Upstream - Part 3

The gathering came together faster than they thought it would. When no one lives more than four and a half blocks from where you're standing, things can happen very quickly. In fact, by the time Collins had gotten the nervously lounging circus performers to lug the bleachers out through the wide tent flaps and into the small square in the plaza, there was a big enough crowd to fill them both.

Cordova and Marie watched the people as they filed up to take their seats. Cordova had worried about what state these people would be in, having been excised from their home (along with the home itself) and transplanted to some foreign, hostile territory, but they seemed calm and orderly. Marie thought that it must have been the fact that they were being organized now. They were being given a place to go, and instructions to receive. They were implicitly being promised a solution to their predicament, and she hoped that together she, Cordova, and Collins could come up with one. They had discussed a plan of action, and hoped that the crowd would agree it was the best course.

Once the crowd had arranged themselves, Cordova could see that they looked better off than one would expect. No one was filthy or in rags. If anything, they looked like no more than tourists who had underpacked for a long trip. Their clothes weren't necessarily the first ones they would have chosen to step out in, but they were still clean and presentable. Things would change in a few days, when the rooftop cisterns began to run dry and the laundry began to pile up. The noise of the crowd grew as their numbers did, people coming to assemble from all parts of the diminished city, but once they were in place, they quieted down, their eyes becoming expectant.

The three had decided that Collins should do most of the talking, since his was the voice of authority the people already knew. If they had questions he couldn't answer, however, he would defer to the scientists, and they would answer as best they could. They held no illusions; these people were going to want to know things that were simply unknown at this point, and would have issues that had no likelihood of receiving solutions soon. But it would be a start.

Once it seemed like everyone had been rounded up, Collins stepped out into the empty space the bleachers had been angled toward. "Good afternoon, everyone," he said with his patented smile, "as many of you already heard, we have actually made contact with the outside world, in the form of these two people you see behind me." There must have been at least a few who hadn't heard this news yet, because a murmur broke out through certain sections of the crowd. Cordova and Marie tried to look upon the crowd with hopefulness.

Collins raised his hands for a return to silence. "Now, I know you all have questions for them, but we've been talking since they arrived an hour ago, and I thought there were some things you all are entitled to know." He took a deep breath; this was going to the hardest sell of the day. "We all know that we've been relocated somehow. While we still don't know the cause of this predicament, we at least now know where we've ended up." The crowd had fallen into rapt attention. "We are currently about seventy miles inland from the coast of Colombia, South America." He followed up quickly, so that the gasp of the crowd wouldn't have time to settle into conversation. "In the year 1952."

The crowd's reaction was hard to gauge at first. Some just continued to look at the trio expectantly, as if to say "Is that all?" Others were stunned, still more turned their heads and murmured excitedly at their neighbors; a few broke down entirely. One man, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index knuckle, croaked that his kids had been away at school that day, and how was he going to get back to them? What didn't happen, however, was widespread panic, the thing that Marie had been fearing most.

Collins again put his hands up to bring attention back to himself. "Now, I know there are many things that we're all wondering, and we’re working on answers to them... but for the moment, our main focus is to stay the course we have set. We'll continue to gather food and water, and investigate how best we can sustain our current state."

A voice came suddenly from somewhere in the crowd. "What about Kettering?"

Collins winced at this, as if he had been hoping no one would mention it. Marie and Cordova traded concerned looks just before Collins turned back to them, as if to see how they were reacting to this new development. Cordova raised an eyebrow at him. Collins, noting this expression, turned back to the crowd.

"Now, as some of us have discussed, we have no evidence that Kettering is coming back. As he stated when he left, his intention was not to find where we are, but to find a way to live in the jungle." The de facto mayor looked back at Cordova again, clearly more concerned with what the scientists were going to think about this previously-omitted information. Marie made sure not to give him anything from her face that he could read.

"Now, here's what Mr. Cordova and Miss Munoz propose... They came in a small boat that is waiting for them at a river that runs by about a mile to the north." He gestured toward the drop-off at the end of the street that Marie and Cordova had scaled when they arrived. "By their estimate, they will be able to take approximately a dozen passengers at a time back to their station at the mouth of the river. We're currently in the process of deciding who should be on this limited passenger list... Clearly, although we are all anxious to get back to your families, chances are we will have to wait a little longer. As I said..." Collins paused here, knowing how ridiculous it sounded, "... it's currently the early 1950's, so things are different. Many of you, as hard as it is to believe, have not been born yet. Your parents might not have, either. What we need to determine is who will be most influential in terms of informing the world about what has happened here. When we arrive at our decision, we will let you know."

A woman called out from the edge of the bleachers. "This is crazy! How can we believe what they say? Do they even speak English?" A murmur went up from the crowd. Cordova stepped forward.

"Let me allay your fears, ma'am. My name is Michel Cordova, and I currently live in Boston, Massachusetts. I came to Colombia to study weather variance in the Atlantic and Pacific ocean climates. If you'll remember your geography, Colombia is one of the few countries that are both part of the mainland and have access to both major world oceans. My associate, Marie Munoz--"

Marie cut him off by stepping forward and speaking confidently, her accent perhaps carrying an extra air of authenticity to American ears. "Mrs. Marie Munoz,” she said first, without any intonation that she was intending to correct either of the men who spoke before her. “I am from Bogota, and study marine biology at the National University. Because Dr. Cordova required river transport as part of his assignment, my ship and crew volunteered to take him to the weather station on the Atlantic side of the coast. We agreed to take him up this particular tributary when he got the call five days ago from the United States government, asking him to investigate anomalous weather and atmospheric conditions in this area. We now understand that those were most likely caused by whatever effect has brought you here."

The crowd listened more attentively to Marie than they had to either of the men. "And it's really 1952?" the same woman in the crowd asked, voice quavering the slightest bit.

"I'm afraid so," Marie said, nodding. "We want to help you all get to wherever you need to get to, but the issue right now is that my boat just isn’t big enough to carry you all. Like Mr. Collins said, a dozen is all we'll be able to handle at a time. And it looks like it would take about twenty trips, with an eight-day round trip time, to get you all out. So without outside help, it would take about five months to get you all back to the U.S. weather station. But as he also said, we're trying to figure out which of you would be best in helping us get our message of your --" she picked her words carefully here '' --unusual circumstances to a world that will have no reason to believe that what we say is actually true.

“Right now, we're thinking that maybe some of the older people here, maybe ones that were already alive in 1952, might be useful. Perhaps there is one of you with some kind of government connection that we can use as proof of what has happened." People in the crowd were looking among themselves, the older members looking nervously around. "But as we said, that's to be decided. What we ask of you all now is to maintain the plan Mr. Collins has helped you all put in place in terms of safety, food, water and shelter, because we believe it is a sound plan."

She had said all she had meant to, and a long silence followed. But the crowd was still looking to her, so she added, "Are there any questions we can answer for you? And keep in mind, this situation is new to myself and Dr. Cordova, even more so than for you."

“I have a question!” a voice rang out from somewhere slightly farther away than the bleachers. The heads of nearly the entire crowd whipped over to the left. A figure emerged from the scant shadow they cast on the asphalt. The muscles of his arms bulged as he stepped into the light, the barrel of a shotgun resting casually across the back of his neck, the stock held firmly in his hand. He was followed by a group of four others, each one looking like extras out of a Vietnam-era action movie, sleeves ripped off and converted into bandanas that were tied around their foreheads,.

Collins let the name out on a breath that sounded chilled, even in the steamy air. "Hello, Mr. Kettering..."

The man with the gun nodded the brim of his cowboy hat to the de facto mayor. "Mr. Collins," he said cordially. "Now, I couldn't help but overhear your conversation," he said flatly. "Are we really to believe that this is 1950-something or other?"

"That's right," Marie said, not about to let herself be stared down.

Kettering walked out in front of the throng, putting himself between them and the leadership. "That's a fine story, a fine story," he said, sounding amused. "But like the wise lady in the crowd said, how do we even know that it's the truth?"

