The Serene Invasion

by Eric Brown

  He genuinely believed that there was a groundswell of public opinion growing for the restitution of the old way of life.

  He genuinely believed that when the Serene had imposed — without consent — their charea on the people of Earth, humanity had been robbed of something fundamental. Not for nothing had mankind evolved, by tooth and claw, over hundreds of thousands of years. We became, he reasoned, the pre-eminent species on the planet through the very means that the Serene were now denying us. It was his opinion, and that of many eminent social thinkers and philosophers, that the human race had reached the peak of its evolution and was now on an effete downward slope, little more than the pack-animals of arrogant alien masters.

  Violence was a natural state. Violence was good. Violence winnowed the fittest, the strongest, from the weak. The only way forward was through the overthrow of the Serene and the subversion of the unnatural state of charea.

  Of course, these were fine words. The reality was that the Serene were so far in advance of humanity in terms of science and technology that it was analogous to a band of Cro-Magnon spear-carriers taking on the might of an elite Delta Force.

  With the added complication being that the Serene were an enemy which did not show itself. And its minions, the golden figures, were as elusive as they were enigmatic. Not one of his sympathisers had ever been able to open communications with the so-called self-aware entities.

  His softscreen chimed, pulling him back to the real world, and Lal’s face flared on the screen. “A little more information regarding the representatives, sir.”

  “Fine. Come on up.”

  He had first set Lal the task of tracking down these ‘representatives’ ten years ago. In the early days he had not even been certain of their existence — from time to time, as Lal’s searches got nowhere, he thought the notion of humans in the employ of the aliens was no more than a rumour — but Lal through persistence and ingenuity had come up with occasional pay dirt. He had identified individuals who did move around the globe with erratic and seemingly motiveless purpose, individuals from all walks of life in whom the Serene should have no interest. But just as soon as Morwell hired people to apprehend and question these people, they vanished as if spirited away.

  A knock sounded on the door and his facilitator Lal Devi, who’d stood by him through thick and thin since the coming of the Serene, slipped into the room, as sharp as ever with his silk suit, ponytail and air of optimistic efficiency.

  He set his own softscreen on the desk top and tapped it into life.

  “Two suspects, sir. The first…”

  A face appeared on the screen, an African women in her fifties. “Chetti Bukhansi, 53, from Chad. An engineer. We’ve been tracking her for a month, on a tip-off from one of our sympathisers. I gave the order for a mole to be introduced, and the insertion was successful but came up with nothing substantial. Bukhansi travels a lot with her work, and it might not be the ‘cover’ of a representative.”

  Morwell frowned. “So in effect a big fat blank.”

  Lal nodded. “Just so.” He tapped the screen again and the African face was replaced by that of a European in his twenties. “This is Markus Dortmund, 28, from Germany. An artist. His girlfriend is a Free Earth Confederation member and contacted me via the website. We put someone on his trail…”

  “And?”

  Lal shrugged his slim shoulders. “The jury is still out. He travels a hell of a lot, but then his line of work calls for it. That’s the difficulty we face, sir — we just cannot be sure with any of them when they’re doing their own legitimate work, and when they might be working for the Serene.”

  Morwell said, “But surely…”

  “It’s impossible to be with the subjects twenty-four seven, sir, impossible to attend all their meetings. It’s quite possible that when they’re conducting seemingly casual meetings with other individuals, work for the Serene is taking place.”

  Morwell nodded his understanding, impatient though he was.

  “Very well. Keep tabs on this individual, Dortmund, and for chrissake don’t get too close. We don’t want to spook the Serene and lose him.”

  “Understood.”

  “And anything further on the idea that the Serene have been amongst us for longer than the ten years since their obvious arrival?”

  It was a schizoid French philosopher who’d first posited this theory, and Morwell still didn’t know how seriously to take it.

  The philosopher argued that for the Serene to institute the changes in the infrastructure of the economy of the planet in such an apparently short time, thousands of ‘operatives’ must have been in place pulling various strings and laying the ground-work for the revolution. Businesses had gone under overnight, only to be resurrected days later; banks had been run dry and then re-capitalised… And then there had been the logistical, organisational changes that had taken place: entire industries had vanished — meat farming among others — and yet within days all workers had been allocated other jobs. Such a smooth and painless transition pointed, so the philosopher argued, to careful planning and the placement of experts in a hundred different specialisms.

  Now the Indian stroked the line of his jaw. “I’ve had investigators checking the backgrounds of more than a hundred individuals, and they have unearthed certain anomalies. People whose life histories seem to have started from nowhere in their mid-twenties or -thirties; people without family or friends whose background has proven impossible to trace, as if they just popped out of nowhere ten, twenty, thirty years ago.” Lal shrugged again. “But the exasperating thing is, sir, that these anomalies might be caused by nothing more than incomplete or inefficient records. I’ll keep my team investigating and report when we come up with anything more conclusive.”

