The Filter Trap

by Lorentz, A. L.

  Lee scrambled up the dune on all fours. She couldn’t let Franks down, not after already letting down her squad. Someone had to live through this and sell the movie rights, after all. She’d dreamed about meeting aliens since she was a little girl. Now her true-life ET story was turning into a Heinlein novel, and her only part in it was collateral damage.

  ‘They’ll try anything but nukes first,’ she reminded herself. The fallout was too close to significant population centers. As devastated as Los Angeles and San Diego were, anyone that had escaped east before the tsunami hit would meet radiation from a nuclear bomb dropped in the Mojave. She knew they might use that option only if the AIM-120 missiles on the F-35s’ mission failed to stop what was growing in the sand.

  She kept moving higher, her heavy flight boots sinking deeper into the sand with each step until she abandoned them altogether to move like a jumpy lizard. At least it was winter, otherwise she might burn her hands and feet.

  A succession of concussion blasts sounded behind her and she hit the sand face first. Shielding her eyes, she peeked around her shoulder. Orange bubbles and black smoke coated the alien structure. The pointy black spires and odd mechanical angles of the place reminded Lee of exploding oil wells in the Kuwaiti desert. Iraq War I was far before her time in service, but they’d all seen the footage.

  Jet after jet zoomed through the smoke, arcing around for secondary runs. Wait, smoke? The structure was burning, vulnerable. Earth might survive, but what would victory look like?

  Waves of destruction rained upon the supposed invaders, a barrage of inescapable heat and force that would not only cripple, but completely incapacitate any human army.

  But human armies never braved the more brutal environment of space travel. The towers continued to rise. Robot spiders regenerated limbs and continued undaunted. For half a mile along the black patch, alien spires grew amidst grand explosions.

  It went on for nearly an hour before the sky fell silent, the jets called off after inflicting no lasting damage. A nuclear equipped B2 remained in a miles-wide circle. The masters of the mechanical spiders, if there were any, remained hidden.

  Hundreds of towers covered in thistle-shaped protrusions grew into the clouds. The desert morphed into a gigantic rose bush carved from coal, curated by black widows, and watched by two curious blue eyes on an untouched dune.

  “Colonel, will they drop the big one?” Lee tried to hide her fear. The heat of the bomb blasts came too close for comfort; a nuclear bomb would fry her in a split second. With all the smoke still clearing into the upper atmosphere above the clouds, she might never see the B2 bringing her doom.

  “Colonel?”

  She turned the radio over. The custom-shaped battery, impossible to shove in backwards, but also impossible to replace, was gone. She was alone, waiting and watching for what might be her death. She’d miraculously escaped so many close calls already; even a cat with nine lives would feel out of luck by now.

  Waking Desert had retreated to slumber again, apparently. Nothing flew, at least in visible range, near the alien complex. Undaunted, the spires grew until reaching an apex, prompting the spiders to scurry into tumorous growths at the base. A crash from the heavens drew Lee’s attention toward long, angled shapes repeating births through the upper atmosphere. A third alien landing.

  Landing was the most dangerous part of any man-made flight, space or otherwise. These aliens seemed to have it so under control that they split their landings into multiple parts, like humans eating a fancy meal. Was this next bit the main course, or the dessert?

  Again, no parachutes or jets flared to slow the descent. Instead, with pin-point precision the sharp prongs engaged the tops of the spires, sliding down upon them using the energy-absorbing properties of the black material to slow to a stop. After reaching the base of the spike, each entire ship flopped over with great force but made no sound.

  They kept coming, a bottomless buffet of landings, one right on top of the other. After reaching several levels, the ends of the bottom ships sloshed open. The greenish-black exterior, burnt from atmospheric entry, exposed a soft orange interior glow. This happened in unison down the line of spires.

  Lee snapped her binoculars up to get a closer look at figures slowly emerging. The movement, deliberate, but with enough hesitation to belay biological decision-making, showed these were not more automata. Perhaps their masters, at last.

