10. Area 51

by Vincent Pet

  “You figured at least what?”

  Height took another gulp of his scotch before taking a deep breath and breaking the silence.

  “Sit down Brad, there’s something I want to tell you.”

  Brad looked back at Height with a puzzled look as he returned to his chair.

  “You didn’t just come here to say hi, did you?”

  Height shook his head.

  “No. I am still not even sure if I should tell you. I mean, I know I shouldn’t and maybe you will wish I wouldn’t have, once you come to know…but…you are one of the most level headed people I know and I’m convinced you would want to know.”

  Brad made a slight grimace as that slow, confoundable feeling of danger started to swell up from his guts while Height entangled himself as he spoke.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s about the aliens.”

  A cold sweat broke over Brad’s forehead.

  “Don’t tell me they’re back?”

  Height shook his head again as he replied in a very low voice that made Brad feel numb.

  “No, I don’t think they’ll ever be back…at least not any time soon.”

  Height paused before continuing.

  “I just want to let you know how it will all end.”

  Brad leaned back in his chair and frowned as a multitude of thoughts passed through his head at once. For a brief moment he was excited.

  “What do you mean? What will all end? Don’t tell me we discovered time travel and we’ve seen the future?”

  Height shook his head.

  “No, Brad. We will never discover time travel. We are certain of that. Very certain.”

  A lump was starting to form in Brad’s throat. There was finality in Height’s voice that strangled any doubt one might have.

  “As you know, we still had parts of what we now call the multi-dimensional string-quantum computer from the crashed ship that the aliens recovered. About two years ago we were able to make part of it work and since then we are slowly deciphering the information stored on it. There’s a lot of stuff, Brad, simply incredible stuff…so much stuff that our eyes are very limited at what they can see and our minds rather inadequate to comprehend what we see. Given time though, we would have been able to go to the stars with the knowledge contained in that hard drive.”

  Height cleared his throat before continuing.

  “Lately we found out a few things about the aliens. Remember the future they said they were trading our resources to?”

  Brad nodded.

  “That future the aliens talked to us about is far, far into the future, Brad. About three billion years in the future.”

  Brad opened his mouth as if to speak but it took him a few seconds to actually say something. Three billion years! The Earth was already about four and a half billion years old. Three billion years was almost as long as the Earth was old!

  “My God! Modern man has only been around for about a hundred thousand years. I can’t even think what we will look like in three billion years’ time! It is no wonder why they are interested in our resources. That far in the future, Earth must be a totally altered place than the one we know now. The oceans must be dried up, plant life must be scarce if at all present, and the average temperature of the Earth must be unsupportable for most animal life. I can’t even start imagining it!”

  Height’s face illuminated with a poignant smile.

  “You are right. We found images of the Earth from that time on the alien ship’s computer. It’s nothing like our Earth at all. Nothing. There are no oceans, no trees, and no animals on the surface. There’s only sand and rock everywhere, much like Mars today, or better yet, the moon with Mars like canyons.”

  Height paused. He brought his glass to his lips and with one abrupt gesture, emptied his glass.

  “And it’s lonely, Brad. There are no traces of roads, no traces of cities, everything is gone...and the sky seems to be a foggy, dark reddish purple.”

  Brad was staring hard at Height as he struggled to understand what Height was implying. There was something in what Height said that his mind refused to acknowledge.

  “Everything is gone?”

  “Everything Brad; including us. We are no longer here, Brad. Humans are no longer here.”

  It couldn’t be, thought Brad. It wasn’t possible.

  “I don’t understand. The aliens lied to us? Didn’t they say they had a contract with the future to supply them from our past?”

  Brad’s eyes peered intensely at Height as he desperately searched for some answers, even if he was starting to piece the puzzle together himself.

  Height’s bitter smile spread slowly across his face.

  “No, they didn’t lie to us. We were the ones that jumped to conclusions. They did sign their contract with the inhabitants of Earth, just that it wasn’t man. In three billion years, another intelligent species will call Earth home. They will live deep under the Earth’s crust. They will have cities hundreds of miles deep and wide that will span the world. We came across images stored in the alien’s computer. I couldn’t bring them, but they are breathtaking and so very alien. It is not our world anymore, Brad. It is theirs, as it should be. There are these fabricated caves and smooth cubes bigger than you can imagine with seemingly suspended structures that glow in multitude of colors. We found images that are so alien in concept that I cannot even begin describing them. We also found some detailed images of the inhabitants. They definitely come from the insect world. They are about five feet long, segmented, much like ants, but for all intense and purposes they could be silicon based life forms.”

  For a long moment, Brad struggled with his thoughts. He had never thought that someone else other than man could eventually inhabit the Earth. He had never thought that if man were to become extinct, another intelligent form could rise to take its place. Then again, why shouldn’t it be like that? Humanity replaced the dinosaurs, didn’t it? One always thinks of evolution of having taken place in the past, when in reality evolution is something that happens in the present to shape tomorrow.