  They chatted about other matters for a while, then Morwell dismissed Lal and returned his attention to the view of sprawling Manhattan.

  He spent hours like this, he realised, staring out at the city but in reality thinking back to a time very different from this one. A time when he worked an eighteen-hour day and made a dozen vital decisions every hour; a time when he courted politicians and had them know that a vote the right way, or a bill passed in favour of a certain policy, could mean the difference between their party gaining millions in funding and getting nothing. Nowadays the world seemed to be run by a bunch of liberal bureaucrats whose favour could not be bought for love nor money. All the more ammunition for the mad Frenchman’s idea that they had been amongst us for centuries, Morwell thought.

  His softscreen chimed again and the beautiful young face of his latest escort, as he liked to call these women, smiled out at him. What was her name? Suzi, Kiki? She was new — had been recommended to him just last week — and knew how to satisfy his needs.

  “James… I’m here.” She blew him a kiss.

  He smiled. “I’ll have security send you up to the penthouse. And you’ll find five bottles of Perrier in the cooler.”

  She pulled a pretty moue. “Five?”

  “Just drink them and I’ll be up in an hour, okay?”

  She pulled a face, hit the deactivate key with ill-grace, and vanished from the screen.

  HE WAS ABOUT to leave the office and indulge himself in one of the few activities he enjoyed these days — even though his sex-life, since the coming of the Serene, had been diminished — when he noticed something in the corner of the room.

  He turned quickly in his swivel chair and stared.

  Something was flickering in the angle created by the two plate-glass windows, and at first he thought it an effect of the light on the glass. As he watched, however, the flickering light intensified and resolved itself into a standing blue figure.

  “What the fuck–” Morwell kicked off and launched his chair across the room away from the figure. He fetched up against the wall and exclaimed again.

  The figure was tall, well over two metres high, and composed of a swirling blue light. It seemed to contain azure spiral galaxies that ro
tated and shifted as he stared.

  It stood with its arms at its side, totally silent, and gazed directly at him — though its face was the same swirling blue as the rest of its body, and featureless.

  He managed, “What do you want?”

  Some envoy of the Serene, come to end his opposition? His heart began to beat faster and he realised he was sweating.

  The figure spoke — or rather its words sounded in his head. “Do not be afraid.”

  “Wh-what are you?”

  “We are the Obterek,” said the figure, still unmoving, “and my time here is limited.”

  Morwell eyed the door, four metres away. He wondered if he could reach it before the figure moved to stop him.

  “What do you want?”

  A beat, then the figure said, “We desire the same outcome as you, James Morwell.”

  His heart skipped. “You… you’re nothing to do with the Serene?”

  “We oppose the Serene; we oppose everything the Serene are doing to your planet and to your people. The Obterek are ancient enemies of the Serene.”

  Morwell nodded slowly, taking all this in. “And you are here because…?”

  “Because we believe you can help us in our opposition of the Serene.”

  He stared at the figure, smiling to himself. “You appear here out of nowhere, a figure of pulsing light. You’ve obviously travelled light years to reach Earth and possess technologies we have yet to dream of… And you think I can help you?”

  “We do not have the time to explain fully, James Morwell. Also, your understanding of the terms we use would be insufficient. Suffice to say, we the Obterek can insert ourselves into the reality of your solar system for brief periods only, for scant minutes every month. The Serene are vigilant, and watch for us, and we can compromise their surveillance only temporarily; likewise, we can breach their charea only briefly.”

  He pounced on this. “You can breach the charea?”

  “With extreme care and a great expenditure of energy, yes,” said the figure. “But to answer your question: you can help the Obterek undermine the Serene, and return the planet and its people to the Natural Way, because you inhabit this reality in a way that we do not. Together we can bring an end to the regime of the Serene on Earth.”

  Morwell gained confidence. He moved his chair closer to the figure and said, “And how might I accomplish this? And why me, of all…”

  The blue figure interrupted. “You maintain an opposition, feeble though it is, to the Serene. You have contacts, a network of agents working to your ends. One of these: to locate the Serene’s human representatives.”

  Morwell nodded. “That is so, yes.”

  “We, too, are interested in these people. We, the Obterek, believe they hold the key to what the Serene are planning in this system. The Serene are using them in ways we cannot quite fathom. To capture a representative, to find out from these people how they are being used, will mark a step change in our opposition to the Serene.”

  Morwell nodded. “We have been attempting to trace these people, which is easier said than done. We have leads, suspects. But when we get close…” He snapped his thumb and forefinger, “they go to ground.”

  “In that, James Morwell, we can assist.”

  For the first time the figure moved. It took a step forward, and then another, and there was something startling about the strength of purpose it exhibited, as if battling against a gravity greater than that to which it was accustomed.

