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Chapter One
He couldn’t stop his mind from going there, despite the time of day and its proximity to dreamless sleep. But he knew: no one truly understands the relationship the space agencies have with the US government. There’s no denying there is one: JPL, NASA, even Musk’s pretense of an agency, they’re all connected. Like an umbilical cord, feeding a cluster of entities a nutritious, life-giving elixir of cold hard cash in the form of billion-dollar budgets or multi-million-dollar contracts. Beholden, in a word. No one was ever meant to understand that relationship. It was too big, too murky, obfuscated with covert intent, like so many other secrets embedded within the world’s largest economy. What was that famous quote, about a riddle wrapped in an enigma stored in a puzzle box? If any one person knew too much about it, they might be a threat to national security.
Avalon Estes realized he was close, on the threshold of knowing too much. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe he was already over that fuzzy line and knew just enough that losing him would be the greater security threat.
The space agencies had a variety of observation platforms circling the earth, most of them looking down at the planet, a handful of them looking up, looking out, beyond, all of their data, every byte of it, circling back to the government in a mobius sort of way. Nine times out of ten it was the ones looking down that spotted the exception. This one was looking up, and out. This one was the exception to the exceptions. No matter which way they were looking, their jobs were the same: keep an eye on anything out of the ordinary. At least as far as the government was concerned. Oh, sure, science, exploration, humankind’s quest for self-understanding through discovery, all that social shit; go ahead, have at it. But in order to maintain the umbilical cord, in order to preserve it, please spy on everything else out there, both above and below, while you’re doing the social shit, and let us know what you find. And what you don’t.
Machines. Orbiting the planet. Surveilling it, surveilling other planets. Avalon Estes remembered the good old days when it was a bunch of jocks who had passed college algebra. Put them in a human centrifuge and spin ‘em at five G’s until they puked or passed out, or both, then launch them into space. Footprints on the moon. Rock samples in a bag. Fly back and fall into an ocean.
Now the machines were having all the fun. Collecting all the samples. Not flying back, but staying there, working, day and night. Not the moon but a planet. At a fraction of the cost, and better at it than the humans could ever dream of.
He couldn’t stop his mind from going there, and the phone had started it all. The first call had come to his landline at two-thirty that morning. A gaggle of propellerheads and their collection of orbiting machines had detected an object entering the solar system at a speed that challenged conventional thinking. One of the machines looking up not down had spotted it, tracking something traveling at a speed measured in the tens of thousands of kilometers per second. Some object blowing past Jupiter on a collision course with the moon. The propellerheads were worried.
The phone’s caller officially elevated Estes to Alpha Status. He was not impressed. Estes yawned, fumbled with a set of reading glasses, then picked up a cellphone and within a few screen swipes knew Stubbs was somewhere north of Nova Scotia. Over it, actually, heading west at around four hundred miles an hour. He returned to the phone call and asked the caller to keep him apprised. He then disconnected and went back to sleep. Alpha Status was pointless. He was always on Alpha status. He slept Alpha Status.
The second phone call arrived just before six in the morning. Estes was up, but only barely, still in his slippers, peeing at the toilet, so he let it ring. By the time he had splashed water on his face and popped a thyroid pill, the analog phone was jingling again. He answered it and learned the object they had been intermittently tracking for over three hours had disappeared behind the moon.
“I thought you told me it was just passing Jupiter,” Estes said to the caller as he reached for his wristwatch on the nightstand. He checked the time. “Disappeared how?” he asked, buckling the watch to his right wrist. “Who?” he asked. “Absolutely not,” he ordered, kicking off the slippers. “Deploy a response team to lock down the facility. Non-interference. I’m on my way.” Estes returned the landline to its cradle on the nightstand and picked up a cellphone next to it.
~_/) ~
Stubbs hadn’t heard the phone because of the DC headphones cupped over his ears but he’d felt it vibrating in his pocket, even with all the turbulence. He pulled it out and saw two letters on the screen: A and E. He pushed one side of the headphones off and answered the call. Estes asked if Stubbs could be at KXTA in less than two hours. Stubbs said he’d try, and then asked what he should do about New Mexico. Estes had already disconnected. Stubbs guessed New Mexico didn’t matter anymore, or whatever was at KXTA was more important. He put the phone back in his pocket, placed the headgear back over his ear and used its microphone to ask one of the people in the cockpit where they were. Ninety-one miles west-northwest of Wichita came the answer through the headphones. He asked if they could make KXTA in less than two hours. A few seconds later Stubbs heard a hesitant affirmative in his ears, followed by an apology: none of the crew had a security clearance for KXTA. They’d have it before they got there, Stubbs assured them. He then stretched back out over the olive-drab canvas bench seat edging the cavernous cargo hold of the C-17 Globemaster cruising over the state of Kansas at forty-one thousand feet. He kept the headset in place but was absolutely determined to get some sleep.
