First Contact - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 1

by Ian Creasey

  Johnson stifled a yawn.

  I grimaced. “Which we definitely need, because we can’t work around the clock ourselves. Not if we want to avoid making dumb mistakes due to fatigue. Let’s knock off and start fresh in the morning. Before Johnson decides to curl up on the table for a nap.”

  They grinned at my lame joke, but I couldn’t return the smiles. Things just aren’t that funny anymore, I thought.

  Of course, I myself couldn’t sleep. After way too long staring at the ceiling, I slipped from my bed, raided Britt’s beer stash, and headed for the observation deck. It wasn’t as bitterly cold as before, mostly due to the lack of wind. But I still felt chilled as I leaned against the rail and stared up at the sky.

  We made good strides today, I mused, but something still feels wrong. It was like looking into a funhouse mirror as we tried to solve the problems. I could see them, but the distortions nagged at me. Like I was missing something more important in the fog of exhaustion and haste.

  Trying to nail what was bothering me just made it more elusive. So I let my mind float. The stars. The desert. The night. All the memories and details of the last few days.

  An unmeasured eon later, Britt appeared with his own beer. He smiled when he saw me.

  “Couldn’t sleep either?” he asked.

  I shook my head. He came over and leaned against the railing. We looked at the sky.

  After his third or fourth sip, Britt looked down and cleared his throat. “They put Fire into cryofreeze tonight. Three more deaths today, too.”

  “That sucks.”

  He nodded. “It hurts every time I hear about more deaths.”

  “Yeah, but better them than us. We’re lucky they didn’t bring some disease that could kill humans.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe they did. You’ve heard about the frog die-off.”

  “What?” I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

  He sighed. “Worldwide, frogs are dying. From a virus brought by the Eridani. We still have no idea how it got out of containment. Of course, people aren’t contracting it, but viruses mutate … Who knows …”

  My blood chilled, but I kept my tone as neutral as possible. “No containment’s perfect. Even if you block everything obvious, there’s always someone who believes the quarantine doesn’t apply to them.”

  He nodded. “There were a lot of problems at first, before we built this base. They’re trying to do better for the next one.”

  “What next one?”

  He took a long drink from his bottle. “For when the next ship gets here.”

  “I thought it wasn’t coming.”

  “If we beat this, it will. Besides, it’s not the only one headed this way.”

  I couldn’t keep the ice out of my voice. “What?”

  “From what we can tell, there are nearly a dozen ships headed for Earth or for other planets they’ve found for possible colonization.”

  “My god.” I took a calming breath. “That’s a lot of Eridani.”

  Brit didn’t reply. Mindblown, I just stared at the stars.

  “We’d do the same,” he said finally. “If we could, we’d flood the stars. There would be thousands of volunteers, too. Maybe millions. Even if we knew that some of us would die on foreign shores.”

  Britt swallowed the last of his beer. “I just wish it had been us among the stars, instead of them,” he said. He didn’t say anything else, and finally headed inside in hopes of finding a bit more sleep.

  We met with White the next morning. As he scuttled into the room, I realized my wonder was truly gone. He waved and looked innocent, but all I could think about was frogs. Dead frogs. Millions of them.

  Britt told White what we’d discovered and requested more blood and tissue samples for our biologists to run tests on. He agreed, bobbing his head like an overanxious woodpecker. Or a politician trying to placate his big donors.

  “If we find the cause,” I typed, “we still have to find a cure.”

  “Understood.”

  “It may take some time. We may not be able to save many.”

  “Save cryotechs,” White replied. “Must save.”

  “Why?”

  “Cannot auto-retrieve from cryo. Controls not work well now. Need techs.”

  “Understood.”

  “We will save them,” Britt typed.

  Then he ended the interview, and we headed back to the war room.

  The team was showing glimmers of optimism. The biologists had some promising ideas, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear them, even if I could have understood them. Instead, I told Britt to take charge, because my part was largely done.

