The Filter Trap (17 page)

After they’d all been hauled into the Huey Minor studied the three civilians shivering in green blankets illuminated by a slow ochre sunrise. They were all lucky to be alive. Even if they’d escaped the vault on their own, the freezing water would have sent them into hypothermic shock in another few minutes.

As they banked and pulled away from what used to be the old campus they could see the tsunami had pushed a pile of debris up into a hill of sorts, and when the building collapsed around the safe it had been rolled right to the top. It was only by luck that it balanced there until the marines arrived. If the flood waters were two feet higher the door would have been under water and the Marines would have passed right by.

Despite her luck that the Marines came along just in time, the Asian woman certainly wasn’t happy to be alive after they slipped smelling salts under her nose. She sobbed uncontrollably while the professor put his arm around her.

“I’m sorry, Natalie.”

“It’s not your fault, Kam. I dove back in voluntarily after you pulled me out the first time. I can’t expect you to save me twice. Father used his last breath to say ‘Save yourself,’ and pushed me away. And there you were, waiting for me. I’m only alive because of both of you.”

Kam looked to the young private. “And I’m only alive because of you.”

“I’m sorry for your loss ma’am,” Silversun said.

Natalie barely acknowledged her, staring instead at a silver ring on Silversun’s finger. Something about it made Silversun self-conscious, and she moved her left hand on top of the other.

Susan didn’t share in the gratitude for her rescue either, instead peering disconnectedly into the grey sunrise through the softly falling Christmas snow over the Massachusetts Bay.

“PTSD I’m sure,” Minor stated. “You’ll all have it probably.”

“Hell, the whole fucking world is gonna have it,” Silversun grumbled.

“A tsunami doesn’t explain this,” Kam insisted. “Even in Japan or Thailand the waves didn’t do this much.” He looked to Minor for an explanation.

“You’re right. I was there,” Minor confirmed. “Dr. Kam Douglass?”

Kam nodded.

“Then you tell me.”

“What does that mean?”

“They don’t send Marines in Venoms to rescue one professor. It wasn’t luck we were out here. We thought you’d still be at your building, but nobody could have escaped from there.”

Though he’d been looking over the devastation for ten minutes, the words brought home the truth to Kam.

“How many escaped the city?”

Silversun shook her head.

Minor gritted his teeth. “It ain’t about escaping. It’s the whole world, Dr. Douglass. You must be one hell of a linguist.”

“One in a million,” Silversun moaned, watching bodies float under them like rice in a flooded paddy. “The only one we were allowed to save.”

“W-why me?” Kam stuttered.

Minor squinted at the slight-framed professor. This was the golden goose? Biggest national
—
nay, global
—
disaster in history and the Commander in Chief was sending Marines to rescue language professors? A presidential pardon was one thing, but come on, this was a death sentence for other survivors. They could have taken twenty people to higher ground from Southie in this time, and everyone knew it. Though they didn’t know yet if anyone in Southie had survived. Still, this was just more proof that the nation elected the wrong guy, but Minor had pledged to serve him anyway.

“I’m here to take you
—
and I suppose the rest of you by proxy
—
to the USS Kearsarge, currently one hundred miles offshore. By order of the Commander in Chief.”

The rolling high hills of Maine and New Hampshire caught a distant purple twilight as the Huey made a slow turn into the Atlantic while the snow abated. Natalie imagined the glimmers of sunshine on the horizon were her father, beaming from heaven, happy she made it out safe.

How he might feel about Kam surviving, maybe at his expense, was less clear. Natalie’s father tried to push them together for years, and sometimes she wished Kam would acquiesce. But part of her despised Kam now, not a welcome trade for her father, tough love and all.

Though if it wasn’t for Kam, she’d be in that deep, dark abyss. Surely his saving her first was an act of love, a subconscious answer to her subtle advances he’d politely refused for years. Maybe it was his business relationship with her father that scared him away. That would all change now. Appa had deep pockets, but not the resources of Kam’s new employer: the United States military. If he took the job, they may never see each other again.