Collins stepped toward the man, putting up a hand. "Now, look, James, we've all decided what our best course of action is--"

Kettering cut him off. "All I heard was you telling all of us to just stay put. But I think I've got something to say now, something that most people would be very interested to hear about what me and my men found out *there*." He dramatically thrust a beefy finger authoritatively in the opposite direction that Marie and Cordova had come from.

"Now hold on just a minute..." Collins said, but then the shotgun was suddenly unslung, its stock resting on Kettering's hip. It wasn't pointed at Collins, but it was tipping in that direction, and it was clear that it wouldn't take much more than a wrist flick to take it the rest of the way.

"Now, here's a thought," Kettering said into the silence that ensued, "Your people have had their say. How about I have mine now, and then we -- as a democratic people -- decide what the best thing to do is?"

Collins shot a look back over his shoulders first at Marie, and then at Cordova. The latter was the one who broke the silence. "Of course, Mr. Kettering. If you have any new information that could be of use to us all, then by all means..." He gestured expansively to the crowd, ceding the floor to the newcomer.

Kettering gave Cordova a long, hard stare, as if waiting for the scientist to flinch. When he didn't, Kettering stepped forward, the muzzle of the shotgun weaving back in forth in the air like a cobra’s head as the stock rolled against his hip with each step. He didn't lower the weapon to point at the ground until he was standing right in front of Collins, who looked like he wished he were anywhere other than there at that moment.

Kettering spun and turned around, facing the crowd. "The brave souls who ventured out in the jungle with me five days ago--" he gestured to the rough-looking individuals who were still standing where the adventurer had first made his appearance, "-- have made an interesting discovery. We thought when we arrived here that it was some kind of freak accident, something that must have been caused by something inside our boundaries. That was part of the reason why some of us decided to leave... The threat seemed to be coming from somewhere among us. But I can tell you definitively, here and now, that we were wrong. That's why we've returned."

"What are you saying?" Marie asked, impatient to get through all this bluster.

Kettering looked over at her for the first time, as if surprised that she could speak. He cocked an eyebrow, and when he spoke again, it was to her. "Because there's another city like ours two days from here, just as dislocated and out of place."

The crowd really gasped at this one, and this time the noise swelled, rising and rising and not falling until everyone was shouting to be heard over the others, shifting in their seats until the crowd was down off the bleachers, gathering around Kettering and his men with myriads of questions. He did not answer any, just smiled across their clustered forms at Marie, Collins, and Cordova, now standing alone in front of the circus tent.

FAST FICTION #25: Upstream - part 2

For a moment, neither Cordova nor Marie moved. "Should we go?" Marie asked under her breath, her voice clearly conveying that she did not want to.

Cordova looked at the guns trained on them. "I think we must, for now." He reached for Marie's hand, and she reluctantly took it.

Hand in hand, they walked toward the dangling end of the rope ladder, which was not even swaying in the still air now that it had reached its full length. Cordova kept one eye trained on the spectators above, noting which ones lowered their weapons or averted their aim, and which didn't.

At the base of the dislocated city, while they were out of sight of all but the sentry and two others standing on the very crumbling edge of the street above, Marie whispered, "We don't have to do this. We can skirt around the side to where they can't see us, and make a break back into the jungle."

Cordova wrinkled his forehead and shook her request away. "This is an amazing scientific find. Don't you want to know who these people are, where they came from?"

Marie frowned at him. "They already said they were American."

"More reason to learn all we can," Cordova said. "They're in the middle of a jungle and scared. We might be able to help them. Also..." he looked back at the smashed cars they had passed on their way to the ladder, "I may not have been in the States for several years, but I don't recall seeing cars like that."

Marie could tell by the look in his eyes that any counter argument would be lost on him. It was the same fiercely inquisitive look he had the morning they had started up the river. He hadn’t grown up on the outskirts of the jungle; to him, it was not full of wonders to be respected, but mysteries to be solved. She reached out and took hold of the ladder.

She didn't ask for a boost to get her feet up onto the bottommost rung, and none came. However, hands reached down to help her over the ragged edge of the macadam to lift her up once she reached the top. She meant to thank her aides as her head came up over the level of the street, but all thoughts of anything other than the scene before her immediately flew away.

In the span of thirty seconds, she had gone from the world's wildest jungle to the downtown street of a major American city. She had never been in one before, which made seeing one that had been through a subtle cataclysm all the more disturbing. The street was pockmarked and pitted like a normal street, but there were also long, rolling grades and inch-wide cracks that she was sure hadn't been there before the relocation. Cars, shiny and rounded and mostly unharmed, lined both sides of the street. The street itself was awash in sparkling drifts of broken glass – nearly every visible window had been shattered -- and she could see where effort had been made to sweep aside dozens of stories of accumulated detritus to make safe paths. Other than that, the tall buildings seemed to be mostly unaffected.

"Dios mio," she heard Cordova breathe as he came up behind her, beholding the same scene. The sentry was immediately trying to ask him questions, but for a moment, the two scientists just stood there together, marveling at their sudden immersion in a landscape that, by all rights, should not have been there.

Marie looked at the small team that had escorted them up the ladder, trying to apply the same eye that Cordova had applied to the cars. She tried to see if there was anything about their fashion or hairstyles that looked wildly out of place to her, given that she didn’t quite know the state of casual American dress. She found that she couldn't determine anything beyond their general disheveled appearance, but that could all be written off by the fact that they had all been literally dropped into a foreign environment and forced to spend at least four days there, without power or (most likely) water.

"There was just this huge sound," the sentry was saying rapidly, most likely because they were the first people they had seen that had been unaffected by the tragedy, "and the rest of the world just... went away. Some people say that a white light surrounded everything outside the boundary, and then everything shifted. When the light died away there was nothing but jungle.”

Cordova continued scanning the street as he asked, "What time of day was it when you arrived?"

The sentry, puzzled why he was asking this, finally replied, "Evening. It was mid-morning before, and then evening."

Cordova nodded. "So it would seem that not only have you been greatly displaced in space, you have also been displaced in time."

One of the members of the crowd, an especially stern-looking man in what might have been a business suit when they first arrived, and who was the only one who hadn't yet lowered his weapon, said, "We should take him to see Collins."

"That's what I was thinking," the sentry said. "Come on," he said to Cordova and Marie, "I'll show you the way." He started walking out in front of them, then turned and motioned when they didn't immediately follow. "Collins will know what to do," he said.

The small group began moving down the street. Every minute or two, a deep, disquieting creak would come from one of the buildings, a sound almost impossibly slow and grinding. Marie absently realized that, in their original placement, these buildings would be built on pylons driven at least half their height into bedrock. Now, they all were poised on nothing more than fifteen feet of stabilizing material. Sooner or later, they were all going to fall like the partial buildings they had seen along the almost surgically-precise edge. The whole city would eventually wilt like a flower, petals dying in the jungle heat and falling outward.

The sentry, still taking the lead, picked a path down the street, and then turned a corner where a gap in the buildings held what was once a wide plaza. The frozen waves of broken safety glass, arranged in a trillion tiny cubes that reflected the morning sun like a vast pile of diamonds, were thicker here; more effort had been made to push them to the edges. In the center of the plaza stood a large tent, painted with bright stripes. It looked like it had been designed for circus use.

"Pretty lucky they were in town, wasn't it?" The sentry was saying. "It seems to be more stable than anything other structure, so Collins has his command center in here." The small group around Cordova and Marie shepherded them toward the large flaps that had been pulled aside to form an entryway. The sentry passed into the dark shadows inside the tent.

If they had been hoping for a respite from the oppressive jungle morning air inside the tent, they did not find it. The heat, if anything, was even worse, the air stale and sluggish. The acidic smell of animals hung in the air, making their lack of visible presence all the more disturbing. Marie and Cordova’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, and they could see that the tent material was illuminated, unable to block all of the sun. The diffused light made everything inside shadowless and flat.

