by C. J. Odle
Around the world, there were the screens.
With all the information people received coming from a live feed, the screens were inevitable. Already in place in thousands of locations across the globe to stream news or sporting events, even more were set up, and people flocked to them to watch and wait. Movie theaters and community centers filled up, food being shared and people setting up camp. This wasn’t a time to be alone.
Some of the biggest screens were in Tiananmen Square and Times Square. Although the space was much bigger in China, both were crammed so densely with people it appeared impossible to squeeze any more safely in. Cultural differences became meaningless now. East and West united in their shared humanity and by their two leaders being key witnesses in the trial.
Everywhere, the police were out in force, but they typically didn’t have to do anything beyond sorting out the kind of minor incidents always caused by such large crowds. People knew the aliens were watching, and generally, they were content to watch them back. Even the police turned and stared as Paige’s parents appeared on the screen.
Chapter Nineteen
The large clock in the studio behind Tasha Baker showed four p.m., only two hours remaining before the start of the trial. She sat on the long couch next to her interview subjects, with her trademark bleached hair and light-blue eye shadow, trying not to let on how out of her depth she felt. Ordinarily, she played the role of the LA reporter KNBC loved to ignore, there for the weird stories, the “human interest” snippets about the drunks who’d seen strange lights or the folks who’d found the image of Jesus in their toast.
When Tasha had seen Paige among the others on the spaceship, she’d screamed, “Oh my God!” and immediately rang her stepsister, who went to the same school, to find out where Paige lived. She hunted down Paige’s parents and rushed them to the studio for an interview. With this trump card in hand, the news director at KNBC was forced to take her seriously, as the scoop would be broadcast across the main NBC network, if not throughout the world.
Ellen and Henry Adams, Paige’s parents, were the perfect interview subjects. Middle aged, middle class, typically suburban, and with just enough hints of friction to indicate a skeleton in the closet if they needed to extend the news cycle into tomorrow.
Everybody liked the image of a perfect family, but nobody liked it if that image stayed perfect too long.
Tasha was her conciliatory best. She’d fought for this, almost literally, when one of the producers had come to their senses and suggested getting in Oprah to do it by video link. With her big moment being screened across the globe, Tasha refused to jeopardize it by being anything less than the picture of sympathy. Ellen was slightly pudgy around the edges and Henry graying and respectable. An optimum setting for Tasha to show off how great she looked, and how she deserved to get one of the real jobs at the station.
“So,” she said, “when did you first realize your daughter had been kidnapped by aliens?”
It said a lot about her career to date that she’d learned just the right tone to ask such a question. Serious, sympathetic, but with a hint of amusement, because no one liked it if you took them too seriously when talking about aliens.
“Well, we found out that she was missing late this morning,” Ellen said. “We went straight to the police, and they told us not to worry, but you can’t help it, you know?”
She dabbed her eyes. Oh, please let her be one of the weepy ones, Tasha begged.
Nothing got ratings like tears, although her ratings could hardly be higher right now.
“We got home,” Ellen continued, “and turned on the TV—”
“You can imagine how shocked we both were,” Henry said.
“But you must have been a little relieved as well,” Tasha guessed, although she would have guessed shocked if they’d gone with relieved. “To see your daughter alive and well, even if on… a spaceship.”
“Yes, of course,” Ellen said. “I mean, you hear about what can happen to girls out there these days, and it’s just… it’s horrible.”
For a moment, Tasha thought she might get the tears she wanted, but no such luck. She kept moving.
“Tell me, has your daughter ever had any interest in aliens before this?”
“Well, no,” Henry said.
Tasha smiled. “That you know of, of course. It can be hard to keep track with teenagers, can’t it?”
“Yes,” Ellen agreed, “it can. But with Paige, it was always more about her causes.”
“What causes were those?” Tasha asked.
“Oh, all kinds of things. She was always out protesting, trying to make the world a better place. We… we used to give her a hard time sometimes for making such a mess while she created her posters and leaflets.”
If the mother hadn’t cried, Tasha would have pounced on her revelation. She could almost see the headlines taking shape now, about a court packed with biased “witnesses” obsessed with “causes.” There would be debates about how representative it could be. It might last weeks, and Tasha would be at the heart of it.
Assuming they were all still here. Probably safer just to ask the next question.
“If you could speak to your daughter now,” Tasha asked, “is there anything you’d like to say to her?”
“Only that we love her and are both really proud of her,” Henry said. “We always knew she was going to do great things, but we never guessed it would turn out to be anything like this.”
After the light relief of the interview, the countdown in New York continued toward nine p.m. EST, and the atmosphere in Times Square began to shift. The late-summer heat dropped a little, and the mood dropped with it. For much of the afternoon, it had been about togetherness. About people realizing there were bigger things in the universe than themselves, and then trying to offer each other support as it hit home that these bigger things were about to judge them.
Before, there had been a party atmosphere with singing and music, even a couple of performance artists who took advantage of the moment to make some money. It had felt like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and no one had focused on the implications of the deadline. It only mattered to be there together.
