Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

In moments I’m heading southeast on Grand Central Parkway for J.F.K. Airport. It’s a good time to call bloody Dr. Backer back.

  This time she picks up the phone directly and I recognize her voice as soon as she says, “Hello.”

  “Is this Dr. Anna Backer?”

  “You recognize my voice and I recognize yours.”

  It makes me angry, but I control myself. “Is this the Dr. Anna Backer who wrote the article on ‘Thought Insertion and Moral Intention’?”

  “James, listen to me. I’m only talking to you because I’m afraid that you might hurt yourself or someone else—”

  “I’m asking the questions here. Is this the Dr. Anna Backer who wrote ‘The Alienation of the Self and the Epistemology of Self-Knowledge’?”

  “James—”

  “Is it?” I scream.

  A pause. “James, you know it is.”

  “Then how can you tell me that what I’m experiencing is impossible? The CIA trained me to insert my thoughts into others, with the moral intention of penetrating terrorist organizations, so that I could assassinate their leaders and protect freedom, our freedom.”

  “You know the authorities in Langley deny that—”

  “If they didn’t do this to me, then how could I keep my knowledge of myself every time I hop from one body to the next? I couldn’t. It would be impossible. Therefore, that proves that they did this to me.”

  There’s no way she can refute that. Because it’s true.

  “Let me tell you exactly what they said when I contacted them about you.” I hear tapping on a keypad. “They said that Jimmy van der Leur came to them from Army Intelligence for specialized training in psych ops, and that he—

  “He died. I know that’s what they say.” I put a hand up to cover the side of my face as a patrol car passes me. “Except I didn’t die. I woke up in another body, which is what they were training me to do, only it was the wrong body—he was an analyst who fell asleep at his desk, and they freaked out.”

  More taps. “James Ricordi.”

  “What about him?” I ask.

  “He was the analyst working in psych ops who disappeared.”

  “He didn’t disappear. I had to get out, because they were talking about shutting down the program, because they thought I was joking when I said I was Jimmy van der Leur. So I went to get the Chinese takeout, only I didn’t come back.”

  “James Ricordi didn’t come back.”

  “There was no back for him to come to. He was gone, gone daddy gone, long gone, so long and good night. I fell asleep in his body while I was driving, and the car crashed, which woke up a trucker parked on the berm, only when he woke up it was me waking up for we.”

  “The American officials say that never happened. They say they’re still looking for James Ricordi.”

  “They’re liars!”

  Another long pause.

  “Three weeks ago,” I say. “There was a car wreck on I-70, just past Goodland, KS. It was James Ricordi’s car. I was … I was going to Vegas. My brother lives there, I thought maybe he could help me. After I woke up in the trucker, a real mother-fucker, I knew I couldn’t get near my brother without possibly killing him too.” I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. Sweat pours from my head into my eyes, overflows my eyes. It stings. “So I started reading and that’s how I found you.”

  More keyboard taps. Taps for Jimmy van der Leur, taps for James Ricordi, taps for the truck driver …

  “Maybe they are liars,” she says finally. Finally, she says, “Maybe we should meet somewhere to talk.”

  And that’s when I know they got to her. I should’ve waited to contact her until I got to England, but someone in the government traced my calls to her, and now it’s too late. They got to her but they won’t get to me.

  “Thank you,” I say calmly, “but I changed my mind. I have to take care of this myself.”

  I throw the phone out the window and drive until I see the signs pointing to JFK.

  I pull into the long-term parking lot and settle down in the back seat. It’ll be a while before anyone comes looking for Mr. Suit or his missing rental car. Plenty long enough for me to take a nap.

  A groan emerges from the trunk, like a drunk, in a funk, and I realize I better make sure Mr. Suit can’t ever wake up can’t ever fall asleep again because I don’t want to wake up trapped in the trunk of a rental car. I’ll have to do this quickly while he’s still concussed.

