Usurper of the Sun Read online

  Aki blinked hard. Tears from her eyelashes hung in the air. Kindersley placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “What I did,” Aki said, “was genocide.”

  “You saved the human race. Genopreservation, not xenocide. Quick thinking and some guts and every accomplishment of our species lives on,” the commander said. “The accomplishments of the past and of the future as well. Your future, mine, those of generations yet to come. That’s all that matters.”

  Aki caught a teary glimpse of the airlock door where she had seen Mark for the last time. Memories rushing back, she saw his gentle smile. He gave his life for this, willingly, and he had not asked for a thing in return.

  How do humans justify atrocities? If he were here he would say, “We are going to endure. That is all that matters.”

  PART II

  PHYSICAL CONTACT

  CHAPTER 1: THEORY OF MIND

  ACT I: MARCH 11, 2024

  9 AM

  AKI LEFT HOUSTON’S blue skies to land in Oakland fog. A Cadillac Deville limousine waited for her. Her tongue clucked when she noticed the limo was a gas guzzler, not a hybrid. Hard to believe that something wasteful had survived the years of famine and civil unrest.

  “Thank you.” Aki bowed her head, one of the few reflexes that remained from her upbringing. “They didn’t need to go to such trouble.”

  “The BART trains are overcrowded and dangerous. The trains rarely run on time,” the driver said.

  “You would be surprised how well I take care of myself. I lived in Tokyo. You haven’t seen crowded trains until you’ve ridden the Tokyo subway during rush hour.”

  Aki had formally refused a bodyguard. She allowed a personal assistant at her UNSDF office but never brought her assistant along on travel. She preferred independence, but knew that just accepting what people wanted to give her often meant less work for the international array of handlers and hangers-on. She tried to compromise in whatever way created the least fuss. Aki was a scientist first and foremost. Being a special advisor to the UNSDF, recipient of a Nobel Prize, known for saving the solar system—half the time it got in the way of the work she wanted to do.

  The four-lane freeway alongside downtown Oakland was nearly empty.

  “Is it always this foggy near the bay?” Aki asked, tilting open her briefcase so that she could get her phone.

  “Never like this. We had the layered cotton that came from the west. Wisps or puffs that came from the hills. Now it’s relentless. We had a sunny day last week, but they’re rare.”

  To Aki, it looked like today would be one of the rare sunny ones. By the time they arrived in the Berkeley Hills, most of the fog had lifted. To the west, she saw a sliver of San Francisco Bay. Even though most of the shops on Telegraph Avenue were still boarded up, outdoor restaurants and cafés had returned. Despite looking pale and haggard, the denizens walking the residential streets made her think that Berkeley was coming back to life as a university town. Some of the infrastructure had been restarted out of pure necessity, but she felt like some of the substructure and public services were returning because people were inspired by hope.

  The limo entered UC Berkeley, navigating the labyrinth of narrow campus streets. Aki looked up at Sather Tower. A Worldunity site had told her it was usually called the Campanile. They stopped at the entrance of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Communications Center, ETICC, a plain, four-story structure that looked out of place amidst the beautiful architecture of John Galen Howard’s “City of Learning.” The building was a military facility surrounded by a twelve-foot tall razor-wire fence. Military guards with guns were stationed at the entrance. Aki fished her laminated card from her briefcase, then clipped the ID to the lapel of her black blazer.

  In 2022, shortly after the destruction of the Ring, the ETICC had been established to contact the Builders. Sixteen years of unanswered transmissions had followed. Once Aki and her team had discovered that the Ring was a laser-powered braking system for alien ships, the gaze of the world’s ringologists had turned to HD 37605.

  The ETICC netlinked observatories across the globe to scout for the still-hypothetical armada and transmit messages. At first the observatories had used satellites in geostationary orbit to send a contiguous signal to HD 37605. Eventually a laser transmitter was launched into a heliosynchronous orbit and was thereby able to beam a constant signal unaffected by the earth’s rotation. Constructed for the purpose of contacting the Builders, the heliosynchronous laser transmitter was not comparable to the Builders’ handiwork, but it was the most powerful laser humans had ever designed. If the laser transmitter were harnessed for power, it could have powered the world.

  AKI KNEW LITTLE about Dan Riggins, the director of the ETICC. Entering his office, then shaking his hand, she realized that he was at least twenty years older than she, which meant he was twenty years older than she would have guessed. Such a large percentage of the scientists were of Aki’s generation that it had become unusual to work with someone as mature as Commander Kindersley or Dan Riggins. At first glance, Riggins struck Aki as cautious, maybe even nervous.

  His demeanor surprised Aki enough that she was unsure where to begin. Despite her innate shyness and reticence, Aki had learned to exchange pleasantries with heads of state. With kindred scientists, she preferred to avoid formality, skipping protocols when she could. She decided that her hesitation came from being unable to decide whether Riggins was a scientist or a policymaker.

  “Allow me to start by saying that this is not a UNSDF inspection. I am here to assess why we have not received a response from the Builders, but it is for personal, scholarly reasons,” Aki said.

  He smiled politely. If she read his eyes correctly, he was suspicious of her presence.

