Second Contact, page 7
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“I can’t think of anything less worthy of our time than that man’s transparent attention-seeking,” Godfrey said in an almost disinterested tone. “That said, Billy’s make-believe detention probably is the most newsworthy thing to have happened at Kerguelen in recent times. The airburst was an unexceptional event which happened to occur in an exceptionally scrutinised region, and that’s really all there is to it. I’d like to take this opportunity to assure your listeners that despite the corporate media’s typically sensationalist reporting of the incident, there truly is no reason for alarm or even for any particular excitement.”
But despite Godfrey’s typically statesmanlike comments, alarm and excitement were the only two moods of the moment.
Massive crowds were widely expected to form at Lake Toplitz and Lake Namtso in anticipation of something extraordinary, while vastly increased attention was also being paid to the less accessible sites of Bouvet Island and New Swabia.
As the ACN reporter revealed on her return to the screen, staff and volunteers at the picturesque Garden of the Gods Park behind her were also expecting today to be their busiest day ever and for the weekend to break that record once again; recent numbers had been great thanks to the park’s appearance in Kaitlyn Judd’s new movie, but the frenzied media speculation surrounding the Kerguelen bolide was sure to ramp everything up to all-new levels.
But this park wasn’t the only nearby spot where major crowds were expected, as illustrated by an advisory police notice which had been issued to warn citizens against travelling to the highest-traffic Fincher trails to the west of the city.
The so-called Fincher trails, with which everyone was familiar, owed their name to the recent re-emergence of a 19th century prophecy which some believed to hint at the location of the fourth plaque. The relevant words had been penned by Humphrey Finch, an undistinguished English art collector, in a self-published pamphlet entitled ‘The Prophet Finch’ which was read by almost no one until recent events appeared to add credence to one particular prophecy. It had also been noted with intrigue that precisely 140 years had passed since the pamphlet’s initial publication — exactly half of the 280-year timescale established by the alien plaques and thus, according to some straw-clutching analysts, perhaps the precise time needed for a one-way journey between their world and Earth.
The key passage in question was by now known to almost everyone over the age of ten:
“A triad of great discoveries will bridge the gap between soil and star, arising from the shadow of the Alps to delve the depths of the Silver ocean and gaze upon the Rockiest peak that lies beyond.”
And as anyone who hadn’t been living under a rock for the past year could attest, the revelation of a Nazi-era discovery at Lake Toplitz, high in the Austrian alps, had directly led to two alien plaques being found off the Argentine coast. As soon as the rediscovery of Humphrey Finch’s prophecy was reported in a small English newspaper along with a note that Argentina’s name was derived from argentum, the Latin word for silver, the story went global.
It didn’t matter that nothing else in the pamphlet’s twenty pages had been correct; Finch’s words, which no one could deny were noteworthily coincidental, sparked great and long-lasting interest.
Some called it Fincher Fever, some called it plain old hysteria. But whatever it was called, the phenomenon had caused a deluge of plaque-hunters to descend upon the areas around several Rocky Mountain peaks and many of them now devoted a great deal of time and energy to locating the plaque based on Finch’s prophecy.
The imprecision of Finch’s final words — “and gaze upon the Rockiest peak” — was a source of great debate among the community of plaque-hunting enthusiasts who had themselves come to be known simply as Finchers. Some insisted that “Rockiest peak” was not necessarily synonymous with “peakiest Rocky”, and thus that prominent peaks as far afield as Mount Robson merited as much attention as the obvious choice of Mount Elbert, the highest of all.
Some name-conscious Finchers were drawn to Argentine Peak, which owed its name to an initial silver discovery which preceded the Colorado Silver Boom of 1879 by a full fifteen years. Other plaque-hunters, who understood that the fourth plaque couldn’t possibly be found in the wilderness and that it must instead have already been in someone’s possession like the third had been in Karl Heilig’s, diligently researched potentially forgotten collections in silver boom towns like Leadville, Creede and Aspen.
The often romanticised Pikes Peak Gold Rush of the late 1850s attracted even greater research interest. Pikes Peak, despite being the specific site of no gold discoveries for several decades, proved enduring as a beacon-like symbol of hope for old-time prospectors due to its visibility from great distances to the east. To many, this made it the natural candidate for the designated “Rockiest peak” in a prophecy which had already explicitly established a westward direction of travel. And for the prophecy’s many committed proponents, this logic opened up several major cities which owed their foundations to the Gold Rush, including the likes of Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs.
More than a few Finchers believed that the final part of the prophecy referred to the plaques falling into the control, if not possession, of Richard Walker and his Colorado Springs-based Interspace Defense Agency. These Finchers, whose internet forums Dan McCarthy paid keen attention to, spent their research hours retracing every step of Walker’s political life with a particular eye for any conspicuous meetings in the vein of his infamous rendezvous with Hans Kloster in Bonn.