  I slip off his jacket, look around to see that no one’s near, and pop the trunk. When he rolls toward the light, I toss the coat over his face and grab his throat. “Go to sleep,” I say. “Just go to sleep.”

  But my small hands have a hard time choking him when he struggles, so I grope for the tire iron and smash his head. Struggle stops. I take the pointed end and stab it down through bone where his head is until his legs stop twitching.

  “It’s nothing personal,” I whisper. “You’re collateral damage in the war on terror. Collateral, it’s like what you give to a bank to get a loan. You’re just the price we pay as security to have security … ”

  My head hurts. I have to stop thinking when the thinks stop making sense, so I slam the trunk shut and it doesn’t hurt anymore. I wipe my forehead automatically, but I haven’t even broken a sweat. There is blood on my hand.

  One thing and one thing only, that’s all I know. Everything that follows starts from that one thing, the only thing that matters, and what matters is who we are and who we want to be, because no one else can ever be the we for me.

  I am a heroist I am a terror.

  In the back seat of the car, I settle down to fall asleep. Every time I fall asleep I wake up in a different body. This time, when I wake up again I want to be surprised.

  It could be in the body of a pilot on an international flight, and I could crash the plane if I wanted to, blaming some other country, and then we’d have to go to war. It could be the body of a cop or soldier, who empties his weapons into a crowded restaurant or office while quoting some other religion, and that would fan the fires of hate. It could be your baby, the one asleep right now in your stroller, where I hide like a latent disease just as long as it takes to jump to someone else. Maybe you.

  Sleep well, when you sleep.

  I’ll be out here heroing, looking for a way to fight the terror for you, prototyping the protocol. I will penetrate, assassinate, and extricate. I have to. I have the infill trait.

  © 2013 C.C. Finlay

  C.C. Finlay is the author of the Traitor to the Crown historical fantasy trilogy, which began with The Patriot Witch (2009), as well as a standalone fantasy, The Prodigal Troll. He’s published more than forty stories, many of which have been reprinted in volumes of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, Year’s Best Fantasy, Best New Horror, and other anthologies. His short fiction has been translated into a dozen languages and his stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sidewise, and Sturgeon awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife, novelist Rae Carson. Visit his website: ccfinlay.com.

  Eight Episodes

  Robert Reed

  With minimal fanfare and next to no audience, Invasion of a Small World debuted in the summer of 2016, and after a brief and disappointing run, the series was deservedly shelved.

  One glaring problem was its production values: Computer animation had reached a plateau where reality was an easy illusion, spectacle was the industry norm, and difficult tricks like flowing water and human faces were beginning to approximate what was real. Yet the show’s standards were barely adequate, even from an upstart Web network operating with limited capital and too many hours of programming to fill. The landscapes and interior shots would have been considered state-of-the-art at the turn of the century, but not in its premiere year. The characters were inflicted with inexpressive faces and stiff-limbed motions, while their voices were equally unconvincing, employing amateur actors or some cut-rate audio-synthesis software. With few exceptions, the dialogue was sloppy, cluttered with pauses an
d clumsy phrasing, key statements often cut off in midsentence. Most critics decided that the series’ creators were striving for a real-life mood. But that was purely an interpretation. Press kits were never made available, and no interviews were granted with anyone directly involved in the production, leaving industry watchers entirely to their own devices—another problem that served to cripple Invasion.

  Other factors contributed to the tiny audience. One issue that couldn’t be discussed openly was the racial makeup of the cast. Success in the lucrative North American market meant using characters of obvious European extraction. Yet the series’ leading man was an Indian astronomer working at a fictional college set in, of all places, South Africa. With an unpronounceable name and thick accent, Dr. Smith—as his few fans dubbed him—was a pudgy, prickly creation with a weakness for loud shirts and deep belches. His wife was a homely apparition who understood nothing about his world-shaking work, while his children, in direct contrast to virtually every other youngster inhabiting popular entertainment, were dimwitted creatures offering nothing that was particularly clever or charming.

