The Filter Trap (44 page)

“What do you mean?” Amanda asked, frustrated. “Look, I know you’re something of a sci-fi geek on your time off and this is all a big thrill for you, being on another planet and all, but that doesn’t mean you can discard rank-I’m still a major, Lieutenant, and if you think—”

“No! I mean I can’t move, Major. At all. I can blink and move my mouth, but that’s it. I’m trying to turn toward you and I can’t even do that. I—”
Lee stopped, her mouth frozen as well.

Amanda reached for the silver ring on her right hand, but stopped a few inches away.
She questioned her reliance on that old ring, reverting to superstition in the face of what her grandfather would’ve considered a living deity with real supernatural abilities. She somehow believed that if she could have just touched that ring again, maybe . . .”

“We are not your gods. We are not omnipotent,” the voice insisted, anger creeping in. “Your fear is misplaced, your role misunderstood, as you think only of yourselves.”

“Major!” the
scientists
screamed, but Amanda couldn’t even blink. The scientists turned to face the motionless gray hide in the peculiar gel tube.
“Those in power always have better ideas for the
roles
of those without,” Jill said.

“You have such short lives, yet you spend your limited time waddling between apathy and contempt for each other and the world around you,” the tardigrade said. “Ego and self-destruction are positively correlated for lower species and yours apparently is not the exception we hoped for.”

“Oh no.” Jill said quietly, moving slowly toward Kam.

“We have waited eons for you, but we cannot be delayed by the curiosities and bickering of unevolved children.”

Kam reached for Jill, but found himself unable to move soon after. He regretted not telling anyone that this creature that seemed to have complete control over their motor functions had been in contact with him since the Event. Had they run from the threat of enslavement at the hands of the bearantulas only to become victims of overgrown water bears? After a short time with the tall ones he knew it hadn’t been them in his head at night. The feelings were so unfamiliar, not nuanced into human context. The tardigrade had known instantly how to relate.

In fact, Kam felt something as they came down the waterfall and a stronger recollection still as they came to the vault entrance. The bearantulas were simple beings of flesh, bound by the economics of their inhospitable planet. They could be bargained with, or at least fought off. By entering their minds, the tardigrades could control matter, any matter with a brain connected to a motor system.

“We have a purpose and a fate for you, one you cannot escape any more than you can escape this mountain.”

Escape. Kam thought of Natalie, wishing he could have escaped with her somewhere on the path that led to this moment. Surely getting on a boat to Korea would have been unbelievably simple compared to escaping the grip of three different aliens and returning to Earth. He let his curiosity pull him into a situation levels of magnitude more perilous than that sinking bank vault in the flood waters of Boston. The worst part was that she’d never know. Without the ability to cry tears of guilt that he so very wanted to make, Kam relied on his remaining senses. Until the tardigrade took over his visual cortex signals he could still see the others. Lieutenant Lee, eternally stuck with her mouth open, seemed to mock him, but must be thinking similar thoughts.

‘I have no mouth, and yet I must scream,’ Lee thought, remembering one of her favorite books. She hoped she wasn’t muted to meet the same terrible fate as Ted, a mind out of body tortured for infinity.

“You have a great imagination to uncover the pinpricks of fear for your instinctual primal urges. We find your willingness to wallow in it disturbing. I will allow you to do this no longer.”

The humans found a new terror in their bodily prisons. Their minds began to ebb away from the self. Free-forming thought became a memory as the tardigrade muted their rambling frenetic grasping.

Jill could see the others in her peripheral vision, a strange sight: four humans locked in fright, knowing that each likely thought the same, but the ability to communicate made it all the more maddening.
If there is a soul, it is carried by the illusion of free will, borne on the back of free thought. Perhaps the tardigrades were not Kam’s gods, but the devil, for only a devil would steal away the soul.
Jill’s final feeling of injustice was the denial of her request to cry at the death of her mind, her most cherished possession.

With all individualism dissolved, the tardigrade spoke again,
sharing with the humans its perspective.

“It is by our actions we would perish and by our will that we may yet survive the coming calamity.”

The gray Han River swept beyond bustling boxy trucks on the freeways and even boxier high-rise apartments on the other side. Bulwarks of progress standing as a new vision before unchanging nature, the apartments’ stark white stood in contrast with the usual stormy sky. The headstones on the opposite side of the Han were white too, but seemed more at home with the thunderous tumult above.

Natalie’s father never lived in a white-walled high-rise, but his high tombstone sufficed. Kyung-Soo, before starting the world’s largest radio equipment supply company, lived in a dirty tenement hovel along the Han, before it was demolished in the economic resurgence after the Americans left. Natalie’s father fought alongside the GIs and took an appreciation for American resilience to his grave that she never understood until it was too late.

Until the Event, Natalie’s America didn’t stand for grit under duress. America was Pretty in Pink, Coca Cola, and Van Halen. Of course, by the time she was born, Kyung-Soo’s struggles that required that grit were over, and hers were far ahead. She knew nothing of the threat of war, save the occasional tit-tats Kim-Il or his son instigated, but those were meant as reminders that North Korea existed, not a present danger. At night half the Korean peninsula plunged into darkness. Natalie’s half basked in the convenience of bright lights and ever faster, cheaper, and better technology, thanks in part to her father.