  “This is unbelievable, Height.”

  Height nodded.

  “They’re rebuilding the Earth. They are trying to recreate the world as it once was. Since they are unable to create it on the surface, they are concentrating their efforts below ground. They have built these immense spaces that they are transforming into life. Imagine, for them, there hasn’t been a tree on Earth for three billion years! They have no idea what a reptile is, what a mammal is, what a bird is! They probably have no idea what an ocean looks like let alone think that something could have lived in it! All this from a planet that is as much home to them as it is to us. We are both native of Earth. We are from their past, they are from our future. I don’t know what else to say....”

  Brad felt a tearing sensation inside that ripped deeper into him as Height told him of this world he had no affinity for. He looked at the rows of books lining his library shelves. Useless was the only word that came to his mind as his eyes jumped from cover to cover. Everything will become futile. How much more time did humanity have? How would it end? What would happen to all this knowledge? He didn’t know why, but one question seemed more important than any other at that moment. He was four years old when he first remembered looking at the stars. His parents had opened his imagination to the mysteries and possibilities of the new frontiers way above his head. He had built his tree house just to be nearer to the stars. It eventually became the spaceship of his imagination carrying him and Bobby to countless adventures towards every point in the sky.

  “Will we have enough time to get to the stars?”

  Height sighed, running his tongue over his dry lips.

  “You know why China is desperately trying to build a life sustainable base on the dark side of the moon? Because they knew! They had an ancient book with all sorts of mathematical equations and riddles in their hands which they didn’t know quite what to make of at first. It had nine br
ain teasers, one in every chapter and just recently they figured out the eighth, which gave the coordinates to something behind the moon. When they went there and found a ship at exactly the position a two thousand year document referred to, they realized that there could only be two possibilities. Either someone had gone back in time to write this book, or that there were forces in play such as aliens which were far past their comprehension. What was dreadful though was that they had discovered that the first eight had happened exactly as forecasted and when they discovered what the ninth would be, they became frantic, to say the least. That is why they started to desperately build their space program. At the same time, they revealed nothing to the world, partly because they did not want to be ridiculed in case the ninth didn’t happen, partly because they started working on time travel and did not want to share this knowledge, and partly because they somehow felt chosen. To them, there had to be a reason why this document had been found in China and referred specifically to their own country throughout. They probably thought that the Chinese government would discover time travel and send one of theirs back to leave the original book for them to find and avert fate. Maybe, they reasoned, the spaceship in orbit was built by China in the far future and sent back to spur them on and save themselves...I don’t know. The only thing I know is that this pride, selfishness, call it what you want on both our sides prevented us from having a fully functional moon base today. With our experience and technology and their ability to manipulate resources, we could have succeeded, not only with the moon base but with other endeavors which might have made a difference to our survival. As things stand now, we don’t have time. Even if we were to help them now, we could never make the moon base self-sufficient in time.”

  Brad went over in his mind what he knew about the book. It was discovered in the 1980s and the few historians that had seen it from outside China at that time had complained about possibly missing information that they felt had been hidden from the world. China had undoubtedly discovered early on that the book was much more than what it seemed, even if it was already precious as was. It wasn’t hard to figure out the truth. The deal between the aliens and the Han dynasty must have included knowledge of his people’s future. They had given him nine mathematical riddles to figure out; the last one obviously containing the fate of his people.

  “What will happen, Height?”

  “Next year there will be a solar flare. It will not be an ordinary flare. There will be a coronal mass ejection, but at a magnitude we cannot even imagine. Actually it will be like a little moon detached itself from the sun and catapulted towards us at more than a million kilometers per hour, enveloping the Earth completely. We will all burn out in a brief second. The Earth will literally be on fire as every city, every town, every house will vanish as if they never were. All the oceans will evaporate instantly. All the water will rise to the stratosphere and will then become lost to the vacuum of space and along with it a good part of our atmosphere. The temperature of the ground will stay well over two hundred degrees for probably a million years. Worse still, will be the radiation that will hit Earth due to the disappearance of the ozone layer. Yet, even under these extreme conditions, genetic material will either survive deep in the ground or its building blocks will be brought again from the stars and evolution will return, slowly but surely through time, until a new species develops intelligence.”

  ***

  There’s a general misconception that our sun is a small, average star. That’s not true. The average size of the stars in our galaxy is about half the size of the sun. The Sun’s energy is produced by nuclear fusion reactions where hydrogen is converted to helium. The surface of the sun is called the photosphere. On top of this lies the chromosphere and the outermost layer of the chromosphere is called the corona. Sunspots are a cooler region of the photosphere and can be huge. In March, 2001, a sunspot thirteen times the Earth’s size was observed. Solar flares originate from sun spots and are literally explosions that burst with the energy of millions and millions of hydrogen bombs. When a solar flare hits the Earth’s atmosphere, it can play havoc on electronic devices. In March 1989, a solar flare left 6 million people without power for nine hours in North America as it shut down a Canadian power grid. Solar flares are quite common but at times a flare can be so powerful that it can eject a stream of superhot gas into space. This is known as a CME, coronal mass ejection, where part of the corona gets thrown into space with temperatures exceeding tens of millions of degrees.