  A paucity of drama was another obvious weakness. The premiere episode involved a routine day in Dr. Smith’s life. Eighteen hours of unexceptional behavior was compressed to fifty-three minutes of unexceptional behavior. Judging by appearances, the parent network inserted commercial breaks at random points. The series’ pivotal event was barely noticed by the early viewers: One of Dr. Smith’s graduate students was working with Permian-age rock samples, searching for key isotopes deposited by ancient supernovae. The student asked her professor about a difficult piece of lab equipment. As always, the dialogue was dense and graceless, explaining almost nothing to the uninitiated. Genuine scientists—some of the series’ most unapologetic fans—liked to point out that the instruments and principles were genuine, though the nomenclature was shamelessly contrived. Fourteen seconds of broadcast time introduced a young graduate student named Mary—a mixed-race woman who by no measure could be considered attractive. She was shown asking Dr. Smith for help with the problematic instrument, and he responded with a wave of a pudgy hand and a muttered, “Later.” Following ads for tiny cars and a powerful asthma medicine, the astronomer ordered his student to come to his office and lock the door behind her. What happened next was only implied. But afterwards Dr. Smith was seen sitting with his back to his desk and his belt unfastened, and the quick-eyed viewer saw Mary’s tiny breasts vanish under a bra and baggy shirt. Some people have interpreted her expression as pain, emotional or otherwise. Others have argued that her face was so poorly rendered that it was impossible to fix any emotion to her, then or later. And where good writers would have used dialogue to spell out the importance of the moment, bad writers decided to ignore the entire interpersonal plotline. With a casual voice, Mary mentioned to her advisor/lover that she had found something strange in the Permian stone.

  “Strange,” he repeated.

  With her thumb and finger, she defined a tiny space. “Metal. A ball.”

  “Ball?”

  “In the rock.”

  Smith scratched his fat belly for a moment, saying nothing. (Judging by log tallies, nearly 10 percent of the program’s small audience turned away at that point.) Then he quietly said to her, “I do not understand.”

  “What it is …”

  “What?”

  She said, “I don’t know either.”

  “In what rock?”

  “Mine. The mudstone—”

  “You mean it’s artificial … ?”

  “Looks so,” she answered.

  He said, “Huh.”

  She finished buttoning her shirt, the back of her left hand wiping at the corner of her mouth.

  “Where?” Smith asked.

  She gave the parent rock’s identification code.

  “No, the metal ball,” he interrupted. “Where is it now?”

  “My desk drawer. In a white envelope.”

  “And how big?”

  “Two grains of rice, about.”

  Then, one last time, the main character said, “Huh.” And, finally, without any interest showing in his face, he fastened his belt.

  The next three episodes covered not days, but several months. Again, none of the scientific work was explained, and nothing resembling a normal plotline emerged from the routine and the tedious. The increasingly tiny audience watched Dr. Smith and two of his graduate students working with an object almost too small to be resolved on the screen—another significant problem with the series. Wouldn’t a human-sized artifact have made a greater impact? The ball’s metal shell proved to be an unlikely alloy of nickel and aluminum. Cosmic radiation and tiny impacts had left the telltale marks one would expect after a long drifting journey through space. Using tiny lasers, the researchers carefully cut through the metal shell, revealing a diamond interior. Then the diamond heart absorbed a portion of the laser’s energy, and once charged, it powered up its own tiny light show. Fortunately a nanoscopic camera had been inserted into the hole, and the three scientists were able to record what they witnessed—a rush of complex images coupled with an increasingly sophisticated array of symbols.

  “What is this?” they kept asking one another.

  “Maybe it’s language,” Mary guessed. Correctly, as it happened. “Someone’s teaching us … trying to … a new language.”

  Dr. Smith gave her a shamelessly public hug.

  Then the other graduate student—a Brazilian fellow named Carlos—pointed out that, whatever the device was, Mary had found it in rock that was at least a quarter of a billion years old. “And that doesn’t count the time this little machine spent in space, which could be millions more years.”

