“You know what I mean,” she says.
I nod, mesmerized not by her beauty, but by her intelligence.
“Darwin sailed to the Galapagos and caught finches, dozens of them from different islands. He stuffed them to preserve them for the voyage home, but he forgot to label where the birds came from. He missed the opportunity to categorize them properly.
“We heard about him from a mutual friend back in England—Charles Lyell.
“Lyell couldn’t stop talking about Darwin’s industrious mind and his adventures on the HMS Beagle.
“Mark and I stopped by one summer day a couple of years later and asked Charles about his collection of finches. Isn’t that strange, I said to Charles. They’re all quite different. Some have thin, narrow beaks. Others, broad thick beaks. Rather peculiar, don’t you think? Where did you find them?”
“Peculiar?” I say, listening to her put on a posh British accent and chuckling at her recollection of meeting Charles Darwin in person before his rise to fame. She seems to like the word peculiar, which is peculiar in itself as peculiar isn’t a word used much these days. Peculiar is one of those subtle hallmarks that betrays her true age.
“Yes, peculiar. And so Charles says, I assure you, madam, these birds are all part of the same species. They differ only in that they were found on different islands in the Galapagos.”
With that, she stops.
That’s it?
That’s all?
I hunch my shoulders slightly, willing her on, but she doesn’t say anything else. It’s as though there’s nothing more to be said.
“And?” I ask.
“That was all Charles needed,” she says. “Just a gentle nudge to see what lay before him all along. His eyes lit up. All the pieces fell together from there. We talked for hours about barnacles and earthworms, and before long he’s telling us about how he thinks life branches out imperceptibly over countless generations from a common ancestor.
“Darwin may have sailed to the Galapagos and marveled at the wonders of Nature on those remote islands, but he discovered Natural Selection in his own backyard, looking at ants and weeds, ducks and pigeons. It was only in retrospect that he realized how important those finches were.
“Once we saw he was on track, we stepped back into the shadows and watched as history unfolded.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s pretty cool.”
My nose is running with the cold. I sniff and wipe it with the back of my hand, hoping I’m not grossing her out.
“Hey, what about Einstein? Did you meet him as well?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “He was so kind, even as a young man. Michelson and Morley performed an experiment for us in the late 1880s, measuring the speed of light in different directions. We knew what the outcome would be, of course, but it left them scratching their heads for a couple of decades. You see, light always moves at the same speed regardless.
“Light doesn’t make sense. No matter how fast you go, you can never get any closer to the speed of light than you are right now, sitting here on a park bench. Sure, you might race away from Earth at close to the speed of light, but regardless of where you are or how fast you’re going, the light around you always wins the race by exactly the same margin.”
I can’t even pretend to understand what she’s describing, but Sharon’s excited by the concept. To me, her words sound mystical, almost magical, even though I know they’re not.
“Do you know what made Einstein great?”
“No,” I say, feeling dwarfed by the discussion.
“That he accepted reality. Everyone else looked to explain away the results. Not Einstein. If the theory didn’t fit the evidence, then he had to find something that would. Once we saw that, we stepped back. We watched and kept him safe, but he did all the hard work. What a wonderful man.”
I’m speechless.
Sharon asks, “If you had to pick one thing in the last thousand years that has had the most profound impact on your species, what would it be?”
I want to say, “I don’t know,” but I have to show Sharon more respect than that, and not take the easy way out. She’s an alien. She’s from the other side of somewhere. I don’t know quite where. The stars? The galaxy? The universe? It is an astonishing privilege to sit here with her talking about human history—my history. I have to come up with a meaningful answer.
“The most profound change in a thousand years?” I ask, looking deep into her eyes. She smiles warmly, sitting back a little and burying her hands into her jacket pockets. She’s genuinely interested in my perspective.
“Is there just one thing?” I ask, my mind rushing to the various possibilities. “I mean, there’s been so many things.
“Galileo pointing a telescope into the night sky... Ah, vaccines. They’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives... The advent of science as a discipline, allowing us to combat superstition... Writing. No, reading becoming commonplace... The invention of the printing press—that had a huge impact on our species... Or the abolition of slavery. The industrial revolution.”
“Pick one,” she says, being patient with me. It might be cold, but I could melt under her warm gaze.
“Okay,” I say. “The microscope. Without it, we’d have no idea about microbes and the diseases that plague our bodies. It’s an invention that spawned the entire medical field as we know it today.”
She nods thoughtfully.
“But it’s not what you were thinking of, was it?”
“No,” she replies with tenderness.
“So what is it?” I ask.
“Ah,” she says, radiating with enthusiasm. “Not an it. Not a thing, but a concept. An idea.”
Sharon pauses, perhaps to see if I’m going to come up with the answer on my own, or simply to give her own answer more weight.
“Equality.”
“Equality?” I say, genuinely surprised. “Really?”
If anything, I’m a little disappointed by that answer. I don’t get it. Perhaps I’m too close to humanity to see clearly, but equality is a buzzword doing the rounds on TV.
“It’s an idea more than a thousand years in the making,” she says. “The idea that each person counts for one and only one.
