Children of the Dark World

by Will Townsend

  Finally, in 2202 the planetary defense system was ready for deployment. By this time four more ETO’s had joined the Lansing and Lao and the deployment was much simpler than the communications deployment and happened in a remarkable seventeen days.

  Although the details of the defense system had been argued over for years everyone had finally agreed that every type of sensor humanity possessed must be brought into play. Humanity was not hanging its proverbial hat on any single detection device to alert it to potential calamities but instead relied on each sensor group to verify the results of the other sensors. Everything from infrared sensors to radar to Doppler shifting analysis was applied on every sweep of the grid. The world had not forgotten the mistakes of its’ past and the Council was determined not to repeat them.

  At about the same time as the planetary defense grid went online for the first time a prominent stateswoman, Everly Fields by name, who’d been born five years before the Calamity and who was a close confidant of the late Samuel Lansing, penned an article that was transmitted across the world within minutes via the new communications net and viewed by the eager eyes of billions. The article was entitled; Who Grieves for the Lost Children. The article applauded the necessary steps the World Council had taken to once again connect the citizens of Earth to each other and defend the population from a repeat of the Calamity. She did, however, take issue with the inaction of the Council on one matter.

  “While the World Council has acted well and steadfastly on the behalf of humanity and has accomplished those things necessary to ensure the continuation of our species, I’d like to remind them of a promise made by this council some sixty three years ago to President Lansing and Premier Lao. A promise that was reaffirmed just thirty-two years ago upon the passing of these legendary men. As these two beloved men stepped down from the offices they held to initiate the era of the World Council and commence the Long Road, they asked but one payment for their years of service to mankind. Who among us can put a price on the service given by these men to humanity? Surely not I, who served them both, and wept, like a child on the day of their deaths. Their gift to us is the world we find ourselves living in today. We who remember the terrible days of the Dying know that their gift was beyond measure. So these two men, who were owed anything their minds could’ve imagined from a grateful populace, asked only one thing of the rest of humanity; remember our lost children.

  “When the Calamity struck I was only a girl of four, but even then I knew that a quarter of a million humans lived off Earth at various colonies and outposts, thirty-one to be exact. In the midst of the Calamity and the Dying that followed we can be forgiven for not thinking of those men, women and children so far away. We were too overwhelmed with our own survival.”

  “But President Lansing and Premier Lao did think of them every day and promised each other that when they were able they’d come to their aid. They were never too overwhelmed with catastrophes or the saving of lives or making the world better for humanity to forget the ones we left behind. I entered service to President Lansing shortly after my eighteenth birthday and one of my first memories of him was when I had made an error in his daily reports and apologized to him for wasting his valuable time. He just laughed and asked me why his time was so much more important than mine. Predictably, I stumbled nervously through an explanation of how much more important he was to humanity than someone like me. He stopped laughing then and became very serious.”

  “You know Everly,” he said with his frown-face, as I always called it, “that is an illusion that’s been created over the millennia of human history by powerful men, and women, seeking more power.”

  “To convince one human being that they’re not as important as another is the most dishonest thing we can do to one another. As Albert Einstein once said, ‘All people are geniuses, but if you judge a fish on his ability to climb a tree, he will go through life thinking he is stupid’. Do you honestly think I could do my job without the work carried on by the people you see in these offices daily? I’m merely the face to their work and that’s my job. To think myself irreplaceable and my value to be more than all others is the folly of the old corporate CEOs. I’m no more important than the farmer in the field or the engineer building the bridges. That’s the terrible lie that we’ve allowed ourselves to believe. There’s no human being who is more important than another. Humanity will always go on after the supposedly indispensable person is no more. But the lesson that’s often learned from this truth, that no one is indispensable, is also a lie. The real lesson is that every human being is of value, as Einstein tried to tell us.”

  “But every day for the last fourteen years you’ve devoted yourself to saving humanity,” I responded.

  “Have you done any less in your time here? Have the others? Truly, every day in this office I’m able to help the children of humanity. But you and everyone else here does the same every day and there are limits to what any one person can do. But together we’ve achieved magnificent things. Since I accepted this office I’ve continually reminded myself that no person is more important than another. I’ve had to prioritize how help is given, but eventually we got the help to the people that needed it. There’s only one thing that grieves me since I started down this road and Lao feels the same as I. On the day it all fell apart there were exactly two hundred and forty-eight thousand, nine hundred and twenty-three humans off planet. They were doing their jobs in the name of humanity and Earth and every day Lao and I’ve had to accept the fact that there is nothing we can do for them.”

  “You see, we’ve always viewed humanity as our children. And while we may’ve had to delay aid to some, and alter plans for many others, we could still do something for them. It was just a matter of scheduling and prioritization. Every day we’ve had to accept the fact that we’re powerless to help those brave people off world and it grieves us terribly. How betrayed they must’ve felt! How scared and utterly alone they were so far from home and the people they loved on the day of the Calamity. And no one is coming to rescue them or to even aid them because we can’t. And every day we’ve had to accept our failure of them.”

