The Invitation-kindle (13 page)

Welling up with emotion, Rebecca looks at Ken Myers.

“Thank you, thank you.”

“You needn’t thank me.”

“But I do need to…who? Who do we thank? Who do I thank? I need to. I need to” Steve says.

“You don’t have to do that,” the President says.

“Yes I do. Yes I do. Please, I need to, I need to.”

“Steve, Steve, what you need is a pair of pants.”

“But who did this for me? I… I don’t know what to say, or even think. Is this a dream?”

“Steve, why don’t you go dancing tonight with Rebecca, and try out your new legs. You might like them,” the President says.

Looking upward, Rebecca is reminded that what she is seeing is also being seen by countless millions via the sky view images provided by the strange enormous object still occupying the space above them, and in a tone of practical modesty says to her husband, “Come on honey, let’s go take care of you.”

Looking over her shoulder as she, and Steve walk away, Rebecca once again offers her sincere thanks to the President.

Among those drawn to the human perimeter of awestruck observers watching the incredible events taking place is the Vice President of the United States, Scott Conner. More scientist than politician, he sees what is transpiring in front of him as an unprecedented opportunity to acquire new knowledge. His mind is racing as he wonders what will happen next. He has no idea that he will soon play a major part in the fantastic drama unfolding before him, and as unbelievable as the events of the past hour have been, what follows next will stretch the boundaries of human comprehension.

All around the world enthralled masses of humanity are witnessing what is unfolding in Miami. In cities on every continent, in urban, and rural areas, most human activity simply stops. Public and private transportation slows to a trickle. In places of cold or inclement weather people watch nonstop television coverage. Vital services for the most part continue, but nearly all other activity comes to a complete global shutdown. Factories stop; schools, offices, places of business, and literally every building that doesn’t have a television set is empty of people. The warm weather of July allows millions across North America to simply walk outside and look skyward to view the spectacle. Streets, parks, open fields, roadsides, public places of every kind are peopled with tens of thousands of spectators uniformly engrossed by the astounding images above them.

In Olympic Stadium, the epicenter of what the entire world is witnessing, thousands have just seen a man who was a triple amputee no more than fifteen minutes ago be given new legs and an arm by some miraculous, inexplicable process. Leaving all stunned to the nth degree, a profound silence comes over the crowd as they apprehensively wait for what comes next.

Carol Myers, witnessing these things, is beside herself with questions that come with a terrible, dubious foreboding. Who exactly is the man that she calls husband? Who is Ken Myers, and how could he have any possibility of knowing what was going to happen tonight? His strange, imperturbable demeanor of showing no shock or surprise in the face of what is nothing less than astonishing have many thinking that he is much more than he appears to be, and first among them is his wife. She suddenly recalls the incredible story she was told by the President’s mother. A vague, uneasy, apprehension grows within her as she approaches her husband.

“How did you know about this? Tell me, Ken. Who are you? Tell me!”

“I am Ken Myers, your husband, the man you married. But you’re right, I’m more than that.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Everything will be resolved, Carol. Trust me.”

As the President is saying these words, an audible gasp is suddenly heard. When Carol looks to see why, she and more than two billion others see something in the sky above them that is beyond the ken of all human experience. After decades of books and movies speculating about what the face of an alien creature would look like, there, projected across the surface of that enormous object hanging in the sky above them, with no fanfare, no announcement, no prior indication of any kind, almost a third of humanity is suddenly looking at something that is now looking back at them. It’s the face of a being from another world.

They see a creature with brownish-gray skin, large, yellow eyes that are very expressive, with a head smaller than a human cranium. No hair can be seen on the creature. Small inlets under the large eyes, and open slits on the side of his head suggest sensory organs of some type. Though astounded, most people assume they are looking at a projected image. They have just seen Steve Kearns on the same visual platform in the sky that now shows a very different face. That could not happen they reasoned, unless what they were seeing was a reproduced image. Despite little sense of general alarm, the size of the image they are looking at is humongous, and though people are relatively contained in their response, animals respond very differently. Dogs bark incessantly, farm animals are spooked, birds still in flight since the object’s initial appearance try in vain to outrun the perceived threat. For humans the initial and prevalent response is not fear. They have seen this colossal object in the sky for nearly two hours now, watching first an incredible display of patterns and colors at once energizing, and tranquil, a display that seemed to awaken a nascent sense of harmony, and concord for those who saw it.

After that, seeing a man with no legs and one arm have his body literally remade in minutes has the effect of engendering a sense of auspicious and benevolent expectation. Most people are not afraid. To the contrary, uncounted millions in their muted sense of collective wonder, find these astonishing events hypnotically captivating.

Several years before, the discovery of living subsurface bacteria on the planet Mars, was hailed as the greatest discovery in the history of science. No one could have known then, that the ultimate implication of that discovery of life on another world would soon present, and confirm itself in stunning, living reality.

Then suddenly, the moment waited for finally comes, as three clearly articulated words are heard by all.

“People of Earth.”

Many lurch back as if shocked to hear something they were already keenly expecting. The sound of his low-pitched voice seems to have no particular point of origin, as if the open sky itself was its source.

“As I speak to you now, I speak in all languages to all the people of your world. We are the Linesians. Our planet orbits a star twenty-six thousand light years away. For millions of years we have monitored the emergence of civilizations across the galaxy. We have known of your existence since before your ancestors walked upright. We have been witness to your dramatic history. We have seen with more than passing interest humans emerge from the grim struggle of your earliest beginnings, through the long journey that has become the story of mankind. In less than one hundred centuries you have reshaped the surface of the world, and established your modern civilization. From scattered tribes of primitive nomadic hominids of no more than a few thousand, your numbers now are in the billions, and you now hold within your fateful power, the very destiny of your species. Through language, culture, and the accumulated knowledge of science, human capability, and understanding has increased exponentially.