  After the show’s cancellation, at least one former executive admitted to having been fooled. “We were promised a big, loud invasion,” he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone. “I talked to the series’ producer. He said an invasion would begin right after episode four. Yeah, we knew the build-up was going to be slow. But then aliens from the dinosaur days were going to spring to life and start burning cities.”

  “Except,” said the interviewer.

  “What?”

  “That’s not quite true. The Permian happened before there were any dinosaurs.”

  With a shrug, the ex-executive brushed aside that mild criticism. “Anyway, the important thing is that bad-ass aliens were supposed to come out of the rock. They were going to grow huge and start kicking us around. At least that’s what the production company—EXL Limited—assured us. A spectacle. And since we didn’t have to pay much for those episodes, we ended up purchasing the first eight shows after seeing only a few minutes of material …”

  Invasion was cancelled after the fifth episode.

  The final broadcast episode was an artless synopsis of the next twenty months of scientific work. Dr. Smith and his students were just a tiny portion of a global effort. Experts on six continents were making a series of tiny, critical breakthroughs. Most of the story involved faceless researchers exchanging dry e-mails about the tiny starship’s text and images. Translations were made; every shred of evidence began to support the obvious but incredible conclusions. The culminating event was a five-minute news conference. Dripping sweat, shaking from nerves, the astronomer explained to reporters that he had found a functioning starship on Earth. After a glancing thanks to unnamed colleagues, he explained how, in the remote past, perhaps long before there was multicellular life on Earth, an alien species had manufactured trillions of tiny ships like this one. The ships were cast off into space, drifting slowly to planetary systems scattered throughout the galaxy. The vessel that he had personally recovered was already ancient when it dropped onto a river bottom near the edge of Gondwanaland. Time had only slightly degraded its onboard texts—a history of the aliens and an explanation into the nature of life in the universe. By all evidence, he warned, human beings were late players to an old drama. And like every other intelligent species in the universe, t
hey would always be small in numbers and limited in reach.

  The final scene of that fifth episode was set at Dr. Smith’s home. His oldest son was sitting before a large plasma screen, destroying alien spaceships with extraordinarily loud weapons. In what proved to be the only conversation between those two characters, Smith sat beside his boy, asking, “Did you see me?”

  “What?”

  “The news conference—”

  “Yeah, I watched.”

  “So?” he said. And when no response was offered, he asked, “What did you think?”

  “About what?”

  “The lesson—”

  “What? People don’t matter?” The boy froze the battle scene and put down his controls. “I think that’s stupid.”

  His father said nothing.

  “The universe isn’t empty and poor.” The boy was perhaps fourteen, and his anger was the most vivid emotion in the entire series. “Worlds are everywhere, and a lot of them have to have life.”

  “Millions are blessed, yes,” Dr. Smith replied, “but hundreds of billions more are too hot, too cold. They are metal-starved, or married to dangerous suns.”

  His son stared at the frozen screen, saying nothing.

  “The alien texts only confirm our most recent evidence, you know. The Earth is a latecomer. Stellar births are slowing, in the Milky Way, and everywhere, and the production of terrestrial worlds peaked two or three billion years before our home was created.”

  “These texts of yours … they say that intelligent life stays at home?”

  “Most of the time, yes.”

  “Aliens don’t send out real starships?”

  “It is far too expensive,” Smith offered.

  The boy pushed out his lower lip. “Humans are different,” he maintained.

  “No.”

  “We’re going to build a working stardrive. Soon, I bet. And then we’ll visit our neighboring stars and colonize those worlds—”

  “We can’t.”

  “Because they tell us we can’t?”

  “Because it is impossible.” His father shook his head, saying with authority, “The texts are explicit. Moving large masses requires prohibitive energies. And terraforming is a difficult, often impossible trick. And that is why almost every world that we have found to date looks as sterile as the day they were born.”