WASHINGTON, DC. GEORGETOWN
Call me Ishmael.
Ok, Ishmael.
I am a friend of David’s.
David doesn’t have any friends.
How did you get this number?
From David. He was my friend.
I doubt that, and he would know better.
Was?
Was. He is gone. I was his friend.
The proof is on your laptop.
Goodbye.
*
Mal roles out of bed while the younger man with exquisite bone structure whines and reaches for her warm spot. She sleep staggers downstairs. Checks all the locks, twice. And when she opens the study, her laptop that should be an idle slate is active and glowing.
When her companion finally wakes and shows up in the doorway behind her, she’s standing in front of her desk bathed in gold light from the lamp and the holographics, haptic tapping, typing. “What the fuck are you doing?” Mumble from the colleague companion.
She doesn’t look back. “Make coffee.” Finds here seat. “We’re taking Reagan Man’s balls.”
*
IN TRANSIT: KEPLER 22-EARTH
*
Call me Costello. Who I am is not important, that you see what I see is absolutely crucial. Watch:
A vessel in transit, not on the seas but through the black-velvet-void. Space. The “sea” is contained in the closed system habitat–the spaceship that looks like a great slender wasp with bulbous engine and orb-tipped wings spinning-not-flapping. They’re close to Earth. The advance team and the elected leadership of the voyage are awake.
They’re reviewing and assessing the high and lowlights of human history during transit, during hibernation. They left home in 1945. WW2 convinced them to come armed. Waking up at the “news briefs” presented by the ships ‘ai’ about Earth’s intervening years did not inspire confidence. The Cold War (both) and WW2.5 caused great consternation. They’re already debating what to do: slide on by and lock the doors, say “hi” anyway, or come in shooting to ensure nothing dangerous ever escapes.
“I will admit. The primates are violent.” Shocked gasps (the equivalent), they shake the tips of their legs in a very specific way like they’re ‘fake scared.’ “Who among us hasn’t punched a fish out of spite?” They’re defending you, that one, the cephalopod with the blue skin and usually-black-rings and the charisma. The one addressing the small crowd of her comrades, colleagues, and shipmates.
The idiom she’s using kind of translates. It’s like living in a glass house and throwing rocks or who ought to be casting “the first stone.”
The idea of “sliding right by” is reintroduced (so many times they’ve lost count). A lil’ guy, red with usually-green circles suggests they record as much music and other media as they can on a fly-by-and-bye, all the stories we can for as long as we can listen to Earth, “and plot a course for brinier waters”
“And simply hope there’s life worth meeting past the primates?” Blue (we’ll call her Blue) really wants to meet you and she is not having any of it. “If there’s no other sentient life within our range, what then?” ‘nods’ (dances) of agreement. “We just drift off into the void listening to Little Richard and the Mountaingoats and Wu-Tang until the ship dies and we with it? Not a terrible way to go, but we were meant for more.” There are nods and giggles, ‘claps’ of a sort. She is a gifted speaker.
Blue is on a roll, has her audience eating out of her sucker. “We set out to know our neighbors. Sliding by? That’s out of character for our people and unworthy of the mission.” Here here. A few emphatic spurts of bioluminescent ‘ink’.
“Sparkle someone else’s eyes, you fry, you whelp” The old timer, his face “tattooed” with living glyphs, his body a living historical repository. He commands respect. And the human cultural reference? He knows your work as well as the fry, and wont let affection blind him to duty. They love your music and art and culture, I cannot stress that enough. But they’re really proud of their culture and the “prosper and don’t die” reasonable and deliberative almost-utopia they’ve made. They’re also afraid in a way that “enlightened” beings don’t like to admit.
They’re so proud and protective of what they have that some, this one in particular whose voice carries weight, would rather burn your world than risk you ever having the chance to hurt theirs. He’s an old timer. He watched another world kill itself via FTL telescope. A desert world, beautiful ice caps and the barest little bits of ocean. They had made it to their own moon, the tragically warlike things. They dreamed of colonization, just as the humans had at one point.
“No, no no. We cannot slide by.” Old timer swims to the center of the group, Blue fades. “These savages could plot our trajectory. Then, being cunning, observe where we came from and where we were headed. No.”
The audience waits with perked-gills (loses a lot in translation): “I am the only one among us currently awake who has seen a species lose the battle with un-reason and barbarism. For the sake of our world, our people, and our future. We must pre-emptively eliminate Earth. It is the technical definition of mercy, really.”
There’s an enormous uproar, ink bioluminescing-every-color. You could be forgiven for seeing the arguments as a series of “dance offs” between arguing octopi. And you’d be right because that’s what it looks like.
