The Cure (25 page)

“Great observation,” said Fermi, with another nod and another smile. “And great question. Through genetic engineering, our normal body language pathways have been subverted. Before I was modified, when I was amused or happy, my second and seventh tendril would wave to the left. But now, the involuntary impulses in my brain, triggered by amusement, are directed down a different pathway, causing my face to form a human smile instead. It’s all quite complicated, but it is a subroutine that is run automatically.” He sighed. “But as impressive as our capabilities are in this regard, my body language is not perfect, as you can tell. Close, but still a hair off. You can mold the bodies and brains of my species only so far into a human. To go any further, you actually have to be one. A perfect forgery is impossible.”

Hansen nodded thoughtfully and realized the very last of his skepticism had now vanished. “What do you call yourselves?” he asked.

“What we call ourselves is unpronounceable to you. We come from a planet, however, whose closest pronunciation in English would be
Suran
.”

“We’ve taken to calling them
Wraps
,” said Fuller. “And this is now what they call themselves as well. I’m not sure who first started this, but it kind of stuck. Or you might say,
clung
.”

Hansen couldn’t help but smile. He had had no idea what to expect after being abducted, but hearing a joke about Saran Wrap hadn’t been one of his guesses. He turned back to Fermi. “And there are four of you here? Four … Wraps?”

“Right,” replied Fermi.

The alien went on to explain how they had been transported here, basically instantaneously, and the civilization-wide effort this had taken.

“With respect to your theories, Mr. Hansen, your insight into the nature of quantum mechanics is raw and embryonic, but it’s on the right track. Your people don’t know enough about dark matter and dark energy to be able to see the proper solutions, but your theory is correct: you
can
get useful information from quantum entanglement, after all.”

Despite the situation he was in, Hansen couldn’t hide his elation upon hearing this from a scientifically advanced alien. He felt as though he were floating on a cloud. He had been maligned for his ideas for years. And here Fermi had matter-of-factly confirmed that the theory he so stubbornly defended against a never-ending onslaught of criticism was right—or at least on the right track. It was a vindication of his most deeply held beliefs.

Quantum physics held that particles could be in many places at the same time and could pop into and out of existence spontaneously. But one of the most counterintuitive aspects of the theory, now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, was quantum entanglement. When a pair of particles were entangled, they would take on opposite aspects when the act of observation forced them into a determinative state.

As a gross oversimplification, all particles in the universe were like spinning coins, in an indeterminate state between heads and tails. But the moment one was
observed,
it would randomly collapse into either a head or a tail. Quantum entanglement said that these coins were emitted and spun in pairs. And if one ended up landing on heads, the other would always end up landing on tails. Always. And instantly. Even if the entangled coins were now on opposite sides of the universe, if one collapsed to a head, the other would instantaneously collapse to a tail, somehow communicating this instruction between them far faster than the speed of light.

This caused Einstein and others no end of headaches, and entire schools of brilliant physicists refused to accept that this was really what was happening. Einstein didn’t believe this was real, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”

Even so, even after quantum entanglement was conclusively demonstrated, the physics community insisted it still didn’t violate the speed-of-light barrier. Nothing could travel faster than light: not particles, energy, or information. But since information wasn’t being conveyed in this case, the speed-of-light barrier held. Yes, if a coin landed on heads at one end of the universe, its entangled partner would instantly land on tails at the other end. But since the heads or tails nature of the first coin was random, what good did this do anyone? No real information could be transmitted by this process.

And the possible implications of quantum entanglement were even more profound than these bizarre results suggested. Since at the time of the Big Bang, all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a single point, it was conceivable that every last particle in the universe was entangled with every other.

Fermi went on to explain how information
could be
transmitted faster than light using quantum entanglement, but that it had to be done through knowledge of dark matter and dark energy, which humanity didn’t possess, having only discovered these major constituents of the universe very recently. Although completely invisible, the Milky Way was thought to contain so much dark matter that this mysterious material outweighed all the stars in the galaxy ten to one.

And 73 percent of the universe was now thought to be made up of mysterious energy called
dark energy,
hidden in the vacuum of space. If human physics was ever in any danger of being impressed with itself, the fact that the science, until recently, had been totally oblivious to the vast majority of matter and energy in the universe, was a humbling reminder of its limitations.

Fermi explained again that he and his colleagues had transported here from Suran using once-in-a-generation resources, so that every atom of extra weight had been inconceivably expensive. The trip had required energy and computational ability beyond even Fermi’s comprehension. While they would have loved to have brought advanced technology with them, the only technology their civilization could afford to send, literally, was a small quantum computer.

“And this is what I’ve detected?” said Hansen.

“That’s right,” replied Fermi. “We have computers many orders of magnitude more powerful, but we could only bring along what you might think of as a laptop. Still, because it operates on quantum principles, it’s thousands of times more powerful than the computers you have here.”

Steve Fuller cleared his throat and faced Hansen. “But bringing this discussion out of the clouds and down to earth for a minute,” he said. “This is one of the reasons I needed to, ah … force a meeting with you. Without putting too fine a point on it, we need you to shut the fuck up about the quantum signature you’ve discovered. Do you think you can do that?”

Hansen was taken aback by the way this had been said. He considered several choice responses before choosing the most benign. “No one takes me seriously anyway.”

“I do,”
said Fuller meaningfully. “Consider yourself lucky that no one else has to this point.”

“What is
that
supposed to mean?”

