Vaz 4: Invaders

by Laurence E. Dahners

  “So, you can understand what their computers are saying to each other?”

  Vaz nodded.

  “Can you tell what their people are saying to each other?”

  He frowned, “They aren’t people… They’re definitely aliens.”

  Tiona gave Cooper an amused but frustrated look. Turning back to her dad, she said, “Can you tell what the aliens are saying to each other?”

  “Well… I’m still working on this program,” he waved at the programming blocks up on his big screens. “It translates most things. I picked up a poor quality program from them that translates the aliens’ acoustic emissions into machine code. The voice-to-code program on the daughter-ship had become corrupted so they sent a backup copy of the whole program over from the mothership. Their machine code is logically organized so I can almost always work out what their voice commands tell their computers to do, and from that the program can usually work out what their spoken words mean.” He tilted his head, “Fortunately, they were worried that the data corruption may have affected some of their other files. Instead of just using checksums to determine whether the data’d been corrupted, they’ve been sending entire libraries of material from the mothership to the daughter-ship, apparently confirming information identity on a bit by bit basis. Those libraries have a lot of images that have helped my program define a lot of nouns.” He glanced toward Tiona with an odd expression that Cooper thought might mean he was about to divulge a particularly interesting fact. “They don’t have any security protocols to protect their data; as if they’ve never encountered data espionage or hacking.” He gave one of his minute shrugs, “So if you can get me a way to transmit to them, I can probably tell the computer on their mothership to send stuff directly to us. That way I could get the answers to a lot of things that have been puzzling me, but that they haven’t transmitted. If you wanted to know some things, I could tell their computer to send that stuff too.”

  Cooper was so stunned by this assertion that he found it difficult to believe. However, when Tiona turned to look at him questioningly he simply nodded. He’d already been told by the people at NSA that the aliens were coding in trinary, but the coders over there kept saying they just couldn’t get any further understanding of what they meant without some kind of Rosetta Stone.

  Tiona turned back to her father, “Have you been able to figure out what the aliens are doing here in our solar system?”

  “Oh, yeah. The Epsilon Eridani system they came from is severely overpopulated. They’re moving here because they need more room.”

  Tiona turned an appalled glance back to Cooper, but then turned back to her father and continued in a relatively calm tone, “Moving?”

  “Yeah, they have an amazing system for packing millions of hibernating colonists into enormous ships. They time the ships’ transits so that when they come through their orbits send them where they want the ships to go in the next system. I thought it’d be impossible to move significant numbers of aliens over interstellar distances, but apparently their race has moved billions, not just once, but over and over again. Each system they move into eventually becomes hyper populated and then they send a lot of their population on to the next set of systems. They’re gradually spreading around the galaxy.”

  Though Tiona looked wide-eyed, she continued to speak in an ordinary tenor. “You’re not saying they could put a million aliens in a single ship, are you?”

  “More than that. Once they’re in hibernation, they can pack each one into less than 100 liters of space. That means they could put a million of them in 100,000 cubic meters. That’s only one third the volume of an oil supertanker and their ships are quite a bit bigger than supertankers.”

  Tiona frowned doubtfully at him, “They’re physiologically able to live on Earth?”

  “Well, no. The gravity’s too high and the atmosphere’s too thin.” For a moment Cooper felt a surge of relief, but then Dr. Gettnor continued calmly and with what appeared to be less interest than he’d displayed while discussing the floating wheelchair, “But apparently they’re really accomplished at genetic modification. They’ve already modified the aliens on board the daughter-ship so that they have a heavier skeleton, stronger muscles and bigger lungs. That way they’ll be able to function here on Earth. They can modify themselves to live in weightless environments on the asteroids. They plan to float habitat in the atmosphere of Venus and build subterranean habitat on the Moon, Mars, and the moons of the Jovian planets… they’re really quite adaptable”

  “My God Dad!” Tiona said, giving Cooper a horrified look. “Are they thinking they could just move in a huge population to live alongside us on Earth?”

  Gettnor shook his head as if surprised that she might think that. “No, they design viruses to wipe out any lifeforms they find problematic. Apparently they’ve never encountered intelligent life forms before, but they don’t think it’ll be difficult to design a virus for us.”

  Cooper swallowed. As a young soldier he’d been shot at in a couple of conflicts, but hearing Gettnor calmly describe how the aliens fully expected to wipe out the human race was making his heart pound harder than it had back then.

  Apparently it was upsetting Tiona as well. She bent down as if to look up into her father’s eyes, but then stood abruptly back up when he turned slowly to keep from having to meet her gaze. Cooper saw her take a deep, presumably calming, breath. “Dad? Doesn’t this worry you? They’re planning to kill everybody on Earth! You, Mom, Dante, me, Linda, all our cousins… Everyone!”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, not sounding particularly upset. “We’ll have to keep that from happening.” He got up from his chair and walked over to a corner of the basement that looked a little bit like an inner-city boxing gym.

  Tiona said with what sounded like forced patience, “How are we going to keep that from happening Dad?”