Kam’s thoughts rested not on family, nor Natalie, but on expanding possibilities. When he nearly drowned his brain showed him something. Despite all his studies of human cultures in far-off places he’d never seen the type of structure that flashed for an instant. He’d never even seen
trees
like that. The phrase, or rather the feeling, of being needed, necessary to the world in this time of crisis, kept him even more confounded.

After much internal debate he decided it surely matched the unique interpretation of the entrance into heaven that the brain purportedly gifts the consciousness when near-death. That pyramid and the strange symbols on it were no more real than Colton Burpo’s throne of God, yet Colton’s return to life took place on an otherwise uninteresting day in 2003. Kam’s encounter with God’s love returned him to a post-apocalyptic world gasping for breath. If visions were in order for a new prophet, this was certainly the right time and place.

As Kam pondered whether he should tell anyone this, Natalie whispered, “I worry your military will keep us prisoner.”

“Do we have a choice?”

“Maybe
you
don’t, but I’m a citizen of South Korea. It would be an act of war to hold me against my will, national disaster or not.” Before she could think twice about it she clasped Kam’s hand. “When we get the chance, we should leave together. I can charter a private plane from any airport if they haven’t frozen the company funds.”

“Which are . . . now yours?”

“Father willed his shares to me. He retired from daily decision-making, not the board. Nothing can replace Appa, but I can use his money
—
my money
—
to help you. If you go to work for the government you’ll never escape. I’ve seen the NSA files they keep.”

“Nat, I don’t know that you’ll have a company to go back to. A tsunami this big had to hit Japan, and I’m sure Korea after that. I don’t think chartering a plane is going to be as easy as you think.”

Silversun, sitting across from them, lowered her head. “You two whisper louder than some generals talk.”

Kam reflexively dropped Natalie’s hand. The private continued, “If the president asked for you, you’re not going anywhere until he says so.”

“Speaking of which,” Minor added, “what did he have us rescue a linguist for anyway? At least Mrs. Cho here could get some of our radios working again. The professor seems useless in a disaster.”

“He’s the best linguist in the world,” Natalie protested. “Maybe he’ll be translating when the president talks to the Russians.”

Kam thought it better to not let them know that’s not
exactly
what he did for a living. Natalie knew better, but she was keen to downplay his importance to ease their escape. The Marines wouldn’t have known the magnitude of the changes on the face of the planet and the implications. Kamran felt a tingling of guilt at keeping those that saved him in the dark. He decided to be democratic and test just how much the Marines already knew.

“I’m an expert in Tocharian, one of the nearly lost early world civilizations that flourished around 5,000 years ago. As this culture lived along the Silk Road, the research is considered an important cultural partnership with China.”

In disbelief Minor huffed, “We saved you to keep some communist science project going?”

“Scholars of Tocharian are rarer than the remaining artifacts.”

“And valued by fewer. Lot of people love Fenway, but the president didn’t send us to rescue any park historians.”

“Look, I can’t tell you why the president asked for me, but it must have something to do with this crisis. Have any of you noticed something odd about the waning morning Moon out there?”

Confused faces stared at Kam, albeit Natalie’s showing more curiosity. She enjoyed a good problem to solve, though the answer to this one probably wouldn’t be very satisfying.

“I can’t find the Moon,” Natalie realized. “You couldn’t find it last night, but . . .”

Kam pointed, acknowledging and waiting for other guesses.

“Yes, the Moon was waning yesterday morning, then disappeared before the tsunami when it should have appeared in early twilight. I thought it might be covered by storm clouds at first, but before we entered the vault I looked up to see stars instead. It should be afternoon by now, yet the Sun has barely risen and the Moon stays hidden, or worse.”

“And here I thought my dang watch was broken from the water,” Susan said, still not grasping the larger implications.

“We experienced a far more powerful tsunami than any triggered by an undersea earthquake.”

“So you can’t see the Moon, big deal,” Susan said. “Ever heard of a New Moon?”

“Of course,” Kam answered. “Even a New Moon controls the tides. The corporal here navigated to us without GPS. Our phones, which all eventually tie to a satellite system, are dead. The destruction we’re flying over was caused not by an event on Earth, but something far above it.”

Minor crossed his arms. “All right, so you’re a details man. But that don’t help us figure out the
why
, does it? The one nugget of information they did share with grunts like us about the Event was that we
know
the Moon’s gone. It’s all gone up there.”