  Yet they resembled their robotic servants, with four appendages allowing quadrupedal or bipedal movement. Each ended in a pad, like an oven mitt, rather than independent digits. Where their servants resembled black widows, the masters resembled four-legged hairy tarantulas the size of small bears. Almost comical in appearance, each bearantula sported multi-colored fur, often with contrasting neon rings.

  Lee’s blood ran cold when she saw the eyes. Multiple, deep set, unemotional black jewels peeked from beneath fur in the midsection. Only then Lee noted the beasts had no head to speak of. As she contemplated this, a bearantula stopped and stood on two legs, looking in Lee’s direction for several seconds.

  Reminded of a passage in Stephen King’s It—the first time she felt honest terror as a child—Lee dropped her binoculars. Her loose interpretation of the titular monster’s final form looked a lot like what walked down there on the landing pad, all legs and dead eyes. Even if those legs were lined with carnival side-show-colored fur. But she couldn’t close this book. There was no escape. She picked up her binoculars, hoping to see the deadlights looking away from her with disinterest as their mechanical servants had.

  To her horror, the thing concentrated on Lee, and more began to notice. Under emotionless eyes it pulled a pair of furry lips back to reveal a small oval of crystalline teeth. Lee noticed more eyes, a small ridge of them circling the mouth, and smaller dots leading up to each of the four appendages.

  The bearantulas were only four feet tall standing on two legs, or hands, or whatever they should be called, which they apparently tended to do when curious. Lee studied more of them as they studied her in return. She noticed only slight variations in color and body mass, unlike her own species. Perhaps these were soldiers, which, like her peers, were forced to meet certain standards of appearance and fitness.

  Lee found out how they’d manipulate something more delicate when she saw a set of pincers leap out from under the edge of one of the appendage-ending pads. The pincer seemed to be made of the same endless black void the landing pad was formed of. The landing pad material, the ships, and the robots were all enabled by some kind of shape-shifting meta-material. Franks said the scientists had called them nanites and Lee hoped she’d live to research the definition.

  The group watching her hesitated on the edge of the landing pad, then marched off of it after a gesture from what must have been a superior. The black pad lunged forward to create a natural ramp ahead of them. The first alien stepped gingerly onto the red sand of the Mojave with two forward appendages, then flipped upright and turned around, facing away from their structure. It looked across the desert for a moment, with a massing group of hundreds arranging behind.

  It turned, probably to tell the rest something, then looked out on the empty desert again. The black material grew things that sprouted from hands and feet and near the strange mouth. Similar technology appeared on all the troops behind, then they started to march off the black tarmac behind the leader.

  As they set foot on Earth soil they treated it as tenderly as a NASA biologist might wisp fossilized algal cells from a Mars rock. Sample after sample was taken as black appendages morphed into all manners of scoops and spoons and funnels. In fact, it seemed the primary occupation of the aliens was exploratory.

  Hundreds, perhaps thousands, streamed out of the structures to explore rocks, cacti, and the occasional rattlesnake. They surrounded samples in the black growths, apparently infinitely expandable, and sent them backwards to the ship like a bucket brigade.

  “They’re scientists,” Lee whispered in awe, hop
eful she might not have a front row seat for the first battle of an interplanetary war after all. But she was cut off with no way to relay the good news. Somehow the structure had survived Operation Waking Desert, but these bearantulas clearly weren’t built to withstand a Fat Man. And if they somehow were, any forgiveness they held after Waking Desert would be exhausted, not that Lee would be around to care.

  As part of their canvassing, the aliens eventually headed in her direction. Surely they’d recognize kindred intelligent life; after all, she’d recognized them as such. She’d decided they were not to be feared, but their appearance still made Lee wince. Perhaps she’d be the first person to make interstellar contact. Perhaps she’d be the first interstellar bigot. She told herself they looked more like bright walking giant starfish than It. A hard sell.

  A small band of them clambered slowly up her dune on all fours, not used to the uncertain sand sinking under each step. In a few moments they realized the solution, expanding black nanites from their appendages to cast wider endings, like snowshoes for the sand.