“It means that in your zeal to localize this signal of yours, you’ve been trying to get permits and funds to dig underground just outside of Washington, D.C., for months. Where you think this mysterious signal is emanating from. And no matter how many times you’re denied a permit you won’t stop pressing. And you won’t shut up about your theory either. Do you know how fucking annoying that is? Well, congratulations. You finally made it. Right now we’re sitting in a facility three hundred feet underground, at the precise spot you wanted to dig. Dead center. And I can’t tell you how much we don’t want to be discovered down here.”

Hansen swallowed hard. He was proud his theory had so accurately pinpointed the location of the signature, but he was beginning to get nervous.

“So we need you to tell your advisor and everyone else you’ve been pestering that you’ve made an error. And that you’ve now come to your senses. It’s a good thing we’re moving our headquarters out West in a few weeks,” added Fuller. “Or we might have been forced to kill you.”

He said it with a friendly smile, as though he was joking, so Hansen chose to believe him.

28

FULLER OPENED HIS
mouth to continue when he was interrupted by a knock at the door. A woman stuck her head into the conference room and asked when she should serve lunch. Fuller glanced at this watch and asked her to return in thirty minutes.

The moment the door closed, Fuller took up where he had left off. “But I don’t want you to decide if you’ll do what I’m asking just yet,” he said to Kyle Hansen. “Because you still don’t know the big picture. After you do, I’m sure you’ll
want
to cooperate.”

Both Fuller and Fermi described the seventeen known civilizations in this arm of the galaxy and how interstellar comingling of the seventeen species was handled. And why the Seventeen believed it was vital that one of them send a contingent to Earth in order to save a savage but talented new species from self-destruction. The Wraps had been an obvious choice for this duty for a number of reasons.

Hansen had no sense of how much time was passing, and was astonished when there was another knock on the door. Could thirty minutes have passed already?

Sure enough, the same woman who had visited before wheeled in a serving cart loaded with five metal plates, all of them covered by metal domes, and an assortment of drinks, along with plates, napkins, and silverware. The conversation ceased until she had left the room once again.

Fuller lifted the domes from two of the plates to reveal heaping mounds of two Chinese dishes, beef broccoli and cashew chicken, which had surprised Hansen since the only utensils that had accompanied the meal were Western.

Fuller turned to Hansen. “Hungry?” he asked. “Or would you rather wait for a better stopping place?”

“I’ll wait,” said Hansen immediately. He could always eat. But he couldn’t always learn about the history of galactic civilization.

Fuller nodded approvingly. He covered the steaming dishes once again and continued where he had left off. “The Wraps came to our government and quickly demonstrated their bona fides,” he explained. “Regardless of what you may have heard, this is the only visitation Earth has ever had. And as you’ve learned already, it wasn’t by spaceship. The Wraps offered to use their skill and their quantum computer to help us protect us from ourselves.”

“How?”

“They were short on explanations. Fortunately, they were long on results. First, their computer is somehow able to scan for nuclear and bioweapon signatures at incredible sensitivity. You identified their quantum computer based on its spectra. Their computer can identify WMD basically the same way, although we have no idea how. And we provide all the inputs we have. Our entire huge database. All the information we have on known terrorists, along with every other piece of electronic data we can collect. And they have access to trillions of pages more on the Internet. Their computer can take these inputs and do magic with it. See patterns we can’t. Make predictions with uncanny accuracy.” He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve been begging them to pick a few stocks for me,” he added with a smirk.

“I’m surprised you trusted them enough to give them total access to your data.”

“They earned our trust. It didn’t happen right away. As a show of good faith in the early days, Fermi and his friends alerted us to several terrorist actions that would have leveled one of our cities if not for them. As distrusting as we were inclined to be, it only took saving our bacon a few times before we became willing to be more open minded. Eventually we decided they were exactly what they presented themselves to be. Namely, friendly aliens trying to help.”

“When did they arrive?”

“The exact date is classified, but it was after nine eleven, unfortunately. Not that we didn’t have all the information we needed to stop that one ourselves. What I will tell you is that we are now the most classified department in the world, under the auspices of DHS; the Department of Homeland Security. We wait a few years after inauguration to even tell new
presidents
of our existence, and the rest of the agencies we serve will never know of us. And I should add that this is a global effort. The Wraps decide on the priorities and where we put resources. If, in their judgment, stopping a plot against Israel or England or somewhere else is more important than stopping a plot against America, we do that. Not that we don’t try to stop them all. We find a way to feed the intel to various protective agencies, our own and in other countries, in such a way that it looks homegrown. We’ve rooted out dozens and dozens of plots that could have spiraled out of control. Plots that through a domino effect could have led to a retardation of worldwide civilization and even the end of humanity. But no one knows we exist, or are providing intel behind the scenes.”

Hansen wasn’t sure he was totally buying it. He felt he was missing something. He loved science fiction and wanted with all his heart for this to be true—an advanced and benevolent species watching over us. It was the ultimate science fiction dream. But it was human nature to question things that seemed too good to be true. And Hansen didn’t quite trust a species devoting huge amounts of energy and resources, on a scale at which the energy output of human civilization for all of history was just rounding error, without wanting anything in return.

“The Wraps are totally pacifistic,” continued Fuller, unable to hide his disapproval. “So we don’t tell them operational details. They like to think of this as an intellectual exercise. If they think people will get hurt, even those who have made themselves the enemy of civilization, they get squeamish. Like a vegan in a steak house. You and I are ordering the porterhouses and trying not to drool.
They’re
trying not to vomit.”

Fermi nodded. “It is true,” he said. He went on to describe the toll just being on Earth was taking on them. They liked and even admired individual humans, who often had a great sense of humor and of duty. Impressive curiosity and drive. But in comparison to any member of the Seventeen, humanity as a whole was the most raw. The most passionate. The most ruthless, selfish, and malevolent.