  Britt organized the remaining research effort, confident of what they were looking for. I tried to follow along, but in the end just volunteered for data entry. They’d done it for me, so I could certainly do it for them. Besides, it was fairly mind-numbing.

  It took a week to isolate the disease agent, and it turned out we were right. It was the Eridani equivalent of a virus that had mutated and used iron as a reproduction catalyst. It was a long week, especially because I still couldn’t sleep, even though I was working more normal hours. Most nights found me up on the observation deck with a beer, staring at the stars.

  I did ask the general to let me go home, since my work was done. He refused, saying I had “a unique way of looking at things.” He was sure my perspective would be valuable, so he wanted me around. I hung my head, too tired to even throw a sarcastic quip in his direction.

  Unfortunately, the general turned out to be right. I was idly making plots in the war room when one of the biologists let out a loud groan.

  “What?” Britt asked.

  “It’s in their brain cells,” the biologist said. “Not just their blood. We can’t screen it out.”

  I turned and joined the conversation. “You can’t what?”

  “We were thinking that a blood filter might work,” Britt said. “Use the iron to separate healthy blood cells from infected ones. But we can’t filter brain cells. Nor can we use some sort of chemo to target the infected cells.”

  “So you can’t cure it,” I said.

  “Not easily,” Johnson said, his face dour. “Not without a lot more time.”

  “Which we don’t have,” I said. “And the infection’s too widespread to have much hope of containing it.”

  “We can slow it down by cutting off the iron,” Britt said, “but that’s going to be hard, once the remaining ship stores are consumed. It’ll take a while to figure out how to get it out of their food completely.”

  “Again,” I said, “time we don’t have.”

  “A vaccine will take time too,” one of the biologists said.

  “Why?” I challenged. “This virus is like their internal cell sores, right? Their immune system can handle it, until it’s overwhelmed. In fact, their immune system is actively fighting it, or the internal cell sores wouldn’t proliferate.”

  “That’s just a theory,” Johnson said.

  “But it’s the best we’ve got,” I countered. “Maybe if we give their immune system a head start, with some sort of vaccine equivalent, while simultaneously cutting down the iron, their immune systems can win.”

  Britt nodded. “Maybe.”

  “We don’t have time to do much else,” I said. “They’re dying pretty fast.”

  “That’s right,” Britt said. “It’s better than nothing, and maybe we can save some of them.”

  The room let out a collective sigh. Then the biologists turned and went to work, while I just stared blankly at my computer screen.

  Another long week later, we had our first vaccine attempt. We’d had to use a live but weakened virus, harvested from a dying Eridani. They’d tried it on a couple of volunteers, and it appeared to work, but getting the dosage right turned out to be tricky. We had to account for whether individuals were already infected and how infected they might be, and we didn’t have a reliable test for how much was in their systems before
symptoms appeared.

  That brought me back into the heart of the problem. I turned my statistical software package to the task and was able to provide a short table of recommended dosages based on how likely an Eridani was to be already infected. We’d still get it wrong some of the time, but the probability of survival would increase overall.

  That night, Britt joined me on the observation deck, but with champagne instead of beer.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked.

  He grinned. “The general. He offered it when I told him you’d solved the problem of how to save them.”

  “I’m no savior,” I said. “Not by a long shot.”

  Britt shrugged and poured the champagne. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

  I didn’t have any retort. I took the proffered glass and drank. We stared at the sky.

  After a long pause, I broke the silence. “Have you ever wondered how we look to the Eridani?”

  “You mean our appearance?”

  I shook my head. “No. I mean do they see us as their saviors? Or are we just primitive savages that got lucky when they needed us?”

  “They don’t see us as primitive. In some areas, we’re actually more advanced than they are. Mostly in metallurgy. I don’t know exactly how they see us, but not as savages.”

  “That’s vaguely reassuring.”

