Waking Gods

by Sylvain Neuvel

  12.14 P.M.

  Business of the House (Today)

  6 Dec: Column 1327

  London Evacuation and Safety

  Motion for leave to bring in a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)

  Deborah Horsbrugh (Lewisham Deptford) (Con): I beg to move,

  That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State for Defence to order the evacuation of the area surrounding Regent’s Park and to deploy the Household Cavalry Regiment.

  Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack was both unprovoked and unannounced, which prompted President Roosevelt to call December 7 “a date which will live in infamy.”

  Unannounced. Attacks seldom come with a warning, as the attacker wishes to benefit from the element of surprise.

  There will be no surprise in London. What we are facing today, what stands a mere two miles from this chamber, did not fire from the shadows. It did not sneak up on us in the middle of the night. It appeared in the centre of our city, at first light, and has been standing there, immobile, arrogant, for two days. If it were to attack London tomorrow, it would probably be the most telegraphed, the most well-announced attack in human history. And yet, we are totally unprepared for what may come. To this day, we have done absolutely nothing, made no preparations for what could be an imminent strike. Londoners living a few streets from the intruder are still in their homes, completely vulnerable. This building, this palace, which transformed over nearly a thousand years from royal residence to the home of a modern democracy, is defenceless. If we were the victims of an attack tomorrow, December 7 is a date which would live in idiocy, for we could not have been more warned.

  6 Dec: Column 1328

  Londoners, for the most part, have not fled as they should have. They have stayed in part out of carelessness, but mostly because for ten years now, they have been indoctrinated by the EDC, led to believe that we live in a safe and peaceful universe filled with amicable creatures by an organization more concerned with justifying its own existence than with the safety of the people it is meant to protect. This government has done more than turn a blind eye to this propaganda; it has been active in its dissemination, complicit in its formulation.

  I bring in this Bill so that the government can do the right thing. Evacuate Central London. Bring in the Household Cavalry Regiment, so that Londoners, the good people of the United Kingdom, the world, and the aliens standing in the middle of our great city all know that our sovereignty is not something you can trample on with impunity. Let everyone know that we are still a great nation, a proud nation. To do nothing is simply un-British.

  12.37 P.M.

  Philip Davies (Shipley) (Lab): I rise to oppose the Bill, if only because the right hon. Member for Lewisham Deptford (Deborah Horsbrugh) introduces it on the basis of falsities. First, this building is not defenceless, nor is the city of London. There are nearly six thousand troops patrolling the streets. Last I checked, Combermere Barracks had not moved, and is still less than twenty-five miles from Central London. The Household Cavalry Regiment is on alert, and is less than forty minutes away. Second, I cannot stay silent while Londoners are called careless for not abandoning their homes. To the best of my knowledge, the right hon. Member from Lewisham Deptford still resides in London, which would make her careless herself, or a hypocrite. I will—[Interruption.]

  Mr. Speaker: Order. I—[Interruption.] I will have order.

  Dec: Column 1328

  The Secretary of State for Defence (Alex Dunne): Mr. Speaker, if I may add a few words to those of my esteemed colleague, I would like to comment on this most ridiculous analogy with Pearl Harbor. The attack was both unprovoked and unannounced. It would be nice if the right hon. Member for Lewisham Deptford (Deborah Horsbrugh) would listen to her own words. Unprovoked seems to be the operative one in that sentence. History would look upon a Japanese attack very differently had the Pacific Fleet been deployed near Tokyo Bay the day before. I am not reluctant to commit to action, but I will not provoke beings we know little or nothing about for the sake of posturing. I will not send soldiers on a grand-sounding mission to oppose an enemy they cannot fight. I will not start a war. That would be un-British.

  Question put (Standing Order No. 23) and agreed to.

  Ordered,

  That Deborah Horsbrugh and Harry Gilbert present the Bill.

  Deborah Horsbrugh accordingly presented the Bill.

  Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on 12 December, and to be printed (Bill 116).

  Oral Answers to questions the Prime Minister was asked—

  6 Dec: Column 1329

  Daniel Stewart (Rutland and Melton) (LD): The Sunday Telegraph carried a UK-wide poll which shows that 62 percent of the British people believe the government is not doing enough. Will the Prime Minister tell us what he plans to do to alleviate the fears of the population? Or will he stand before this assembly and tell us he will simply ignore two-thirds of the British people?

  The Prime Minister (Frederick Canning): This is not a popularity contest. This is a time to do the right thing, and, sometimes, doing the right thing means being patient. We have to deal with the reality of the situation. Part of that reality is that the United Kingdom is part of a worldwide organization known as the United Nations. That organization has a branch whose sole purpose is to handle situations such as this one. We have a responsibility to the rest of the world not to engage in the kind of hasty action that would put the entire planet in jeopardy. Make no mistake, this situation concerns everyone, not just the people of London. What we do here, now, will define the relationship Earth has with an entire civilization. I will not take that lightly, and I will not put the population at risk by succumbing to public pressure.

