Scarcity (Special Forces: FJ One Book 1) (6 page)

Social’s bandwidth had to be throttled – the overwhelming response to what was being tagged as “Salvation” was crashing servers worldwide. “Saved” was the biggest tag in the cloud, and pictures were being posted and shared and reshared: The blackened wasteland around Centralia, smoldering but visible for the first time in decades. The great “pillar” of trash rising out of the Pacific, being sucked into the maw of an alien ship, like something out of a biblical epic as directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

The aliens’ self-declared status as “Visitors” was being eagerly embraced. Not everyone was raving with joy, of course. Social being what it was, there were comments about the Visitors’ long flowing robes (“maybe they’re hiding six dicks or something,” one wisecracker suggested). Aficionados of old TV science fiction reminded those who would listen about the scaly reptiles beneath the human masks in “V,” who were also called “visitors.”

The Captain and HM walked the halls of the Palace, idly discussing inoffensive things.

“The closest parallel I can think of is V-E Day in Britain during World War II,” HM said. “That sense that all the struggle, the suffering, was finally over. I say in Britain, because its people had to deal with more deprivation than the Americans.”

“Yes, but ‘Austerity Britain’ was a state that went on for years after the victory. Whereas we’re seeing immediate improvements in our quality of life.”

“Definitely.”

They entered the secure room and sealed themselves in. HM opened the drinks cabinet. “This calls for the very good stuff. I’ve been saving this for a long time.” She held up the bottle of Macallan to show him.

He knew his boss well after all these years. She held his gaze firmly, and batted out a message in Morse code with a few short and long blinks of her eyes:
Windtalk.

He took the bottle from her hand. “Very nice. What a gorgeous crystal bottle. It looks rare. How’d you get hold of it?”

With his free hand, he signaled back in their private cipher, his fingers twitching rhythmically.
Assuming we’re being overheard?

“After Collapse, there was a bottle in one of the
Latifundia
in China. For a billionaire, $628,000 for a bottle of alcohol he would never drink was a mere trifle.”

Always assume the worst. They’ll break the code eventually but it’ll buy us time.
Their cipher was complicated, based on the “unbreakable” Navajo language used as code in World War II, with another layer of code over that. Living to a ripe old age gave one plenty of time to devise difficult puzzles.

“Well, I look forward to enjoying what he didn’t. Thank you,” he said, taking the glass.

The whole thing smells,
the Captain signaled.
Little Green Men. Signs and Miracles.

“Cheers.”

You can’t fault people,
HM replied.
It’s as if everyone won the lottery. Earth is saved, or that’s what it feels like. No more struggle, no more austerity, no more hardship on new worlds.

“Man, that is fantastic. Not $600,000 worth, but still.”

I’ve been on a lot of worlds, ma’am. I’ve been in the business of first contact for almost seventy years. And this is not how Contact goes. Greeks bearing gifts and all. They dropped that hint, that they ‘learned of how you have advanced,’ that implies they’ve been here before. Which ties up the whole LGM thing with a bow. But if they’d been visiting us all this time, we would have run into them somewhere by now, or at least a trace of them.

“I rarely abuse my power, Captain, but when I saw that bottle on the appropriations registry, I’m afraid I pulled some strings to get it. Of course, post-Collapse, the whiskey is less valuable now than the bottle. Which, mind you, I will certainly make sure goes into the arkship resource pile. When it’s empty.”

The whole flying saucer thing is clearly deliberate. Wherever they go, I bet they present as what’s least shocking to the native population. Remember the Aztecs? Cortez was thought to be the “white skinned god from the east.” A happy accident for him, but it does make a great strategy.

“Well, it’s truly fantastic stuff.”

The Jungian Archetype, you mean. Something to soothe the subconscious. Well, it’s working.

“Do you know the story behind this bottle? It’s really quite fascinating. This is the ‘Constantine’ decanter. There were only four of them made. It took 17 craftsmen over 50 hours to complete the job. They destroyed forty decanters for imperfections before they were happy with the final product.”