Every phone sold in South Korea had one of his company’s mini-radio receiver chips. To his dying day Kyung-Soo didn’t understand why the Americans didn’t want radios in their phones. His impact at home was enough to grant a spot here, in the Seoul National Cemetery, among fellow veterans and important countrymen.

It was comforting to Natalie that from Dad’s headstone, high up on the hill at the back of the cemetery, he’d always have a view of Namsan Tower, for which, behind the scenes, he’d lobbied hard and fronted a quarter of the construction cost. The government
owed
her father a spot in the National Cemetery.

It was weeks before Kyung-Soo’s body was found by the Army Corps of Engineers in the great cleanup of Boston, and many more until he could be shipped home. Natalie thought he’d have to rest forever inside the same bank vault that sheltered her and Kam from the tsunami, but ultimately dragged him to his death.

Instead he’d received a full military burial, with one unusual addition. Although they couldn’t come to Seoul, a trio of high-ranking American servicemen had each sent her a silver ring when they learned of Kyung-Soo’s unfortunate end. Natalie knew what the bands meant, but the soldiers only knew half the story.

When the battles between the North and South became heated, as one of the few Korean soldiers to speak rudimentary English, Natalie’s father was in a peculiar position to unite the two nations’ troops beyond their standing orders to fight the communists in equal measure.

Kyung-Soo used the American
mid-century naïveté
about Korean religion to his advantage. Just like in WWII, when Shinto could be misused to tell any number of lies to GIs, Korean Muism inspired many rumors. It helped, of course, that the ancient religion was all but banned by the same pro-Christian faction that Kyung-Soo and the Americans were partnering with to fight the godless communists in the north. They’d have to take anything Kyung-Soo said about Muism on his word. And he had some interesting things to say.

Before their first mission he took them to a Jeomjip with a mudang Kyung-Soo knew from his youth. Inside the fortune-teller’s house, the mudang blessed twenty rings with a pageantry reserved for stage shows and gibberish that would make a baby blush. Natalie had heard her father recount the story hundreds of times, letting out the belly laughs he had to stifle when it originally happened.

The Americans were no wiser as long as Kyung-Soo kept his composure and the mudang stuck a few familiar phrases in here and there. After the ceremony, Kyung-Soo gave all twenty rings to the Americans in the combat unit serving with his. Though the story each of the Americans told about his ring in the ensuing years changed, each man survived the war and attributed it in part to the luck bestowed upon him by that blessed ring. On their death-beds several of them, separated from Kyung-Soo by decades and continents, requested that the blessings be returned along with whatever thanks could be given.

Kyung-Soo used these letters and rings as lessons for his young daughter, showing not the benefits of deception, but the goodness in the human heart and appreciation of shared good will. Natalie never really understood until she noticed the ring on Private Silversun’s finger.

Amanda hadn’t saved Kyung-Soo, but she’d saved his daughter many times. Whether Kyung-Soo believed the rings truly blessed or not, Natalie wondered how much extra adrenaline Amanda used in the belief that the ring
did
have some control over their fate.

She hoped Amanda was still alive, and felt a little remorse for never telling her what she really knew about the ring she wore. Amanda never told the story of the ring’s origin. So when Natalie got back to Seoul she checked her father’s records. Sure enough, one of the twenty belonged to a Raymond Silversun, undoubtedly Amanda’s grandfather. Natalie hoped the ring would continue to work its magic and enable her to tell Amanda the truth about it in person someday. Hopefully a day less depressing, as so many stormy January days were in Seoul.

Rain started to patter on her long black coat and Natalie wondered what
she
owed her father. The debt for her life alone was incalculable, but he’d left her tremendous wealth. Before he retired his oversight of the board, she’d taken a spot at the company only so he could transfer his stock to her. Hardly anybody outside the board knew Natalie, the quiet woman working late nights after long “vacations” to the US with her father, owned 51% of the company.

Despite the modernization of the country, Natalie still earned rebuke for remaining unmarried well into her thirties. She had hoped Kamran Douglas, a man she’d come to love, first through the admiring eyes of her father, would put an end to that.

The Event forced their relationship to blossom, only to ground it after granting her jet permission to leave when the US government restricted all private flights from entering its airspace.

They couldn’t restrict the travel of radio waves, though. She had yet to hear from Kam since their teary goodbye in the Catskills evacuation site, but reports came in on her father’s own radio network that the Americans had tried an assault against the aliens before they left.

The reports also said the mission failed, with all soldiers near the site dead or unaccounted for. One of the other scientists Amanda mentioned Kam would meet, astrophysicist Allan Sands, was reported dead the same day. Killed “in service of his country,” Sands was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Because it took so long to find Kyung-Soo’s body, Allan and her father’s official medal award press releases, such as they were in a virtual media blackout, had been issued at the same time.

Natalie knew Kam was deeply involved somehow, but the extent of the mission was classified, relayed on the US military proprietary short range radio networks. On the other side of the world, without relay satellites, Natalie was cut off.