But when it came to the other sub-groups of Finchers who were literally searching in the mountains, Dan couldn’t for the life of him understand why they thought the plaque could be there. He could only roll his eyes when he saw people moving across the country and setting up camp near the high-traffic trails as though participating in the real gold rushes of the past.
The senseless nature of this treasure hunting didn’t bother Dan personally until a young online celebrity fell to his death while live-streaming his own attempt to find the fourth plaque and tragically paying too much attention to his phone and too little to his footing. Another two Finchers had died since then, and Dan struggled with the guilt of knowing that people were dying in their attempts to search for something that wasn’t there. Emma and Clark calmly but firmly reminded him that the chaos that would result from lifting the veil on Walker’s hoax would significantly outweigh a handful of isolated accidents, but logic didn’t always trump emotion.
Another individual who wrestled with his conscience over these deaths was Timo Fiore. Following a short-lived bidding war with a Silicon Valley hotshot, Timo’s remarkable $1 billion bounty for the plaque’s discovery was responsible for a great deal of the recent fervour. He nonetheless refused to bow to political pressure to revoke his offer, insisting that someone else would still offer a high enough amount to ensure the searching continued as zestfully as ever. In a rare public interview, Timo explained that he saw it as the responsibility of a man in his fortunate position to ensure the plaque ended up in safe hands — i.e. his own — but that as far as he was concerned, the responsibility ended there.
Such a serious amount of money had naturally attracted some equally serious search expeditions, ranging from organised teams of civilians to venture capitalist types and even rich athletes who deemed investing in a search team to be a shrewd move given the size of the prize.
Dan and Timo both imagined that state interests were looking, too, but the impenetrable secrecy of such groups meant that there was nothing to follow on that front. President Valerie Slater, for her part, had thus far maintained a firm and unbudging position that William Godfrey’s GSC had no business searching for anything within the borders of the United States, which put many individuals at ease that the fourth plaque wouldn’t end up in Godfrey’s questionably-motivated hands.
For Dan, this was the crux of his keen interest in the existing search. He had no reason to believe that the fourth plaque was currently anywhere on Earth; but wherever and whenever it arrived — and for all he knew, the Kerguelen bolide may have been a sign that the time was now — he had to find it before it fell into the wrong hands.
Dan didn’t yet understand why the Messengers would risk such a thing, but he understood that it would be more than a little egotistical to assume they would deliver any message into his lap when it was meant for the whole of humanity. All he hoped was that they were smart enough to drop it far enough away from the laps of any self-serving liars like Godfrey and his kind.
All around the world, Fincher-like search parties had sprung up. Anywhere even tangentially linked to the key sites became a point of concentrated interest, with every location ever visited by anyone implicated in the supposed cover-up quickly seized upon by locals keen to get in on the plaque-hunting fun.
But one key site in particular was about to emerge at the forefront of the world’s attention, and the surprised look on the ACN reporter’s face suggested that some unexpected news was currently filtering through her earpiece.
The general story she was hearing, which regarded a security incident at Lake Namtso, was newsworthy enough. But if some of the specific details were correct, the political fallout would be immediate and could possibly eclipse even that from the Kerguelen bolide…
C minus 84
Lake Namtso
Tibet Autonomous Region, China
The idyllic region around Namtso — one of Tibet’s three holy lakes — had for the past year been feeling the strain of an unprecedented and unexpected explosion in visitor numbers.
Tibet’s relative physical accessibility in comparison to other key sites of alien-related interest, namely those in the far south, made Namtso a hugely popular destination despite the region’s delicate diplomatic situation.
A handful of appropriately gargantuan Western-style hotels had already opened following fast-track construction ordered to deal with an influx that was far too vast for the existing guest houses to accommodate, and many more were almost ready.
Several hours before Thursday’s sun rose over North America, its setting over Namtso signalled the end of the most frenzied day in the resort’s history. Excitement over the Kerguelen bolide was more feverous here than anywhere, with many visitors not just hoping but expecting that something incredible would happen at any moment.
Nothing incredible or even noteworthy had come to pass, but that wouldn’t stop anyone emerging from their hotels the next morning with similar expectations and a fierce determination to obtain a good view.
What thousands of sleeping tourists didn’t know was that the lake’s immediate vicinity would be under full lockdown before they had the chance.
A member of one small tour group, returning to his hotel after an exhausting day-long excursion, spotted something as his bus turned a corner and its lights briefly illuminated what appeared to be a sizeable group of people.
“Look,” he called. “What are all those guys doing?”
When the bus drew to a halt, several of its passengers used their phones’ flashlights to light up the area at the side of the road. They saw a large stationary truck, with six men behind it busily placing a crowd-control barrier directly across the entry point of one of the main tourist paths which led to the lake.
“They can’t be closing the lake without any warning,” an American tourist said, quickly making his way down the aisle to get outside and ask what was going on. “My camera is at the time-lapse photography point! I need to get it.”
