Jill tried to be empathetic without talking down to the leader of the free world. “You’re right, sir. That may be what they’re trying to do. I also believe that was their intent. However, I’m sure Allan, an astrophysicist, would question whether beings capable of moving entire planets would send radio waves to say hello. To move a planet, in orbit, with so little effect on the surface, requires an intimate knowledge of that planet. That is why all three of us are convinced that none of these signals are from the same intelligence or phenomena that moved the Earth.”
“I see,” he replied, trying to be magnanimous in accepting his own logical misstep.
To prevent Jill from doing any more damage, Allan stepped in.
“In fact, they may be closer to monks as Pith suggested, than those responsible for the Event. They’re much closer to us than the other planet, and we can get more detail from the Wenchang and even ground-based observation.”
Photos of the planet showed on the transparent glass in front of the meeting participants. The greenish ball hovered there, looking not unlike an Earth with shrunken oceans. Something looked familiar to Kam, even though Allan had no time to share the images with him before preparing for the meeting. Yet, on some base emotional level, Kam could swear he knew more about that planet than Allan. He couldn’t bubble his thoughts coherently enough to the surface of his conscious mind to say anything, so Allan continued.
“Our limited photography of the second planet shows little to no airborne particulates. However, where we would expect to see cities, we see nothing. If intelligent beings live there, they seem to be disguising their civilization, or long gone.”
“Hopefully that means they are not a threat,” Pith said. “Have they sent anything our way?”
“This is the interesting thing,” Dr. Tarmor said, “These weak monotone chanting tones do seem to be directed at us . . . or perhaps at the ships in orbit above us.”
“Collusion?” another general asked.
“Do we know what the chant says?” the president asked, hoping he’d be right they were saying ‘hello.’
“Unfortunately, we have too small a sample size to tell anything like that, sir.” said Kam, wondering if he was lying. He did, in fact, feel some recognition in that pattern coming from the planet, the same strange feeling he got when looking at the photo of the forest-covered world not so different than the one he saw in the last sparks of his dying neurons underwater back in Boston. If he said any of it out loud they’d laugh him out of the room. It would make more sense to say he believed in ghosts than what he felt now, connected—communicated to, even—in some way with another planet that no human being had ever visited-a planet, and its radio signals, invisible to every telescope or receiver humanity ever built, until a few days ago.
“Could be a warning or an S.O.S.” added Bolton.
“Or both,” cautioned Jill.
The president pointed at Jill. “I’ll meet you halfway. If those are refugee boats up there, I’m going to separate them from the beach for a bit and see how they react.” He turned to the Franks. “How far out are we?”
“Twenty minutes, sir.”
“Tell your bombers Operation Waking Desert is approved.”
Part III
Prologue: East
The banker knew about karoshi, the polite Japanese term for working to death, before his sister warned him during their airport goodbye. “Where do you think Wall Street learned how to burn out interns?” she asked rhetorically.
“Stanford,” he had replied with pride.
She rolled her eyes before giving him one last hug.
What he found on the other side of the Pacific was nothing like the accelerated graduate financial studies program at Stanford. There were no study clubs at Sumi Holdings to help struggling noobs catch up. The closest thing he’d found was a coworker that took him drinking and confessed his life story after too much sake. His peer was behind on his work as well, further than the hotshot American banker even, though the westerner would never let on. They were so cutthroat that even drinking was a contest to see who could bare his soul while sharing the least.
That coworker wasn’t here today to go drinking, not tonight, not tomorrow; he was long gone, fired and probably back in the old country. His description had sounded so peaceful that the American banker wanted to go someday, hopefully for different reasons than his friend. It might not work out that way, if he couldn’t catch up on all the work left behind after the layoffs.
The banker had barely looked up from his monitors in the five hours since eating lunch in front of them. It was a Saturday and despite karoshi, only the die-hards, or those on the verge of a pink slip, as he was, were in the confines of the multi-story complex in Nihonbashi with the red Sumi Holdings logo on top. The two intertwined triangles were confusing to his friends and family, but after working for the company for two months, the American banker found the name of a judo throw highly appropriate for the work done within.
Right now he’d like to sumi gaeshi his computer right through the window. Imagining doing so, he looked up and noticed the reflections of the sunset flittering through the other buildings of the dense financial district. The job wasn’t without its perks: this floor was high enough to see a quarter of the Imperial Palace, another place he’d go someday.
As much as he wanted to throw his computer out the window, he craved a nap even more. There was something dreamlike about the gently falling snow outside, twinkling orange in the setting sun. It was just out of reach from his world of spreadsheets, stochastic, and sobol sequences. Maybe he should gift himself with a nap; it was Christmas after all. They treated the holiday more like Valentine's Day in Japan, and he was more than happy to kiss the cool surface of his desk for a while.
Work followed into his dreams. Chaotic strings of glowing numerals cascaded into beautiful waterfalls leading to tranquil pools surrounded by falling purple and gold spreadsheet cells. He missed Ryunzu in autumn, putting off the drive until it was too late and the famous Dragon’s Head Waterfall was covered in snow and ice. The numbers swirled into a white mass, freezing the pool, a catalyst like Vonnegut’s ice-nine, continuing up the waterfall. A noise, like a gong from a Shinto temple, rang through the ice. The frozen cascade shook violently into shards, flinging crystal knives at him.