They passed between two large stacks of bleachers, which held sparse groups of people, sitting and talking in low tones. Some of them were clearly the circus’s performers; Cordova saw one man whose face was incomplete with clown makeup, caught in preparation for a morning show and now half-melted off with sweat: outlines of black and red, white streaks down his neck, one greasepaint eyebrow raised in permanent surprise. The bleachers faced a ring of fat tentpoles that circumscribed a foot-high, circular wall at the very center of the tent. Inside it, the ground was covered with a thin layer of sawdust. It had been spread evenly for the start of the show, but now it had been kicked and shuffled through until it formed tall, abstract patterns on the thin padding underneath. Near the rear, several tables had been pushed together so that maps, blueprints, and other materials could be laid out. Between them, a well-worn path had been made in the sawdust. A man walked back and forth among the tables incessantly, tracing the route over and over again, clearing it to a width of over three feet. His skin was dark against his buttoned white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

The sentry stopped just before stepping over the low wall and into the ring. “Mr. Collins?” he called.

The pacing man looked up immediately. Sweat stood out on his brow. “Yes?”

The sentry suddenly seemed to lose his sense of authority. “We… Some people…” he stammered.

Collins narrowed his eyes, then smiled and waved the man forward. His grin was wide and charming. “Come over, Allway,” he said. He certainly could be an actual mayor, Cordova thought.

The sentry, breathing a sigh of relief, stepped over the wall and walked to Collins. They talked in low tones for a moment, some of the attending personnel looking up from their tables to listen in. More and more glances were thrown in Marie and Cordova’s direction the longer the Allway spoke.

Finally, Collins seemed to have heard enough. He put his hand on Allway's shoulder, and turned back to the place where Marie and Cordova stood. "Come on over!" the man called, his teeth shining.

Leaving the rest of the sentry group behind, they stepped over the wall and crossed to the group of tables, their feet rustling erratically through the small waves of sawdust. Allway backed away respectfully as they approached, absolving responsibility for them. Collins spoke in conversational tones as soon as they were within earshot. "So, I hear you're from outside," he said.

Cordova nodded. "We were on the coast originally, but there were seismic reports and weather phenomena, so we were asked to investigate."

"Wonderful!" Collins said. "That's been our biggest fear, you know, that no one realizes we're here, wherever that is. Where are we, exactly?"

Cordova spoke as if he had been mentally rehearsing for some time. "Not far from the northern coast of Colombia," he said. "A little over four days' trip by boat up the river."

Collins seemed genuinely fascinated. "Amazing..." he mused. “And how much information does the government have?"

"Which one?" Marie asked.

Collins seemed to have not thought of this distinction. "Ah... well, yours and ours both, I suppose."

"Nothing yet," Cordova said. "We're too far out of radio range to relay our information back."

Collins squinted at them, puzzled. "Radio range? So, no one's taken any satellite imagery yet?"

Cordova shrugged. "I don't know what you mean. Are you talking about radar?"

Collins looked between the two of them for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was low, conspiratorial. "What year is this, anyway?"

Cordova answered quickly, matching his hushed tone. "1952."

Collins' face went a little gray. "I see," he said. "Could you two... follow me, please?" He turned and walked toward the smaller back flaps of the tent without checking to see if they were following. The two explorers exchanged a wary look, then followed. They left behind a few staff members to pore over the maps and schematics on their own.

Marie and Cordova exited the tent the way the performers did, at the back of the ring. In the back, there were a few narrow switchbacks between walls of canvas. It was darker back here, the smell of animals more intense. They followed the shadow of Collins as he constantly turning corners ahead on them in the canvas warren, and finally came out in a sheltered area that was full of movement. They clasped hands instinctively as they realized that they had found the source of the animal smells. Cages of all sizes ranged around. Here, a pair of tigers paced back and forth, flashing orange and black between the bars. A small stable along the back held a half-dozen horses, all nodding acknowledgement at the new people. Back in the corner, the largest cage held a small elephant family, all of which flapped their ears and regarded them stoically. Collins turned to face the two scientists, his countenance dour, miles away from the cheerful politician that had originally greeted them.

"I take it my answer was not what you suspected?" Cordova asked.

"When we left, it was..." Collins paused for an unusually long time, as if not wanting to manifest the answer in the physical world, and then uttered a time that lay some sixty years in the future. Cordova nodded, remembering the strange car models lying at the edges of the excised city. "Of course," Collins said, his voice subdued, looking around him at the trapped animals, "... there's no way for us to get back, is there?" He turned back to them, his bark of a laugh holding the slightest hysterical edge. "We're stuck here."

"There are things we can do..." Cordova began.

"Yeah?" Collins said, his eyes wide. "Because if it’s anything other than telling those people out there that they can't go home again, that they're trapped forever in the past..." He ran his hands over the sides of his face. Marie took a half-step back. "I'm not even a real leader, you know," Collins was saying, starting to jabber. "For the first few hours, everyone was just running around, trying to figure out what the hell happened. I just started giving people tasks to do, you know... Sweep the glass out of the street, start taking inventory of the stores and restaurants, things like that." He began pacing anew, this time a sense of urgency in his steps that wasn't there before. He wheeled on them, his tone equal parts incredulity and panic. "I'm an elementary school teacher! I didn't ask for this! I made suggestions, and all of a sudden everyone was looking to me to save them! I can't go out there and tell them that we're not even in our own *time* anymore, and that no one is coming to save us! This city is going to collapse entirely before too long!"

He lunged forward, grabbing Cordova by the lapels. Marie tried to step forward, put herself between the two men to keep them apart, but didn't quite make it. "What are we going to do?" Collins asked, launching flecks of spit toward the other man in the ammoniac heat.

Cordova's calm didn't break. "The best thing you can do for these people right now is to get hold of yourself," he said. "One thing at a time. Securing their survival is the number one job, and it looks like you've managed to do that, at least for now."

Collins looked almost disappointed that Cordova wasn't retaliating, hitting him to the ground, kicking him, anything. Marie considered that maybe that's what the de facto mayor wanted, to sustain some physical wounds to detract from the psychic ones he had been hiding since this emergency started.

Collins looked into Cordova's eyes, first one, then the other, and slumped against him. Because the men were almost identically sized, it was nearly impossible to tell which of them was holding up the other. Marie went into one of the darker corners of the tent and returned with a folding chair. She slid it under Collins, and Cordova lowered him into it. Collins, his hands still crabbed even after relinquishing his tight hold on Cordova's lapels, ran over his sweating face and scalp.

Cordova crouched down next to the chair, looking up at Collins. The weather scientist spoke. "Now, granted, I know next to nothing about these things, but I think the fact that Marie and I didn’t arrive in a city full of savages bashing each other’s brains out in fear means that you've done something right. Can you accept responsibility for that much?"

Collins, staring straight ahead into the gloom, nodded.

"Good," Cordova continued. "Now, you said that you were taking inventory of food and water stores, correct?"

Collins nodded again, but this time flicked a wary glance over at Cordova.

"So you've secured sustenance and shelter for these people. For the moment, the situation is stable. Can you admit that?"

Another nod.

"Okay, so no one's going to starve or start fighting for food. How long can that status be maintained?"

Collins' mind began to work again. "We haven't looked everywhere, but I think we have two weeks of food if we ration it correctly. There are seven restaurants in this section of the city, which has nine complete blocks in it. There are teams still scouting the partial buildings out around the edge, because they’re the least stable and careful progress is slow, but we figure we'll find other hidden survivors at about the same rate as we find food. We're trying to fill six of the restaurants' freezers with everything perishable and keep the doors closed. They're mostly deep inside buildings, so we're hoping the food will last longer."

"Wonderful," Cordova said. "And how many people are accounted for as of now?"

Collins searched his memory. "Four hundred sixty-three," he said. "We lost another hundred in various accidents. Those that didn’t make it… we put in the seventh freezer." His voice was not robotic, but had a statistician’s detachment. Marie thought this was probably necessary for someone in this situation.

Cordova shared a grim look with Marie. "And what is the focus of your efforts right now?" Cordova asked.

“Water," Collins said, more like his original self than he had been since they entered the back of the tent. A tiger growled nearby as if it understood what he was saying. "Any buildings over six stories have rooftop tanks, so we’re making sure they’re full."

