The rapid montage of unsettling imagery flashing on the screen suddenly segued into a series of two- and three-second-long clips from summer blockbusters like Independence Day, Armageddon, and Deep Impact, most of them from scenes that depicted all of humanity uniting as one species, to save itself and its home from a deadly comet, a rogue asteroid, or from a wide variety of hostile alien invaders.
“I think the Europans have been studying us and our popular culture since before we even made first contact with them,” my father said, raking his hands through his hair. “I think they watched all of the science fiction films and television shows we’ve made that depict an alien invasion of our planet, and they realized it was one of our species’ worst nightmares. So they set about making it happen. They proceeded to stage an alien invasion just like the ones we’d always imagined. The kind depicted in our fiction, complete with giant motherships, starship dogfights, killer robots—all of it!”
My father stared at me, waiting for me to say something, but I was momentarily speechless. I could only continue to stare at the screen, where the images kept coming. I spotted stills from the reboots of The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and War of the Worlds, and then a clip from an older film, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.
“I knew for certain these transmissions were intended to be some sort of a message when I heard this,” he said, tapping his QComm. “Each of these bursts of images ends with a series of five tones.”
It was the opening of “Wild Signals” from John Williams’ score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The five tones the government has their keyboardist start off with when they play that epic game of Simon with the aliens at the end of the movie.
La-Luh-La-BAH-BAH!
The tones sounded as if they were coming from an old touch-tone pushbutton telephone handset. They began to play, very quickly, on a repeating loop. Then my father muted the audio and turned to study my reaction. But hearing those five notes from Close Encounters had momentarily thrown me off balance. I’d never liked that film—probably because of how easy it was for the main character, Roy Neary, to (spoiler alert) leave his family at the very end of the film. It hit a little too close to home.
I stared at the images. I listened to tones. I waited for him to continue.
“Okay,” he said, inching forward. “First, just think about the chronology of events. Think about how our first contact with them went down. The Europans orchestrated this entire conflict—they lured and manipulated us into it.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why else would they slap a giant swastika on the surface of Europa—it was a trap, and we walked right into it! Just like Admiral Fucking Ackbar!”
Under other circumstances, this might have made me laugh. But not then.
“So,” he went on, “humanity discovers this threatening message from an obviously nonhuman intelligence—placed in a spot where they knew humans would find it when our technology advanced to the stage where we were capable of sending probes to our outer solar system—sort of like the monolith buried on the moon in 2001?”
I nodded—not in agreement, but just to indicate I understood the reference. I’m sure I would have mentioned that I’d read his copy of “The Sentinel,” the short story by Arthur C. Clarke that served as the initial inspiration for 2001’s artifact-left-behind-by-ancient-aliens storyline—but internally, I was wondering if my father was experiencing confirmation bias or observational selection bias, or one of those other biases I’d learned about in my AP Psychology class. Maybe he was seeing patterns where none really existed.
Then again, maybe not.
“The Europans must have known we wouldn’t be able to resist sending a probe down to investigate its origin—and the moment we did, they suddenly declared war and their intention to kill off our entire species. According to the official story, the aliens never gave us a chance to explain our actions, or negotiate with them. But they didn’t kill us off right away—even though they clearly had the technological means of doing so. No, instead of attacking us, they lured us into some sort of weird arms race. Then they gradually let us close the technological gap between us and them. Over a forty-two-year period. And then this year, they finally decide to invade. Why? Their behavior doesn’t make any sense—unless they’re testing us. It’s the only logical explanation.”
“We’re not talking about Vulcans here,” I reminded him. “You can’t impose human logic on alien behavior, right? Why should anything they do make sense to us? Their culture and motives might be … you know, ‘beyond our human understanding.’ ”
My father shook his head.
“This human understands enough to know when he’s being messed with,” he said. “These aliens have coaxed and manipulated us into this exact position for a reason—maybe to elicit a reaction. Or to put us in specific kinds of circumstances, to see how we’ll react to them—collectively, as a species.”
“As a test?”
He nodded; then he sat down abruptly without saying another word, like an attorney who had finished delivering his closing argument to a jury, and stared at me, apparently waiting for me to respond, his eyes darting back and forth feverishly, hanging on my reaction.
“What is it you think they’re testing us on? To see how terrified they can make us? To see how difficult we are to kill or enslave?”
“I don’t know, Son,” he said, his voice still calm and even despite his expression. “Maybe they wanted to see how our species would handle itself during an encounter with another intelligent species? A potentially hostile one? That’s one of the classic tropes of science fiction. Aliens are always showing up to put humanity on trial. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Stranger in a Strange Land, Have Space Suit, Will Travel—and a bunch of different Star Trek episodes. The Europans might have a million different motives. On the eighties reboot of the Twilight Zone, there was this one episode, called ‘A Small Talent for War’—”
I raised my hand to cut him off.
“But this isn’t science fiction, General,” I said, feeling as if I were the adult in this conversation, while he had assumed the role of the starry-eyed teenager who won’t listen to reason. “This isn’t some Twilight Zone episode. It’s real life, remember?”
“Life imitates art,” he said. “And maybe these particular aliens do, too.” He smiled at me. “Does any of this feel like something that could happen in real life to you? Or do events seem to be unfolding the way they would in a story, or a movie? Perfectly timed for dramatic effect?”
He picked up a large whiteboard resting against a nearby console and tilted it toward me so that I could see the two hastily drawn diagrams on it. He’d drawn a picture of the Death Star from Star Wars on the left side and a sketch of the Disrupter dodecahedron on the right. Both drawings were surrounded by arrows and notes that appeared to draw a comparison between the two. But it was hard to be sure—because I couldn’t read my father’s handwriting to save my life.
“Take the Disrupter, for example,” he said. “Why is it so difficult to destroy, when we have no problem plowing through their other drones? Why not make all of their drones that hard to destroy? Because the Disrupter is a level boss, that’s why!” He pointed to the whiteboard. “The Disrupter is their version of the Death Star—it’s a huge, nearly indestructible doomsday weapon, but it has a small Achilles’ heel that will allow us to destroy it.” He locked eyes with me. “It’s like they designed it that way—so that at least one pilot has to sacrifice themselves to destroy it. The shields only drop for a few seconds—just long enough for two perfectly timed core detonations to go off! Why would they engineer it that way, unless it was on purpose?”
I nodded. “I wondered the same thing,” I confessed.
“No weapons designer or engineer would build something with such an arbitrary weakness,” he said. “The Disrupter is more like something a videogame developer would come up with, to create a big challenge at the end of a level—a boss that requires a huge sacrifice to destroy. And then they send one—just one—to attack this base, instead of sending it straight to Earth. Why? Because they wanted us to see how it worked! Then they let us destroy it! Maybe that was part of their test—to find out if humans are willing to make a heroic sacrifice to save their comrades? To see if our species actually behaves the way we portray ourselves in our books and movies and games?” He stood back up and began to pace, faster and faster. “They could be testing us to see if humanity lacks the courage of its convictions? Are we as selfless and noble as we think we are?”
“But how would the aliens even know about Vance’s heroic sacrifice?” I asked. “Or about anything that was going on within the EDA’s ranks during those battles?”
He bit his lower lip; then he held up his QComm.
“Think about it. Where did this QComm tech come from?”
I shook my head, not wanting to believe it. But he nodded in disagreement.
“The Europans invented this technology, and we barely even understand how it works,” he said. “For all we know, they’re using these to eavesdrop on us right now.” He rubbed his temples, wincing. “I mean, do you think it was a coincidence that of all the EDA sites around the world they could’ve attacked this morning, they chose the one where we’d just relocated all of our elite recruit candidates?”