The Serene Invasion

by Eric Brown

  A silence lengthened, and Allen found himself standing. “Why,” he asked, “are we here? Why have you chosen us to tell all this to?”

  He sat back down, frustrated that he had not asked more — like, what had happened aboard the plane, with the silver dancing spider; just what had the Serene done to him and, presumably, to everyone else in the amphitheatre?

  “You were chosen,” said the golden figure before Allen, “because the Serene need human representatives to assist with the many changes that will affect Earth over the coming decades. You were chosen, all ten thousand of you, because you were assessed and found to possess the attributes required by the Serene.”

  Someone asked, “Which are?”

  Again Allen gained the impression that the figure before him was smiling. It gestured with an outstretched hand and said simply, “Chief of all, you posses humanity, an empathy with your fellow humans, a common decency. You are, if you like, representatives of your race.”

  Allen stood again. “But what exactly do you want with us?”

  The figure inclined its head, a gesture he recalled from the figure which had visited him back in Uganda. “One day a month, maybe two, you will be required to work for the Serene, to travel the world and, in time — when we have established settlements on other planets of the solar system — to those too. You will liaise with people working in various positions on the many projects we are establishing to bring change to the world, whether these projects are political, technological, scientific, social… For the duration you are working for the Serene, you will be unaware of what you are doing. Those days will be, as it were, blank; you will have no memories of what you did, who you met, or what you talked about.”

  Someone objected, “But that’s wholly unreasonable!”

  “But necessary,” said the golden figure. “There will be those amongst your kind who are opposed to the Serene and the changes we are instigating. If you retained awareness of the work you do, you could be compromised, endangered. It will be safer, for yourselves and for the success of the various projects undertaken, for you to work in ignorance. However,” the figure went on, “those amongst you who do not wish to lend themselves to our ends, who feel they cannot work within this remit, are free to absent themselves from proceedings.”

  Seconds elapsed. Allen considered what they had been told, thought through what he was allowing himself to do, and did not demur. He swept his gaze around the auditorium. Here and there he saw figures disappear, absorbed back into the padding which cradled them. Someone nearby was thus retracted, his place taken by a seamless black void.

  The golden figure went on, “Very well. Thirty of you from a total of ten thousand have decided not to take part in what lies ahead. They will be returned to their lives without prejudice, but without any knowledge of what occurred here today.”

  “And the rest of us?” someone asked.

  “Shortly, you too will be returned. You will retain memories of what happened here, and in a little under a month you will be contacted.”

  “And will we be… compensated for the work we do for the Serene? Many of us have jobs which…”

  The golden figure interrupted. “You will not be paid, as such, to work as representatives of the Serene; however, nor will your work situations be prejudiced.” The figure spread its arms. “In time, the nature of work as you know it will change, as your society changes. With limitless energy, with advanced computer systems, with much production automated, you will find that you have increased leisure time… which in turn will bring its own demands.”

  A silence developed, and then someone asked, “Why should we trust you? Why should we take on trust everything you have said? For all we know, you might be the front for some hostile alien invasion.”

  “I assure you that that is not the case, as you know…” And, again, the intimation that the figure was smiling. And the representative of the Serene was right: Allen knew, somehow without knowing quite how, that the invasion was wholly peaceable.

  The African woman stood up again. “You said that there are other races that you’ve helped, out there in the universe… But when will we meet them? When will the human race be allowed out of the solar system to mix with these other races?”

  He looked across at the woman, admiring her foresight.

  “It will happen in time,” the golden figure said. “You are not prepared, quite yet, but that will change. One day you will meet beings similar to yourselves, and many wholly dissimilar, which inhabit the breadth of the galaxy.”

  Allen looked at the African. Her mouth was open in wonder.

  The golden figure finished, “Shortly you will meet individually with us, and any last questions will be answered.”

  Seconds later the golden figures fade from sight. The panoramic view of the Saharan city vanished, to be replaced with the golden glowing disc, and suddenly it felt as if he was being absorbed into the very fabric of the padding around him.

  He was back in darkness, with a golden strip glowing on the floor before him.

  He was eased into a standing position, and stepped towards the lighted strip. He followed the light, but this time walked only a few paces before he found himself once again taken up by the padding. He sat, waiting, and a second later a golden figure manifested itself before him.

  As earlier, in the lounge back at the national park, Allen made out flashes and pulses of light within the body of the figure, and again he wondered at the nature of this ‘self-aware entity’…

  The figure reached out towards Allen’s right hand. It held something — a band of gold the identical colouration of itself — and slipped it over his hand. Allen looked down. A slim bangle sat on his wrist, warm to the touch. As he stared, it seemed that the band was absorbed into his flesh. Seconds later it had vanished.

  The figure spoke. “Mere monitoring devices. Do not be alarmed. They also allow us to communicate with you.”

  Allen said, “You said that you’d answer any final questions?”

  The figure inclined its head. “That is so.”

