Superluminal

I had been unsure when to reach out to the other members of the Resource Advisory Council. The findings of the Far Worlds exploratory mission were explosive, to say the least, but nothing we could parse from the telemetry seemed definitive. We were looking at alien technology - that was all we knew.

Still, I had a gut feeling about the findings, about what they meant. And I knew that recent social tensions here in the Lunar townships, in the scattered orbital habitats, and on the Martian colony made timing a crucial factor.

Those tensions were recent, but I had lived for years with the sick feeling in my gut. It became stronger than ever - became a certainty, really - when the mission telemetry came in. I absolutely knew that I was right, that the alien artifact we'd identified confirmed my suspicions. Still, I hesitated. My personal certainty - and my personal rage - would not be enough. If I didn't have more, I'd be ignored. If I had passion but nothing more than the scant evidence I had assembled, and nothing more in the way of a compelling argument, I'd come across as a raving lunatic and that would be that. I'd be finished professionally; worse, the political ties I had painstakingly cultivated would go up like an oxygen flash-fire. Get this wrong, and no one in a position of authority would want to be associated with me or my theories. Even if other, more respected people came to realize what I already knew, my entire line of argument would be contaminated, and no one would want to press for the goals I held to be more crucial than almost anything else.

It was Dr. Hsu's success at the Mars Propulsion Institute that finally signaled to me that the time was right. He had succeeded in proving that leptons could be excited to a state of particle shift and changed into tachyons. An electromagnetically shaped field of leptons would retain that field shape when they transitioned. If applied just right, it was possible to use such a field to propel a spacecraft at speeds that far exceeded that of light.

Dr. Hsu had proven superluminal travel to be possible - and not just by using equations and computer simulations. He'd actually sent an unmanned drone from Martian orbit to Neptune in a matter of minutes.

After a sleepless night, I composed carefully worded messages to each of the council members asking them to attend an ad hoc meeting at my tiny office, in order to see something of note - something that they might find invaluable, personally and politically.

Something the entire human race... what was left of it... would want and need to see.

***

Jules Randovy entered the archive office. Already present were Albert Sanderson and Dagmar Brennan - and myself, of course, seated at my workstation. It was already crowded in the room, and it was going to become more so as the others from the committee showed up. The four of us were taxing the room's re-breather equipment; if everybody showed, there would be a total of nine. I hoped the equipment would labor through the meeting. My job is a lonely, sometimes tedious one; I'm the only one doing the work I do, so the archive office was never meant for large gatherings. Still, this was the best place to have everyone assemble. I had evidence I needed them to see, carefully collated and presented evidence that I could only display to them from my station.

Claustrophobic and hot as it was, I was hoping for a full house. We were going to need solidarity, and the full political weight of a unanimous committee.

Randovy had a grim look. He sat in one of the mismatched chairs I'd collected from different offices and the small refectory up the corridor, but he couldn't sit still. As he fidgeted, another arrival entered the room - Jane Sledenski, our biomass origination and recycling expert. Even as Jane was finding a chair that suited her diminutive frame, Randovy stood up, unable to contain himself.

"I'm sorry," Randovy said to the room, "but before we hear whatever Hoang has to say -- " He nodded toward me. " - I think we need to discuss something. Hoang?" He turned my way. "Okay with you?"

We still had three more coming - I hoped - and I preferred to give my presentation to the full committee, or as many as I could gather. Hoping for the others to show up while he talked, I nodded and said, "Please, Randovy."

Randovy handed me a black flash drive. "This is from the monitor of last night's town hall meeting on orbital station eight," he said. "I was there to address concerns about metals, minerals, and gases acquisition. Before I had a chance to give my report, the meeting took up a proposal to sponsor a migration to the Mars colony rather than proceed with plans for the Lunar Four habitat. That's when... this happened."

I plugged the flash drive into the proper USB port and scrolled through the thumbnails on the video record time line.

"A little further," Randovy said. "A little further... there. Stop. Play."

I initiated playback at the point he'd indicated.

"...estimated four to six years," a woman I recognized as Thalia Denys was saying.

"Ladies and gentlemen, there's only one way to proceed, and this offload isn't it!" an angry male voice broke in. People looked around for the source of the outburst; a couple of gasps at his coarse language were audible over the thin, muffled audio. The man came into frame then. I recognized Leroy Paster.

"Not him again," Dagmar said loudly, her tone freighted with impatience.

"He was in fine form," Randovy said.

On the recording, Paster had launched into an invective-filled diatribe, which was nothing unusual for him. Over the past few months he had been disrupting meetings and work groups and even televised announcements to air his grievances and solicit support from other malcontents.

"What's he saying?" Jane asked. "What's he talking about?"

I toggled the volume and manipulated the bass and treble settings to try to enhance his voice without amplifying the recording's inherently shrill quality. "God punished us for our sins," Paster was declaring, "and God alone can save us - but only if we turn to Him and follow His word without question."

