The Fermi Paradox

by Mark Harrison

  “This really sucks,” said Bobby.

  As they approached the plain, Sandra put her phone in her pocket. She pulled around the crossbow strapped to her back, then held a finger over her lips and looked at Bobby. The boy was like a bull in a China shop but he got the hint. He began to walk with more careful, deliberate steps behind his mother.

  Sandra’s family had asked her time and time again why she took her two young children hunting. Why was it necessary to expose them to violence? Particularly when you didn’t actually “hunt” the animals out in the wild anymore. All you could do was shoot them with tranquilizer darts and pose for a picture with their sleeping body.

  Sandra didn’t care about any of that.

  She believed in the importance of learning how to take care of one’s own self. Our self-reliance, she thought, is what compels the human race forward. It’s what separates us from the beasts. We decide our fate. The kids needed to learn that.

  Bobby stepped on a twig and it made a loud snap.

  Slowly, Sandra turned around. Bobby was frozen. He knew he had made a mistake. The look on his face was priceless. At least he knows he made a mistake, she thought. She gave him a pat on the head and they continued forward.

  They made their way out of the dense woods and came to a clearing. Sandra pulled out her phone, opened the national park app, and waited for her daughter’s location to show up. Nothing happened.

  That’s weird. She shook her phone. Nothing. She bent down on one knee. Bobby mimicked her. She looked at the app again. In the bottom right corner of the screen she spotted the problem. It read:

  ‘GPS Not Found. System error.’

  “Psst,” said Bobby. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “No GPS.”

  “What’s a GPS?”

  Kids these days, she thought. Sandra didn’t have time to explain to her nine-year-old son how global positioning worked. She needed to get in contact with Claire. Without the live feed, she didn’t trust her daughter out on her own.

  She called Claire’s phone. No answer.

  She looked up above the treetops, searching for the black outlines of the drones. She didn’t see any.

  “Claire!” she shouted. “Claire, you out there?”

  They were close to the location Claire had been when she’d last checked on her.

  No answer.

  Sandra looked down at her phone again and gave it a whack. Again, nothing. She pulled out Bobby’s phone. His phone didn’t have a GPS signal either.

  Alright, Sandra thought, time to track like we used to. She told Bobby to stick to her like glue. They were going to find Claire. The hunt was over.

  5 Oleksii Borachev

  Sept 22, 2051, Honolulu, Hawaii

  “Die, die, die!”

  Oleksii screamed out curse words and death threats in his thick Russian accent. His english was fragmented but he knew enough to get the point across. He wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy in the slightest.

  He only stopped the screaming, when the game ended. Game Over. He was dead. Dejected, he threw the controller on the ground. He took off his VR headset and let out a big sigh.

  “What a waste of time. Why do they make pieces of crap like that? Garbage.”

  Oleksii was sitting at his desk. The glow of his monitor shone across his face, highlighting his gaunt, pale features. He put his VR headset down and got up. It felt good to stretch his legs. It had been hours since he last stood up.

  As he walked over to the controller, his legs cracked. The controller was broken. He picked it up and threw it in the trash can beside his bedroom door. It landed on top of a mountain of crushed soda cans and empty chip bags.

  “Lights on,” Oleksii said.

  The lights inside his bedroom flickered on, revealing what looked like a teenage boy’s fantasy. Stacks of comic books were strewn across his floor, while posters of half-naked women were hung up on his walls. Super heroes and bikini models. He was living the dream. That is, of course, if you ignored the fact he was essentially being held hostage by the American government. Oleksii looked back at his computer monitor.

  His shift was about to begin.

  Five years ago Oleksii had been tracked by the CIA as he masterfully hacked into SpaceForce spy satellites. He made a mockery of the millions of dollars that had been spent on satellite security. This pimply teenager in a small, derelict apartment on the outskirts of Moscow was costing them a fortune.

  Luckily, the Russians knew nothing about him.

  When the US government apprehended the Russian president’s son, Vlad, at the Mexican border with bags full of Neclo, a pharmaceutical digital drug, they knew exactly who they wanted to trade for. They made up some story that Oleksii had been breaking US election interference laws by running social media groups aimed at damaging the president’s reputation. They even faked a few groups and sent them to the FSB as evidence.

  When Oleksii realized what the CIA was doing, he played along with it. He had no desire to be recruited by the Russians, and the thought of living in his mother’s cramped apartment, eating her burnt cabbage stew, didn’t hold much appeal either.

  In an exchange with the Russian government, the US handed over custody of the president’s son for Oleksii. When the Russian police stormed into his apartment, he’d already packed.

  They handcuffed him and put a bag over his head. The next few hours were terrifying.

  He thought about all the ways things could go wrong. The FSB were notorious for throwing bodies in the Moskva river. But in the back of his mind, he knew the American’s wanted him alive. They wanted his skill. Once he was in the US government’s hands, he was interrogated for hours. They had psychologist after psychologist interview him, making sure he wasn’t going to double cross them, making sure he knew he was a prisoner. But if he played ball, he would eventually have all the freedoms of an ordinary citizen. Albeit, as long as he did everything they asked him to do.