Inevitably, and despite their local interpreter’s request, a handful of other tourists followed the first. The driver seemed far less concerned about this than the interpreter, and was himself gazing with great interest at the uniformed men. He opened the door and followed the tourists outside.
Immediately, two of the uniformed men approached the group and firmly instructed them to stay back.
“Stay… back,” one of the men demanded in heavily accented English. To the Western tourists, he and his colleagues looked Chinese. But theirs was not the uniform of the state or local police force; it was the uniform of the GSC Security Corps.
“My camera is in there,” the American tried to explain. “You know, at the place where you can leave them to get a time-lapse? That cost me twenty bucks and the camera was four hundred! How am I supposed to get it back if you block all of the entrances?”
“Phone down,” the same GSC employee barked at another tourist. “No… photographs!”
The phone-holding tourist, a young French woman, continued to move her hand in a slow sideways motion as she captured a video of what was going on. “They are locking us out of the entire area around the lake,” she narrated in English, the language of her tour. “As you can see, they are—”
“Phone down!” the man repeated, firmly enough to frighten the woman and simultaneously beckon his entire group to his side.
One of his colleagues, noticeably older than the other five and apparently in command, stepped to the front.
“You must go,” he said, pointing down the road in a calm and relaxed manner. “You must go now. No trouble.”
The French woman held her phone steadily — defiantly — and zoomed in on the GSC badge on the commander’s uniform.
“He said go!” the first man snapped, losing patience and pushing his hand into the woman’s phone.
She stumbled backwards, losing her balance, then fell to the ground. In the seconds before the back of her head hit the ground, her still-recording phone captured the scowling face of a GSC employee staring down at her.
Immediately, the commander verbally reprimanded his foolish underling and pushed him away in anger; however uncooperative she was being, it didn’t take an expert to realise that first-person video footage of a Chinese GSC officer pushing a female Western tourist to the ground was not going to go down well with anyone. Chairman Godfrey and Chinese Premier Ding Ziyang’s relationship was frosty at the best of times, and the embarrassment and trouble that this incident was sure to bring both could only test it even further.
The fallen woman, dazed but not obviously injured in any serious way, slowly rose to her feet with the help of her local interpreter.
The commander began speaking quickly and angrily to the interpreter as soon as he noticed the man’s presence, clearly lambasting him for being stupid enough to let the tourists leave the bus. He pointed down the road again, far more forcefully than before, at which point the interpreter told his tourists that they really did have to get out of there and travel the last few hundred metres to their hotel as quickly as possible.
“I still need my camera,” the American tourist insisted. “I’m not going home without—”
“Do you want to go home at all?” the interpreter asked, physically ushering the man back onto the bus despite his repeated protestations.
The young French tourist, gingerly retaking her seat at the back of the bus, rubbed her head on the spot where it felt like a bruise was sure to develop and then inspected the back of her phone for damage. Like her head, it was more or less fine aside from a small mark near the top.
She then turned it around and looked at the front. She navigated to her most recent video recording, tapped to select, and posted it online.
By the time she reached her hotel, the footage would be everywhere.
C minus 83
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
A flashing notification on Dan’s wall-mounted trend-ticker alerted him to a piece of footage which was going viral at a remarkable pace. The incident — a run-in between Western tourists and GSC staff near Lake Namtso — didn’t strike him as overly important.
A storm in a teacup, he thought.
Dan cared far more about the recent news that Billy Kendrick was now safely out of the GSC’s makeshift holding cell, news he had heard directly from Billy in a short but friendly phone call in which Billy shared every detail he remembered of the remarkable bolide. His tone was almost euphoric as he spoke about the “beautiful” and “life-affirming” sight of the meteor as it sped to its death high above Kerguelen.
There had also been a piece of news about Dan’s friend Timo Fiore, who had supposedly moved a major announcement forward by a full week and would soon be addressing the world’s press to reveal something that he promised would exceed their expectations.
But what Dan had been most interested in throughout the night was the emergence of hard observational data regarding the Kerguelen bolide itself.
The best estimates, so far reported only by journalists rather than authoritatively published by any GSC facilities, placed the meteor at fifteen to eighteen metres in diameter and stated its estimated kinetic energy to have been around twenty times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Both of these numbers were slightly below those of the incident at Chelyabinsk which captured the world’s attention in February of 2013, but Kerguelen’s was nevertheless a bona fide superbolide ranking comfortably in the top five modern examples.
Obvious media comparisons were made throughout the night to not only the Chelyabinsk superbolide but also to the less understood but highly intriguing Tunguska event of a century earlier.
Closer to home, The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972, an Earth-grazing asteroid which passed within 35 miles of the planet’s surface before escaping the atmosphere 1,000 miles from its entry point, was cited as a similarly awe-inspiring event. But as interesting as the grainy images of that fireball were, the clear skies and unobstructed vistas around Kerguelen — allied with massive advances in mobile photography — ensured that the footage of the previous day’s superbolide was the best ever seen, effortlessly blowing any billion-dollar special effects budget out of the water.