“Even the stars,” Kam said.

“What?” Private Silversun leaned forward. “You just said you saw the stars before the tsunami hit.”

“Oh I saw stars, just not any I recognized.”

“So what? You’re a linguist, not an astrologer. The only thing I ever recognize is the Big Dipper.”

“Do you know how many ancient societies studied the stars? Built entire calendars around their movements? Created entire mythologies around the shapes of the constellations and their movement across the heavens? For God’s sake, are you a Christian?”

“What kind of a question is that? Course I am!”

“Christmas was based in part on the solstice observation by earlier pagans. That star in the story of Jesus’s birth? Human civilizations, all of them, were built and organized to some extent by a lack of understanding of what happens up there. Now that we finally figured it out, what each of those lights is, what kind of star they are, how many light years away, it’s all been scrambled again. We’re once again swimming in an ocean of stars, a mystery with tools removed.”

“And you’re going to decode that?”

“I’d like to try. Every civilization thought it did, and they all failed. Maybe this is Robin Hanson’s Great Filter. Maybe someone was trying to tell us something, test us until we get it right, but we failed once again.”

“Hey! In case you didn’t notice, egghead, you’re on a United States Marine helicopter on the way to a United States Navy battleship, and only because a brave private here jumped in and rescued your ass. America hasn’t failed, and it sure as hell didn’t fail
you
.”

“Sir!” Silversun interjected. “I’m sure Dr. Douglass didn’t mean it that way. What I really want to know is what he meant by ‘someone.’ Who did this?”

“Or some
thing
. Maybe an asteroid destroyed the Moon and its gravity spun us into higher orbit. However, like you said, I’m not an astrophysicist. I’d really like to talk to one.”

Private Silversun leaned even closer. “You’re in luck, pal. My buddy, Pete, was with an Army brigade in San Francisco that picked up another professor. Caltech astrophysics guy, forget his name, but he was talking about stars too. Really freaked Pete out.”

“Allan Sands?” Kam asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, I think that was his name. Good guess!”

“I’d like to meet with any astronomer but
him
.”

The USS Kearsarge first looked from the air like a gray rectangle in the Atlantic. As the Huey with the survivors from Boston approached, the Wasp-class Navy assault ship’s tower grew alongside a runway spanning nearly 850 feet. Where larger aircraft carriers featured runways at an angle, the entire deck of the Kearsarge had painted grids allotted for helicopter storage with the low tower running on the edge.

Below the deck, the steel seeped in pockets of rust, and as the survivors angled around the back side, a tall, rectangular chasm near the waterline opened. What looked for the longest time like a whirlwind far out on the water drew near. A hovercraft, deck full not with assault vehicles but clogged with survivors from the East Coast, slowed and blew water upwards, surrounding the ship like a fog.

As the Huey hovered and waited for the mist to clear the deck, an Osprey, the only aircraft there, started its massive twin rotors. The Osprey ran half the course of the deck and flew up at an angle too acute for a helicopter and too obtuse for a jet.

“Everything’s scrambled,” Minor answered before anyone could ask, as the Huey slowly ducked to the forward area of the deck for a tidy vertical landing. “Either for rescue, reconnaissance, or defense. Nothing’s idle unless it’s broke.”

As the rotors still spun above them, Minor led everyone to the tower, where a sailor waited. Nothing was idle inside either. In the guts of the amphibious assault ship, sailors buzzed the narrow corridors. Parts of the ship normally saved for storage or recreation began to fill with tsunami survivors, huddling together in gray and green blankets. Minor, Silversun, and their three rescues followed the sailor down one of those corridors to a small briefing room.

“Wait here,” the sailor addressed them for the first time.

“For what?” Susan asked, but the sailor had already disappeared into the network of exposed gray steel beams and elliptical openings of the interconnected maze outside.

“Just like prisoners,” Natalie whispered to Kam.

“Just be glad you ain’t an officer,” Minor said. “Then it’s a life sentence.”

Silversun chuckled knowingly. “Or a death sentence if you can’t follow orders.”

“She’s right, you three do everything you’re told from here on out. These ships are dangerous for civilians to be on. If they say to wait, you wait days if you have to.”