  He suddenly sounded very sad at that point and wanting to cheer him up I said, rather naively I must admit, “But it’s not a matter of you won’t help, it’s just not possible for anyone to do anything to help them.”

  He smiled at me, rather sadly I thought, and then spoke.

  “A parent doesn’t get to console themselves that help is just not possible. A parent can never comfort themselves with the assertion that there is nothing they can do because those words turn to bitter ash in their mouths. They sound hollow and brittle. The parental mind is inconsolable. So every night Lao and I, we speak of the plans we’ve made to save our lost children and how those plans will start preparation any day. Of course that will be right after we’ve managed to feed humanity and after we’ve rebuilt the transportation systems and after we’ve cleared the skies. But we know we’re lying to ourselves and our grief is inconsolable. We both lost our biological families and so we’ve adopted humanity to fill the void. So knowing that we can’t help those off planet is the terrible burden we’ve had to endure.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the world, no, fellow citizens of Earth, I’ve never spoken of that moment to anyone before. Mostly, it’s because President Lansing was such a very private man. And it was impossible to work with him without feeling a great sense of loyalty toward him. But mostly, it was because it was my special memory of him. But now I share it with you, because I realize he never meant for me to jealously guard that moment.”

  “I believe that we’ve followed the Long Road in the way he and Lao would have wanted us to and that they’d be proud of the progress we’ve made. I look into the skies of earth and I see the enormous airships moving people across the world and further up, equipment into orbit. I see the maglev trains spurting across the world and I can simply reach out with a voice command and contact any one of a number of friends I mad
e over the course of the years while working for the beloved ones.”

  “But it is what I don’t see that makes me sad, and leaves me thinking that we’ve betrayed those two wonderful men who were like fathers to our race. After the Calamity our night skies were a tortured landscape that reminded us daily of all that humanity had lost. There was rubble orbiting the Earth and shards of the many objects we put into the skies and the magnetic dust that isolated us. Every night they rained down on us and the skies were full of shooting stars for years and the once starry skies shimmered and danced across our vision blotting out anything beyond. The old telescopes from before were either destroyed, or, slowly over the years rusted into nothingness. The enormous, far seeing instruments built by the governments were all destroyed or cannibalized and the personal ones were melted down for their metal. It made sense at the time because they served no purpose under those alien skies and our survival depended on it.”

  “Five years ago though, through the efforts of this Council whom I address now, for the first time in eight decades humanity gazed into a starry night. But we no longer have the instruments or astronomers to explore the heavens. We’ve achieved wonderful things on the Long Road but we’ve forgotten our promise to the men who made this future possible.”

  “Every day, in President Lansing’s own words, from the day of the Calamity onward, he and Lao grieved for the lost children of Earth. Now they’re gone and I don’t know when we’ll see their like again. I’m an old woman now, but I remember the promises as if they were yesterday, so I ask the Council this one question only. It has been thirty years since the roaring millions made the promise that echoed across our world and which the Council affirmed. So tell me, people of Earth “Who grieves for the lost children?”

  The old woman’s plea rolled through the population of Earth like the tsunamis of the Calamity. And the people asked themselves, what does it say about us as a people? We have so soon forgotten our sworn promise, made by the funeral biers of the two beloved men who gave us everything they had to give? The roar of the masses was heard once more reverberating through the halls of government and the World Council stood forth and reaffirmed their decades old promise to the fallen leaders. Humanity would no longer sit, blind and deaf, to those who’d been abandoned.

  And the task began as astronomers were once again trained to delve the mysteries of the cosmos and the gigantic radio dishes of earlier years appeared once more. Telescopes were launched into orbit and relay satellites for communication off world were constructed and went aloft aboard the ETO ships. Many failed and replacements were funded and launched with amazing speed. Mankind had much to rediscover in this science and had grown ignorant over the years in its artifices. So the sciences of the heavens were relearned as the bridges were once again built into the sky.

  In the ninth year of the project the transmitters and radio telescopes of Earth were again tuned to the frequencies of old and turned toward the sky and the lost children of Earth.

  And the silence that greeted them was deafening.

  THE SILENT SKY

  On the day of the Calamity there were thirty-one colonies and outposts spread out across the solar system. There were two hundred and forty-eight thousand nine hundred and twenty-three humans sprinkled throughout those outposts and colonies.

  Over eighty-six thousand people were distributed throughout the six lunar colonies and another fifty-seven thousand were dispersed among Mars’ six colonies. The number in the asteroid belt was one hundred and two thousand sprinkled throughout as many as fifteen colonies and bases. This was only an estimate because the colonies and the bases in the asteroid belt were owned corporately and the corporations guarded their secrets jealously. The only information that the corporations would confirm was that there was indeed colonies on the four main asteroids of 1 Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas and 10 Hygeia, along with numerous start-ups in the Cybele and Eunomia families of asteroids. The farthest outposts from Earth were located on the Galilean moons of Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto. These were scientific bases funded in part by the governments of Earth and in part by the corporations. There were possibly twenty-seven hundred people stranded there when the Calamity struck, although the numbers were suspect due to corporate secrecy.