His words were lost in a blurry wash of sound - the people in the room shouting him down, booing at him.

"I have a right to speak!" Paster was screaming. "I have a right to be heard!"

Thalia spend the next several seconds getting the room back in order, then snapped at Paster, "You do not have the right to flout the law, Mr. Paster. You know the proscriptions on fraudulent speech."

"This is not fraudulence!" Paster shouted. "Sinners all! Will you not hear the words of the Lord? He smote our planet and scattered the survivors across a barren wild. He drew the sinful and their vices into a void, and with them he cast the garden that was Earth. He - "

Two men launched themselves at Paster at that moment. They tussled; the two men who had jumped him flailed as Paster, who was anchored to the floor thanks to his velour boots, used his leverage to shove them away. One after the other, they hurtled across the room, but the people in attendance easily caught them and got them reoriented before they could crash into the walls.

"If you let the unholy dwell among you, righteous is the Lord to bring you disaster!" Paster screamed. "The sexual deviants! The fornicators! The abortionists!" He turned toward Thalia with an accusing finger at this point.

"No one here advocates abortion," Thalia said, attempting to quell his mania with reason. She didn't succeed, of course.

"Trying to fund research into the re-construction of pharmaceutical prophylaxis?" Paster cried, spittle flying from his lips and forming globs that scattered in every direction. "Isn't that abortion?"

"Abortion happens after an ovum is fertilized." Thalia tried to respond.

"Semantics!" screamed Paster. "Fake speech! Sinfulness!"

More men now grasped him and tried to pull him from the room, but Paster had expertly laced his ankles through security straps located low on the wall. He twisted and shoved and sent the men flying. "While you try to murder our babies, the faggots are selfishly wasting their seed on each other for nothing but lust!" he continued. "The survival of the human race is at stake and you allow these perversions to continue? Sex fiends! Resource thieves! They take and take, they morally contaminate us, and what do they offer in return? Life? No! Pollution! Moral taint!"

"Okay," I said. I hit the pause icon and then the eject glyph. I yanked the flash drive out of the USB and handed it back to Randovy.

"I exercised government emergency power to have him arrested," Randovy said, "since the station's security didn't seem to want to. I think Paster might have a few converts among the constabulary. That in itself concerns me greatly."

"What do you intend to do with him?" Albert asked.

Randovy looked over at Albert. "Well, the general consensus being that in these post-Earth times we no longer have the luxury of rehabilitating anybody... or coddling criminals and misfits..." He shot a look at me. "I guess we have to kill him."

Jane gasped. Dagmar said, coolly, "That is the law."

"But all he was doing was - it really amounts to nothing more than theater," Jane protested.

"Political theater," Randovy said. "The worst kind. The most dangerous. You think we can sit back and allow the seeds of division - or rebellion, sedition, all those nice old Earth customs - you think we can afford to just let them germinate?"

"Do you suppose he's really that much of a danger?" Albert asked.

"Who's a danger?" a new voice asked. Everyone looked to the hatch, where Linus Stromgaard was entering the room.

"Paster again," Randovy said. "He was at a town hall meeting last night."

"I heard about that," Linus said. "How his followers fail to see the way he manipulates them is beyond me."

"You spend your entire life working some boring job in a hot, cramped space, with miserable rations and poor air, and you have few prospects for anything else," Randovy said, "and then here comes some blowhard to promises that through the force of his will he can magically improve your life... well, it's the same formula that brought our ancestors religion, which they happily slaughtered each other over. It took Europe to fascism in the mid-20th century, and even after the United States helped put out that fire, the United States itself fall to fascism less than a century later. It's like some people say," Randovy continued, with another meaningful look in my direction. "When you have too much material wealth - too much comfort, much of anything above subsistence level - people automatically shift priorities from survival to status. And to get status, they'll throw each other out the airlock."

"Or into the afterburner," nodded Dagmar.

"Isn't that what we're talking about doing to Paster?" Albert spoke up. "And why? Because he has an unpopular point of view? Have we stopped to think that perhaps he had a point? Our most precious resource is human life. Gays don't add to that."

"The hell we don't," snapped Linus. "Who helps look after the young, ensuring the survival of the next generation while not adding to the stresses on our life support systems? We do. People like my husband and myself. When Gundarssen and his wife were killed two years ago I didn't see the Bible crowd jumping up to take in their children. We did that."

"It would be wonderful to tout the message 'Go forth and multiply' if we had a whole planet where we could do it," Randovy jumped in before Jane could fire back. "But these aren't Earthdays. We haven't got a planet."

"We have Mars," Albert responded.

"We have a colony on Mars, and its life support systems are just as crucial to human survival there as they are here," Randovy bit back. "Mars isn't the planet we evolved to live on. Earth was our haven and our home. It's gone. Every breath of air, every drop of water we consume, we struggle to obtain and keep hold of. This is no time to engage in a fantasy about increasing our numbers. We simply can't sustain a larger population, not without adequate planning and preparation."