  Gettnor jumped up and grabbed an overhead pipe. To Cooper’s astonishment Gettnor started ripping off pull-ups. Cooper had been thinking that the baggy clothing hid a soft obese body—but that couldn’t be. The man must have done forty pull-ups before he dropped off the bar, grabbed a couple of handgrips and started doing push-ups. Cooper counted those and Gettnor stopped at eighty. He did 100 sit-ups.

  Cooper watched this in awe. During the performance Tiona on several occasions tried to ask Gettnor questions, but got no answers. She even went so far as to touch her father on the shoulder a couple of times, but if he noticed he gave no indication. After the sit-ups, Gettnor pulled on a couple of lightweight boxing gloves and began absolutely pounding a heavy bag, then a light bag.

  Hands on her hips, Tiona watched her father exasperatedly for about another minute, then turned to Cooper and said, “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s go talk to my Mom. Milk, cookies, hot chocolate, coffee.”

  Thus Cooper found himself sitting in a pleasant farmhouse kitchen, eating cookies, drinking coffee and talking to the woman that Tiona had inherited her good looks from. It was a pleasant conversation—when Cooper could keep his mind off of the end of the world as he knew it.

  A few oblique questions Tiona addressed to her mother made it evident that Ms. Gettnor had no idea what was going on with the aliens… or what her husband had discovered.

  After the coffee, they went back over to Gettnors’ basement. Dr. Gettnor was back over in the area with all the screens, intently focused on one of the screens with all the programming blocks. He ignored all attempts his daughter made to communicate with him.

  Eventually her shoulders slumped and she waved Cooper toward the stairs. As they walked out to her car, she said, “He’s always been weird and hard to talk to, but I’ve never seen him like this. “ She got a distant look in her eyes, “Well, maybe something a little bit like it. Having a fight with my mom, he once locked himself in the basement for weeks. We didn’t see him the whole time so he might’ve been like this.” She shrugged, “Maybe he’ll be better tomorrow.” She turned and eyed Cooper, “Sorry to say, but i
t looks like General Stoddard was right about the aliens.”

  Cooper said, “Maybe. Somehow we’ve got to get your dad to tell you us how he decoded the aliens’ transmissions. If NSA can’t confirm his translations, I can tell you the president is going to be very reluctant to attack interstellar visitors based on what she’ll think are outlandish claims…”

  ***

  New York, New York — Demonstrations have broken out here in New York City today, as in many other major cities around the world. Central Park has been the scene of a semi-spontaneous “peace party,” with tens of thousands of people watching a number of musical acts, both large and small, that have appeared to call on our leaders for restraint. As has been a common theme in other areas, these people wish to greet the aliens as beneficent emissaries of another world.

  A separate group has marched on the UN, urging it to represent our world to the aliens.

  Another group calling itself “Preparation” has chosen the 9/11 Monument for a demonstration highlighting its concern that the aliens might be malignant rather than benign. Their spokesman urges that the government, “… should hope to welcome the aliens with open arms, but should also be prepared to fight for our lives!”

  The president of the People’s Republic of China revealed today that it used its massive radio telescope to send a welcoming message of peace to the aliens, a message that he claimed had been translated into twenty-three languages. He did not respond to questions about why he believes the aliens would understand any of the languages of Earth, but he is presumably following the widespread belief that the aliens have likely been studying Earth and our audio/video transmissions for some time.

  Shortly after the above revelation by the PRC, a number of other national polities revealed that they’ve sent their own messages to the aliens. A brief review of those messages reveals that they range from saccharine-sweet to aggressively bellicose.

  It is hard to know what the aliens might make of all these intentional broadcasts or even their incidental reception of entertainment broadcasts or message traffic from our planet. In view of the fact that the aliens’ radio emissions are digitally encoded in their own particular brand of trinary computer code and so far remain completely incomprehensible to any of the thousands, or perhaps millions, of people trying to decipher them— unless some secretive government agency has decoded them but not revealed their contents to the rest of us—it seems ominously unlikely that the aliens are particularly interested in communicating with us.

  President Miles eyes narrowed, “He said what?!”

  General Cooper repeated himself, “That they’ve come here because they’ve completely overpopulated their home solar system. They plan to move billions of their people to our system.”

  She shook her head, “And he knows this how?”

  Cooper shrugged, “He claims to have decoded their transmissions.”

  “I thought the NSA said they couldn’t be translated for lack of a Rosetta Stone?”

  “As I understand it, he’s using their verbal commands to their computers and the resultant actions by those computers as a form of Rosetta Stone for verbs. He also says he’s intercepted some encyclopedic data files containing images and, having deciphered their imaging protocol, he’s used those images to translate nouns.”

  The president stared at him for a few moments, then said, “Have him explain that to some of our and NSA people so they can back check him.”

  Cooper slowly shook his head, his dismay evident. “I don’t think we can. While Tiona and I were asking him about this she confronted him with the fact that the aliens were talking about exterminating the human race and he suddenly clammed up. He doesn’t answer questions. Hell, he doesn’t even seem to notice that anyone’s in the room with him. It’s like he’s catatonic… Or something like that—I don’t think catatonic’s the right word, but I don’t know much about abnormal psych.”