  Now as humanity turned their gleaming new listening devices and radios to the night sky, the silence that met their efforts hung like a palpable cloud over their hopes which had erstwhile been high. Every frequency from the century old records was tried and met with the same brooding silence. Many feared they were merely calling out to an empty graveyard that had long ago witnessed the passing of humanity’s first foray into the void. Nothing remained, they whispered, but bones and the regrets of betrayal. Not even the former lunar colonies responded.

  But then one of the new breed of astronomers had taken to the podium. As Carl Sagan had done in the late twentieth century and Neil DeGrasse Tyson had done in the early twenty-first, he spoke to the public in that reasonable, wise-uncle fashion. Like his predecessors he was able to distill down complex ideas and systems into main stream language while conveying the conception without the unnecessary scientific verbiage. His name was Stuart John Covington, a name that, given his extraordinary skills of conveying complex conceptions, failed utterly to convey the heritage of the owner. In Covington the world could see first-hand the continued blending of humanity, English-Chinese father and Indian-Brazilian mother, and as such, a significant bulk of humanity identified with him.

  Covington was thirty-three when humanity experienced the silence of the heavens, already possessed of degrees in three other disciplines before he launched himself into astronomy as the science reemerged into the reality of the twenty-third century. It was often rumored that his IQ would make Einstein blush with envy.

  After reading numerous editorials and watching live lamentations on the tragic fate of Earth’s lost children by various corporate moguls he decided he’d had enough. After calling the brand new observatory that had been placed under his control by the World Council, he contacted a friend who was connected with the news industry.

  “Erik? How are you?”

  “Just fine Stuart, how’s life treating you?”

  Covington had never been much for small talk and his friends knew it, so he dove right into the proverbial pool. “Listen, Erik, have you been paying attention to this latest round of interviews of the corporate establishment regarding the colonies and the lack of communication?”

  “You know I have Stuart or you wouldn’t be calling me,” the other man said smiling on his end. Erik knew that Covington was incorruptible. Because even if he actually craved wealth and fame, which he didn’t, he was about as subtle and guileless as a brick through a kitchen window, as they used to say. Having watched the latest round of pure speculation trying to be sold to the public as truth, Erik had patiently awaited this call.

  “Can you get me included in one of these so called “panel of experts”?”

  “Yes I can. As a matter of fact I’ve been waiting for your call. What took you so long Stuart?”

  “I’ve been working on a few things that I think are important and I wanted to have a clear and convincing set of facts before I addressed the public.”

  That was another reason Stuart had endeared himself to this modern day media. The facts he used in his sessions, Erik knew, were as unassailable as the characters of Lansing and Lao now that they’d ascended into legend.

  “There are several scheduled right now that I could get you on. But there is one in particular on which I’d like to have you as a guest. Perhaps it will teach a lesson to the corporate moguls that are still trying to insert themselves into governmental affairs. There’s a live conference at two o’clock tomorrow. Can you be ready?”

  “Actually, that’s perfect. Thank you Erik.”

  “Don’t mention it. It’ll give us a boost in audience anyhow. Don’t you want to know who the other panel members are?”

  The face on Eric’s hol
o-screen scrunched slightly in perplexion as Covington thought it over. “No, that’s irrelevant. Thanks, I’ll contact you tomorrow morning to make sure everything is still as scheduled. You’re the best Erik.”

  The hologram disappeared and Erik smiled to himself. It had not mattered one smidgeon who the other panelists were because Covington would be in possession of the facts. But Eric couldn’t wait to see six CEO’s squirm under the withering assault of, probably, he acknowledged, the smartest man he’d ever known.

  The panel was conducted in a spacious studio at a large oaken table comfortably seating the seven panelists and the host, Mariko Hiyoshi. The glare of the multitude of lights surrounding the stage and the intimidating presence of cameras seemed to put the well-dressed CEO’s ill at ease. Or, perhaps, it was the appearance of Stuart Covington across from them that made them as wary as a wildebeest approaching a waterhole. Their manner was nervous but their comportment was arrogant, as if entitled to a greater degree of attention than the others who bustled by attending to the many details of the broadcast. They spoke curtly to the workers running here and there preparing for the event, demanding this and that and sniffing slightly when it did not arrive as soon as they thought it should’ve. For his part Covington went over his notes looking for anything he may’ve missed or correcting a minor point or two. It irritated the CEO’s when staff members stopped by Covington and offered a variety of things for his comfort, while attempting to ignore the impatient CEOs. Covington politely declined all offers with a smile. He never looked up at the corporate deities sitting across from him and in some unfathomable way this seemed to infuriate them. And then Hiyoshi brought the conference to order. Only then did Covington look up from his notes.

  “We’re here today with the CEO’s of the six remaining corporations and a special guest Dr. Stuart Covington. Our topic today will be the lack of success we’ve experienced in our attempts to reach the off world colonies that were isolated in the wake of the Calamity. First question will go to Jochem Werner of the Seisfeld Limited Corporation. Mr. Werner, what do you make of the failed attempts to establish contact with the off world colonies?”