People are tired, Dieter. They’re tired of struggling, knowing that for most of them, life will never get better. They’re tired of starting over on new worlds and having to behave when they get there. Maybe we made a mistake, encouraging a completely secular culture. Maybe there is a “god gene,” and people will always look for a god or a savior, and our Visitors can just…step into the vacuum.

The Captain nodded. “Amazing. It never ceases to astonish me, you know? Reading about those times. People back then were still appalled by stories of Roman orgies, and yet they didn’t bat an eyelash when they heard about a man who spent nearly a million bucks on a bottle of booze.”

I have to admit. “I Want to Believe.” It would be so nice to stop fighting… So let me play angel’s advocate – what if they’re The Culture, from the old Iain M. Banks books? The post scarcity civilization, peaceful, rational, who’ve really come just to uplift us?

“Their definition of what was ‘normal’ in that department just kept expanding, it had to, to accommodate the ever-more-unreal reality of it all. That a man could spend so much wealth on a single object. That a whole school of philosophy existed to justify his decision.”

Then they surely won’t mind if we make provisions for the opposite case. Speaking of philosophy, I want to know theirs, if they have any religion. Let’s see if we can’t get our guest to discuss it.

“Well, they paid the price after Collapse. That’s how bad it had to get, for all the world’s Ents to finally rise up and take down their Sarumans.”

That would be revealing, wouldn’t it. I’m assuming you’re thinking about the Campbell quote?

She nodded. They were both intimate with Joseph Campbell’s work, and after so many years of working together, he could read her intent from inference. In “The Power of Myth,” he noted that some cultures had mythologies of war and some had mythologies of peace.

But those whose mythologies were peaceful “have not been the people generally who have survived in what Darwin termed the universal struggle for existence. Rather…it has been the nations, tribes and peoples bred to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to their descendants.”

HM waved her free hand, dismissing the foolishness of people in the past who should have known better. “On the bright side, at least our Visitors found us after we’d come to our senses, and not before. I wonder if they’d have been so helpful to a world run by Sarumans.”

Also, I need you to take the pulse of popular opinion here in Berlin. Do a walkabout, see what people are thinking. We know the mob mentality from Social, but I want you to use the personal touch. See what people say when the world isn’t watching.

“If the world was still run by Sarumans, there wouldn’t be much of a world left, would there?”

Will do. I could use a good cup of ersatzkaffee.

“No. And no reason to visit, other than to collect some of leftover humans as zoological samples, I suppose.”

That’s a contradiction in terms. But if people are welcoming our new visitors with wide open arms, we need to make some plans, you and I.

The Captain put on civilian clothes for the first time in a long time. It was strange, looking in the mirror and just seeing “Dieter Chen, citizen.” He’d had to ask his team what to wear that wouldn’t make him look too rich or too poor.

“Kind of ironic,” Hewitt said, shaking his head at the pile of clothes that Chen had left behind on Earth. “You’ve ‘gone native’ so many times that you’ve got no idea how to live at home anymore.”

“FJ One is my home,” he replied automatically.

He laughed. “Right. Okay, good thing we’re the same size then. And a good thing that I’m still a bit of a clotheshorse.”

He’d outfitted the Captain in a pair of polycot khakis, a dark blue polo shirt, and a pair of white Adidas. “You’ll look like a businessman who’s uncomfortable in comfortable clothes. Someone who doesn’t know how to wear anything but a suit, which is close enough to your situation.”

Mr. Chen took a side exit from HM’s apartment building across from Museum Island. The building had once modestly housed one of the last leaders of Germany, who’d given up the stately home that came with the job to remain here in her comfortable home instead. HM had taken the apartment herself, as much for the symbolism as anything else.

Now he was just another Berliner on a stroll on a balmy summer evening. Unter den Linden was a piece of the old world that could let you believe, for a little while, that nothing had changed. Thousands of linden trees had once lined this old world boulevard, and even now, there were still hundreds, an island of greenery in a drought stricken city.