  ***

  A few months later, Brad received a letter. It was from Height.

  “Dear Brad,

  Forgive me if I didn’t stick around for the big event. Call me a coward, but I could never stand fire. Maybe, God will come down and save the world, but I have my reserves on this. He already destroyed the world once by water, and if He Himself said that he would use fire next time, who am I to doubt Him? No, I don’t want to go by fire. After I mail this letter, I will go find myself a nice old oak tree under this magnificent blue sky and fall asleep for the very last time. It has been a great adventure, hasn’t it?”

  On the bottom of the letter, Height had written the date and time of the fatal event.

  About four months after the letter arrived, Brad was abruptly awakened by his worried wife.

  “Brad. Something’s happening to the sun. It’s grayish. I can actually stare at it without blinking. There’s something going on. It can’t just be sunspots.”

  Brad closed his eyes and remained in bed a little longer. He heard the soft steps of his wife leave the room. Funny, he thought. He had never really paid attention to the movement of those delicate steps as they brushed across the hard floor. He rolled over to his wife’s side and thought about the sunspots. They had started last month. Recently a new one had appeared. It was growing at an alarming rate. The general population had been edgy for the last few days, but not more than that. Society rolled along with its usual frenetic pace. There had been some alarming reports from some in the scientific community but most scientists had downplayed the events by assuring the populace that it was the sun’s normal eleven year sunspot active phase and would last for a year at the most. True, they said, there had never been sunspot activity as energetic as this current cycle, but not enough information was known about sunspots to know if it was normal for the sun to be this active at this stage of its history.

  “Brad, I don’t know if I should go. It’s like twilight outside.”

  Brad put his foot down on the floor. He knew it was the last time he would ever get up from bed. For the last four months he had replayed this day in his mind. He had thought about having his whole family at home. He had thought about going somewhere alone where he had never been to before. He had thought about going to the most expensive restaurant in the city with his wife, or curling up in his favorite chair to reread his favorite book. He had thought of what to wear, what to eat, what to drink, and even about the last words he would ever pronounce. After all, he knew the exact second the CME would hit the Earth. In the end though, it didn’t really matter, did it? The most satisfying thing he could think of was to live the day normally. Why should he act like someone else for one day when all his life he had lived like Brad Walsh?

  “Go ahead, Jessica. Holly’s waiting for you. Plus, isn’t it this afternoon that violin prodigy friend of hers is in concert?”

  Holly was Jessica’s best friend. It was about an hour drive to her place and another four hour drive to her country house by the lake. Jessica would have been staying there for the week-end.

  The TV was on as Brad reached the kitchen. Jessica turned to him.

  “Yes, Belinda Stern. Remember that name. She’s going to be really famous one day.”

  Brad glanced at the TV as he spoke to his wife. Luckily he had cable. The satellite dishes were for the most part, inoperable.

  “They’re not saying much about the sunspots.”

  Jessica followed his eyes.

  It was one of those
morning shows. An expert was talking about how to dress sharply at work in order to be noted and succeed. He recommended bringing two suits, a conservative one for the morning and a trendy one for the afternoon.

  “…the morning is when most of the work is done, so you want to give a professional image to your peers as if you’re ready to go, go, go. In the afternoon, you have to convey a relaxed, easy going, confident attitude as if you’re on top of things, you know, that stress free image as if everything is rolling fine even if you have no idea of what’s going on…”

  “Brad, if I’m not able to get in touch with you over the week-end, don’t worry! I’ll be fine. I’ll see you on Monday. Remember to pick up the kids Sunday evening!”

  Brad nodded. The phone lines had been on and off for the last month as sunspot activity played mayhem with the communication satellites in orbit. The kids, meanwhile, were on a hiking trip up north with their cousins and friends. A sudden, painful seizure held his chest tight for a moment as he thought of them. He breathed out slowly. He still remembered their amused looks when he kissed them and hugged them as tight as he could to him; especially his son who not only found his reaction to their leaving for a week disproportionate, but also was starting to think that his father was becoming whacky in middle age.

  A few minutes later, Brad watched from the window as Jessica made her way to her car and left. She deserved more than he had ever given her. Death is like that, he thought abstractly. Before it permanently shuts your eyes, it opens them wider than ever before. You see things that had been under your nose a whole lifetime for the first time. By that time, it was too late to do anything about them. He looked up at the sun before turning away from the window. It seemed to be smoldering behind a grayish filter, almost as if it was peeling away.

  Brad sighed, not quite knowing what to do until that fateful moment scheduled for late afternoon. An unexpected knock on the door though, turned his attention away from himself. He opened his front door and was surprised to see a two military men standing seriously in front of him.