"That's wonderful," Cordova said. "I thought sixty years from now they'd have moved on to better plumbing technology."

Collins actually smiled a little at that. "No, it's still done with the old wooden tanks. Don't mess with perfection, as they say." Cordova chuckled, prompting Collins to continue, "I'm having the roof taken off one of them," he said. "They're draining it, moving the water to other buildings. We need to see if the rainwater we catch will be usable."

Marie saw a moment for her own expertise to be useful, so she jumped in. "I'd think so. Your people can't drink water from the streams down in the jungle without getting sick, but the only bacteria in the tanks are the ones you brought with you. So far, anyway. It might be such a gradual transition that your people won’t feel it much."

Cordova nodded toward her. "Marie's our native biochemist," he said. "If you're going to get through this, you'll have her to thank more than anyone else." The look on Marie's face betrayed how deeply she now realized the responsibility on her shoulders.

"What about you?" Collins said. "What's your line of work?"

Cordova shrugged. "I'm a meteorologist," he said. "But I'm an American, so there's that. I'm guessing you're from the East Coast, is that right?"

Collins nodded, and volunteered the name of the city they had been excised from.

"Were there any warning signs before this happened to you?" Cordova asked. “Was there any kind of precedent for it?”

Collins shook his head. "There's been news, I guess, but nothing out of ordinary. Threats of terror attacks, that sort of thing."

"Russians?" Cordova asked, already nodding. Collins laughed out loud.

"No! We're not worried about them anymore. It’s more religious extremists that we're concerned with now. There have been other attacks, but nothing like this."

Cordova looked at Marie. "How do you feel about speaking to the people?" he asked her. "This is your nation, but this turf is more mine. I think we need to talk to as many of these people as we can, and tell them what we understand so far."

Marie nodded. "Promise me one thing, though," she said. "We won't sugar-coat this. The situation is dire, and they should know that." She turned to Collins. "You know them best. Is this information something they can handle?"

Collins nodded, his resolve clearly coming back. He even sat forward in his seat a little bit. "I've seen these people pull together in ways that I've never even considered before. They can take it."

"Sooner is best, I think," Cordova said. "How quickly can we gather them together?"

FAST FICTION #23: Upstream - part 1

The river turned sluggish on the fourth day, becoming choked with debris, logs and clumps of biomass that had gotten tangled into mats further up in the rapids, and were now hurtling toward the small research boat. Cordova, standing on the cabin roof, got out his binoculars and turned them upriver, trying to see if the way got clearer up ahead. As far as he could see, it didn't. Marie came up next to him, watching the crew -- most of them hired hands from the port -- standing at the prow of the boat. They used big poles to push aside the floating chunks of forest as they came. The boat kept pushing through this semi-cleared channel, but the pilot had dialed down the throttle to prevent running into anything at a damaging speed.

"Terrazas says that he's never seen anything like this," Marie said.

"Well, he ought to know," Cordova said, taking his binoculars down, but still looking ahead. He didn't want to look at her. If Terrazas was concerned, with more than twenty years navigation experience than anyone else on the boat, then he supposed they should be too.

"How far away do you think we are?" Marie said. "And is the way going to get harder the closer we get?"

Cordova answered with a terse, "Two more days, at this rate. And probably."

Marie crossed her arms, and he could feel her stern look without turning to her. "Are we even sure that we're going to know what we're looking for when we find it?"

"We'll know. Something that causes this much damage will be obvious." There were other signs, too. The jungle sounds that usually filled the air had started to fade, which meant that they were getting closer to the center of -- whatever this was. And maybe he was imagining it, but the trees seemed to be leaning the slightest bit downstream, opposite the direction the boat was traveling.

"I'm going to say it again," Marie said, "but we're really not equipped for this kind of thing. All our equipment was designed for weather data, and this--" she swept a hand at the thickening river ahead of them, "--definitely isn't weather related."

Cordova sighed, finally turned to her. "I agree with you. The only advantage we have is that we'll be able to get to the site before any other military presence can get feet on the ground. And to the bosses, that means something."

"Well, I don't like it," she muttered. "We have no idea what we're getting into. We could be heading toward a radiation-heavy site, or a volcano that could go off again..."

Cordova interrupted her. "No evidence points to that. That's the reason why the government called us to check it out first. We've got our radiation detectors running, and if this is some sort of missile attack gone astray, that's important information to have."

Marie just looked at him for a moment, then swatted at a persistent, noisy fly that was circling her ponytail. "I'm going to take a shift on the prow," she finally huffed, and went down to relieve one of the tired men on the bow.

Cordova watched her as she stepped up beside one, put her hand on his shoulder, and took the pole he was using to push debris out of their path. He wondered when -- and if -- he should tell her, what he suspected, and what the commander he had spoken to had suggested to him when they were taken away from their weather station monitoring to undertake this mission.

He raised his binoculars up again, and was stunned with what he saw when he scanned the horizon. There, clearly rising out of the mist in the distance, was a small clump of tall buildings. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and checked again. Yes, there they were. They had to be some kind of mirage in this green wilderness. But they didn't shimmer, didn't move, just became steadily clearer the closer they crept toward it.

He waited until he was absolutely sure that his eyes hadn't deceived him before calling Marie up to verify what he was looking at. They were the highest personnel on the boat, so no one could see it from the lower deck, even if they hadn't been preoccupied with clearing away the junk below that threatened to impede their progress. He didn't speak when she responded to his call, did nothing to allay the sense of annoyance in her eyes when she came up from her work to stand beside him. He just handed her the binoculars. He waited patiently while she held them to her eyes, followed his pointing finger, lowered the lenses, raised them again, lowered them again.

"What the hell is that?" she finally asked.

"It's the impact site," he said.

Marie stood silent for a few moments. "I thought this kind of debris was most likely caused by a volcanic eruption, but since there was no ash, I thought it might have been a meteorite."

"That's what I thought too," Cordova said flatly. "But this is... something different".

"How soon until we get to it?" Marie asked.

"The river hasn't stopped flowing, so it's not blocking the river."

"Wait," Marie said, "you think this thing just appeared there?"

"I don't know," Cordova said. "I think anything we guess is going to be proven wrong tomorrow." Marie nodded. At the rate they were moving upstream, they wouldn't get to those distant man-made peaks until the next day.

By nightfall, the whole crew knew about what was ahead of them. Cordova had spoken to each of them separately, slowly and calmly, and as night fell, he was glad he had. There were sounds and a few lights from over there, some of which might have been shouts. Cordova also thought he might have heard gunfire. Some of the buildings had fires burning on their roofs, and a bigger fire he couldn't see the source of underneath that might be a whole small building going up. Engines could be heard, and even the blat of a few truck horns. As fascinating as it was to watch and listen to the steadily-growing incongruity, he forced himself to bed early. He suspected he would need all the energy he had.

They arrived at the point of the river closest to the city the next morning before noon. They knew they were getting closer because the trees' tilt -- which he hadn't imagined after all -- grew progressively more pronounced, until they found they had to hug the right bank of the river to avoid the low-hanging branches from their left. He ordered the crew to continue upstream, drawing abreast of the city, until he perceived the trees to be leaning upstream along with them, figuring that that would mean that they had just passed the closest point they were going to get to the city. He ordered the captain to park as close to the left bank as they could, once they found a spot relatively clear of bent trees.

He and Marie, carrying their packs full of supplies, jumped off onto solid ground and began to pick their way forward, now able to see several of the tallest buildings over the lowering treetops. They proceeded without speaking, both excited and frightened in equal measure. Periodically, he would close his eyes as they reached a relatively clear stretch of ground, and the closer he got, the more he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a city. It was subtly different, though; more human voices, less traffic.

It was during one of these periods of self-imposed blindness that Marie caught his arm, holding him back. He stopped and opened his eyes. They had finally reached the point where the forest had been flattened enough that their heads were sticking out over the top of the foliage. In front of them lay about a hundred yards of utterly flattened ground, and beyond that, a city on a pedestal. It took him a while to realize what he was seeing. Being a scientist above all other things, two words stood out in his head like neon: “core sample”.