He awoke, shielding himself, but noticing the last qualms of a real earthquake. He’d never experienced a quake that strong in his short time in Tokyo, but he’d read minor tremors happened about once a week. Usually he couldn’t feel them at all. He wondered if his sister would soon call again in a panic. He didn’t look forward to reminding her again how hypocritical it was for someone living in Oakland to worry about earthquakes in Tokyo.
Looking outside again the sunset was gone and the snow had ceased. In fact, the Sun had already traversed the other side of the sky, leaving the Imperial Palace in the long shadow of the higher parts of Nihonbashi. The maze of zigzag streets after stretched all the way to Mt. Odake, its snowy peak plainly visible, thirty miles away.
It didn’t feel like he’d slept all night, but the new Sun was here, and was it so unbelievable that he’d worked all week with little rest between? If his lazy friends back in Oakland could sleep from noon to midnight and then play video games for another twelve hours, he could sleep from 6 pm to 6 am after hard work!
The only trouble was the clock on his computer. It took a nap as well, it seemed, still stuck in ‘pm.’ The banker cursed Bill Gates. Not only did the auto-updates mess up his apps every three days, now his computer couldn’t tell time. Perhaps it was an international conspiracy; the banker’s fancy GPS-updating Seiko couldn’t tell night from day either.
‘First World Problems,’ he chuckled and grabbed his iPhone. The conspiracy club was getting larger; Apple was in on the joke as well. He restarted the phone, but it refused to connect to the network.
He remembered his father’s advice to get three independent sources before confirming anything as fact
. The computers could be explained, though not easily, with some kind of universal virus or glitch, but what about the old lobby clock? “Sixty years without winding or charging,” the HR manager had proudly relayed on his first day on the job.
After that rough nap he needed some coffee anyway, and there was a Starbucks only a block away. He could check the old clock on his way out.
The old clock ticked away like always, but was only minutes separated from his Seiko. He stood, staring at it for a time. Was he still dreaming?
If the banker was on the verge of worry already, the sudden siren outside pushed him over the edge. He imagined what that siren must have sounded like here in 1942, and what it might mean now.
People were running everywhere in the streets like a flash mob gone mad, hurtling in one direction: west. He understood rudimentary Japanese, but most of what he heard was either unintelligible or specific words he’d not heard before, like “Mokushi!”
The frantic footsteps turned the fallen snow to muddy mush as he followed the crowd to Nihon Bridge. A woman wept hysterically under the life-size lion at the entrance.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, praying she spoke English. “What’s happened?”
“Tsuki,” she whispered, afraid.
He knew that one, and looked up instinctively. “What about the Moo—”
Gone! Only yesterday he’d walked home under the light of it.
Sumi Holdings prided itself on hiring brains that could connect disparate data points faster than others. The American banker didn’t know where the Moon went, but it couldn’t have gone from full to new in one day. No matter why it was gone, he could be certain what would follow.
The mob ran for higher ground. The siren had nothing to do with bombs.
Tsunami!
He drifted away from the woman, walking, then running faster himself. An elderly man next to him babbled the same phrase over and over: “Sekai no Owari.”
“I thought Japanese people didn’t believe in judgment day.”
The old man turned, his deep black eyes studying the young foreigner who presumed to know so much.
“Theravadan tradition teaches of seven suns, one after the other, delivering the world into ruin. The first sun, our Sun, causes the Earth to dry up. This is what you in the west call global warming. I watched the old Sun set today, and a new one appear.”
“I’m sure it’s not the end of the world. Come with me, there’s a tsunami-we need to seek higher ground.”
“Look not toward higher ground, but to the water below us.” The old man tugged at the American’s arm, imploring him to look over the side of the Nihon Bridge.
“You see the water draining, the water level going down?”
“That’s what happens in a tsunami; the water recedes.”
“The coming of the second Sun, it is said, will dry the brooks and ponds. There is no need to run and hide. This age of destruction may be longer than many generations.”
“Suit yourself.” He patted the old man’s shoulder before turning to run with the crowd. As he ran south to cut around the Imperial Palace, en route to the higher elevation of Akasaka Palace, he couldn’t shake the contrast of the old man’s countenance with the rest of the frenzied populace.
Perhaps his time in Japan had been wasted. As the tsunami bared down on the island, the American banker wished he’d spent more time enriching his mind than his wallet.
Chapter 1
“Up. Get up!”
Clear as day, but far from it, Lee heard the words through a swirl of darkness and pain. She blinked her eyes, unable to recognize at first the difference between opened and closed.
Why was she here? Where was she? Things ached where she didn’t think nerves existed. Then she remembered. The plane pushed out of control, her parachute catching on fire, and her final drop to certain death on the dusty, black, alien platform in the Mojave Desert.