  It stood before his desk, pulsing, and from just a couple of metres away Morwell could feel the heat radiating from its body.

  The figure reached out a hand, and opened it.

  A shower of what looked like sparkling blue coins — the same shade and make-up as the body of the Obterek — spilled across the desk.

  Morwell stared at the dozen discs as they glowed on the desk-top.

  He looked up at the figure. “And these are?”

  “What they are called does not matter, nor how they work. I could not explain their mechanics in any way that you would understand. Put simply, though erroneously, they transmit the content of a sentient’s mind to us through a breach in the space-time continuum. This explanation is imprecise, but will suffice.”

  “And you would like my agents to…?”

  “When you apprehend a suspect, one of these attached to that person will be enough to begin the transmission process.”

  He stared at the discs. “And just how do we attach them?”

  “By simply placing a disc against the skin of a suspect. The disc will do the rest, will insert itself instantly under the skin of the suspect, who will feel nothing. One hour later, however, the subject will die — an unavoidable consequence of the transmission.”

  “Die…” Morwell said to himself. He gestured towards the discs. “But I can handle them with… impunity?”

  “You will not be harmed.”

  He was silent for a time. At last he asked, “And how do I know I can trust you? How do I know that these… these discs will do what you say they will?”

  He had a dozen more questions, but these would do to start with.

  The figure said, “The fact is that you do not know, for certain. You must merely trust. And hope, James Morwell. And hope is a commodity of which you have had little over the course of the past ten years.” The figure paused, pulsing beautifully, and went on, “We have read your manifesto. We have studied your online pronouncements. The Serene, too, are aware of you, but in their complacency they allow you to conduct your opposition, such as it is. But that is the difference between the Obterek and the Serene: if you were opposed to the Obterek, we would have no compunction in carrying out your summary extermination.”

  Morwell almost smiled with the thrill of hearing such threats. He was thirteen again, and his father was approaching him with a baseball bat…

  He leaned forward and said, “And after the Serene have been vanquished, and the Obterek rule, what then?”

  The figure standing before his desk began to fade. Its last words sounded in his head: “Then you, the human race, will be alone again, such is the Natural Law…”

  “But –” he began, meaning to ask what the Obterek would gain from a return to the old ways.

  A second later the blue figure vanished.

  Morwell leaned forward and touched the closest disc. It was warm, and pulsed against his fingertips. Smiling, he reached out and trawled the rest towards him like a gambler scooping his winnings.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ALLEN HAD TWO hours to wait before the monotrain was due to leave Tokyo and head north to the Fujiyama arboreal city, so he sat in the plaza outside the station and sipped a coffee.

  The city skyline was dominated by a thousand-metre-tall obelisk, jet black and slightly tapering towards its summit. It was one of a dozen identical buildings gifted by the Serene, along with the eight ‘wilderness towns’, the hundred-plus littoral domed cities, and the arboreal cities, numbering in their thousands, that were springing up all around the world. The difference with the black obelisks was that they were the only Serene buildings placed within already existing cities, and they were the only constructions not purposefully created for human habitation. In fact, no one knew why the obelisks had appeared simultaneously five years ago in the centres of twelve of the largest cities on Earth.

  Since their arrival Allen’s monthly missions, as he thought of them, were always to the cities occupied by the obelisks. The routine was always the same. He would be alerted by a golden figure’s calm voice in his head telling him to make his way to London Airport, where he would board a Serene plane and instantly lose consciousness.

  The next thing he knew it would be one or two days later and he’d be sitting on a bench near one of the obelisks. In the early days the same routine would transpire, and he would come to his senses in various far-flung cities around the world. He would check his softscreen and more often than not find he had a photo-shoot appointment the very same
day somewhere not far away. For the past five years, however, every time he regained consciousness he was close to an obelisk — leading him to assume that his ‘missions’ and the obelisks were in some way linked.

  A few months ago he’d taken the monorail into London with Sally, and after a morning spent in the National Gallery Allen had suggested a stroll to Marble Arch. There they, along with thousands of other curious sightseers, walked around the base of the obelisk, marvelling at its seamlessness, its lack of features, the faint pulsing warmth it gave off.

  The media had not been slow in suggesting what the towers might be: they were, opined a respected international newsfeed, where the Serene themselves dwelled, looking out with sophisticated surveillance apparatus at the doings of the human race. More bizarre suggestions included the idea that they were the very engines that maintained the Serene’s regime of non-violence across the face of the Earth, that they were the physical essence of the extraterrestrials themselves, or that they were alien prisons where malcontents from across the galaxy were suspended and stored.

  Allen subscribed to none of these theories. The obelisks were, he surmised, meeting places where summits between fellow representatives like himself gathered to conduct Serene business — fulfilling much the same role as did the amphitheatre in the conjoined starships a decade ago.

  Of course, quite what business he and the other representatives were conducting was another mystery.