Unlike the places in the world where gatherings became nasty, Times Square knew how to handle large groups.
New Year’s Eve was a joyous occasion, a time when people looked to the future, proposed to one another, made plans for what they would do next year. The closer this countdown came to its finish, the more people realized there might not be a next year. Maybe there wouldn’t even be a next week.
As the clocks on the screens marked eight p.m. and time until the trial dripped from hours to minutes, the huge crowd found itself divided about what would happen. Some felt events to follow would vindicate humanity’s existence, demonstrating all the good it had done. Others seemed certain they were facing the end, and watched with grim fascination. Some blamed the president for letting them know; others felt he hadn’t told them soon enough. A few Republicans argued if only they’d been more heavily armed it wouldn’t have happened, but nobody really listened.
It was 8:50 p.m., and the countdown kept up its relentless beat, the second hand slicing away the future as it swept slowly around the large clocks on the screens. There was something as alien and implacable about it as with any image of the ship.
The last sixty seconds finally arrived.
At New Year’s, it would have meant the whole crowd chanting along with the count with varying degrees of accuracy as the drink took its toll. The crowd building up its energy for the cheering to follow. Now, one million people waited spellbound in a ghostly silence. The seconds filtered down to a handful, then ran out entirely. The image on the screens changed.
What it displayed in the wake of the numbers was clear. A courtroom.
Jake and Sarah followed as the aliens led the witnesses along the tubed corridor to a new room in the ship. The neurons firing beneath the curved surface of the tube discharged like tiny for
ks of lightning as they passed. They eventually walked into another oval room, thirty feet across at the widest point, larger than the room the ten of them had come from but seemingly just as empty. This quickly changed as Sirius and Vega stepped carefully along the elliptical curves, pulsing psychic energy into the ship’s systems, and the ship responded by morphing its interior space.
A judge’s seat flowed out of the middle of one of the wider walls, silvery and metallic, a molten material solidifying to form a broad chair with rolled, luxurious arms reflecting the luminescence of the walls. On the left flank of the judge’s chair, a witness stand emerged from the floor, gleaming turquoise like mother-of-pearl as it flowed upward and curved with a sinuousness designed to enfold whomever stood there. Jake watched as Vega and Sirius stepped ten feet in front of judge’s chair and two smaller seats rose from the floor, more like ergonomic barstools and with a height obviously designed for the two aliens.
“The implications of this are incredible,” Dr. Gardener muttered. “They must have discovered some kind of living metal, and how to control it… but all the data on psychic phenomena suggests it can’t be real.”
“Trust me,” Jake said, “it is.”
Vega and Sirius weren’t finished yet. They walked to the left of the witness box and to the opposite end of the room from where the humans gazed dumbfounded. Now more seats started to grow from the floor. No two were quite the same, each one shaped for both the body and personality of one of the witnesses. It seemed as if the aliens had delved into the witnesses’ lives and picked out their favorite chair, recreating it in the organic metals and shimmering surfaces of the ship. In the first of the three seats in the front row, the president of the United States got a high-back office chair, finished in tan brown and looking as though it came straight out of the Oval Office. Next, the president of China was given an elegant cream armchair that would have been at home in Beijing’s great hall. The pope received a stately throne with gold embossment, and red velvet-like cushion and arm rests. In the second row, Professor Allen had something reddish brown and broad suggesting a library reading room. Dr. Gardener’s lab chair was black and chrome with an adjustable seat, while Amita’s chair was humble and finished in opal white. Paige’s resembled a garden deckchair, with colorful stripes on its canvaslike surface. Behind the second row, the shaman even got a gossamer hammock, floating in the air with no visible means of support.
A couch waited at the far left, and Jake knew without being told that it had been created for him and Sarah. Sarah knew it too, because she headed straight for it, sitting there with Jake and taking his hand. Despite its appearance, the metallic texture beneath their bodies felt soft and welcoming as they sank into it.
“This is just like my couch from my old apartment,” she said. “Just like it. Even the smell is the same.”
The others all knew which chairs were theirs. Once seated, they looked more like a jury than witnesses. Jake guessed this was the effect the aliens wanted to achieve. To make this appear as normal as possible to the public viewing on their TVs, phones, and computers.
In the middle of the wide curved wall opposite the judge’s seat, a console rose into position with multicolored crystal buttons. It looked similar to the console in the control room. The wall above it transformed into a wide screen. The courtroom flowed and extruded into existence one piece at a time, until finally it looked like a courtroom a futuristic lawyer would feel at home in. Maybe a cyborg Perry Mason.
“Where’s the judge?” Sarah asked.
“Everything is in place,” Vega pulsed, and Jake heard an echo of the alien’s words as the ship sent them out over the airwaves in a form the world could understand. “The judge will arrive soon. Please be ready.”
Vega and Sirius stepped over to perch on their narrow seats. Between them, they looked like a strange guard of honor, staring at the judge’s chair while they waited for it to appear.
A few seconds later, it did.