He was looking at an excised section of a city, a cylindrical piece that started at about fifteen feet below street level and ended somewhere above the top of the highest building, as if it had been and dropped there. The force of such a weight being landing on a swath of virgin forest, he imagined, would force so much air out from under it that it would cause the arboreal devastation in all directions, smothering trees and clogging river with blown debris. The most amazing part of the excision -- if he was thinking about this correctly -- was how it failed to take human geometry into account. The edge of the sample was a perfect circle, judging by the smooth way it curved away from him and Marie in both directions, one that sliced through buildings regardless of how they were arranged. In fact, he could see at least two places around the half of the circle visible to him where buildings had been clipped so thinly that they had collapsed, falling away from the center and off the elevated disc, crushing even more jungle floor. He imagined there were just as many that had fallen inward, which might account for the random firelight he had seen the night before.

The several yards of underground that was exposed were riddled with pipes of all sizes, huge mouth-like storm drains and smaller utility pipes as well. Many had thin streams of brackish water still flowing out of them, turning the ground surrounding the base into a swampy morass. There were more than a few overturned cars in this mire below spots where surface streets ended, implying that the displacement had happened so quickly that they did not have time to realize that the street before them didn't continue, but ended in a sheer drop to the jungle floor.

"Hey!" a voice called. It had a strange tone to it, both echoing and muffled at the same time.

Marie pointed up to the edge of the street that ended closest to where they stood. A man was standing up there, holding an imposing-looking rifle against his hip.

Cordova raised a hand and waved it over his head. Marie grabbed for it, as if to prevent the gesture, but either thought better of it or realized the damage had been done, and let him do it. "Hello!" he called as he waved.

The man with the rifle placed his other hand on the butt of it, but still didn't point it in his direction. "Where are you from?"

Cordova stepped forward, far enough that the flattened trees and undergrowth only came up to his knees. "We're scientists. We were exploring the river when we spotted you in the distance." If Marie minded that he was bending the truth, she didn't seem to mind. "How long have you been here?"

The man with the rifle looked behind him, but from this low angle Cordova couldn't tell what he was looking at. "This is the third day," he said. "None of us knows what happened. We just appeared here."

"You were carried and dropped?" Marie asked, addressing the sentry for the first time.

"Not carried, just dropped. We estimate we appeared about ten feet off the ground, then fell. We're shaken up pretty bad, but we're trying to pool resources and keep order."

"Is there a leader we can talk to?" Cordova asked.

The sentry considered his answer for a moment, then said, "The mayor's residence was outside the circle, so we're trying to figure out that part too."

"Is there a way for us to come up?" Cordova asked. "We'd like to help, if we can."

The sentry looked behind himself again, nervously this time, and looked back down at them. "We haven't really left the circle yet, but we know we'll have to eventually. Hang on a minute." The man disappeared without waiting for an answer from either of them.

When he left, Marie began to wonder. "What city *is* this?" she asked.

"I don't recognize any of the buildings." Cordova shook his head. "I'm just glad they speak English. But look at the cars."

She followed his pointing finger at the smashed cars that had fallen off the edge of the city circle. She didn't know cars very well, but there were a few that bore strange design elements that she hadn't seen before. They were sleek, curved in ways she wasn't used to seeing. "What does that mean?" she asked.

Cordova shrugged. "Maybe nothing. But this looks like an American city to me. The only trouble is, I don't know any of these car models. They look somewhat... futuristic, don't you think?"

Marie squinted at them, wishing she had paid more attention to car design. Or that they had a chance to look at specimens that were more intact. When she looked too close, she began to realize that the cars she was looking at were gruesomely occupied. Those who had been driving the cars when they plummeted and crashed were, for the most part, still visible inside the vehicles. She turned away. "God," she muttered.

The man with the rifle reappeared, this time flanked by a half-dozen more people. They were unarmed, and their dress ran the gamut from t-shirt and cutoffs to business suits, all similarly scuffed and askew. "Hey!" the sentry called again. Cordova and Marie looked up to him. "We're working on a ladder for you," he said. "Do you have a radio down there? We have a few intact towers, but don't seem to be getting any bars up here."

Cordova had no idea what the man was talking about. "We have a radio in our boat, but we're too far inland to call anyone. We'd have to travel at least two days downstream before we can call the coast."

The man looked perplexed. "Which coast?" he asked.

When Cordova said, “Columbian, of course," a murmur went through the elevated crowd. Clearly, this was not an answer they had expected.

They turned and talked to each other in hushed tones, although they needn't have; nothing less than a hailing call could be heard over the distance between them and Cordova and Marie.

"Are you saying," the sentry called, making sure to speak over the rising voices behind him, "that we're in Columbia?"

"That's right," Cordova answered. "Where were you expecting?" He wasn't mocking him, he just wanted to know.

Marie jumped in, fearing they would misunderstand his tone, "We're guessing that you're American, yes?"

The sentry seemed a little reluctant to talk to Marie, noting her accent. "Yes. That's right."

"What city?" she asked.

The sentry turned and spoke to his cohorts behind her, and in lieu of an answer, he called down, "Hold on," he said. "We're getting the ladder now." The group moved away from the edge, at least far enough that Cordova and Marie couldn't see them anymore.

“You're going to spook them," Marie said. "Please be careful. You can't convey tone across this distance."

"Don't worry," Cordova said. "These are my countrymen. We understand each other."

At that moment, the group reappeared at the edge of the city. Now they were all armed, the barrels of rifles, shotguns and pistols alike trained on them. The sentry kicked a bundle off the edge of the street, and it unfurled into a chain-and-plank safety ladder on the way down, its end snapping just two feet off the ground and waving in the still air. "Come up, please,” he said. “The woman first."

The Alien Sequel That Never Will Be

Alien fever is starting up again. After proving that he can handle sci-fi in new and inventive ways with District 9, Elysium and Chappie, South African director Neill Blomkamp has set his sights on revitalizing the Alien franchise -- and if Hollywood is going to continue chasing its own tail in its pursuit of franchises, it just might kick off a Marvelesque universe that incorporates Predators and Prometheii (?) alike.

That being said, we're starting to see some pre-visualization sketches coming out for what will be Alien 5, and I'll be damned if they don't look sorta familiar. Because, you see, back in the 1990s, when the independent film boom was bringing new visionaries to the screens of America -- a torch that has since been passed to cable television -- I thought I had a new take on the Alien idea, fueled by my love/hate relationship with the end-of-the-world fever-dream that was David Fincher's Alien3.

I felt that some wrongs had to be righted, the worst of which being that the beloved side characters who survived Aliens deserved better than being killed in their sleep at the top of part three. I believed that the future of the Alien franchise hinged on three basic questions:

1) What if Alien3 really were some kind of dream? Could I finagle a "take-back" that made sense in the arc of the whole series?
2) Could an android feasibly be a host for an alien embryo? And what would the resulting creature look like?
3) The teaser trailer for Alien3 featured a giant Alien egg floating above the Earth... what if that original idea (later scrapped for a setting on a prison planet) was followed through?

With these thoughts in my head, I started visualizing my own version, one that wouldn't have to involve Sigourney Weaver if she wasn't game to reappear (although for Blomkamp, she apparently is). In the interest of testing my precognitive abilities against that far-away release date, I submit my treatment here for your approval:

---

It begins with Rebecca "Newt" Jorden, now grown up. She lies on a dark hillside on Earth, looking up at the stars and imagining that Ripley is singing "You Are My Lucky Star" to her. A shooting star streaks across the sky, followed quickly by another. And another. Soon there are dozens of them, drawing lines in the sky, lines that begin to take the form of an enormous Alien head, bending down toward her and opening its jaws, as if it intends to swallow the Earth whole...

Rebecca wakes up; she hadn't realized she nodded off while lying on the hillside. She goes back into the farmhouse where she lives with her grandparents and quarrels with them. She still believes that the world is in danger, while they think that she is still suffering from the trauma she endured as a child in the doomed colony of Hadley's Hope on LV-426.