  “In that case, what happened to me, and presumably to the others out there, when time seemed to stop and I saw a silver…?”

  The figure raised a hand. “It was not as you assumed. You saw what you thought was a spider, felt it invade you… This was your mind, making sense, as it were, of sensual inputs which were beyond its comprehension. It merely substituted images, sensations, that you could readily comprehend.”

  “Then what did happen to me?”

  “Your mind was audited,” the golden figure told him. “Your identity was accessed, recorded, and found suitable. The exact process of what we did would be beyond your scientific comprehension.”

  “And… and how you managed to stop the entire human race from committing violence? Presumably that, too, would be beyond my puny intelligence to comprehend?”

  “Intelligence does not come into the equation,” it said. “Rather, you — and I speak here of ‘you’ as the human race — you do not have the required scientific knowledge to understand the process whereby the Serene facilitated charea, as we term it, a word allied to the Hindu concept of ahimsa. Suffice to say that on a level of reality beyond the sub-atomic, there are fundamental particles — which you call strings — which are accessible and are… the only word I can find that remotely suggests the term we use, is ‘programmable.’ Through this readjustment of fundamental reality, the Serene brought about charea.”

  “The domes…?” Allen began.

  “The placement of the domes was necessary in order for the Serene to bring about the successful implementation of the charea.”

  “And the Serene?” Allen asked. “You are their… their acceptable face, perhaps? What are they like in reality? Why don’t they show themselves?”

  “They are humanoid in appearance… not dissimilar to yourselves.”

  “And not monsters, repellent to our senses?”

  “By no means.”

  �
�Then why don’t they show themselves to us? I take it they are somewhere aboard these ships? Would it be possible to meet one…?” The very idea of it, he thought; to meet the aliens responsible for the salvation of the human race…

  The figure hesitated. “There are no Serene aboard the kavala, the eight ships. They are few in number, and spread wide throughout the galaxy. We do their bidding, in their absence.”

  Allen wondered whether he should be put out, on behalf of the human race, that the Serene did not see fit to be present during the momentous changes taking place on his planet. He said, “The golden figure I met earlier, in Uganda… it said that it, you, were ‘self-aware entities’… But what does that mean? Are you… robots, androids, or something my puny intellect cannot comprehend?”

  “We are living, biological beings, self-aware, individual, conscious — but grown, as it were, and programmed with the… desires, is the right term… of our mentors, the Serene.”

  “And have you yourself ever met a member of the Serene?”

  The figure gazed at him. “That honour has never befallen me, but several of my contemporaries have had the privilege.”

  “And what are the chances that I might one day meet a Serene?”

  He sensed the being smile. “As a selected representative of an uplifted race,” it said, “the chances I would assess as… good.”

  Allen smiled, then laughed. “If I’d been told about any of this a few days ago…” he began.

  The golden figure said, “And now, if you have no more questions…”

  “I have about a million, but it’d take a year to think of how to phrase them.”

  “There will be time enough in the years ahead, my friend. Now, you wish to be transported to London?”

  He stared. “How could you possibly know that?”

  The figure inclined its domed and pulsing head. “The Serene know so much,” it said, and faded from view.

  The padding around Allen flowed, returned him to an upright position. He followed the golden strip-light on the ground, and minutes later found himself aboard the alien plane. He was the first human of four to take his seat, and the second he did so he slipped into unconsciousness.

  SPRING HAD COME to London, sunlight replacing the grey drizzle he had left just days before — but that was not the only change. The ad-screens plastered across the walls of buildings as he came into Victoria monorail station no longer flashed with tawdry advertisements. Every one of them showed the eightfold coming together of the alien starships over rural China, and the growth, on the parched land far below, of a second green city.

  He noticed a change among his fellow Londoners, too. There was a collective air of excitement about the place, a buzz he had experienced only in times of momentous events — the outbreak of war, or Great Britain’s victory in the 2022 World Cup. Everyone was discussing the arrival of the aliens — the fact that they were called the ‘Serene’ was not public knowledge yet — and it appeared that even now, in the early days of the charea, some subtle change had come over the citizens of the capital. Was he imagining it, or were people more polite to each other, more respectful? As if, concomitant to the blanket ban on violence, individuals were wary of showing even such nascent signs of violence as bad temper or irritability with their fellow man.

  He wondered how long it might be before a more unconscious psychological response manifested itself? Denied the cathartic release of violence might some individuals, the psychotic and unstable, suffer increased mental conflict? And what about citizens who never thought of resorting to violence? Would the very fact of violence being denied have some effect on society as a whole? No doubt, over the days and weeks ahead, the newsfeeds and TV channels would be bursting with pundits expounding their views at length.

  On the way from Heathrow he read on his softscreen that the very first official communiqué from the alien ships had been received at the UN headquarters. The Visitors — as the news media had dubbed them — had announced that they would broadcast their intentions to the world at three that afternoon, Greenwich mean time.