  They set him up in a condo overlooking the beach in Honolulu, an office at the SpaceForce Intelligence Ops division at Pearl Harbor, and told him to be quiet. Oleksii did what he was told.

  Thinking about it made him laugh. He felt they wasted way too much time and money on him during that whole exercise. He felt no loyalty to Russia. Although he did miss the vodka. He couldn’t find good vodka in Hawaii.

  His job now was to hack into Russian satellites, to provide encryption services to American satellites, and to make sure that no one suspected a thing. With a new name, a new identity, and a cover story as a tech-trillionaire, he looked like any other Russian playboy blowing his money on Neclo and hookers. Little did they know, Oleksii hated drugs. He didn’t mind hookers, though.

  He sat back down at his computer and checked the status of SpaceForce’s spy satellite fleet. This was the easiest part of his day. All he had to do was make sure everything was working as it should.

  He ran some system diagnostic checks. A green checkmark next to every satellite. Then he checked flight course patterns. Once again, a green checkmark next to every satellite. Everything looked good.

  Oleksii grabbed a handful of chips from a bag on his desk, stuffing them in his face. Crumbs landed on the floor beneath his feet. Wiping his fingers on his pants, he watched his computer monitor with bizarre satisfaction. All he had to do now was check that his firewalls weren’t compromised, work on some new encryption software, and that would be it. Another day at the office done. He smiled.

  Then, a red X appeared next to a couple satellites in the flight course patterns column.

  That was strange.

  Then a few more appeared.

  “What the fuck?” Oleksii said, his mouth wide open.

  Before long, the entire flight course pattern column was marked with red Xs.

  Oleksii sat up. He had data readings on the entire fleet of SpaceForce’s satellites at his fingertips. He selected one of the satellites at random and opened up its individual live data report.

  A detailed l
ook at SpaceForce Satellite B-2798 appeared on his desktop.

  Erroneous flight course patterns were a common problem. But only for one or two satellites, not the entire fleet. This had never happened before. It was as if something or someone had physically pushed each satellite off its course. But that was impossible. SpaceForce command would know about it. They would have detected any physical disturbance well before it happened.

  Oleksii opened a series of programs he’d designed that scanned the hardware and software of the satellites.

  When the scan was complete, he saw what was causing the problem. The motherboard was corrupted.

  “What the…” Oleksii trailed off. He couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing.

  He opened up another satellite. The same problem.

  “Oh my god.”

  With the motherboard on each satellite corrupted, it was only a matter of time before SpaceForce would have no way to control them.

  Oleksii’s mind raced. His expertise was satellite communication software. This was way above his technical ability. But was he the first to notice? He picked up his phone and called SpaceForce Command.

  6 Rick Frost

  Sept 22, 2051, Deadwood, South Dakota

  The crater was three meters wide. The small circular pit was surrounded by corn stalks, flattened from the explosion.

  When Rick saw the plume of smoke rising from the middle of a corn field he told the truck to park and got out.

  The trek through the corn field had started to sober him up. The cold didn’t help either. Rick could see his breath. He needed a drink.

  He approached the crater and looked inside.

  A small metal orb, about the size of a basketball, rested at the bottom. It didn’t look like any satellite he had ever seen before. It didn’t have any insignia on it, although that may have burned off during its fall from orbit. That said, it looked to still be in one piece. One tough cookie.

  One thing was for sure, it wasn’t American. He was pretty sure it wasn’t Russian or Chinese either. Not unless they were testing something new that no one knew about. During Rick’s years in SpaceForce he had become familiar with satellite tech. If anything, this metal orb looked like a test probe. Something from a company looking to patent some new space tech that they would later sell to a government. Miraculous that it didn’t bust up on reentry, but maybe that’s what they were experimenting with.

  If it was government property, it had to be reported to the authorities immediately. Private enterprise space materials, however, could be claimed and sold as scrap. The more stuff we put up there, the more would fall back down. Over the last thirty years, an entire industry popped up around scavenging fallen space materials. You could break down their parts and sell them as scrap to companies for a pretty penny. Or, what Rick was hoping with this find, you’d sell it back to whatever private company made it. They would pay hush money to keep their failed mission quiet. No way they’d want anyone else to learn about their space probe. Or that their space probe had fallen onto private property. Rick was doing them a favor and it only made sense that he got rewarded for it.

  He may have just hit a bit of pay dirt. If this was some new tech, he might get upwards of $50,000. Enough to survive for months. Enough to drink away his nights and forget about the past. Who would have thought, something from the stars would help him forget about them?

  Rick pulled out his phone and scanned the area. He was looking for heat signatures and radioactivity. It was safe. Just a few fires here and there. That and a lot of ruined corn.

  He took off his jacket and threw it over the orb. He was going to drag it out. He didn’t care if his jacket was ruined. With the money he’d make from selling it, he could buy a new one.