  The first, probably an expedition leader, had a spinning appendage creating sparkling apparitions in the air. There were several cautiously following him on either side. They drew closer, pointing strange appendage tools in her direction, studying her like a wildlife photographer trying to get as close to the subject as possible without scaring it away.

  The leader exposed the glistening hole in the middle of its midsection. It was so close she could hear a sucking sound from it reminiscent of a rattlesnake. Lee tensed and grasped her M9. The leader stopped, straightening to stand fully upright, a motion quickly emulated by the entire team.

  Her head told her that they were scientists, probably as elated to speak with another intelligent life form as she should be, but Lee’s heart didn’t believe it. She had nowhere to run, there were at least ten of them starting to surround her, and hundreds—maybe thousands—fanning out off the platform beneath the dune. They’d be on her before another F-16 could cruise by, not that a pilot could pick them off without killing her too.

  Smoothly putting her M9 away, she stood up. The aliens froze as Lee walked toward them. She stopped at arms-length and reached out her open hand.

  The leader, the tallest of the group, only stood as tall as her chest, but what was the proper way to measure height for animals without a proper head? They looked up at her, perhaps in fear, bending their starfish-shaped midsections and hanging their upper appendages backward.

  Lee withdrew her hand and knelt, reaching open palms toward the leader, imitating the shape of the mitts and the strange joints of their appendages.

  The leader extended his upper appendage towards hers, shadowing her hand with his heavy mitten.

  Lee felt something, at first like a pin prick, then stabbing pain. She withdrew her hand and saw a long black line spew out of her bloodied palm. They’d injected some of that strange black stuff into her body. The nanites were inside her.

  Lee turned to run, scrambling her hands, which felt strangely disconnected, through her pockets for the M9. Shoved down into the sand from behind, she felt the mitts holding her limbs, then the pin prick again at her neck. She turned her head to see a black shroud envelop her body. She screamed as her eyesight failed, but a coldness filled her throat and continued to her lungs before the rest of her senses failed.

  Chapter 2

  “Any sign of her?” Franks asked Pith, as they both searched the giant wall of monitors relaying information from drones and Dragon Ladies over the Mojave.

  “Hard to tell. Quality is a problem. We’re relegated to radio relays instead of the classified gigabit satellite signal we used to get down here. No more reading the brand of cigarette a terrorist smokes on the street in Syria.”

  Franks sighed, “Can’t tell a prickly pear from a perilous pilot.”

  “Cacti move like that?” Pith pointed to the black jumbles that bounced on the surface of the alien platform between video frames.

  “I don’t know anything that moves like that. They’re like crazed ants, uprooting, cutting and capturing specimens to send back to their hive.”

  Pith put a big paw on the Franks’ shoulder. “I’ve seen on TV what happens when ants find something curious and take it home. I’m sorry, Colonel.”

  “Then I’ve lost the entire squadron. How long till he ends this?”

  “The president wants to know what they’re doing down there first. A nuclear strike is still last resort.”

  “Well, what resort are we at right fucking now? It ain’t Club Med down there, Pith.”

  “Keep your voice down. We’ve lost a lot of good soldiers already. No matter what the president decides, it isn’t going to bring them back. You’ve got to think about the ones still here, still fighting. I only brought you in here to see for yourself and put it to bed. C’mon, we’ll be late for the briefing.”

  The men left the control room and walked down the dim corridors under the mountain. With each passing guard salute they plunged deeper into secrecy. Outside the War Room Franks hesitated.

  “What does he know about XinJiang?”

  “Only as much as you,” Pith answered, opening the door. “Those three scientists he’s so fond of don’t know shit.”

  Inside, the politicians sat with arms crossed, sore from lack of relevancy as any hope for diplomacy receded and the brass stifled any talk of patience or peace. The three scientists, increasingly more tired in every meeting, looked anxious as ever. Each time the president summoned them he had more bad news, another problem for mankind that they were ill-equipped to solve.

