET-1, another on how to engage with the aliens from a distance, and two for how to communicate with them.

  Kilmer had kicked things off with his school-dance analogy. “It’s not that you don’t want to dance. It’s that you’re afraid to be the first one on the dance floor. Everyone is waiting for someone else to make the initial move, and the longer the impasse lasts, the harder it gets—more anxiety, more uncertainty. Now, we’re on one side of the gym, and the aliens are on the other. It’s possible that they came only to study us from a distance, but I doubt it. I think that if there is anyone on board ET-1, they came here to dance. Otherwise, why follow the coordinates we sent them? I think it’s unlikely they came all the way to Station Zero only to get upset if we approach their vessel.”

  Whitman nodded. “I never hesitated when it came to dancing, but I see what you mean. What do you suggest?”

  “That we enter the kill-zone and approach ET-1. Instead of a soldier who advances cautiously with his weapon drawn, we send a larger group that tries to act non-threatening. Like you’re asking someone to dance—or welcoming them to your home. My hypothesis is that the aliens are more likely to respond aggressively if they see our soldiers in formation or hiding in the bushes. If we accept vulnerability first, maybe they reciprocate.”

  “And what about the safety of our troops?” asked General Ramsey, the commanding officer at Station Zero.

  “We do need to think about that,” Kilmer responded. “But we should at least get to the one-hundred-yard mark, the very edge of the kill-zone. Beyond that, perhaps we move a bit slower. Maybe we use guide dogs on long leashes to lead the way. Maybe we just start talking from there and hope they get the message that we came to communicate, and not to fight. I’d even advocate taking gifts, but I have no idea what that would look like to them.”

  “I can’t even figure out what to buy for my wife,” Nielsen joked. Everyone laughed.

  General Allen asked a question from HQ-2. “Would our men be armed?”

  “I would suggest not,” Kilmer replied. “But I leave that to your judgment, General. It might be risky to go unarmed, but it does build trust. And if the aliens can detect a weapon, or if a soldier brandishes it under pressure, that could create a problem.”

  Strauss interjected. “I would want our soldiers to brandish a weapon if they were under pressure. That’s why we arm our soldiers in the first place, Professor.”

  General Allen spoke up in favor of Kilmer’s proposal. General Ramsey was less supportive. Ultimately, Whitman gave it the green light.

  “General Allen,” she said, “I want you to work with General Ramsey and Professor Kilmer to come up with a plan that all of you are comfortable with—and it should include what our people will do if they get close to ET-1. I want something by 2:30. Anything else to discuss with regards to how we might approach them?”

  General Allen weighed in with another suggestion. “Madam President, I propose we make the scene surrounding ET-1 less chaotic. Sending in drones or troops or deliveries from all directions might confuse or overwhelm them. It might also obscure the fact that our intentions are benign—that we simply want to engage. I propose we streamline our approach so that we always advance toward the kill-zone from the same direction, and along the same path.”

  General Allen then made a specific proposal along these lines: Given the angle at which the spacecraft was parked, the point of departure for all engagement should be 300 degrees on the perimeter. This would allow a straight-line movement toward ET-1, orthogonal to the length of the spacecraft, and aimed right at its midpoint. “Imagine it’s a castle and we’re paving a straight path from the perimeter to the front gates.” No one objected.

  The discussion then shifted from how humans might approach ET-1 to other forms of engagement. Director Druckman jumped in from HQ-2. “I like the idea of sending care packages. We need to figure out what to put in them, but thanks to Strauss, we already have a way to make the deliveries.”

  Overnight, HQ-2 had solved the problem of safely delivering something close to ET-1 in the kill-zone. It was a non-trivial problem. Any delivery device, like a drone, would probably malfunction and fall apart as soon as it entered the kill-zone. You couldn’t tie a care package to a bullet or an RPG and shoot it at the spacecraft. And parachuting something from a high-altitude drone wouldn’t work either—the winds would carry the item off-target. That’s when Strauss suggested a variation on the parachute idea. He proposed the use of a catapult to deliver items close to ET-1, with a parachute attached to the catapulted item so that even fragile items might be delivered. Over the next few hours, the defense secretary oversaw a design competition: four separate teams of soldiers and staff raced against the clock to create prototypes that could be field-tested by breakfast. The winning entry had been called the “Cata-chute” by its inventors. It was quickly renamed the “cat shooter” by Secretary Strauss—for absolutely no reason other than it was more entertaining.

  With no one objecting to the idea in principle, Whitman asked Nielsen to lead a small working group that would propose a list of items to send to ET-1.

  The conversation then switched to communicating with the aliens. Until now, the only successful messaging had involved the sending of coordinates, but that would hardly suffice now that the aliens had landed on Earth. The problem was not figuring out what to say, it was how to use FERMAT to convey the desired message. After various ideas for how to tailor FERMAT to deliver more complex messages hit a brick wall, the group concluded that the language they had used while ET-1 was in space just wasn’t cut out for the task at hand.

  “Maybe we’re thinking about this the wrong way,” Silla finally said. “It’s clear that our language isn’t rich enough to do the things we want it to do. But maybe that’s okay. It reminds me of when my father was sick, and we had very little time left. There was a lo
t that I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the words. I wasn’t even sure he could hear me. So, I just used the words I could find—simple ones—and I made sure to convey just enough for him to understand what I was feeling. And if even that was beyond his comprehension, at least he would know I was there—that I hadn’t abandoned him.

  “We keep thinking about what we would like to convey to ET-1: that we come in peace, that we would like to enter the kill-zone, or that we want them to reveal themselves or their intentions. Maybe, instead, we should just think about what our language can do and see if any of that can be used in a productive way. Maybe they just need to hear our voice. Maybe they just need to know we’re trying to communicate. Maybe we start with that.”

  “Okay, let’s try starting from there,” Whitman agreed. “What can we do with FERMAT?”

  Art jumped in first. “We’re dealing with numbers. We’ve already used them to provide coordinates. They can also be used to count, to tell time…” And then the brainstorming took off.

  “To measure angles.”

  “To measure distances.”

  “For binary signal communication—yes versus no, or on versus off, for example.”

  “To create patterns.”

  “To create secret codes.”

  “To color by numbers,” Druckman offered.

  Laughter.

  “Am I the only one with grandkids?” he protested.

  With a number of ideas on the table, the group discussed how these capabilities might translate into something functional. In the end, Whitman approved two proposals.