“I hope we’re waiting for a doctor,” Susan said. “Kam and Natalie barely made it out of there alive.”

Kam and Natalie huddled closer together, finally able to relax for a moment. Both felt an ice in their veins from nearly drowning that the ride over hadn’t abated. The cold steel of the Kearsarge did little to diminish their shock, but it was the first thing approaching safety they’d experienced since the Event.

Susan looked into the hallway again, but abruptly ducked back inside, pushed by a young woman in uniform. “Who hit the water?”

Everyone but Minor, slightly embarrassed, raised their hands. She immediately began assessing and prodding at each of them in turn.

“How long do we have to stay here?” Susan asked.

“‘Stay?’” the young medical officer mimicked. “You’re lucky to be alive, and luckier still to be on this boat. Most of my time the last twenty-four hours has been spent tagging toes and authorizing burials at sea. Half the rescues we get back die of hypothermia no matter how hot we crank the heat in here. This is an assault ship, not a medical frigate.”

“But . . .” Natalie started.

“Mrs. Cho,” a stern voice echoed from the hallway before matching up to a middle-aged man with many medals on his chest. “I know this ain’t the penthouse you’re used to staying in, but you’ll have to make do as long as you're a
ward of the state
. We weren’t aware of your little rendezvous with Dr. Douglass until you were already on your way. Our intelligence is stretched a little thin at the moment. Still, I’m informed your father was a war hero, helped our boys in Korea. I’m very sorry for your loss.

“Regardless, I’m sure these Marines informed you Dr. Douglass was our focus. None of you need to worry; you won’t be on this boat for long, because it’s being pushed to Florida, or rather the underwater peninsula that used be the southern part of the state. They could have sent another sailor to tell you this, but the brass thought I should do it, as Dr. Douglass and I’ll be seeing a lot of each other for a while.”

The man finally stopped to take a breath and extend his hand to Kam.

“General Pith.”

“Kamran Douglass.”

They shook awkwardly and then Kam couldn’t help himself. “General, is it true that the Moon is gone? That all the satellites are gone?”

Pith glanced at the Marines. “Maybe they should have said ‘loose lips sink helicopters.’”

“Sorry, sir! We thought this was common knowledge.”

“It’s all right, Corporal. It’s common enough, we just don’t encourage anyone to carp about a problem until we’ve worked out the solution.”

Kam’s curiosity couldn’t be held. If anyone knew more about what happened in the Event it would be the general. “I’m guessing when the stars come out tonight they’ll be in the wrong spots too, is that right?”

“Now hold on there, professor. Let’s not trade guesses. Like you, I’m just a guest on the Kearsarge at the moment and I don’t think the captain would appreciate me helping along any rumors that could dishearten our courageous sailors enough to neglect duties that are so very important in our nation’s
—
in our world’s
—
time of need.”

Natalie lowly said, “So much for the First Amendment.”

Pith turned to her. “I have merely made a polite request concerning everyone’s safety. Yours included.”

“What are you trying to hide?” Susan asked.

“I think he’s more worried about what
I
was going to tell you,” Kam stated.

Pith glared at Kam, punishing his soul for the very thought of speculating on the Event. He cocked his head and smoothed his countenance into a smile, opening his mouth once more as he put a large hand on Kam’s shoulder.

“Look, I’ll level with you. I treasure free speech as much as anyone. It’s my job to defend the Constitution with my life. So if the professor really wants to speak, I can’t stop him. Thirty years ago I took an oath. It wasn’t a promise to these boys,” he gestured to the Marines, “but to the people of this country. To you.” His eyes moved to Natalie for a moment.
“
Guest Visa holders included.”

“You’re
so
generous,” Natalie sarcastically replied.

“Look, your money is worthless right now. You know what isn’t? Information
—
everybody wants it and there ain’t nearly enough. You know the best way to keep a hungry kid out of a cookie jar? Only give him one cookie at a time.”

“So give me at least one, then,” urged Kam. “The Moon is gone, blown out of the sky. That’s what caused the tsunamis, isn’t it? And it’s global, not just Boston. Not just America. I surmised this, but you can confirm it, can’t you?”