Chapter Twenty
Jake felt the Supreme’s arrival before he saw it. It arrived in ripples through the universal consciousness, everywhere and nowhere all at once. It could have been on the other side of the galaxy an instant before, but now it materialized here, and the waves caused by its presence in the room spread out until they became almost unbearable. Even the witnesses winced in response to the pressure at the edges of their minds, as the Supreme slowly coalesced from many different planes of existence into just one.
The pressure only lasted a few seconds. It ebbed as the being pulled back its power to prevent the destruction of everything in the room. It seemed to be remembering the rules of existing in a mere three dimensions, understanding the limits of what it could do without harm as it brought itself into a more comprehensible form.
Visibility followed presence, but only in stages. The space around the judge’s chair flickered and shifted, as though the Supreme was testing different possibilities. Briefly, it gave the impression of something humanoid, then of a coiling body, before concentrating down into a dark cube and reducing ever smaller, shrinking until no bigger than an eight-ball.
Jake gazed at it and felt his consciousness sucked into the small black sphere. For a moment, he thought he could see through it, as if it weren’t just a patch of emptiness but a hole in the fabric of reality leading to a plane far beyond. Jake thought he could see tiny dots of light, and somehow he knew that those dots were stars, rendered tiny by distance and perspective.
With the same certainty, he knew that if he pushed his hand into that darkness, he would find himself pulled through it, the gap in reality sucking him into some other place with no light, or air, or hope of surviving.
“Jake,” Sarah said, putting a hand on his shoulder, “are you all right?”
Jake shook his head. “It’s too much,” he said. “Something like this… it’s too powerful to be in one place.”
“Normally we wouldn’t be.” The words didn’t feel the same as Vega’s or Sirius’s projections. These seemed to have no point of origin or obvious direction to them. They simply were, present in the fabric of the universe for anyone to hear, as much the memory of something having been said as the act of saying it. “The concerns of so few dimensions are… difficult to concentrate on. But it is necessary.”
In an instant, the blackness of the sphere collapsed in on itself. Light burst from it in a flash so bright, Jake tore his gaze away. He wasn’t alone. All the witnesses averted their eyes, although Dr. Gardener held on the longest.
“It’s like seeing the beginnings of the universe,” he said with something like awe.
It was. Like looking into the heart of the big bang and seeing the shift from an instant of explosion to expansion on a scale Jake couldn’t begin to comprehend. Simultaneously, he saw it occupied a space no more than three feet across to create a sphere.
The sphere appeared to be filled with light, almost a miniature sun but for the way it pulsed in and out, contracting and expanding in a heartbeat formed of energy, gentle white light shifting into every color of the spectrum as Jake watched. Its intensity varied, sometimes so faint Jake thought he could see the chair through it and sometimes so intense he turned away to stop afterimages flickering across his eyes.
It had a cycle, with the movement from faintness to brightness seeming to come so regularly, Jake could have timed it with his watch if it hadn’t been so entrancing. It pulsed, and he could sense not just the power but also the vast intelligence at its heart.
The Supreme dimmed its peak brightness and pulsed again, and more words came into being. This time Jake knew everyone watching would have heard them, their weight carrying out across the world.
“We have gathered, and the trial is prepared. We will begin.”
Jake saw Sirius stepping to the front, pulsing out words for all in the courtroom to hear telepathically. He knew the ship would be automatically translating the psychic pulses into local languages so those watching and listening around the world
could also comprehend. The large screen above the console showed the footage being relayed.
“I am Sirius,” the alien explained. “In this proceeding, I will be arguing against humanity. This trial has been convened because an exhaustive analysis of the sum total of human history, by our computer known as the Pyramid, has shown only a 48.9 percent probability of the human species evolving beyond a level representing extreme danger to itself and other life-forms. In the interests of neutrality, at the end of the trial, the Pyramid will again analyze the original data to submit to the Supreme for verification. The Supreme will use this data, along with the evidence given by the witnesses, to then give the ultimate judgment.”
Sirius let these words sink in before continuing. “About 3.8 billion of your Earth years ago, my ancestors seeded life on this world as part of the Startoucher project. A quarter of a million years ago, my colleagues and I added a second stage to the experiment, placing traces of engineered DNA into archaic great apes to potentially produce intelligent species similar to our own.”
Sirius paused, although it couldn’t be for the Supreme’s benefit. The Supreme must have understood every nuance of this. No, Jake guessed, the pause would be to ensure the implications could be understood by those watching around the world.
“We performed this experiment in good faith,” Sirius pulsed. “We did it as a bulwark against the possibility of destruction, and as a way of spreading what we hoped were beneficial traits throughout the galaxy. We hoped, in essence, to create something more than ourselves.”
Another pause, and this one was simply the alien playing to the gallery. Jake shouldn’t have minded. He’d done it plenty of times. Yet here, with the future of mankind on the line, he felt the alien should show a little more respect.
“We failed,” Sirius continued. “At least when it comes to humans. The aggressive tendencies have not changed. The history of your species, the species we created, is one of violence, greed, and destruction. We have been monitoring your planet closely since the deployment of atomic weapons in 1945.