~_/) ~
Avalon Estes was downstairs in the foyer of his Georgetown condo looking out the front door’s glass panes, waiting for the car to arrive. He was wishing for a change in the weather, a little precipitation for once – snow would be nice, considering it was December – and just happened to settle his eyes on one of the copper-colored lampposts in the condo’s courtyard when its light winked out. They had all shut down, all of the courtyard’s decorative lamps, creating a blanketing pre-dawn darkness. Curious. He was thinking of the timer that controlled the landscape lights for the gated community when he noticed every light was out, in every condo throughout the complex. They had been on just a minute ago, he was sure of it, at least some of them, some of the windows in some of the townhomes, surely the ones just across the narrow street from where he stood, rectangles of light escaping through pulled curtains and louvered blinds. And now nothing. A power failure? He looked up to the faux chandelier suspended from the ceiling of his condo’s foyer as he flipped its switch on the wall. Yes, a power failure. And for some inexplicable reason he also took a couple steps back so he could see what should have been the electric-blue display coming from the microwave hanging above the range-top in the kitchen, just to confirm, as though a power outage would affect some appliances in the house but not all of them. He was wondering if he knew how to reset the clock on the microwave when a set of headlights caught his attention. A car pulled up to the curb outside the condo.
Estes had assumed the lack of power was restricted to his gated complex of condominiums until the car’s driver, a middle-aged man named Jeff who had been driving for Estes about six months, abruptly brought the Lincoln town car to a stop and mildly cursed. The intersection ahead of them was gridlocked by a dead traffic signal, forcing an increasingly impatient file of cars to manage the crossing manually. Jeff suggested Virginia Avenue might be less affected by the outage. Estes didn’t respond, wholly consumed with why his cellphone was refusing to send the text he had just composed. And then he saw it, in the upper left corner of his phone’s display: NO SERVICE. The two random and separate events connected in his mind with the subtlety of a shotgun being pump-loaded. No phone service and no power? Estes asked Jeff if his phone was working. The driver didn’t answer but handed his smartphone over the seat to Estes.
Same thing.
No service.
No power.
An object disappearing behind the moon.
Estes handed the phone back to Jeff and authorized the driver to step on it – break any traffic law you want. Jeff asked if they had gone to Bravo Status. Estes didn’t answer; he was thinking if their superiors even remotely suspected the three phenomena were related, the entire organization would be on Charlie Status before the jet’s wheels left the ground.
~_/) ~
It had been the deepest sleep he’d had in days when the headset started shrieking an alarm meant to capture everyone’s undivided attention. It was the digital version of a grieving wail punctuated with sharp, piercing chirps and Stubbs knew something wasn’t right aboard the C-17. His headphones faithfully reported one of the crew shouting over the artificial scream, something about resetting the APU’s. Two human voices took turns shouting back a negative! and then an electronic voice, a female’s, joined the chorus, chanting Guidance System Failure! Navigation Downlink! The digital woman was on her fourth iteration of warning when it stopped, all of it, the screaming, the chirping, and the chanting. Less than two seconds later, the crew’s voices returned to the plodding and deliberate tone their years of training provided them. Stubbs heard the voices on his headset, going through a procedure, like a checklist.
He waited for a prolonged moment of silence before interrupting. “This ride come with a parachute?” he said into the headset mic, knowing that it didn’t. He meant it to be funny.
The crew ignored him.
~_/) ~
All six hundred twenty-three of the lights inside the Super Walmart just off the four-ninety-four in Bloomington flickered exactly twice before going out, sending the cavernous super center into a blinding darkness. It persisted, and in the midst of the bewilderment that followed, with children screaming and adults shouting or laughing, the man known as Paul Runyon suspected. But then he felt the alteration in the planet’s natural radio frequencies rippling across the surface of his thought process and had no doubt. Goosebumps formed on the skin of his forearms. It almost felt good. He adjusted his vision to compensate for the absence of light. As a random voice in the darkness bravely scolded Walmart for not paying its electric bill, Paul Runyon parked his shopping cart next to a chilling unit filled with sale-priced Farmer John’s pork link sausages. One by one, he removed the items from his cart - fresh vegetables, frozen entrees, a cardboard canister of steel-cut oatmeal – and placed them on top of the pork links inside the display.