A miracle to be alive, but for how long? She rolled from her side to her back, staring at the blue sky, the final wisps of dust cloud gently blowing away in a winter breeze. With the holes burned in her flight suit it was almost cold. She’d beaten much of the dust, still hot or not, to the ground, and it shook off her as she rolled, echoing her previous position like a temporary ghost before settling back onto the black-the black what?
Turning her head again, she was face-to-face with this alien surface, though it was no longer a deep black. The miles-long alien installation in the desert now had a more natural caste, covered in the dust it had expelled from the ground after more objects came slamming down. Her head had slammed too, and a thousand hangovers all at once made her want to just lie there and continue dying.
Squeezing away dizziness, Lee noticed movement in the direction of the tall black spires rising from the settling dust. Dark lines shimmered like a strange mirage above the same surface she lay upon.
Black limbs shuffled nearby quicker than her eyes could follow. With a shout of agony she instinctively reached for her pilot’s standard M9 and pointed into the heart of the roiling mass, but they didn’t appear interested in her yet. The last thing the colonel asked her to do was report, not attack. Her hand shifted to her emergency radio controller.
“Colonel?” she whispered. “If you can hear me just tap on your receiver. I don’t think I’m in danger if I stay quiet.”
The receiver made a slight pop. The colonel, and likely the president, listened. She’d enlisted in the Air Force to fly fighter jets, not become a broadcaster, but she’d give it her best shot. Hopefully without taking one.
“In front of me, dark shapes bustle under, across, and through each other. A nest of dog-sized black spider-things moving in and about the spikes that embedded in the black material before I ejected. The former spikes are shifting slowly to a horizontal orientation, aided by spider-like creatures growing and losing appendages as needed.
“In my expert opinion, this is all creepy as hell, sir. I’m backing away as inconspicuously as I can. Luckily my flight suit is still covered in dust and matching the color of the sand that’s on the surface. I thought all my bones would be jelly after falling that far, but I feel okay, no worse than after a bad day in basic. The energy-absorbing properties of this stuff must have absorbed my impact too.
“These things move really fast, too fast to see in detail. I only catch bits here and there when one slows down to knock a pillar in place or lose appendages and roll to the next construction zone. They’re coated in a matte gray or black, but not the light absorbing material I examined on this platform before the towers came down.”
Lee smelled burning fuel from her downed jet drifting in the wind. If anything down here wasn’t a dumb robot she wouldn’t be inconspicuous for long. She pulled out her M9 and steadied it, aiming at the middle of the orgy of folding alien limbs below, though she doubted her reaction time would guarantee a hit against the hummingbird’s pace of those things.
“Lieutenant,” Franks whispered.
Bang! The voice unexpectedly coming through her emergency radio tripped her nervous finger to fire her M9.
“Shit!”
“What happened?”
“Well, I just shot at them and they didn’t seem to notice, so that’s good, I guess.”
“Shot at what? Do you see extraterrestrial beings?”
“I suppose. I’m not sure they’re alive in the sense that we are, but there are a great many manufacturing something more than a mile across. Whatever the landing pad is made of must have absorbed the impact energy and directed it downward, drilling through the rock beneath the sand. Honestly, sir, they kind of look like gigantic golf tees pounded into the ground.”
“Maybe they’re trying to reach an aquifer. If they need water, that means they’re some kind of animal, like us. They can be killed.”
“Not the things I’m seeing. Hold on, I’m coming to the edge of the platform soon. How long until the others get here?”
“Any moment now. Scramble as far away from the d
ead zone as you can.”
The dead zone. “They’re nuking this thing?”
“Not yet, Lieutenant, but you’ll be dead all the same if you’re down there in the middle of it.”
On cue, the cavalry arrived on the eastern horizon. Ten F-22s boomed high overhead, little triangles flanked and followed by scores of F-18s. In the distance, Apaches rumbled lower across the desert. The tiny, blasted cross shape of a B2 bomber loomed above the faraway clouds. Lee knew she had to be long gone before it arrived. She stripped out of the sand-covered flight suit, grabbed her survival pack and ran through the sand for a high dune.
Through gulps of air she shouted questions to the colonel.
“Did they destroy the Moon, Colonel?”
“Unknown, Lieutenant, but nobody else has returned to the scene of the crime yet so they’re our prime suspects I guess.”
“Do you intend to eradicate the structure?”
“The president authorized Operation Waking Desert, a show of our offensive capabilities in case your mission for direct observation resulted in anything less than them coming out to shake hands. Needless to say the president and Joint Chiefs are less than pleased with the welcome mat they’ve laid out for you down there.”
“They wouldn’t know what a welcome mat is. I just wonder if we’re not making a mistake. When I fired my M9 they didn’t even notice. No defensive capabilities. That might mean they don’t have any offensive either.”
“Better safe than dead. For us and you. Take cover, Lee.”
Lee turned and ran, unbuckling her emergency vest and stuffing her survival pack into her waistband. A trio of F-35s flew over the low California desert hills. She heard the cool hiss of missiles going live and streaking in her direction.
Franks didn’t usually use first names. Maybe he worried it would be the last time they spoke, all pretenses of authority dropped to convey it was more than an order. He was scared.
The Filter Trap Page 23