If it seems silly, it’s because it is. I love them, the cephalopods. I have deep affection for their culture, but they’re also silly little squishy-stoic guys who act as if they’ve mastered their emotions. But clearly, you see the same dance-argument as I. No being ever ‘masters’ their emotions. That’s not a desirable state if achieved anyway.
Adorable as the cephalopods are, and you primates as well, there’s this deadly serious point: The “dance off” is only going to get bigger as they get closer and closer to Earth. More sentient-octopi will come out of hibernation and enter the debate. And parked in low Earth orbit, they will come to a consensus, one way or the other.
*
WASHINGTON DC
Sydney Sanders is displeased. You can hear it in her walk if you know (Jonathan knows). Someone is going to feel her wrath when she finds one worthy and deserving. She woolgathers, broods, reflects. Fake listening on the walk from the office to the discreet tunnel.
She had one hell of a “first hundred days” secured the future of the New New Deal by excising the “sundown” poison pill. After that, kept the hawks at bay until midterms.
Mid-terms. The opposition bit into the DemSoc majority, hard. The white collar end of the Bunker Babies. “Why rearm when no one else is?” was a good political platform. Let’s spend our resources on, well, us. “Robots will come for you” was apparently more effective messaging–never mind that it was a complete political pivot from “let them rust.”
And the party in power is always punished. They’ve still got a majority in congress, slim-and-slimmer when the Donkeys caucus with the Gerrymandering Old Pissants. From the leader of the party to, what? Still the leader of the party. Just can’t really push legislation. She feels like a tree, alone in a field. She dreams it. Stuck there surrounded by deep furrows. Black Earth. No seeming purpose. No agency action or motive force. Watching the world pass. Every night.
The old steel door in the bowels of the older building clanks shut. The fed frienemy with the vape steps as inscrutable as ever from the shadows and its back to work–Sydney is pulled back into the term of office presently slipping past her.
“Please give me good news.” Can’t do that. “Then kindly fuck off.” How about this.
Above the phone in her hand hovers the hologram, the Lux-Tech middle manager and the sweaty faced doctor, the threat, the fear.
Syd smiles, “Show me more.”
*
PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Nobody knows why two barrage balloons, stable and settled over Prague for a decade. The ones that punished anything below with weapons and roving dogs and flyers, those two. Ten years of “no-go” zone below and then? There is no answer as of yet. The two great motherships, weapons platforms, or whatever just shimmied, shuddered, collided and fell to Earth obliterating themselves and many drones beneath. More rubble on the abandoned city (New-Prague well below the surface reported only broken glass and minor injuries).
And the people who have to find out why this happened? They’re a little busy. Because every hawk, everybody on Earth who has the authority to send someone’s kid to go shoot at things and people. Every “General Ripper” and war pig is chattering and communiqueing and communicating subtly and loudly and all points between and speculating that maybe Abel has lost a step?
And maybe the mighty machine that pressed pause on the war before it became WW3, were never so mighty? And the old “map lust” crept back in, the itch when one sees a map–that desire to possess the dirt it depicts and draw lines and fences all over it.
*
PEORIA ILLINOIS
The city is rubble and robot dogs. Quad rotor’s flit from rubble pile to building to hole in the ground. From the remains of a mostly-sturdy parking garage the four travelers survey the scene.
Abbott strains and stretches, brings four rubbered limbs. He grunts and groans and stretches fingers into some great circular lense in front of them–like the hoop a child might blow soap bubbles from. And that’s what he does: blows, not gently or like whistling, but a raspberry–all snotty.
The tardigrade snot magnifier shows them their destination and path. “Really you should be able to do this by now.” Abbott, don’t. “I’m simply saying.” Don’t simply say.
The thing hasn’t been secret in a long time. There’s been construction since human’s abandoned it. Concentric rings of what appear to be turrets surrounding what looks conspicuously like a freight elevator to hell. Just then a robin skirts to close to be fried out of the air by a blue beam from one of the confirmed turrets.
Dogs, big-ARCs and the little agile yipping ones patrol or guard pre-determined positions. Dolores counts a dozen. She turns, can see Jonah counting them, brain churning. His hand’s moving up and down explosive things as he composes an action-movie sequence. “You’re not going.” What? “You’ll die.”
“My daughter speaks sense.”
“I’m going. Alone.” My body? “Yes, Abbott. I’m going alone with my asshole father. If Abel wants me? He can have me.”
Jack seems confused: “We’re not gonna kill god?
*
END DOLORES (8)