“Throughout your history, kings and queens ruled with an iron grip, but their edicts were arbitrary and whimsical, rarely handed down justly. Princes demanded equality before the law, then landowners, then the common man, then slaves, and finally, women.”
She might as well hit me over the head with a baseball bat. I couldn’t be more stunned.
“Equality is the quiet enabler,” she says. “Think about how remarkable these times are. Up until the start of the last century, half of the adult population had no say in the affairs of their own lives.”
“Women?” I say, not having thought about it before. “Women were the last ones to get the vote?”
Sharon nods.“In America. In some countries, the color of your skin barred you from voting. Equality is a catalyst for genuine change.”
I feel somewhat ashamed that for a species that’s been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years, that’s been civilized for at least ten thousand years, it’s only in the last hundred years we’ve actually lived up to our ideals—and even then, only barely.
“I guess I just always assumed... And it makes a big difference, huh?”
“Giving 100% of your adult population the freedom to choose their government is significantly better than keeping it to 49%,” she says. “And yet, even though this principle has been established by law, it has still taken over a century for minorities and women to really come into their own as equals. And there’s still work to be done.
“It’s easy to see the sensational. The advent of nuclear power. Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon. Jet planes and computers leading the charge of change. But it’s the small things, those that seem insignificant, that are often the most meaningful and lasting.”
I’m staring into the eyes of a woman, an
d yet I’m not. I have to remind myself that behind these beautiful brown pupils lies the mind of an entirely alien creature from some other world. If I could see her true form, she would in no way resemble either a man or woman. In less than a day, she’s torn apart my preconceptions about women. From the dance of the soap suds to visiting young Sharon’s grave, and now hearing her talk about equality, I’m seeing humanity through alien eyes.
I splutter, saying, “And you’ve seen all this, the change we’ve been through?”
“Most of it,” she says.
“What about Hitler?” I ask, knowing I’m focusing on the sensational, but I have to know. “Why didn’t you guys kill him? You could have, right?”
“Yes, we could have vaporized him from a low Earth orbit, but what good would that have done?”
I cannot help but blurt out, “It would have prevented the bloodiest war in human history.”
“Would it?” Sharon asks. “One man does not a nation make. There were plenty of people trying to kill Hitler, but they failed to see the broader problem.
“There were worse leaders among the Nazis. Take out Hitler, and Goering, Goebbels, Eichmann, Mengele, Himmler, or even Bormann would have stepped into his shoes. There was no shortage of fascists ready to take power, and the outcome would have been largely the same. No, as tragic as it was, Germany needed to be defeated. If anything, Hitler’s pigheaded stupidity hastened that fall. He made all kinds of stupid decisions that went unquestioned and shortened the war.”
She pauses, and the weight of what she’s describing seems to bear down upon her.
“Your literature describes hell as a place of fire and brimstone, but there’s no hell imagined that’s as bitter as war... And I fear we failed you.”
“You failed us?” I ask. “We failed ourselves.”
Speaking softly, she says, “War is the failure of reason. It is a return to barbaric times, the last resort of civilization. Suddenly, culture is meaningless. War is to society what amputation is to the body—an act of desperation to ensure survival.”
She sighs.
“We did what we could. We petitioned governments, helped catalyze the nation. Mark worked on the Manhattan Project. I served in Churchill’s office, and made sure Alan Turing’s efforts with the Enigma machine made it to the right people. We ensured you discovered radar before the Germans. We did what we could, but we couldn’t intervene. As much as we hated to, we had to stand on the sidelines despite the appalling loss of life.”
“Why?” I ask. It’s a question that’s been burning in my mind for a while. “I mean, even now. Why not send a spaceship to the White House? You know, land on the East Lawn in a flying saucer. I come in peace. And all that stuff?”
“Why not play kindergarten cop?” she asks in reply. “Because it wouldn’t work. Oh, it would get everyone’s attention, but in entirely the wrong way.
“Look at your recent history. Terrorists fly airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in broad daylight. They even admit to it, and still large swathes of the population are convinced it was the U.S. Government attacking its own citizens. No amount of evidence will persuade some people. Disinformation is more dangerous than dynamite. What do you think they’ll make of us arriving in our silver spaceships?”
I hate to admit it, but she’s right.
She takes my hand, holding my fingers as though I were a child.
“You’ve got religious leaders in the Middle East convinced your planet is flat. I mean. Wh—What? After all your rocket launches, your satellites, and space stations, your missions to the Moon, to Mars, and Jupiter, and Saturn and beyond, still they’re convinced otherwise. What do you think they’d make of us?
“We would be demons in their eyes. We would be hell bent on destroying life on Earth as far as they were concerned. Everything we do would have some sinister undertone designed to deceive and mislead people. But they—they would be the vanguards of truth, the grand protectors of life. Too many people would look up to them and follow their lead.”
I wish she was wrong, but I know she’s not.
“We’ve run the numbers,” she says. “We’re continually scouring your social media, sucking up every Facebook post, tweet and Instagram pic on the planet, and the analysis is always the same. Factions will form. Blood will be shed. Hundreds of millions will die.”