  “We hoped for immediate results,” Aki continued, “but we are all frustrated on this, and I have wondered if the problem lies in the science informing the contact attempts.”

  The director appeared to relax a bit, perhaps because he was beginning to see the tack of her argument. He asked Aki to take a seat on the sofa.

  “What would you like to drink?” Riggins asked.

  “Tap water if it will not make me sick.”

  He removed two sealed bottles from a drawer, opened hers, and then sat.

  “The ETICC pretends to stay optimistic. Have you heard of SETI? It was a similar situation. My mentor was heavily involved at the very beginning.”

  “I am somewhat familiar with Frank Drake’s Ozma Project, aiming a scope at Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani and hoping to see the unseen.”

  The director smiled. “The same. SETI sent messages, but of course mostly just listened in on the stars as it were. Then Project Phoenix, even the Interstellar Message Composition Project, which sought to express the human ideal of reciprocal altruism as well as the supposedly universal scientific and mathematical concepts we have often tried. Decades of hope, trying to find a response from intelligence outside our solar system. All the assumptions that ‘they’ were out there, that we couldn’t be the only forms of life that evolved as far as we did. Several hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. You know all this.”

  “No. Please continue. This is why I am here. I know less about SETI than I do most of astrophysics, mostly because SETI never discovered more than some scintillation or atmospheric twinkling.”

  “When the project began, we weren’t pretending. We imagined that we would make contact right away, having finally found intelligent life out there. We pointed our antennae and figured we would tune in the radio signal just like I did in my car this morning. Instead, nothing came. SETI did this for forty years. I’m going to do this until I die. Every wavelength, consistent disappointment.”

  “I have stood on that Ring. I know that whoever built that ring can hear us,” Aki said.

  “Did you know that I started this before the Ring even came along? I was convinced there was alien life before the concept flipped around.” Riggins offered a dry laugh. “Now the UFO skeptics
are the conspiracy theorists. We believed the signal would come first, never imagining that a giant object would just be constructed in local space, right in front of us. You brought proof and they’re, what? Four-tenths of a single light year away. Ten times closer than the nearest star. It was an opportunity to redeem SETI. With the ETICC, we knew they would reply. We just knew it. All we do is listen. It couldn’t have taken our signal more than ten months to reach them and for them to respond.”

  “You have not failed. The distance, the braking time frame for the deceleration lasers. Technically, those are guesses, Mr. Riggins.”

  “Sure. The calculations could be botched, but I need to be realistic. It’s two and a half times longer than the most conservative scenario. Two years with no response. It’s time to face the facts.”

  “One question.”

  The balding man leaned his head forward and adjusted the knot of his tie.

  “How do you know they have noticed our transmissions?”

  “Because their evolution is so far ahead of us that it makes us look like we’re going backward.” He straightened his shoulders. “The chances are nil. Maybe they would overlook radio waves, but I know they can detect a laser. That Perpetual Happiness almanac puts their light in the sky six centuries ago and proves that their laser is within our visible spectrum because that teahouse proprietor saw it. Even if their eyes are radically different and work along a different swath of the spectrum, you have to figure that the Builders would use a light that they could see too. They would choose beams they could see for when it was time to decelerate. Tell me that we’re aiming wrong, tell me that four-tenths of a light year is far enough away to be grossly inaccurate, maybe it’s even dissipation and we don’t realize it—but don’t tell me they can’t see it.”

  “Could their sensors be blinded by sunlight and unable to distinguish between the two because they blur on the visible spectrum?” Aki asked.

  “Sensors? Maybe. Eyes? Unlikely. Our laser’s monochromatic, different than sunlight. It would be a sharp peak on any optical spectrum. Relatively, the sun looks weak from that far away. There’s no way it could drown out the brightness.”

  She had to concede that he was right. The ETICC’s satellite used an ingenious laser that changed its frequency, sending a range of wavelengths but ranging across the entire visible spectrum. Even if it needed to land on a certain frequency to communicate with the Builders, there would be times when the beam would coincide. “Given that the Builders detect it, do they realize it is encoded?”

  “Here’s the theory: to make sure the deceleration laser is functioning, they must be able to check its beam of light, in case it’s blocked by a comet or even a meteoroid. No amount of scatterplotting can predict that stuff with enough accuracy. They monitor their beam, or any beam that matches, right?”

  “It is likely.”

  “They discover our signal is intermittent, it wavers and creates a regular pulse. Any chance they ignore it?”

  “I do not see why they would.”

  “Some natural energy sources emit simple repetitive pulses, but ours is much more complex and spans a broad range of frequencies,” Riggins said.

  Aki could see how a human scientist would be curious enough to want to investigate and find the cause of the phenomenon by recording the pulse, placing it on a time axis, and then uncovering the embedded information, but she was not sure that the Builders would react in the same way. Why are they disinterested in a civilization that is calling out to them? How can advanced intelligence coexist with an absence of curiosity? Can the Builders simply be cosmic apathists? How could the Builders have gone to such extremes to undertake this incredible journey and yet be completely unconcerned with who might be waiting to greet them at their destination?