“These things we have seen. We have also seen the senseless blight of war and conquest, and the human misery it spawns. We know your aberrant tendency toward violence is the primitive legacy of a savage past. The brutality and chaos of your world spring from ancient, inherited reflexes of fear and aggression. Throughout the galaxy millions of planets are inhabited by beings much like you, with similar histories of struggle and conflict. What humans are now experiencing has been repeated countless times across this galaxy, and beyond. All sentient beings come to a threshold point in their civilization’s history when they must collectively choose to renounce the futile confusion of war and aggression. For mankind, that time has come. It is nothing less than a choice between the past and the future, between fear and imagination, a choice that cannot be avoided. Not choosing is to choose by default. The hour is late for
Homo sapiens
. You now stand on the brink of an imminent global cataclysm. Your actions make certain a catastrophic worldwide upheaval, impossible to avoid, will be experienced by your descendants, who will pay the terrible price for centuries of careless damage inflicted on your life sustaining ecosphere.

“Your climate will become unstable. Warm and acidic oceans will no longer nurture abundant life. Deserts will again come to dominate all land masses. Most of the animals that have inhabited your world through eons of change will become extinct. Deadly radiation from abandoned nuclear reactors will poison your water. War and famine will dominate. A microbial onslaught of infectious diseases will follow, killing off most of humanity, and human civilizations march through history will stop. Your cities and urban landscapes will be emptied of all human inhabitants, and centuries of decay will reclaim the Earth. A long period of struggle, and hardship will ensue. Yet, even this, humans will survive. In high mountains, and remote places, the scattered populations of the genus
Homo
will live on. Their descendants will live to see an age of ice, and a world much colder. Your oceans will shrink, and mountains of ice will dominate the land. Six thousand years will pass before deep sea currents once again restore the stability of a temperate world. At that time, a second dawn of man will begin. Human population will have dwindled to less than one percent of its former peak. The cataclysm will be over. This is the future you’re apparently willing to bequeath to your grandchildren’s grandchildren. And so we will show you what you are by default preparing for future human generations. Behold the future of man.”

With these words the alien face of a creature that calls himself a Linesian” fades from view, and in its place, all can see a wide-angled, panoramic view of the eastern United States as seen from space. The projected image still dominating a quarter of the night sky now showing our own world is remarkable in its detail, and clarity. It zooms in to the New England coast and the city of New York, but as the view brings us closer, and closer something very disturbing presents itself. Immediately noticeable is the absence of any familiar landmarks. An eerie curiosity pervades, as image after image is displayed, and it becomes hard to believe that what we are seeing, really is a picture of what use to be America’s financial capitol. We slowly approach what remains of the island of Manhattan, but it’s barely recognizable. Great heaps of rubble covered in huge mats of moss and algae, part swamp, part archeological ruin, with no bridge, building, or standing structure of any kind in any direction, and then the alien voice is heard again.

“The year is 2280. A runaway greenhouse effect is causing dramatically rising temperatures in your world. The release of methane gas from substrates beneath the sea floor has increased forty fold in the last half century, accelerating the warming trend. By this time, the Greenland ice sheet no longer exists, disappearing more than sixty years ago. Ice all over your planet is melting fast. Your oceans have risen over forty feet. Coastal cities have been abandoned for decades. Twenty six years before, on a warm, dark night in 2254, anyone looking eastward on the Atlantic coast of North America saw something very odd. A flash of brilliant white light was seen, and quickly disappeared. Lasting only a few seconds, those who saw it were at first puzzled, but when a slow rumbling was heard, and felt minutes later, it became unmistakably apparent that an impact event had occurred. It was a meteor. Only one hundred feet wide, it was not very large, but that was large enough. This meteor, made mostly of iron, was hard and heavy when it streaked through your atmosphere at seventeen miles a second almost a thousand miles east of New York City. The brief, silent flash was over in an instant, but would have effects lasting for decades. The meteor’s weight, speed, and angle of impact sent a massive energy wave across the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. A cloudless, moonless night shrouds its terrifying approach. The tsunami is almost eighty feet high, and traveling at two hundred and seventy miles an hour. When the juggernaut strikes land it crests at one hundred and thirty feet, its incredible impact magnified many times over by increased sea level. Coastal cities, already crumbling are pulverized by the tsunami’s massive punch. Another great wave follows. Billions of tons of water strike your coastal cities at over two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and physically erases them. Parts of your Statue of Liberty are carried seventy miles inland. Warming temperatures did not cause this event, but made it much worse. What you are seeing is the aftermath of the most powerful indigenous impact event in recorded history. Nothing could have resisted it. All standing structures were undermined first by rising sea water, and then completely annihilated by the tsunami’s irresistible crush. Your New York City, capitol of the world, epicenter of global wealth and prestige, , the proud icon of your modern age, your Rome, is obliterated, and becomes the flooded wasteland of tangled industrial wreckage you see before you.  What was a teeming center of human activity and commerce teems now with mosquitoes and turtles. The city that never sleeps, now sleeps forever. The ‘Big Apple,’ you might say, has been swallowed. If you could find a human in this wasteland to ask him where all the people are, he wouldn’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Over a century ago unusually virulent plagues ravaged already declining human populations killing hundreds of millions. The steep decline in human numbers will continue for thousands of years.”

As we look at the devastated wasteland that once was the most populous city in North America, the image zooms out and moves southward. The detailed clarity of the images, combined with the visual impact of seeing them across one quarter of the night sky is spellbinding. Coming down the coast of New Jersey, scenes of abandoned devastation repeatedly come in to view. Barrier islands no longer exist. The Chesapeake Bay, bloated and unfamiliar, looks more like a gulf, as the Linesian continues his narrative.