  “They’re wonderful,” he said, his voice full of awe. “I can’t tell you how privileged I feel to be working here, with them. They’re practically fairies. Like Shakespeare said, ‘It’s a brave new world that has such people in it!’” His eyes drifted off into some pleasant memory.

  I sipped silently. It looks like it’s time to be brave.

  Bravery turned out to be easy. The next morning, I simply handed the biologists a revised dosage table.

  “Are you sure these are correct?” Johnson asked.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “And don’t forget – we need to get all the cryotechs. In fact, you should probably start with them.”

  Johnson nodded. “Right. We’ll get them vaccinated today. That’ll ensure the colony’s survival.”

  No, I thought, it will ensure Earth’s survival.

  But my poker face must have held, because Johnson didn’t ask anything else. He rounded up the vaccination team while I turned back to my computer and quietly deleted every file and every program that could be used to calculate the correct dosages needed to save the Eridani.

  That night, I once again headed up to the observation deck. Except this time, instead of looking at the stars, I stared east. Had my Native American ancestors done the same thing? What really had caused the destruction of that first Roanoke colony?

  The lost Virginia colony hadn’t stalled the European invasion for long. And maybe I hadn’t stopped the Eridani plague either. But hopefully I’d bought us some time.

  I stared at the barren landscape. The cold pierced me through to the bone. I let the wind brush over my face one last time, then went below for some sleep.

  Nectar of the Gods

  By Jessi Rita Hoffman

  What a waste of a Saturday afternoon. Chase kicked his father’s polished teakwood desk in frustration. Half an hour he had sat here, but if he left now, for sure he would be grounded for a month. The orders of Damien Rockfort were not to be trifled with – not by the thousands of minions who served his financial empire, and certainly not by his 13-year-old son. Better to stay and get it over with. But why was Chase to wait for him here in his father’s library? Surely not on account of that little remark at breakfast. It all seemed so formal and mysterious.

  His cell phone rang. Of course – Ted. Chase’s parents didn’t know, but Ted was still his best friend. They had stopped approving of Ted last year when he got kicked out of the private boys’ academy he and Chase attended. Ted liked challenging authority and had asked irreverent questions in class once too often.

  “Whassup?” said Chase into the phone.

  “Infowars dot com. Did you check out that website, man?”

  “More conspiracy theory?”

  “Conspiracy isn’t a theory, dude. It’s for real. The New World Order.”

  “Ted, next thing you’ll be telling me there are aliens in your backyard.”

  “Alex Jones doesn’t believe in that alien stuff – only in stuff he can prove. All the stuff on that website is documented, man. No lie, there’s a global conspiracy.”

  “Ill look at it later.”

  “W still shooting hoops this afternoon?”

  “I’m stuck here a while. Get back to you when I know.”

  The heavy oak door of the library opened, and Rockfort senior stepped inside – an imposing shadow against the wall of books. Chase flipped the cell phone shut.

  “You didn’t turn on a lamp,” said the man in his deep-barreled voice. “Good.”

  Damien struck a match, and a candle flared and sizzled.

  “Weird,” thought the boy. “Why did he do that?”

  Shadows danced in odd shapes on the ceiling. Chase shivered in spite of himself.

  “You’re probably wondering, why I called you here today,” said Damien. “You’re on the cusp of manhood, Chase – the son of an illustrious family with a long-respected history. It’s time you understood where you came from. It is time you were initiated into the heritage of your fathers.”

  The boy had heard his dad’s lectures before, but this was promising to be an especially long one. He mentally waved goodbye to his plans of meeting Ted in the park.

  “There are three classes of men, son, making up what we call ‘society.’ Taken together they constitute the shape of a sacred symbol: the pyramid.” The formidable man positioned himself in a high-backed leather armchair across from Chase. Silver hair and blue eyes glinted in the candlelight.