  Allan’s insomnia had returned on the long nights conferring with Air Force Intelligence and it showed. His head hung lower to the table every time the president summoned him.

  Jill, on the other hand, was excited, if not a bit apprehensive. Although all three scientists had connections to SETI, she was the only person in the room who actually held a permanent position in the organization. Unlike Allan and Kam, she was only just now starting to reap the rewards of long hours of research. The president seemed to lean on her opinions, splicing her scientific takes with the military’s penchant for aggressive defense.

  Kam had perhaps the least to show for his work in these meetings. Many, including General Pith, had not-so-subtly often suggested he be disinvited from the War Room panel. If anything, Kam served here as a bolsterer of the other two scientists’ opinions, something that conflicted with his deep-rooted feelings for them. A few weeks ago he’d have wanted nothing to do with the woman that spurned his advances as a young graduate assistant on summer study at Arecibo and the man she probably still mistakenly pined for after so many years.

  But when the fate of the world is at stake, petty personal vendettas are best kept under wraps, just like strange moments in dreams when you think God just might be trying to speak to you. Kam was quite sure nobody would understand how he felt he already knew the truth about these aliens with a planet in higher orbit, and the mysterious other ones on a planet interior to the Earth’s new place in the universe. The thought of hiding this information, amounting to treason if it were true, didn’t make him feel any better about attending another of these meetings.

  The president didn’t waste any time, addressing Pith before he could sit down.

  “General, my liaison with our eyes in the sky, what’s happening in the desert?”

  “Sir, I’m assuming you’re talking about the Mojave, but there are two more we should be worried about.”

  “I’m concerned about the colonel’s young lieutenant, the one that led my escort from Hawaii before the tsunami and lost her brothers—”

  “Bubbas, sir,” Franks interjected. “She’s gone, they’re all gone.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Colonel Franks.”

  “Gone isn’t entirely accurate,” Pith added. “We’re still receiving pings from her beacon.”

  Franks tried to hide the look of shock and delight on his face, switching
to anger and suspicion. Why did Pith keep this from him? A power play. Franks had practically put on a lab coat and joined the scientists in his rejection of more forceful action while Lieutenant Green might still be alive out there in the desert with the aliens.

  The president pursed his lips, dreading what he’d have to say next.

  “Colonel, I know in the armed forces you have several different ways of saying you leave no man behind. However, this may be one of those cases when you must.”

  Franks tried to hide his feelings, imagining steam must be bursting from his ears.

  “Our last contact with 2nd Lieutenant Lee Green was at 1400 hours. Her F-22 was caught in the backdraft from the second landing and had to eject.”

  “Didn’t she have an emergency radio?” Bolton asked.

  “It appears Lieutenant Green ditched her flight suit after Colonel Franks warned her to take cover before Operation Waking Desert. We were able to track her pings while she escaped the alien structure, and we’ve got Dragon Ladies feeding us aerial radio reconnaissance, since our eyes in orbit are all gone.”

  Photos popped up on the glass panels in front of each seat. Franks wondered again why Pith hid this information. It was apparent that by the time Pith brought him down to the monitor room to search, Lee had already been tracked and disappeared. Where she’d gone seemed obvious and terrifying. Pith’s comments about her being taken by the ants had new meaning now. Most things taken back to an ant hive were chopped up and eaten in short order.

  “We made multiple passes after the lieutenant bailed. On the first pass we observed her body on the platform. Second, we saw her running up a dune to the north. A third pass showed her stationary, situated up the dune about a quarter mile, probably resting—”

  “Or passed out,” Bolton added. “It can get 120 degrees in the shade, so I can’t imagine what it’s like in a flight suit.”

  “Senator, if you’d let me finish, I was about to say we do not believe she was unconscious due to her position. It’s winter in the Mojave and perhaps sixty degrees. The lieutenant had already abandoned her flight suit and appeared to miraculously avoid any broken bones from her descent.”