Paul Runyon then pushed the empty shopping cart through the blackened store, out of the grocery section, past aisles of shoes and diapers and beyond walls of DVD’s and televisions but made a left into a corridor when he saw the laundry detergent. He placed four one-gallon jugs of Great Value bleach into the cart. Nine feet farther down and on the aisle’s opposing side, he found as many gallon-jugs of ammonia and placed those in the cart as well. He then weaved and wheeled the cart across the deadened hundred thousand square-foot store until arriving at the gardening department tucked into a corner of the building. He found a three-gallon weed sprayer with a wand nozzle made by a company called Hudson and was placing it in his shopping cart when the spectrum of altered frequencies abruptly jiggled back to its normal rhythm. The lights of the store blinked awkwardly back to life. A chorus of cash registers and other electronic devices beeped to signify they were rebooting. Paul Runyon adjusted his vision to compensate for the rush of artificial light. He was forced to wait three long minutes before the register’s self-checkout software was settled enough to permit him to scan the UPC code of his first item.
The power anomaly had lasted seven minutes, eleven seconds, for a total of four hundred thirty-one seconds – a triad of prime numbers. How convenient. And humans thought machines didn’t have a sense of humor. It was fourteen minutes past five am as he exited the super store through two sets of slithering glass doors. He initiated an exit sequence for his current location of Minneapolis.
The frequencies alteration was dispersed, per protocol, part of the Engagement structure. He had sensed it washing over the planet, wrapping around its spherical curve to form a hermetic seal of electromagnetic interference. The mask. Seven minutes, eleven seconds. Paul Runyon was smiling as he wheeled the shopping cart of supplies through the Walmart parking lot to the trunk of a black Jaguar XJ. He paused to enjoy the primal arc of an orange sun as it shimmered up from underneath the planet’s horizon, then loaded the items from his cart into the car’s trunk.
The cube had arrived. It was on the planet. His planet, with its magnificent sunrises and hundred-thousand-foot grocery stores that stayed open around the clock, even during power outages.
He started the supercharged V6 engine by pressing a button while seated on leather upholstery and knew he liked this car. And the townhouse on Penn Avenue with its view out the south-facing living room windows of a tree-studded park; and its swimming pool and built-in barbecue stands and fitness center and free WiFi. He liked being comfortable and human and eternal and having sex with females who sighed with urgent pleasure in his ear. He preferred the females and their organic energy, purple waves of it, soaking and gushing and vibrating and penetrating him with instinctive sincerity. Humans, with their tendency towards neural unpredictability that challenged his structural protocols, forcing them – and him – to adapt. It was all about adaptivity. Paul Runyon would preserve his own integrity by adapting. That was what his instructions told him to do.
~_/) ~
KXTA was a four-mile-long runway all by itself in the middle of the Nevada desert just north of Las Vegas. Literally, all by itself. Nothing else but a dry heat somewhere over eighty degrees and a constant wind of about twenty knots that fought Stubbs every step of the half-mile-walk from the C-17’s belly to a tight cluster of single-story buildings painted the same color as the desert dirt surrounding them. And not a speck of security, which Stubbs found odd. The building’s interior was not air-conditioned, and he spotted Estes standing all by himself in a space that looked like it was once an office. The furniture had been removed, maybe years ago, leaving behind only a discoloration in the floor’s linoleum, rectangular outlines suggesting where walls and desks and filing cabinets had once been. Like a ghost town, the office version.
“Uneventful flight?” said Estes with a smile. He handed Stubbs a digital tablet.
“I thought you were in DC.”
“I was.”
“When you called me? How’d you get here so fast?”
Estes had already turned around and was walking deeper into the empty building. Stubbs followed. “I was on a faster jet. And that little problem you had somewhere over Kansas was an EMP. Knocked out everything. I mean the whole planet. We’re at Charlie status, by the way. Details are in your hand. We land in about forty-five minutes.”
“Land?”
Estes answered the question by pushing through another door at the other end of the empty building that put them both back into the windy heat of a blinding sunny day. A hundred feet in front of them, sitting all by itself on the sun-bleached cement was a shiny-clean, white and blue helicopter whose blades were already spun up for takeoff. They were airborne before Stubbs had buckled his seatbelt.
A thousand feet above the airstrip and a mile away from it, Estes looked at Stubbs, looked to the digital tablet Stubbs held in his hands, then reclined his seat and closed his eyes. Reclining seats in a helicopter made no sense to Stubbs at all. He activated the tablet’s power and began reading a summary brief of the past twenty-two hours.