  “At the bottom of the pyramid are the masses, the laborers of the world. Some call them ‘teeming humanity.’ Wanting in intelligence, they always are in turmoil, victims of the circumstances they constantly blame on others. Incapable of rational thought, they must be led and controlled by their more disciplined betters, who constitute the second rung of the pyramid.

  “These people – the corporate managers, educators, government leaders, police, and military – comprise what the world calls ‘The Establishment.’ But above these two groups is a third group, rarely notice – a small and private nucleus of individuals, never in the limelight but guiding and controlling all the rest. These few silently dictate the rules that the world runs by. It is this elite, obscure group at the top of society that your family belongs to.”

  Damien scanned his son’s face for a reaction, and Chase was careful not to roll his eyes. His father had raved about their family’s superiority ever since Chase was old enough to remember. It was one thing to be fabulously rich and get every toy and opportunity a kid could possibly want. Chase couldn’t complain about that. But it was embarrassing the way his dad went on, as if they were rich by right and better than everybody. Chase hated the poverty he saw on TV and sometimes firsthand when riding with his chauffeur through the city. To his dad, the people Chase felt bad about were poor because they were dumb and deserved it.

  His father was rambling on now about something called global governance, a plan the silent few were enacting to manage the trade, currencies, military, and governments of the world. “It is for the good of all that we do this,” he pontificated. “Left to itself, humanity would self-destruct through ignorance and greed.”

  “Dad, I’ve heard this all before. I really wanted to shoot some hoops with the guys this afternoon. If you called me here because of what I said at breakfast – about being vegetarian – I know I’m not allowed. You don’t have to sit me down and lecture me.”

  “I am going to explain why you will never be vegetarian. Why it is not possible for you to be a vegetarian,” said Damien. He walked across the room, gracefully slid behind his desk, and opened a drawer with a tiny key hanging from a chain inside his vest. He li
fted a carafe of wine from the drawer and filled a long-stemmed glass with the liquid. Chase squirmed in his chair and wondered when this would be over. He felt hot and uncomfortable.

  Damien Rockfort took a sip. “Delicious. Have you ever wondered, my son, why families like ours send their children to private schools, why we never allow you to mingle with the majority? Ours is a sacred bloodline, a DNA of power and knowledge, that must be forever preserved and kept pure. Our heritage of wisdom has been passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, since before recorded history.

  “We were in Sumeria, at the birth of civilization. We came from another place, after our home was destroyed, seeking natural resources to sustain us. We found animals – and humans little better than animals – eating, copulating, filling the Earth with unfettered folly. It was only a matter of time until they multiplied and destroyed themselves, spoiling this planet in the process.

  “Inherently dull-witted by nature, humanity lacks direction. Our people gave this world an intelligent system – a marshalling of resources and capital – that harnessed the abilities of the planet to produce. We gave it the Feudal System and the Industrial Revolution, with all the divisions of labor those entail. While making their lives easier, we organized humanity. We took away their sovereign independence and set them to work for those who were brighter than themselves, making them dependent on our systems in the process. Waste and want declined for the masses, and we, their masters, reaped the rich rewards – well-deserved rewards, for what we gave the rabble far surpassed their former feeble, scrabbling existence.”

  “He should have been a professor,” thought Chase, repelled by his father’s arrogance. Rockfort senior lifted his glass and inhaled the aroma of his wine. He drank a long, deep swallow. Chase felt parched as he watched him. If only his dad would offer him some of that drink.

  “The masses have a duty to pay tax in support of their masters – or their leaders, as we call ourselves to their face. They could not survive without us, and for the gift of our guidance and control, we earn the tithes they pay. These we extract through taxes and interest on debt. All the debt of the world is owned by our people. We lend the minions money that does not exist – s imply by writing numbers on a check. This they pay back a thousand fold through the hard fruits of their labor. Yet they are too stupid to understand or even question the financial system that extracts such interest, choosing instead to obediently pay whatever is demanded, like sheep lining up to be shorn.