Pith put his hand down and started to shake his head up and down with increasing strength. At first he almost whispered. “Yes,” he said, then his voice grew in strength. “Yes, yes. In the briefest of security briefs I’ve ever received, the Moon is no more. But, what you couldn’t guess about, professor, and it is my
job
to, is the impact. I don’t care how this happened, just yet. I’m too busy cleaning up.

“Rampant looting in the Midwest. Coastal metropolises razed. The worst thing this country has ever faced, but we’re certainly not alone. There have been coups in seven countries, including Mexico. All commercial aviation has been grounded, not that there’s an easy way to enforce it right now with all our tracking satellites gone.”

“Metropolises? What of Seoul?” Natalie asked with worry.

“If it’s anything like here, the numbers are staggering. Millions in the United States feared dead, tens of millions more wounded. World fatalities are estimated at almost a hundred million, but that’s a really rough guess. We can’t even talk to countries who haven’t got their old shortwave radios back up yet. The worst attack I’ve ever seen.”

“You said the worst
attack
, General,” Kam reminded him. “Is this
not
a natural disaster?”

“From a national security standpoint we are to treat this as an attack until we know otherwise, so don’t read more into it than that. The official title the Joint Chiefs are using for this attack now is the
Event
. You asked me to confirm the Moon was gone, I suspect the president is going to ask you to confirm whether it was on purpose or not.”

“You need him to translate messages with the Russians or the Chinese?” Susan asked. “Do they already know how this happened?”

Pith laughed with his belly. “From the mouths of civilians, eh fellows.” He looked at the Marines, who emitted weak smiles. “We don’t even need
people
for translation anymore, ma’am, and from what I hear, that’s partly thanks to Dr. Douglass, anyway.”

“That’s true. Other than the Tocharian project, I work on translating variants of known languages that still have rough edges showing up in computer-based translation, essentially filling in the gaps in machine language interpretation.

“Other than Natalie’s father, my biggest research funding comes from Silicon Beach, hot on the trail of adaptive live translation to fulfill military contracts. Not just word-for-word swaps, but interpretive phrasing and deep knowledge of historical linguistics.”

“Shit, if you’re translating I don’t know how the president would ever get a word in edgewise,” the younger private at the back said.

Minor broke his stoic countenance to chuckle again. “Other than filibustering I still don’t understand what use they’d have for yah.”

Kam tried not to show his frustration. “Language comes from a central place, a way of transmitting emotions and desires concretely. Even the Minoans had the same love—and lust—for life that we do now. A Rosetta Stone isn’t always necessary to untangle lost alphabets, only an understanding of the fundamentals. Code breakers in the military use the same techniques but to a different end. The Enigma program’s breakthrough was realizing every Nazi message ended with a nod to Hitler.”

“Hitler? So you think this was an attack, a modern Pearl Harbor? The machinations of a group or government we don’t have a handle on yet, and you’re the code breaker?” Pith asked.

“Not exactly. Breaking any code requires a robust knowledge of a culture’s history, clues to deciphering quicker than a computer’s dumb brute-force attempts that smash billions of possible combinations against a single keyhole. My work is less translation, and more sociology and archaeology.”

“I don’t get it.” The general threw his hands in the air.

“General, I get to know the lock builder instead of trying every key.”

“Well, it ain’t the ancient Egyptians that did this,” Minor stated.

“All biology is bound by the same language, Corporal: mathematics.”

“Trust me, kid, we’ve got plenty of math majors,” Pith replied indignantly. “Working on classified projects without a budget is impossible for most eggheads to resist.”

“If I’m on the president’s list my expertise isn’t going to be used to translate Russian radio intercepts, read ancient cuneiform, or do calculus. If they need me, then they’ve found something else, something new that requires a broader skillset that your eggheads with tunnel vision working on new encryption schemes for the NSA don’t have.”

“Yeah, and what’s that?” Minor asked.

“It’s not the ‘what’ that’s important.”

“It’s the where,” Private Silversun asserted.

Kam nodded.

“And where’s that?” the general huffed.

Kam lifted his arm, touching an outstretched index finger to the cabin ceiling. They looked up in silence and fear, imagining what lay beyond in the strange, new sky.