  Daniel Stewart (Rutland and Melton) (LD): I would like to remind the Prime Minister that this government survives because of Lib Dem votes. It would be imprudent for the Prime Minister of a minority government to brush aside our concerns if he wishes to continue governing. The Prime Minister thinks he can ignore the British people until the next election, but he cannot ignore us, or that election will happen much sooner. Liberal Democrats will not be silenced. I for one will give some serious thought to these issues before casting my vote next week.

  FILE NO. 1429

  INTERVIEW WITH MR. BURNS, OCCUPATION UNKNOWN

  Location: New Dynasty Chinese Restaurant, Dupont Circle, Washington, DC

  —Greetings, Mr. Burns. I took the liberty of ordering for you.

  —Did you get the Indonesian rice?

  —Kung Pao chicken. It has been nine years after all.

  —What if I’d been here yesterday? You know people do eat even when you’re not around.

  —Forgive me. I did not mean to be presumptuous. I assumed you had been away since I have been unable to reach you for nearly a decade. I have also had this restaurant under surveillance, and I know you have not eaten here since we last met.

  —For nine years? I should be flattered.

  —Only during business hours.

  —Of course. I wouldn’t want anyone to work overtime on my account. No sniper this time around?

  —No. Not this time.

  —Ahhh. I’m touched. How’ve you been?

  —Occupied. Can you tell me why you disappeared?

  —I didn’t disappear! I was … occupied. And now I’m back!

  —You are back, just as a giant alien robot materializes in the middle of London. That seems … convenient.

  —I know! Can you believe I almost missed it?!

  —Are these the people who built Themis?

  —Oh, it’s them all right.

  —Can you tell us what their intentions are?

  —I don’t know. Right now—

  —The robot is not moving at the moment.

  —It may not be moving, b
ut it’s doing something. Right now, it’s scanning everything and everyone around it.

  —For what purpose?

  —Maybe they’re curious.

  —What should we do?

  —Now? We should eat!

  —Please. We are in the midst of a pivotal moment in our history, one that could signal a new era of discovery, or put an end to us all. Whatever … personal conviction is stopping you from helping us must be weighed against the stakes at hand.

  —You really haven’t been listening to anything I say if you think I’m keeping things from you out of some misguided principles. That robot will do what it came here to do, whatever that is. There isn’t anything you can do about that. For now it’s scanning you, so be scanned.

  —Is it here because of Themis?

  —It could be. Does it really matter? It’s here.

  —My understanding of space travel is very limited, but if traveling from their home world to our planet takes several years, or decades, they might not be aware of what has transpired recently, or that we have discovered the robot they buried. This may sound stupid to you—

  —No! Not at all. You’re a little off. It takes about ten days to get from there to here. But you’re absolutely right in that they’re probably completely unaware of what happened during that time. If you did anything really bad last week, you might just get away with it.

  —Making fun of my ignorance will not stop me from asking. I am trying to prevent a war. There must be something you can tell me that will increase the likelihood of a peaceful resolution.

  —Do you like squirrels?

  —I ask for your help in preventing a conflict of apocalyptic proportions and your answer is: “Do you like squirrels?”

  —Yes. I have a good squirrel story.

  —Of course. By all means.

  —Squirrels can hide thousands of nuts every year. They—

  —What species?

  —Does it matter?

  —There are several species. Some bury nuts individually in multiple locations, others will stockpile them aboveground.

  —I don’t know. The grey ones with the bushy tail. The ones in the parks. They bury thousands of nuts every fall and they look for them during winter when they get hungry. Squirrels have tiny brains, though. They can’t remember where they hid them all, so—

  —Studies suggest they recover about one-quarter of the nuts they bury, but—

  —That’s what I said. So they end up sniffing around everywhere and they find a lot of nuts that were buried by other squirrels.

  —I was going to say that they do remember a significant number of cache locations. In a controlled environment, they have been shown to retrieve nuts from their own cache sites up to two-thirds of the time after delays of four to twelve days.

  —Can you stop interrupting? It’s a story. There’s a fairy in it. No, I don’t know what species of fairy.

  —My apologies.

  — …

  —Please, continue.

  —Too late. I’m curious now. How do you know so much about squirrels?

  —Work. Squirrels do not simply hide nuts and dig them out when they get hungry, they will check on their cache sites to make sure they have not been pillaged, and will often … reorganize their stock, rebury nuts in different locations. When a squirrel surveying its hiding sites encounters another squirrel looking for food, it will use various techniques—visiting empty sites, pretending to bury something—to deceive the predator and avoid revealing valuable nut-location information. I briefly monitored a research project hoping to mimic squirrel deceptive behavior in robots and automated drones. A robot designed to guard military supplies could, for example, alter its patrol route to lead an approaching enemy away from what it is trying to protect.

  —Military squirrel applications.