  As he bent down to the ground, he felt the heat of the soil on the palm of his hand. He reached down and grabbed each arm of the jacket. He was trying to cradle the metallic object. He didn’t want to touch it with his hands. It wasn’t on fire, but it did just fell from the sky. It was going to be hot. He started to pull it up out of the pit.

  Damn thing was heavy. Rock solid. Satellites were usually built from paper-thin aluminum. This one was different. This would probably take him hours to drag back. It didn’t matter. Rick continued to pull. The metal object made a path in the dirt as he dragged it through the field. Rick kept knocking down corn stalks along the way. He would get it home and store it in his barn. Things finally looked like they were going his way.

  He didn’t notice the small yellow glow on the object’s side or the melted SpaceForce drill bit sticking out of it. Had he, he would have called SpaceForce right there and then.

  7 John Slate

  Sept 23, 2051, NASA Space Center, Houston, Texas

  The coffee was good. It pissed John off. Of course their coffee would be good.

  As Chris Dellon walked into the room John stood up and shook his hand. He gritted his teeth. Chris was followed by three others.

  John didn’t know any of them. He sat back down and took another sip of his coffee and cursed under his breath.

  John had caught the red-eye from Boston to Houston. The call with NASA the night before left him confused. Things kept getting stranger.

  He knew the call with Chris would be about the warm objects detected in the Oort Cloud. Although he didn’t quite know what else there would be to say about it. It was unusual. But not so unusual as to warrant a phone call with a bitter rival.

  John had a theory the objects were simply part of an interstellar asteroid field. Perhaps they were the remains of a rogue planet. A planet that had lost its sun. Potentially, it could have collided with another rogue planet. The warmth of the objects could potentially be explained by analyzing their light wavelengths. It was interesting. The kind of discovery professors and scientists got excited about and wrote papers about, but nothing life-changing.

  When John picked up the phone, he could hear the panic in Chris’ voice.

  “John, I know I’m the last person you want to talk to”.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You don’t need to play nice with me, John. We need your help.”

  “I’ve looked at the Oort Cloud numbers,” John said. “I’ve seen the unusual findings. Thousands of warm objects. It’s unusual. I wonder if…”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Chris interrupted. “John, they’re moving fast. We just got the data a few hours ago. We don’t believe it. I know what you’re probably thinking. You think they’re probably, what…” He trailed off.

  “Interstellar comets? The remains of two rogue planets colliding? Asteroids?” John said.

  “They’re definitely not that.”

  “What makes you sure?”

  “They’re moving too fast. Their path doesn’t make sense. Those numbers from the deep space telescope. They’re not accurate now.”

  “Something’s probably interfering with their gravity,” John said. “The Einstein Deep Space Telescope is good but it’s not perfect. We must be missing something.”

  “You could be right.”

  John was surprised to hear Chris telling him he might be right about anything. They’d been friends before he split up with his ex-wife. They were competitive, but in a healthy way. The way two athletes compete. They would always shake hands at the end of each game, although their games involved scientific discoveries. When Chris married Sharon that changed. John didn’t just want to beat Chris. He wanted to ruin him professionally. Needless to say, he had failed tremendously in his task. Chris climbed the ranks at NASA and now served as its primary director. John was still an MIT professor. Hearing Chris concede that he may be right felt like a victory.

  “That’s probably what it is, Chris. Just some bizarre interference.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Okay, thought John, that didn’t sound right. Why would Chris Dellon hope I’d be right about anything. John didn’t know what to say. He was expecting more from his chief rival. He was
expecting an argument.

  “Listen,” Chris continued. “I want you to come down to Houston as quickly as you can. I want you to look at what we’re looking at. You’re the best at this kinda stuff, John. No one in the world can predict the movements of deep space objects like you. Maybe you’ll set my mind at ease. Maybe you’ll set all our minds down here at ease.”

  When John ended the call, he felt unsettled. Hearing Chris so worried was unusual. John agreed to come down to NASA. He needed to see what had Chris so worked up. If anything, this might be the chance he’d been waiting for. He might be able to make Chris look like the phoney he always said he was. And he might be able to prove to someone in Houston that he deserved to be working for them. He went home, packed his things, and got on the plane.

  A few hours later, he was sitting across from Chris. In a room with three other NASA scientists.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Chris said. “We’re dealing with a global satellite disturbance on a scale we haven’t ever seen before. We’ve been on the phone with SpaceForce all morning. We’re trying to get to the bottom of this. It’s like we’ve gone back a hundred years.”

  John had heard the reports as soon as his plane hit the ground. It was on every news screen in the Houston terminal building. Hundreds of satellites all over the world had fallen from the sky and worldwide satellite communications were massively disrupted. He was lucky his flight had taken off when it did because commercial air traffic had already been grounded.

  “Listen,” John said. “You know I don’t really want to be here. We’ll talk about the satellite stuff later. Why don’t we get right to the point. What’s got you all so spooked?”

  John got the distinct feeling that everyone in the room felt the Oort cloud disturbance and the satellite disaster were connected. Even if it made no sense, two major issues at the same time was too much for people to keep separate in their minds.