They have cause to worry, too. When Newt and Ripley arrived back on Earth, they spent the next five years trying to evade the law and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It ended with a standoff situation, Ripley finally giving up Newt on the condition that she be left alone and returned to her surviving family. Ripley then escaped capture and disappeared. Now that Newt has graduated college (online, not having left the farm the entire time), her grandparents believes she needs to get back into the world. She resists, but eventually concedes to going to an interview for a social work job in the city.

Meanwhile, in the bio-labs of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a science team (led by the a man named Marcus King, and partially comprised of seven mentally-connected Bishop androids that are modeled in his image) have managed to salvage a small cache of Alien eggs from deep beneath the nuclear wasteland of LV-426 and have brought them to Earth for study. They have taken every precaution, and have as their chief of security former Marine Dwayne Hicks. Now scarred and half-blind from his previous run-in with these creatures, Hicks very good at his job and watching this project with keen interest.

Rebecca ventures into the city for the first time, and marvels at its splendor. W-Y has used its terraforming capabilities to transform former urban blight into a rainforest-like utopia. All the skyscrapers have their own exterior ecosystems -- including hanging gardens and bioengineered rabbits that can leap dozens of feet from ledge to ledge. The jewel in this emerald crown is the W-Y headquarters, a beautiful, gigantic glass pyramid. Newt can see it from the office building where she has her interview, where she hopes to start working with troubled kids. She aces the interview -- having been a frightened child once herself -- and goes to have lunch in a nearby park.

There, she sees a man preaching to anyone who will listen. She recognizes him from Ripley's description of a hypersleep-induced dream she had on their way back to Earth... in the dream as well as here, the man’s name is Dillon. Fascinated, Rebecca follows him to the place where he holds his own version of church services every midnight. He runs the Church of Hypnos, a group devoted to the interpretation of dreams. His beliefs center in particular around oxygen, which he sees as a gateway to divine dreaming. Since Ripley's vision was had in super-oxygenated hypersleep, Dillon is very interested to hear it. When he unveils a painting he made while inspired by a nightmare he recently had, Newt recognizes the face of the Alien and faints.

Meanwhile, something has gone wrong in the W-Y biolabs... While King is conspicuously absent from the lab, a massive power outage affects the entire building. The science team had been wearing coolsuits to mask their body heat so they could study the Alien eggs at their leisure, but as the power fails, so do the suits, and the eggs start to open up, sensing possible hosts. Hicks, seeing what is happening, activates an old high-level security code that effectively closes the building's defenses against nuclear attack, including blast shutters over every window and utterly sealing all exits. It's an extreme measure, in effect closing the building off from all communication with the outside world, but Hicks knows better than anyone else the horrible outcome if an Alien were to get loose... This is why he became security chief at W-Y after his honorable discharge from the Marines -- to prevent this very situation from getting out of hand. Unfortunately, the science team -- including the androids -- become hosts for fifteen of the creatures.

Leaving the Church of Hypnos, Dillon and Newt are confronted by a young woman in a limousine. She is Mimi Yutani, daughter of the current CEO of W-Y. She wants them to help her get inside the building, because now that the building has been closed up, her father is trapped in there. W-Y has clearly been keeping tabs on Newt all along, and now Mimi sees her as a way to get to her father. In exchange, she says that she has similarly-obtained information on where Ripley is, and will help Newt… if she helps Mimi first.

Avoiding the gathering crowds and arriving at a secret subterranean entrance to the building, Mimi gets in contact with Hicks and uses Rebecca in a reverse-hostage situation, to get *into* the building. Hicks manages to broker an exchange... all the personnel in the building that he can get together in exchange for letting Mimi in the building. The transfer goes well, but Mimi brings Newt in as a possible further bargaining chip, and this sets up an adversarial but symbiotic relationship between them... one is trying to find her father, the other trying to find her foster mother, and each using the other to get there. Dillon, refusing to be separate from what he sees as his divine destiny, goes in as well.

Pulling up a schematic of the building, Hicks realizes that none of the personnel he could save came from a certain area in the building, a vast greenhouse deep within the pyramid called "The Atrium", where a division of W-Y is trying to naturally reproduce various pharmaceutical chemicals usually found in a rainforest biome. Hicks' small security team, along with Newt, Mimi, and Dillon, venture warily into the area.

There, in the dark caused by the power outage, they find an Alien hive, and many of the missing personnel being held as potential hosts for a small, rapidly-maturing Queen. Just as they attempt to rescue them, though, a different tribe of Aliens -- sleeker, faster albinos bred of the Bishop androids -- arrive and tear the old breed apart, carting off the captured humans for their own use. Hicks and his team only manage to survive by pulling back from this Alien crossfire.

After leaving The Atrium, they run into King, who claims that he knows nothing about what went wrong with the power, and says he's trying to find CEO Toshiro Yutani. Hicks and Newt don't trust him, but Mimi will do whatever she has to in order to rescue her father. When King says there are more Bishops that they can revive to help, the group reluctantly agrees.

He leads them to a biolab storage office, where there are not only four more Bishop androids, but a cache of prototype bio-limbs, reverse-engineered from what the Company knows about the Aliens so far, which give the wearer extraordinary arm and leg strength. Armed with four hive-mind Bishops and arm/leg augmentations that might prove to be somewhat of a match for the android-Aliens, the crew heads for a large elevator shaft that leads up to the very top of the W-Y pyramid, where Mr. Yutani's office is. Mimi is convinced that this is where her father is hiding.

Halfway up the shaft, the team meets up with a group of bone-white androidal Aliens, and a vertical battle ensues. Over the course of it, it becomes clear that not only has King programmed the Bishops to value Alien life over human, but that he caused the power outage, sacrificing his science team to experiment with how android-based Aliens will differ from human-based. Unfortunately, his experiment went too well, and he couldn’t contain the results. Even now, he's only trying to get the new Bishops up to the android Queen (who we're sure is residing above) so she can have more minions.

They reach the apex of the pyramid, which is glass on all four sloped sides, the only part of the building that is strong enough that it doesn't need the blast shields. That turns out to be a good thing, because here is where the white android Alien Queen has built her transparent nest. The sun is setting outside, and Mimi finds her father, who has been cocooned in the clear resin just like all the other captives that have been brought up from the rainforest atrium.

The final battle happens here in the blood-red and purple of twilight, and everyone ends up being destroyed except for Newt, Mimi, and the Queen. An airlock does manage to get blown open, and the Queen escapes to the outside of the building. The two women, their arms and legs still outfitted with bio-limbs, follow her out.

It has been raining, and the outside of the pyramid is slick. The Queen, seeing her opportunity to escape, begins sliding down its side toward the city below. Newt and Mimi follow her, just managing to destroy her before she does. When they reach the bottom, and confronted by the police forces that have surrounded the building, the two of them escape together in fifty-foot leaps, on their way to find Ripley.

---

So that's what I came up with... I think I kept a lot of the elements that I enjoyed about the first two Alien movies. There's more detail that I left out here, of course, mostly about how the dream prophecy of the third affects the events and decisions the characters make, and there are always a few more things that need to be fleshed out, explained, streamlined or just plain rethought.

But at least it's now out in the real world. Let's see how Neill and Sigourney handle their version of it. This franchise was the first to teach me how related stories could be told in drastically different styles and still feel of one piece, so I'm genuinely excited to find out.

FAST FICTION #14: Awesome?

I've been going back and forth about this song.

Back and forth how?

Well, I'm concerned about what's going to happen when the kids who are running around singing it grow up and figure out that it's a song about embracing conformity.

"Everything is Awesome" is a about conformity?

Well, yeah! I mean, come on. *Everything* is awesome? Doesn't that imply nothing in particular is more awesome than anything else?

You're going to have to explain this to me. It's a song, from a kid's movie, about having a positive attitude. How subversive do you think it can be?

Pretty damn subversive, actually. It *sounds* like a positive let's-all-work-together pop song, but look at it in the context of the movie. It's the sole theme song of a city where everyone likes the same things, and loves everything that happens no matter how good or bad it is. That's how Lord Business keeps everyone down.

Now, wait a minute. I thought that Lord Business is just misguided. He wants everything to run smoothly and for everyone to be happy. And he did that! Brickburg is a happy place.