  —Indeed. Now, please continue with your story.

  —Where was I? Oh yes, so the squirrels forget where they hid most of their nuts. One day, in a city park somewhere, a fairy shows up, and she sees this young squirrel digging aimlessly through the snow—the poor thing’s all skin and bones, starving to death, all scuffed up from fighting other squirrels—and she feels her tiny fairy heart breaking. She blows a bit of magic dust at the creature and flies away with a smile on her face.

  The squirrel sneezes to get the magic dust out of its tiny nose. As it clears its head, it suddenly remembers it hid an acorn at the base of a nearby tree. Oh, and one over there! And there! And there! The fairy gave the squirrel a photographic memory so that it could find all the food it painstakingly buried in the fall.

  When spring comes, the fairy, still feeling pride over her good deed, visits the park again, hoping to see her squirrel thriving. She spots a young squirrel on a park bench, but hers had a scar on its tail. Another one is climbing a tree, no that’s not the right one either. The fairy gets her hopes up about a hundred more times that day, all the while getting mad at herself for not making the squirrel pink, or something else that would make a squirrel easier to distinguish from a gazillion other squirrels. Come nightfall, the fairy’s exhausted and a bit worried. She gets her magic dust out and makes the first squirrel she sees into a talking squirrel.

  “Hello, little squirrel,” she says. “Hell … Whoa! I can speak!” answers the squirrel. The fairy goes on to explain that she’s given a perfect memory to a young starving rodent and that she’s eager to find him. “You must mean Larry,” the squirrel replies, uncomfortable. “He didn’t make it.”

  Eager as she was to save the sickly squirrel, the fairy didn’t think about all the other bushy-tailed gluttons in the park. Normal squirrels that they were, they had forgotten where they hid most of their loot about twenty minutes after they buried it. When hunger came a-knocking, they searched the park as best they could, digging just about everywhere to find something to eat. They found some of their own nuts, but they remembered wrong most of the time and ate a whole lot of nuts other squirrels had saved for winter, including Little Larry’s.

  With his supersized memory, Larry didn’t make mistakes. He could pinpoint with perfect accuracy every tree, rock, bush, bump, trash can, and lamppost where he had buried a precious red-oak acorn. Unfortunately for Larry, the other squirrels had been digging all over the place and, knowingly or not, stole most of his reserve. Had he been as half-witted as the other animals, Larry would have found some of their nuts along the way, but Larry knew better, and he visited all the 3,683 spots where he had buried an acorn, one at a time, but the handful of nuts he recovered weren’t enough to sustain him. Larry died a few weeks later.

  The fairy is crushed by the news and flies away crying, leaving behind a talking squirrel. Being the only talking squirrel in the park, he lived a wretched life, scaring the living hell out of everyone.

  —Is that the end?

  —Yes! What do you think?

  —I … I enjoy squirrel stories and found yours very entertaining. You conveyed the desperation of Little Larry really well and I was saddened by the news of his demise. With that in mind—and I hope you will not judge me too harshly for my lack of perspicacity—what could this possibly have to do with the aliens in London?

  —Oh, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with them; this one’s about you!

  —I am the squirrel?

  —Yes, you’re Little Larry. You see, I could tell you many things, fill your head with all sorts of information to help you come up with that “best course of action” you’re looking for. Unfortunately, it’s not you they came to see. They’re curious about mankind right now, not you. If I told you anything, you’d try real hard to control the situation, but you can’t. Inevitably, you’d fail, because you’re not the only squirrel in the park. You might be able to stall NATO or London for a few days, but that won’t last forever. People do what people do, and you’ll be miserable in the end because you’ll
blame yourself for something you really have no power over. I like you. I don’t want you to be miserable.

  —How could you possibly know what NATO plans to do?

  —A little bird told me. There are little birds everywhere. My point is you can’t control every single person on this planet, no matter how much you’d like to.

  —What would you have me do? I cannot simply sit back and do nothing.

  —You’re such a control freak! You just keep on doing what you’re doing, and other people will do their thing.

  —And then?

  —How should I know? Que sera, sera …

  — …

  —You don’t seem happy with my answer.

  —I am not.

  —Did I mention how much I like that suit? You look dashing today.

  —Very well. I give up. I would, however, like to ask for your help on another matter, one I hope you will not be as reluctant to discuss. Dr. Franklin is deeply troubled. She is obsessed with the idea that she is not herself. As much as I would like to help her understand what happened to her, I cannot explain it, nor can I fathom what she is going through.

  —What do you mean, not herself? Dr. Franklin is Dr. Franklin. If she weren’t, then she would be someone else.

  —Is she a clone?

  —A clone? Of course not! Does she look like a ten-year-old? She would have been an infant when you found her. Do you really think I would have abandoned a newborn child on the side of the road?

  —I meant a fully grown clone.

  —Oh, movie clones! We don’t do those. Clones are born. You can’t just bake a grown person.