Year after year, Berliners voted to sacrifice a part of their water allotment to keep the trees alive. For centuries they’d thrived, until Adolf Hitler had uprooted all the trees and replaced them with Nazi flags. But the city’s attachment to them was so strong that even he had caved in the face of massive outrage and had to replant the trees. If Hitler couldn’t kill the trees, Berlin had decided, then even the end of the world didn’t stand a chance against them.

Only a small strip of it now had any nightlife. A few cafés and used bookstores, a couple bars and restaurants, all stayed open as long as the solar power collected on their rooftops would last. Since this was the end of June, and the sun set as late as it would all year, it was the most festive time on the calendar.

There were no private cars anymore, so save for a bus lane, the wide lanes of the street had been taken over by artists, jugglers, and musicians. Mr. Chen got an
ersatzcaffee
from a vendor whose stall had a long line – a good sign that it would taste something like the real thing, which was too expensive for most people now that it that no longer grew on Earth.

He took a seat near an animated group of young people, obviously students from Humboldt-Universität, and eavesdropped on their conversation.

“I think it’s wonderful,” one girl exclaimed, her face bright and clear. “If they can clean up Hanbit, and Chernobyl, and Fukushima, well, just think what else they have for us. Cures for all the cancers! Lazarex for everyone, not just the rich!”

A young man snorted, his dark curly hair and five days’ beard marking him as a Humanities student. “Oh yes, they want us healthy, so that we’re tasty when they eat us for dinner.”

A clean cut Business-student type laughed, siding with the girl, clearly trying to gain her favor. “I think it’s wonderful, too. Imagine a future where we don’t have to fight for a slot on a colony ship. Where we can have new lives, right here.”

“Right!” the girl agreed. “I don’t want to end up on some distant planet with those FJ people telling me what to do every second of the day.”

“Yeah!” her would-be suitor said. “Don’t eat this, don’t grow that, don’t walk on the grass. I don’t know how people stand it. Go all that way to live under a worse nanny state than we have here.”

“Oh,” the Humanities Major challenged him. “So you think we should just walk on the natives, destroy their worlds, take what we want, is that it?”

“Sure,” Business said defiantly. “That’s evolution isn’t it? Survival of the fittest? And those goddamn FJ storm troopers are just holding us back.”

“Storm troopers!” Humanities shouted, making heads turn at the terrible words. “Is that what you think they are?” He looked at the girl’s hard face and softened his rhetoric. “Sure, they go overboard. They should give people a little more freedom. Everyone knows that.”

Mr. Chen got up and wandered some more, disturbed by the conversation. Even the Humanities student had accepted as common knowledge that the
Fallschirmjäger
“went overboard” in controlling growth.

He stopped at Speaker’s Corner, one of the relics of old London that had been imported with its refugees, after that city went under the sea. Here people stood on soapboxes and declaimed on whatever took their fancy. It was a charming and fascinating sight in a world where most people spoke their incendiary opinions onto Social through their phablets.

It was a competitive process. By unwritten rule, the speakers took positions almost out of range of each other’s loud voices, but not so far out of range that they couldn’t seduce audiences away from another speaker. Some unstable types ranted about the end of days, troubled minds still under the religious delusions most humans had left behind. Some went on hilarious rants about local politics, still others used it as impromptu stand-up comedy stages.

Today, no surprise, the biggest audience was for a woman talking about the Visitors.

“Can you believe it? We made it. We made it! We survived long enough on this ocean of deprivation and hopelessness to be rescued.” Mutters of agreement from the crowd. “Just think what the future holds. No more one minute showers!” A ragged cheer for that. “No more Basic Diet!” Huge cheers for that. “No more uniformed governesses telling us how many kids we can have, even on another world!”

“Yeah! Right on!”

HM had wanted the pulse of public opinion. And he had found it. He really
had
spent too much time away. He realized now, quite possibly too late, that Department 6C needed something that HM, and the professionals who worked for her, had disdained. A press office, a publicity department, all that…bullshit.

They’d made a mistake, thinking that just doing the right thing would be enough. That people would see that it was right and accept the obvious rightness of it – morally, pragmatically, rationally.

And now, the Visitors were here. And the people of Earth weren’t looking to Department 6C for rescue anymore.

And that could be a problem.