But at what cost? And I don't think he really wants people to be happy. He just doesn't want them thinking for themselves. That would lead to them building their own things and "messing with his stuff". It's why he's going to coat the whole world in Crazy Glue.

Wait, we're getting off track. What's stuck in your craw about the song, now?

It's an incessant, impossible-to-escape ode to doing everything that everyone else is doing. "Everything is cool when we're part of a team", right? And doesn't the last line of the chorus sound like "When you live in a dream"?

I think they're saying "When you're living our dream". Big difference.

But doesn't it sound *intentionally* similar? And whose dream are we talking about here?

I don't know. Living in a world where everyone is happy is kind of the ultimate goal of civilization, isn't it?

Sure, it's easy for everyone to be happy as long as they don't do anything because of their own wants or needs. Do you think ants are happy?

I don't know... I'd suppose if they have emotions, they are. They never have to wonder if they're doing the right thing, or what they really want to do with their life. And they look like they're at least motivated to do what they're doing.

But look at how Lord Business runs things! He threatens everyone into doing what he wants, he has no regard for the common people... his bureaucracy is manned entirely by robots, for crying out loud!

I think you're reading an awful lot of political allegory into this.

Am I? Think about Emmett's job. He's a construction worker, and the first thing they're told to do in the morning is to blow up "anything weird". Meaning all the individual, interesting houses. It's a wrecking ball and explosions for all of them. Even at the end, when they break into Lord Business's office tower, how does Emmett help? By telling the rebels how to get in, and he says he knows how because he's built about *ten* of the same kind of towers.

So you're saying that Lord Business is... stomping out individuality and creativity?

Of course! Because what do you get when everyone is allowed to build whatever they want?

Um... I guess you get Cloud Cuckoo Land.

And didn't that place seem bewilderingly chaotic and confusing?

I guess... but it looked cool.

It did, true, but look at Unikitty and you can see what it does to you. She was the epitome of emotional self-denial. You'd have to be that way, in order to co-exist with people who could do anything they wanted, any way they wanted, any time they wanted. Lord Business is imposing order to keep out that kind of chaos.

It's starting to sound like you're going over to his side now.

Not really, I'm just trying to show you that both sides are equally misguided. People aren't genuinely happy in either place.

Now, wait a minute. Unikitty's kind of a mess, but Emmett seems happy.

Does he? Think about the beginning of the movie. He loves every part of his day, even when it consists solely of trying to fit in. He watches the same stupid "Where are My Pants?" show as everyone else, he dutifully drinks his $37 morning coffee with a houseplant instead of friends, and still no one he encounters during the day even knows anything about who he is.

So then Emmett's a great example about how playing by the same rules as everyone else doesn't really get you anywhere.

To Lord Business, he's the perfect citizen. And we're back to the song, since it's all he allows to be played. It's catchy and upbeat, yes, but it's really telling you to accept, to actually *believe*, that... "Everything you see or think or say, is awesome" ... Everything.

Even living the lonely life that Emmett's living?

Exactly. He's super-excited about having a totally banal, effectless life. That's what Lord Business wants. That's exactly what the Master Builders are rebelling against.

Ah-hah.

Emmett is constantly reassured he's on the right track, and now we've got a whole generation of kids running around singing the very same theme song about the joys of being oppressed!

..... oh dear God.

Giving It a Think #4: The Fermi Paradox

"Are we alone?" is one of the first questions we humans asked ourselves, even before we realized that the Universe is a vast, filamented web of uncountable galaxies... and not a tight ball of crystal spheres centered exclusively around us.

Two great scientific thinkers answered this question in their own particular way...

Carl Sagan: "If not, it seems like an awful waste of space."
Enrico Fermi: "If so, then where *are* they?"

They both had a point, but since good science brings up at least as many new questions as it answers, I'll focus on what Rico said. (And yes, I feel comfortable calling him that.)

We've come to accept the immense age of the Universe (in the ballpark of 13.8 billion years). We've also learned that the most necessary elements of organic life (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon) are, item for item, also the most abundant materials in it. Given those facts, shouldn't the Universe be profoundly stupid with life? Shouldn't some great galactic civilization have been formed a hundred million years ago and colonized us by now?

That's the Fermi Paradox. The fact that we turn our telescopes (both optic and radio) toward the Universe and find absolutely no evidence of intelligent life seems fundamentally wrong. In the interest of taking a stab at what we should be expecting, astrophysicist Frank Drake made a famous equation where he started with the estimated number of stars in the Universe, and then whittled it down toward a possible number of intelligent civilizations by nested sets of criteria: How many stars have planets? How many of those planets are habitable? How many of those habitable planets have life? What about intelligent life that can communicate across space? And perhaps most importantly, how long do such civilizations survive?

Today, even though we have more complete answers to some of those variables than Frank did, we still end up with a number that could be anywhere between 1 (that would be us) and 100 million. That's a big range, but take note that any number larger than, say 10, seems like should result in our being able to find alien civilizations pretty quickly. After all, odds are that anyone else out there would have technology thousands or even millions of years beyond ours. So, as Rico queried... why don't we?

There are a couple different theories why not. We'll start with the most cynical one, and work our way toward hopefulness... an approach that I tend to find does the most good in all situations.

Possible Reason #1 - There is no one else, and never will be. It's been theorized that we live in an especially hospitable situation here in our little solar system. We're in our solar system's "Goldilocks zone" (not too hot, not too cold), outside of which it would be difficult for liquid water (and thus our concept of life) to exist. In addition, we've got a nice, big moon that not only stabilizes our planetary spin so that there's a relatively small difference between winter and summer temperatures over most of our surface, but also causes tide pools, isolated little ecosystems that some think might be very important to the development of early microbial life.

Galactically speaking, we're in a placid locale as well, cozily nestled between spiral arms, and yet we don't get interfered as much by nearby supernovas and giant gas clouds as we would be if we were closer to the center. All these factors might point toward life being actually quite hard to get started on a planet. Note that our relatively peaceful planet has had to essentially hit the reset button on life (via mass extinctions) no less than five times... and only one of those was because of a giant asteroid hit. The rest were caused by natural planetary and biological processes.

So maybe life isn't inevitable at all, or the factors that lead to it come into conjunction a lot less often than we think. But let's assume that it does actually happen once in a while. What then?

Possible Reason #2 - Civilizations always die. Any civilization sophisticated enough to communicate across space, and even travel through it, also has the capacity to destroy itself. Perhaps it always does.

Take a look at us. We perpetually seem to be on the brink of doing that very thing, whether through nuclear warfare or climate change (actually, there appears to be a sixth mass extinction going on... *and* *we're* *causing* *it*). Maybe intelligence is just another way Nature has of wiping its own slate clean, like a super-effective, all-species-affecting disease (remember Agent Smith's "humans are a virus" speech from The Matrix?). Maybe the creation of an immortal, space-faring civilization isn't the direction we should be heading in. Perhaps that road *always* leads to strife and ultimate destruction.

Possible Reason #3: They're out there, but hiding. Star Trek called it "the Prime Directive"... a policy not to interfere with the development of the "new life and new civilizations" that they came across. (I actually seem to remember them interfering/kissing the heck out of those new-found civilizations, but I digress...) The idea is that life needs to find its own way, and showing them new technology or letting them know that there's other life too soon might cause society-wide psychological damage (cue the UFO conspiracy theorists who think that the government is hiding aliens from us for this very reason).

So maybe we really are being observed by some pan-galactic overlords, but they're consciously not letting us in on the secret of their existence. It wouldn't be all that hard, really... in terms of viewing the Universe in its entirety, we're still like little kids on a hill looking around through the wrong end of our binoculars. The Universe is so mind-staggeringly vast that we've only begun to explore one fraction of our little part of it. And this blends nicely with the next reason...

Possible Reason #4: We have no idea of what life can look like. At this point, science and astrophysics are defined more by what we *don't* know than anything else. Dark matter, dark energy, dark flow, quantum uncertainty... these are official terms. We're consciously ignorant of what the Universe itself is mostly made up of. Wouldn't it be easy to miss any kind of life that isn't virtually identical to our own?