  Just as he was about to alight at Victoria, and take the underground to Notting Hill — where Sally would be awaiting him — he heard a couple of businessmen discussing in anxious tones what the aliens might have planned. One invoked the old film Independence Day, another The War of the Worlds, and both agreed that the end was nigh… Nursing his knowledge like a privilege, Allen felt like telling them that they were foolish and that there was nothing to worry about.

  He left the carriage and took the packed escalator down to the Tube, and as he made his rattling journey west to his apartment and Sally, he saw his first case of ‘spasming,’ as it came to be known.

  A dozen school kids were arguing in the aisle. In the general verbal to and fro, one particular insult was taken badly and a youth moved towards another, anger on his thin face. He pulled a knife, drawing gasps from nearby passengers, then stopped suddenly, his face twitching, his entire body convulsing as if in the grip of some autonomic malaise.

  “He’s spasming! Spasming!” the others taunted, dancing around the stricken youth.

  Allen stepped from the train at Notting Hill, thinking that the display of spasming and the resulting taunts were eminently preferable to the violence that had been circumvented.

  HE UNLOCKED THE door to his flat and stepped into the hall, the pleasurably tight pressure of anticipation within his chest. He heard a sound from the lounge, dropped his holdall and waited for Sally to emerge. She appeared in the doorway in faded blue jeans and a white cheese-cloth blouse. She stopped there, her breath caught, then rushed at him. He lifted her off the floor and it came to him that the heft of her in his arms, her reality, was far more meaningful, far more emotionally resonant, than his recent encounter with the extraterrestrials.

  He carried her into the lounge and collapsed on the settee; they kissed and hugged, pulling away frequently to look at each other.

  She appeared far more beautiful than he recalled her ever being in Africa; her face was fuller now, no longer taut and stressed, and she’d had her hair cut and styled, shortened to shoulder-length.

  “You look… incredible.”

  She laughed. “It’s great to be back. I can’t believe the range of food. I forgot what London was like… I’m eating well. I’ve put on pounds!” She patted her perfectly flat stomach and laughed.

  “All the more to love,” he said.

  She tugged at his shirt, and they undressed and moved to the bedroom.

  Later, lying face to face in the sun that slanted in through the bay window, she stroked his arm and murmured, “Tell me all about what happened on the alien ship.”

  “The Serene,” he said, “hail from a star twenty-odd light years from Earth, a star we call Delta Pavonis.”

  He told her about his experience aboard the nexus of alien ships, the amphitheatre containing ten thousand fellow human representatives, and what the ‘self-aware entities’ had said.

  He seemed to talk for a long time, recounting his impressions, his feelings.

  “And they chose you,” she said, as if in awe.

  He laughed. “For my humanity, my empathy.”

  She whispered, “Which is the reason I fell in love with you, Geoff Allen.”

  “Thank you. But enough of me. What have you been up to?”

  “Well…” she began, then told him about the encounter with her kidnapper in the village of Benali.

  “And… how did he react?”

  “With anger, especially when I offered him antiseptic for his face… He came for me and…”

  He said, “There’s already a term for it.” He described the youths he’d seen on the Tube earlier. “It’s called spasming.”

  “That’s exactly what happened when he tried to attack me. He stopped dead, taut, and… spasmed.”

  She was silent for a while, thinking back. He said, “It must have been… satisfying.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Yes, it was.
But then… then something happened, and I don’t know whether I did the right thing, or…”

  “What?”

  She sighed. “Ali had a wife, Zara. It was obvious from how he spoke to her that… that he treated her like an animal, to be blunt. When I was about to leave, she ran from their hut and asked to come with me. I… I don’t know whether what I did then was a sadistic impulse, done to get another one over on my enemy… or done out of altruism. I said she could come with me, and we made for the car, Ali following in distress and anger, and spasming as he tried to prevent Zara from leaving him.”

  She fell silent, shaking her head.

  She murmured, “She told me about her life as I drove down to Kampala. You wouldn’t believe it, in the twenty-first century. She was little more than a slave. Ali wanted a son, but Zara fell pregnant twice and both times with a girl, so he forced her to terminate the pregnancies. And he beat her, abused her. She’s an educated woman, not that that makes the slightest bit of difference to the reprehensibility of his attacks. But she was clever enough to know that she deserved more. And then with the coming of the Serene… this gave her the courage to act.”

  He thumbed a tear from her cheek. “Sally, you did the right thing. Don’t browbeat yourself trying to scrutinise your motivations.”

  “But one’s motivations are important, Geoff. They’re who we are, after all.”

  He smiled and shrugged and wondered why some people tortured themselves like this, needlessly examining their actions and reactions and the reasons for them.

  “You’re a good person, Sally.”

  She looked momentarily unhappy, then said, “Don’t you question yourself, Geoff? Analyse your motivations?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes, maybe…”

  She smiled, reached out and stroked his cheek. “That’s one of the things I love about you, you know, you’re so…”