  Miles drew her head back in disbelief, “You’re not asking me to make decisions—decisions that would affect everyone on this planet—based on statements made by a man that you’re also telling me is having a mental breakdown?!” Looking at Cooper’s expression she frowned unbelievingly and said, “Are you?”

  Cooper took a deep breath, “The man’s bizarre, no doubt, but he’s a bona fide genius. I think you’ve got to at least know what he said and factor that into your decision-making…” The president didn’t tell him to stop, so Cooper continued, “He says this race of aliens has done this many times. They overpopulate an entire solar system, kind of like humans have done the Earth, except on steroids. Then they put huge chunks of their population into hibernation and move them to another system, like they plan to do to ours.

  “They like worlds like Earth with oxygen atmospheres, but they use almost all of the other bodies in a solar system as well. He says they’ll float cities up in the dense atmosphere of Venus, at an altitude where the temperature’s reasonable. I’ve looked it up, and that strategy’s actually been proposed by people here on Earth. They’ll dig in underground on Mars. They’ll also dig in underground on our Moon and in the big moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Smaller moons and asteroids they’ll form into hollow worlds where they’ll live weightlessly. They don’t need to ‘terraform’ worlds other than to provide sources of oxygen which they’ll get out of the carbon dioxide on Venus and out of oxide rocks on Mars and most of the moons. Instead, they use DNA manipulation to modify their bodies and their crops so they can thrive on worlds that they modify minimally.”

  Looking aghast, the president leaned back in her chair, “I can’t take this on faith! You’ve got to find a way to confirm it. NSA’s got to check out his translation program and tell us they think it actually translates… I’ve got to know these aren’t all just a bunch of delusions!”

  Cooper raised his hands in a gesture of hopelessness, “I agree. Absolutely. But we’ve got to have the man come out of whatever state he’s in so he can let them access the program and tell them how it works.”

  “Have them break into his computers and find the program for themselves! I’ll authorize it on a Presidential order. We’ve got a genuine state of emergency here.”

  Cooper slowly shook his head, “Not a good idea. Remember the NSA guys couldn’t even break into his computer when he was being held captive in Korea.” Cooper shook his head, “If they try it now and he’s functional enough to recognize what’s going on, it might destroy any chance we have of getting some answers.”

  “Can Tiona try to get permission to access this translation program?”

  “I’ll ask her to try… every day until she gets it.”

  “Meanwhile,” Miles said with a sigh, “in case he’s right, we need to figure out how to fight. I’m putting you in charge of that because my impression is that Stoddard’s a little bit of a loose cannon. I’m not telling you to fire him, after all he’s been studying these kinds of problems for quite a while, but I want you to be the boss.”

  ***

  Washington DC — Some are blaming the Secretary of State for sending Kurt Shapiro, a very junior member of the State Department as our first emissary to the aliens rather than going himself. However, it is difficult to fathom what a more senior negotiator might have achieved, as evidently no communication whatsoever was achieved with the aliens prior to the attack on the saucer that killed Mr. Shapiro.

  Bitter wrangling has broken out in Congress over the proposed nature of our response to the aliens. Conservative hawks, pointing out that the aliens have actually already fired the first shot, argue for an all-out attack aimed at obliteration. Liberal doves, fearing the aliens advanced technology, argue that any aggressiveness could incite a devastating response from the aliens, up to and including obliteration of the human race.

  Responses from around the world vary as widely, but the majority seem to be advocating a peaceful approach. Because, at this early stage in the development of thruster technology, the United States through GSI has almost
the only true space going craft, other countries are mostly limited to advocating for or against aggressive responses.

  It is thought, however, that some countries may be attempting to dismantle various construction lifters or commercial thruster-based aircraft, repurposing the thruster technology contained in those craft for use in their own spaceships. This is, of course, is forbidden by GSI’s patents and contracts. It must be noted that GSI has intentionally constructed their thrusters in ways that make them difficult to reverse engineer or repurpose. In fact, when others have attempted to repurpose thrusters in the past, the electronics which power the thruster discs have had an alarming tendency to fail catastrophically. When this happens GSI not only refuses to honor their warranties, but refuses to sell the offending entity any more thrusters. However, in a time of emergency…

  Tiona had her car lower itself down to street level before entering the park. She still felt uncomfortably ostentatious showing up at an outdoor event by dropping in with a flying car. She also felt a little bit awkward going to any kind of an event while the aliens were approaching. However, after spending a couple of weeks thinking about little else but the aliens, she thought that maybe a little break would help. When Carolyn’s invitation to watch the Fourth of July fireworks arrived, it seemed like a dose of the girl’s bubbly personality might be just what she needed.

  Tiona’s AI helped her pick her way through the halfheartedly cheering crowd to Carolyn’s location at the edge of the lake. She had the impression that many of the people were trying to act enthusiastic despite their concerns about the impending arrival of the aliens. When she got close enough to actually see Carolyn and her friends they seemed to be in much better spirits than the rest of the crowd, something Tiona thought she should have expected, knowing Carolyn. They proved to be standing in the water, something that didn’t seem like a bad idea on a hot summer evening.