The SETI program (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has spent a lot of its time and budget searching for structured radio emissions from space. After all, we have been beaming out constant streams of electromagnetic waves for decades, so why mightn't other worlds? But in the last ten years the stray radio transmissions of Earth have dropped significantly, because instead of just beaming radio and TV out into the aether, we've moved more and more communication into underground cables and ever-shorter wireless connections. We might not see anything because other civilizations have done the same.

I'm probably wrong, but this shows a flaw in our thinking when it comes to intelligent alien life. We're necessarily limited to using technology that we know and understand. Who knows what kind of unknown future tech they may be using? Maybe they're not aware of our radio emissions because they've moved on to some other method far beyond what we understand.

Possible Reason #5: This is my favorite answer, and the one I'm rooting for most... Another thing we've learned about the Universe is that stars and planets form out of the wreckage of earlier generations. Just as trees die, fall over and enrich the soil for new trees, stars explode, sending out material and dust (including freshly-minted heavier elements that they can't create otherwise) to seed the next generation. Given that the sun has a lifespan of about 6 billion years, and the Universe is not quite 14 billion, we can estimate that our Sun is part of maybe the third generation of stars that have been created since the Universe began.

It seems to me that we need heavier elements to support intelligent life. Yes, the building blocks of both the Universe and Earth life are identical, but there are many aspects of our complex biology that require metals, minerals, and other materials that are only created when stars go supernova and scatter their ashes out into space. As Carl said many times, our bodies are made of "star stuff". Taking this into account, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it might have taken at least two solid rounds of star explosions to create enough raw material for our world, and us, to form out of.

So maybe that galaxy-spanning civilization that doesn't destroy itself with its brilliant technology, and becomes the very first to spread across the cosmos, discovering its wonders and learning to understand the whole, glorious span and depth of it... is really *us*.

Giving It a Think #3: The Singularity

People tend to fall into two camps when you talk about The Singularity: those that think it's the next inevitable step in evolution, and others who think it's impossible. It's hard to think of any other scientific concept that's so fundamentally divided... which is why I thought I should think on it for a while.

The Singularity is a name -- popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil -- to describe the inevitable moment when humans switch on a computer that is smarter than a human. He, and others who think similarly, believe that people will thereafter find themselves obsolete, surpassed in every way by the ever-increasing intelligence of machines they've created. And while they are certain that human life will be fundamentally different after that point, they are equally uncertain in what way those changes will take place. Will the computers decide to eliminate us? Or will we allow them to take over, relegating us to leisurely existence while they assume all creative, mechanical, and cognitive work?

I have to say, right off the bat, that I don't fall into this latter camp. I think that there is something fundamentally unreplicable about the human mind, and I doubt if there's any amount of microchips that can quite match its flexibility. So I guess what I'm trying to do today is explain why I think that is.

I think it all comes down to what you believe "intelligence" means. If you're looking for a computer that can hold more factual information than the human brain, they're not that hard to come by. But as far as taking that information and formulating answers to questions, the most highly developed one is probably Watson, IBM's supercomputer that dominated over two humans on the game show Jeopardy! in 2011.

While it's true that Watson won the competition overall, it's more telling to see what kind of questions it missed... context clues, for the most past. Watson couldn't distinguish the difference between "the '20s" and "the 1920s", and it ignored the name of a Final Jeopardy category when it answered "What is Toronto?" -- the category was "U.S. CITIES", although that particular fact wasn't restated in the clue.

Okay, so maybe pure factual recall isn't the benchmark we should be using... there's also the famous Turing test. In the mid-20th century, Alan Turing postulated that if computer can convince you that you're talking to a person, then that computer should be considered a person, in every practical sense. It's the flip-side of that junior-high philosophy freak-out question everyone ponders at some point: How do you know everyone around you isn't a robot? The answer, of course, is that you don't... every human life is purely subjective. Thus, computers only have to live up to the same "human" standards that you hold every other person in the world to.

This task, however, hasn't been lived up to all that well, either. In a 2014 AI contest, a computer convincingly named "Eugene Goostman" by its inventor, Kevin Warwick, convinced one-third of the judges that it was a thirteen-year old, mostly by answering their questions vaguely. Any grammatical or factual slips were glossed over by the backstory that the child was raised in Ukraine.

So was this a real pass of the test? There's a lot of debate about it. But for myself, until a computer convincingly fools a majority of people that are specifically looking to determine its authenticity, I doubt we can definitively say that it has.

Keep in mind that Watson (and Eugene Goostman) were built by some of the brightest human minds, provided with millions of dollars and years of research and equipment -- for *one* specific purpose -- and even then, they couldn't quite mimic a human brain doing that same task.

I personally think that the really unique aspect of the human brain -- and the one that it's going to be hardest for computers to ape -- is its ability to take all its factual and emotional recalls and weave them into a story, extrapolating either into the past or the future.

In his excellent and hilarious science book "What If?", Randall Munroe unwittingly illustrated my point with a drawing... A tall figure is standing with its hands on its hips, looking down at a small figure who is wearing a cowboy hat and holding a rope at its side. A table is nearby, and next to it lies the broken shards of a vase. Munroe points out that while it's easy for us to synthesize exactly what has happened here and what is probably going to happen (with only minor differences in detail), a computer would have a devil of a time trying to do it.

And when you think about it, it's not that surprising. Let me try to outline all the information you need to piece together in order to make a coherent story out of this image:

- basic sequencing of cause and effect
- relative size of humans, based on age
- likely relationships between tall humans and short ones
- human body language (the tall figure's akimbo stance can mean many things, but in this case probably connotes frustration or anger)
- the cowboy hat on the child's head suggests character play, which children are known to engage in
- the recognition of the rope as a lasso, based on the shape of the child's hat and cowboy lore
- info on the use of a lasso, and in what way it might become out of control in the hands of a child
- understanding of gravity
- the typical structural makeup and integrity of vases, along with the ability to determine the object *is* a vase when only partially intact
- likely reactions when certain materials (i.e. vases and floors) come into contact
- relative monetary or sentimental value of objects (i.e. vases) held by adults, and likely emotional reactions when that vase is destroyed

I realized, even as I was writing that list, that I was glossing over whole layers of information and intuition that our brain does, instinctively, all in a fraction of a second. Never even mind the fact that we were looking at a *drawing* of an incident, and one with stick figures in it to boot. That adds a whole new levels of image recognition and conceptualization.

Even if it got everything else right, a computer would get totally hung up on what was responsible for the broken vase. Of course, we immediately assume it's the kid with the lasso, but that's only because we've heard enough stories to know that if it weren't, that would make a lot of the details in the picture irrelevant. And since this drawing was made by a human, we assume that the details *mean* something.

That's the sticking point, isn't it? So much of our intuitive understanding is based on the fast that we're humans communicating with other humans. There's a common baseline understanding that derives entirely from developing as a human in a human society.

Think about it from a different angle... aliens visiting our world wouldn't understand our music, and it wouldn't resonate emotionally with them, simply because they haven't grown up with it. They wouldn't have a genetic predisposition to enjoy it, and they wouldn't have been indoctrinated with it since before birth like we have. Even if they studied it extensively, it wouldn't truly be a part of them, and thus forever beyond their ability to comprehend it fluently.

I think that's the trouble I have with the assumption that, once computers have the capability to be more intelligent than us, that they will be. Human intelligence as we know it requires one to have lived as a human, to have grown and experienced humanity from the inside. If you don't have that, then you don't have that instinctive baseline that all we humans do. The best you'd be is a good mimic.

I also don't know what the advantage to building a computer that is smarter than humans would be, anyway, when it will probably turn out to be easier to augment human thought itself. We already know there are places in the brain that can have vastly improve cognition and reaction times if you stimulate them electronically. Improving the human brain itself seems like a better way to go (unless, of course, you care about controlling the improved mind that results). But why build something from scratch when you can improve the original?

My opinion: Hacking the brain is the future we should be thinking toward. It's the original computer, after all.