  “What is the best theory for explaining the Builders’ apparent indifference then?”

  The director shook his head and scratched the back of his neck. “We’ve bounced it around. Damage to their ship?”

  “From the size of the deceleration array,” Aki said, “it looks like a fleet of ships.”

  “I know, I know. Even if it’s one, their nanobots would repair it.”

  Aki nodded and finally took a sip from her water.

  “Any other potential explanations?”

  “The next best is sadness from a loss of morale. I admit that I wouldn’t blame them.”

  Aki said, “Oh? Go on.”

  “The Builders have been traveling over six hundred years. No matter what their life span, the mission gets handed down from generation to generation. After centuries of passing through empty space, they’ve lost their purpose. Morale drops, partially from the lack of stimuli. After that, our guess is an onboard catastrophe and the ship is empty and either operating on autopilot or even unguided and drifting.”

  “Hardware and tech durable enough to run for centuries is not going to be inhabited by a crew that is unprepared for the emptiness or likely to die from a plague,” Aki said. “Turning their graser back on them was possible because the Builders had not considered implementing heuristics. The Builders would have approached that problem differently if they had a clearer understanding of the variables involved. They did not even consider our existence when designing and deploying the Ring. Perhaps we are just beyond their perceptions, or perhaps even their conceptions, somehow.”

  “Then extended hibernation, maybe,” Riggins said. “The passengers are in deep sleep and computers operate the ship. Instructing the computer to ignore a simple yet significantly anomalous signal—or not even programming in the capability to detect such signals. Such programming reveals apathy to other forms of life that may be encountered, but it makes some sense. The computers see us but the computers aren’t authorized to be proactive. The Builders seem like they didn’t consider encountering another species, but perhaps they were actually more concerned about a species more advanced than they are, and we’re so far behind that we’re missing the nuances.” He shrugged. “I don’t like that one because, even if the computers aren’t supposed to interact with a species on their own, for example, I figure the computers would be programmed to rouse one of their masters if it looked like communication was being attempted. Maybe the builders are just extreme fatalists, and concepts like morale and curiosity don’t mean much at all to them.”

  Dan Riggins sighed, then folded his arms slowly. “I’m glad you’ve come. I wanted to meet you. None of the theories explain enough or predict enough about Builder behavior; they’re not convincing. The Builders know damn well that we’re here. The Builders are choosing to ignore us.”

  “That might be the case.”

  Their deceleration lasers did not arrive as planned. Instead, a weak yet steadily pulsing laser with an electromagnetic signal embedded within it showed up on various wavelengths. Their uninhabited island has turned out to be ruled by hostile natives who have made it impossible for them to dock or even stop. Instead, they will sail into a never-ending void, alone.

  A familiar pain grew in Aki’s chest.

  Should the Builders reply to the belligerent indigenous inhabitants who destroyed their only chance for survival? They probably do not believe in trying to negotiate with their enemies.

  “You look as lost as I sometimes feel, and I know what you’re thinking. Let me tell you that I’ve never met a person who isn’t grateful for what you did.” Riggins rose from the sofa and walked to his desk. He turned around a framed picture. Aki expected a wife, kids, or a dog. It was a picture of Aki and all three of her crewmates from the Vulcan Mission standing in front of the blue field of a large United Nations flag. Aki bowed subtly. As often as she felt conflicted by these expressions of gratitude, she wanted to acknowledge Dan Riggins’s thanks at least. Unsure what to say, she did not speak for a minute. She had learned to understand how Americans thought and she had learned to ape their body language cues, but for the moment, she decided to let Director Riggins find her inscrutable.

  Interpersonal or
interspecies, judging a being’s character based on its ability to communicate was as foolish as determining the size of an iceberg from a casual glance at the visible peak. In between the inferences and the guesses, she had found enough of the answers she had been looking for.

  “What should we be saying?” Aki asked.

  “Sorry? I didn’t mind the quiet.”

  “To the Builders, I mean,” she said. “We need to tell them something. We need to send a message that the Builders have no choice but to answer.”

  Riggins understood what she meant.

  “Aki Shiraishi, you know the message we’ve been sending. Let me show you our transmission facilities.”

  ACT II: MARCH 11, 2024

  11 AM

  THE TRANSMISSION CENTER was in a small room in the back corner of the third floor. Its simple setup was somewhat disappointing to Aki. It was low-tech, except for the retinal-scan security lock. There were no large wall-mounted monitors and no team of specialists running around with headphones on. Instead, there were two men and a woman in casual business attire at workstations, as there might be in any office building. The interdisciplinary team who created the messages to be sent to the Builders might have already been dissolved, or at least had its offices elsewhere.

  Riggins introduced Aki around, though of course the savior of the world was recognized on sight. Each stood, shook her hand, and expressed what an honor it was to meet her. Riggins led Aki to an empty cubicle as the other three went back to work. The nameplate said Director of Transmissions. The monitor was running a 3-D display reminiscent of the waves of an oscillograph. A sequence of rectangular pulses changed amplitude as they scrolled across the screen.

  “There is the gap. It is recycling,” she said.