Despite the cold, I have my hands out, holding hers as she speaks.
“As well meaning as we may be, if we came down here, we’d take a volatile species and set it alight.”
I nod, saying, “You’re protecting us from ourselves.”
“We’re trying,” she says. “Some days, we do better than others.”
“So what’s the answer?” I say, “What’s the solution? How do we grow up?”
Sharon doesn’t reply. She doesn’t have to. No sooner have those words left my lips, than I know. A single word slips from my cold lips.
“Equality.”
Sharon smiles.
“It’s a quiet revolution,” she says. “It may not mean much to you, but a husband scrubs the toilet, and we rejoice.”
“Because, why the hell not?” I say.
“Exactly,” she says, squeezing my fingers.
“Well, I’ve got to say. This isn’t what I expected. I mean, too many movies, I guess, but I thought you guys would be all ray guns and alien space tentacles.”
Sharon laughs, punching me playfully on my arm.
“Pleasantly surprised?”
“Pleasantly.”
Fuck, it’s cold.
I can’t feel my feet.
I try to hide the chatter of my teeth.
“We should get going,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say, although I don’t want our conversation to end. I want Sharon to tell me about her world, about outer space, about the other planets she’s visited. I want to revel in the mysteries of the cosmos.
We get to our feet and Sharon stops abruptly.
Two black sedans come sliding to a halt, skidding on the ice. I recognize the cars. I’ve seen them before, a few days ago when Mark was shot.
“Run,” I say, pushing her behind me and shielding her from sight.
“But—”
Already, soldiers are spilling out of the vehicles. They’re carrying machine guns.
“Go,” I cry, “I’ll hold them off.”
Hold them off with what, lover boy? Harsh language?
Sharon runs.
I grab one of the wrought iron gates, swinging it closed. Soldiers run in hard toward me, shouting and screaming. “On the ground. Get down on the fucking ground.”
A black-clad assault trooper darts through the far side of the gate, sprinting down the narrow alley after Sharon. I throw myself into him, body checking him into the brick wall like a hockey player in the final minutes of the Stanley Cup. He crashes to the footpath, sprawling out across the snow.
Several other soldiers come running in behind him. They ignore me. Sharon’s the prize. I grab the park bench with both hands, surprising myself with the surge of strength pulsating through my body. I’m high on adrenaline. I wrench the seat off the frozen ground, spinning it around as though I was a highlander tossing a telegraph pole, and send the seat careering through the air into three soldiers.
Someone crash tackles me from behind, connecting with my ribcage and knocking the wind out of my lungs. Several more soldiers pile on top of me as though they’ve sacked the quarterback.
The cemetery is a dead end. The aging brick walls are easily ten feet high, forming a vast courtyard, but I catch a glimpse of Sharon springing off the ground in the far corner, bouncing from one wall to another, scaling the brickwork like a cat. And with that, she’s gone.
Chapter 04: DARPA
—RIP OFF YOUR GODDAMN HEAD.
—YOU FUCKING HEARD ME, THAT’S WHAT I SAID.
What the hell?
I open my eyes but there’s nothing beyond the darkness.
—HATE IS
LOVE.
—HURT IS PEACE.
—WHAT YOU THINK IS RIGHT STINKS
—AND YOU’RE DEAD
My arms are strapped to a wooden chair, locked in place from my elbows down to my wrists. A pair of headphones have been clamped over my head along with some kind of blindfold.
Heavy metal music blares in my ears. The guitar is thrashing a single chord, madly tearing at the strings and sending out a wall of noise. Drums boom around me, exploding like the crash of thunder. I swear, a bunch of chimpanzees are beating on a snare drum, a top hat, and a bunch of tom-toms in some bizarre syncopation that jars the mind. I can hear the chimps screeching and squealing, wailing in the background. All I can think is they’re determined to puncture the drum skins, not to mention my ears.
—LOOK AT ME WRONG AND I’LL GUT YOU LIKE A FISH
—I’LL SERVE UP YOUR HEART ON A RUSTING METAL DISH
Words scream in my ears.
The noise is so loud, it hurts.
I can’t think.
Through the haze of pain, I somehow grasp that this is the point. I’m being tortured. It would have been nice if they’d introduced themselves first, but no, all I get is:
—CRUEL TO BE KIND.
—KIND TO BE CRUEL.
—THIS IS MY WORLD.
—I SET THE RULES.
I don’t know how much of this I can take.
My head is pounding.
The rules.
Don’t play by the rules.
As difficult as it is to think straight with this infernal noise pounding in my ears, I have to try something. Anything. I’ve got to stop this tsunami of sound, but how?
I start tapping my feet and nodding my head in a vague sense of time with the music, if it can be called that.
“Do you take requests?” I ask, knowing there must be at least one other person in the room with me, perhaps a guard or an interrogator.
“Have you got any Def Leppard?” I’m trying to recall as many heavy metal bands as I can. I wonder if I’m yelling. It doesn’t feel like I am, but it’s natural to try to be heard above the noise, even though the maddening racket is confined to my headphones. “D-E-F not D-E-A-F. Be sure to spell it right.”
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