Inside her own country things seemed safe and sane, despite the suffering elsewhere. Japan had shouldered the brunt of the tsunami and earthquakes. The East China Sea had risen of course, as all seas did; the entire world was subject to a new sea level. Incheon International, built twenty-three feet above the old sea level, still had half that to give before it would flood permanently, but the tsunami ripples had crippled it. The surge up the Han threw cars and people into the water and then back out to sea on the reflex, but they’d experienced none of the disaster that other coastal locales endured, though those in Busan on the bottom of the peninsula might feel differently.

Seoul’s location, tucked away inside the western elbow of the peninsula, opposite the tsunami direction, allowed the modern city to stay far more intact than many of its neighbors. Taiwan lay in ruins to the south and Japan may have finally surrendered to disaster after a century filled with struggle. The word from the Philippines was even worse, but they were always hardest hit. The hermit kingdom went silent, but many suspected Pyongyang received aid from the communist regimes sharing its border.

China struggled to scare the invaders, who seemed to leave of their own resolve after taking the water they needed. Natalie was well aware of events the general public left to speculation. Having sold 80% of the radio network software in Asia had its benefits when other forms of international communication were in short supply. It was a daily struggle to keep from hacking into the Republic of Korea Air Force chatter. Her father had maintained an exclusive agreement; all the F-15s in service had his radios. Of course they were covered up with encryption now, but as Chief Technology Officer for the supplier, Natalie was one of only a few civilians who knew the government-mandated backdoor key.

As she walked swifter in the increasing rain between the long rows of white headstones she wondered how her thoughts had gone from Dad’s legacy to radio encryption in fighter jets. She’d thought about grabbing the code before, but determined it was better to just write off Kam and start again. For all she knew the code would only get her nowhere, no closer to the truth that Kam was probably dead. It
would
get her thrown in jail for the rest of her life and loss of all her stock options. With airspace shut down there’d be nowhere to run to.

Yet the thought beckoned her, as much as the blinking red light from Namsan shined through the storm. Reaching her car she asked it to navigate not to headquarters, but Nongjang, the R&D building her father used to affectionately call
the Farm
.

All of their innovations sprang from the Nongjang campus. The first miniaturized mobile radio receiver was built there back before investors sprinkled the hillsides with condominiums. Natalie had worked on the accompanying code herself while in college. She hadn’t gone in years and was afraid of the power to search for answers at her fingertips, that is, if the modernization of the military hadn’t already overwritten company code with the new equipment the American joint-venture was supplying.

At least they still had their Hyundai contract. Her sleek black “luxo-barge,” as Kam used to tease her, navigated to Nongjang not via GPS, but by pinging radio towers and triangulating. Radio also played an important part in the self-driving system, still being tested for the general market, but Natalie eagerly accepted the invitation to become a beta tester since a tenth of the processing involved her own software. That software did its damnedest to find the quickest route through the rain-soaked streets to the Farm, tucked away in the hills of Yangju to the north of Seoul proper.

Why was the urge so strong today? Even after Dad’s funeral she kept her rebellious instincts at bay. Why now, weeks later, with the aliens gone, would she risk everything for that man who’d waited until the worst time imaginable to finally show an interest in her?

The aliens had left. Surely airspace would be cleared soon enough. If she just had patience she’d call him herself, or he’d call her. The Chinese launched a satellite weeks ago, and the Americans undoubtedly were preparing their own. The world was normalizing, despite all the uncertainty about the aliens’ future intentions and why the Earth had found a new home in the first place.

“So why am I doing this!” she said out loud and reached to cancel and reroute the trip. Before her finger could touch the big console she froze. Not just her finger, but her entire body stopped responding.

Her first thought was corporate espionage, a rival put some drug in the air and was going to take her at gunpoint through the Nongjang. Their competition didn’t even know where it was, and for good reason; many of the discoveries happening behind that nondescript mountain gate were now state secrets.

“What the fuck!” she screamed as the car accelerated.

‘Oh, I can still speak,’ she thought. Further evidence she was speeding to a kidnapping. Her heart rate increased and sweat soaked up through her clothes to meet the rain-wet coat. She wheeled through strategies to keep her kidnappers from getting inside. Without the ability to move she couldn’t even poke her eyes out to keep them from eye-dentification access.

She could scream for help at the door but they’d surely cover her mouth with something as soon as it opened. Maybe she could give herself a heart attack? Her racing heartbeat might get her there anyway.

After weeks learning to control panic attacks brought on by the Event, now she had to conjure one up to save herself and possibly the country. Hurtling, literally out of control, away from the city and up through the darkening hills in a soundproof car, she breathed faster. Perhaps she could hyperventilate and collapse; the time it took to resuscitate her might alert the evening guards that something was wrong. “Ms. Natalie” never parked outside the gate, and the presence of unidentified individuals opening her car door would add fuel to that fire.

The word “fire” didn’t bring the response she expected. Instead a cool mountain in the morning sunshine filled her vision. The bumpy road rolling up through the trees was gone, though she still felt the jostling. Instead, she surveyed a crisp panorama, devoid of civilization for miles.