The space agency named Jet Propulsion Laboratory, nestled into the foothills of southern California, had begun tracking an object around ten AM PST of the previous morning. An orbiting space telescope had picked up the object departing the Kuiper Belt on a trajectory towards the planets. It was small and insignificant and would have earned no attention at all except that its speed was erratic. Over a period of about six hours, the delayed data streaming in from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE space telescope recorded the object as both stationary and also moving at about one quarter the speed of light. Simultaneously. An hour later the telescope’s onboard computers refused to admit they had been tracking anything. The object was gone, and no other component of the combined JPL/NASA deep space surveillance grid – ground or orbiting – had yet to acknowledge the object. The scientific consensus was technical problems.
Stubbs swiped the screen to the next page.
Five hours later, the object was back, and had traveled over a billion miles in that time. By ten PM of that same night the object was transiting Jupiter at well over seventy thousand KPS. Stubbs used the tablet’s calculator app to do the math: something over one hundred sixty million miles an hour, according to his calculations. Million. A rate of speed that exceeded both natural and manmade conventions, which, in Stubbs’ mind – and a lot of other peoples’ apparently, according to the brief – meant the object was neither natural nor manmade. The NORAD tracking station had confirmed the object and its irrational speed. STRATCOM had been notified. Encrypted alerts had been sent out to a small cluster of select personnel. Estes had been one of them. That was when he had called him, Stubbs realized, diverting him to air base KXTA in Nevada.
Stubbs swiped the tablet again.
Just seven hours ago, approximately two-forty-four AM PST of the previous evening, six independent ground stations simultaneously tracked the object as it slipped behind the Earth’s moon, at which point everyone on Earth effectively lost contact with whatever it was they had been tracking. JPL then repurposed NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to see what, if anything, was sitting behind the moon. Twelve minutes later the LRO arrived at a position to do just that. Its LROC camera module captured nearly six seconds of high resolution digital imagery before an EMP event swept over the planet, disabling the entire world’s array of electronics, including the feed streaming from the LRO’s camera. The summary brief then spent nearly two screen pages explaining what an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse, was, how they were generated, and how this EMP was unlike any other they had ever seen. Or even theorized about.
It was not a solar flare event.
It had not originated on the planet.
It had not behaved the way anyone predicted an EMP of this amplitude would.
And for the first time since Stubbs had started reading, the brief used both the word alien and the word extraterrestrial. In the same sentence: The purported EMP anomaly is thought to be both alien in nature and of extraterrestrial origin.
Directly after that sentence were two links, underlined in blue text. The first one read lroc.1. The second one was labeled lroc.001. Stubbs tapped on lroc.1. A new window opened on the tablet. It was the captured footage from the LROC, a crystal-clear image of nearly half the moon from perhaps only a thousand miles above its surface. And to its left, dwarfed by the moon’s apparent size yet clearly visible against the background of black space, was a perfect sphere. It was silver, entirely reflective; like a mirror, Stubbs thought, just sitting there, not moving, a speck, just hovering, motionless. The video stopped playing. Stubbs closed the window and tapped on the second link. It looked like the same image, the same footage, the moon in exactly the same position and the sphere still suspended off to the moon’s left. Except it was no longer a sphere, but rather a tumbling, mirror-silver cube. The footage zoomed in all by itself and offered Stubbs a pixelated closeup of the spinning anomaly. A box of data was streaming numbers down at the bottom left of the screen, values for x and y, a measurement of the cube’s axial rotation.
Stubbs felt something touching his left knee and looked up to find Estes looking at him, seat upright, wearing a headset. He tapped the headset, then pointed to the bulkhead in front of Stubbs. Stubbs looked there and found a pair of headphones hanging from a Velcro hook on the helicopter’s cabin wall. He slipped them on.
“They slowed the footage down by a factor of a thousand,” said Estes. “It’s a cube, but it’s spinning on a double-axis so fast it looks like a ball.”
“Where is it now?” asked Stubbs.
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
Estes shrugged his shoulders. “The EMP lasted just over seven minutes. By the time all the systems were back online, the thing was nowhere in sight.”
“So where are we going?”
“To put out a fire.”
“We’re firemen now?”
Estes forced a smile and gestured to the digital tablet. “Just keep reading.”
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Prologue
Prologue
In the stagnant cold and pervasive stillness of space, a perfect cube tumbled through the absence of light towards a star system located lightyears from its point of origin. As it approached the system, the symmetrical object slowed its velocity and eased through a solar debris field encircling the relatively young collection of orbiting planets. When the cube reached the inner edge of the scattered plane of icy fragments, it paused: the targeted planet was slipping behind its host star.
The cube continued transmitting the access signal.
There was no response.
~_/) ~
The man known as Paul Runyon, standing third in line for the teller window of the Bloomington, Minnesota branch of a Wells Fargo on a cool and sunny mid-April morning, felt the cube’s presence. The object was close; not here, not yet, but close. The cube’s unique signal resonance had taken him by surprise, at first, like bumping into an old acquaintance while shopping for asparagus. It had been more than thirty years since he had last sensed the alteration in frequencies and its subtle vibration over his skin. Unmistakable nonetheless. The cube was calling to him, for him.
He would not answer.
~_/) ~
As the left crescent of the smeary white and blue sphere first appeared from behind its star, the cube measured its mass, orbital speed and gravitational relationships. It recalculated and verified the planet’s time and distance to cube perihelion, then projected a correlated intercept trajectory to the planet’s natural satellite.
It amplified the access signal and continued transmitting.
~_/) ~
The man known as Paul Runyon sat by himself in the Caribou Coffee shop on the ground floor of the Tower building in Bloomington, enjoying delicate sips of a double espresso from a white china demitasse on a brilliantly clear and glorious early June morning. The front page of the Financial Times was loaded on his digital tablet, but he wasn’t reading it, pleasantly distracted by the obscured view of the lake across the street, Normandale Lake, on the other side of West Eighty-Fourth, with its tree-lined shores soaked in vibrant hues of green.
He needed the distraction. The cube’s increase in signal strength was an irritant, like an allergy attack with its stuffy-headed headache, or the nagging presence of mosquitos, contemptuous of the desperate swat. Like an expensive divorce and the insatiable spouse who wanted it all, knowing that would never happen but going through the motions anyway, just because they could. Because the system allowed it, supported it, encouraged that kind of gratuitous greed. It was both wrong and proper. It was a necessity.
And yet the irritation was informative; he knew where the cube was in relation to him, to the planet, his planet. The sun had been in its way, between the cube and himself, requiring it to suspend the hunt. The increase in signal intensity was procedural, and revealed the planet was now in direct line with the cube. And he knew what the cube would next do, because he had failed to respond, what it had been programmed to do. He appreciated the cube’s efficiency intimately, empathized with it for a disagreeable moment, and then synchronized his motivation to its actions. Now it was just a matter of time.
He knew the protocol.
If he did not respond to the access signal, the cube would send a probe after him, a machine. The machine would attempt to link with him, to overwrite his neural network, to absorb him, to end his time – and his life – on Earth. He had prepared for this, had assembled structures to defend against it. As a drill, a theoretical scenario whose time to test had come. He would modify his Anonymity structure and initiate a defense protocol; he would disappear from the machine’s array of sensors, disable the probe’s keen ability to track him. The cube might even assume his demise, his destruction, and call off the hunt.
Not likely.
Paul Runyon began to cry, awkward and embarrassing tears leaking out and dripping down. It made no sense to him. He was human. He belonged here, amongst his people, his beloved people. It had no right. They had no right. He was the one who had the right, to continue living, to exist. To breathe. He used a Caribou Coffee napkin to dab dry his face, then blew his nose. No one was seated close enough to have seen the breakdown.
He knew the protocol.
Once upon the threshold of the planet, the craft would generate a pulse, the mask that would confuse the Earth’s tracking capabilities, allowing the cube to slip into the planet’s atmosphere undetected, to land, to eject the probe and begin the search. It was programmed to do just that. The probe’s capabilities exceeded all things human, yet was not human, and that would be his advantage. As hard as a machine tried, it would never perfectly emulate the human experience. Not without years and years of experiential training. The machine would be tasked with finding one particular human out of nearly eight billion. He would make sure there was nothing particular about him. The organic probe would be oblivious to his presence. Even if he were wrapped in its …
It was a gratifying moment of clarity, a shining path to success: wrapped in its arms.
He must find it before it found him.
The man known as Paul Runyon had six months to live, six months to prevent his death. He would succeed.
For the moment, he returned his attention to the espresso’s aromatic suggestion of smoky-chocolate and began reading the digital version of his favorite morning paper. He wished he could have enjoyed the beverage at its ideal temperature of one hundred sixty-three degrees.
~_/) ~
The cube, indifferently patient, remained in pause until the planet’s orbit brought the engorged bluish ball of organic matter to the point closest to its location, its intercept trajectory within the debris field. The access signal had remained unacknowledged and was now timed out. The cube terminated the focused broadcast and initiated a new protocol. The calculated path to the planet’s natural satellite was implemented. The cube exited the debris field and accelerated toward the organic satellite.
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