"Even in Earthdays the failure to plan properly for a growing population led to disastrous consequence," I added. "And not just in the late industrial phase, when resource exploitation and pollution combined with overpopulation to created massive turmoil. Population pressure was often a problem throughout human history. For example, before the advent of sophisticated agriculture, it was the case that human populated expanded geometrically while usable farmland increased in a linear fashion. That created a situation that guaranteed poverty for most people, with the result that there was extreme social inequity."

"The cream floats to the top," Albert muttered.

"That's Earthdays foolishness," Linus said to him sharply. "There's no room for that selfish mode of thinking."

"So you say, but isn't it selfish to tell common working people on the stations or on Mars that they can't have children, while Luna dwellers breed like rabbits?" Jane asked.

"That's a mischaracterization," Randovy said.

"Really? That's what it looks like to me," Jane said.

"Then you're not objective," Randovy told her. "Population is our most difficult problem. Yes, we need to grow our numbers. But no, we can't do it recklessly. People on the orbiting stations and on Mars have fewer children because they are more susceptible to genetic damage. Here in the Lunar strongholds, which are mostly underground, cosmic rays aren't as much of a challenge. Our government and our economy might be centered on the Moon but that's not the reason people here are granted permission to reproduce and people off-Luna are not."

"And isn't resource management a convenient excuse when it comes to keeping the total number of people down to a more easily controlled level?" Jane asked angrily.

Randovy refused to back down so much as a millimeter. "Resources are what they are," he said. "It would be foolish in the extreme to ignore the limits on what we can do. The numbers are supreme, and if we disregard them we perish. We can create and recycle oxygen and water for just so many individuals. We can feed only so many people, and no more."

"Maybe if we had more faith we'd have better results," Jane said.

"What do you base that on?" Randovy asked.

"Comfortable fictions," Dagmar said. "Delusions and magical thinking."

"The word of God!" Albert said, too loudly.

"The word of God won't conjure up extra air and water," Randovy told him.

"Maybe God would provide, if we showed we believed in His generosity," Jane protested. "And even if it's really only up to us, we can adapt. Where we feed two, maybe we could feed three."

It was ridiculous to see members of the committee on resource management abandoning the basics of priority this way. That was how deeply the rot had eaten into our collective intellect.

Time to re-state the obvious. "There's a lower limit to how much you can provide people and see them thrive," I said. "Population control has to be dictated by available resources."

"In that case," Jane flared, "who do you think we should send back?"

There was a moment of confused silence as those present tried to parse what she meant by this non sequitur.

Randovy broke the quiet. "You're treading awfully close to fake speech," he warned Jane.

"And you're telling us the truth?" Albert challenged him.

"Let's stick to the point. Even in Earthdays," Dagmar said drily, "we managed to overwhelm the planet's carrying capacity. There were more than eleven billion people on Earth when it was destroyed."

"Earth's destruction wasn't our fault," Albert said.

"Do we know that?" Dagmar challenged him. "We have no idea what happened."

"Of course we know what happened," Randovy said. "We just don't understand how it happened."

"Speaking of sticking to the point," I interjected. Everyone looked at me. "I appreciate the urgency of discussing Paster's outbursts and the destabilizing influence he's had..."

"Although it just might be the case that he's preaching the truth," Albert muttered.

I ignored him. "However, what happens to Paster as a result isn't up to us. It's up the council magistrates. We deal with resources."

"And you have a resources-intensive matter to discuss with us?" Dagmar asked.

I suppressed a smile at her imperfect English. The orbiting station she's grown up on had originally been put up by the European Union, where German was the international language. That was still the language spoken on that station.

The European Union, Japan, and Brazil had taken over development of space flight technology and solar system resources once America retreated from the world stage and collapsed on itself in a protracted spasm of partisan bickering. English had faded from the world stage and been replaced by Japanese as the default language of commerce. But because English remained the lingua franca among scientists for decades longer, it was still the most commonly held language when the catastrophe of Earth's destruction descended upon us.

"I have something to show you that I believe will profoundly affect how we advise the council to allocate resources for decades... maybe even generations... to come," I said.

***

I'd found opportunities over the years to slip each of the council members electronic copies of a book I'd be referencing in the meeting. I had originally recommended it for their reading pleasure, or touted it as relevant to their own fields of expertise. You're curious about the proposition that human consciousness is an essential ingredient to the cosmos? I've accessioned a book recently that touches upon that very subject...

You say you admire international action-adventure literature from the turn of the 21st century? Allow me to make a recommendation...

Cosmopaleontology is such an interesting field, up and coming in so many ways no one would have expected. You know, not long ago I came managed to repair and access an old e-reader that contained a previously unknown book you might find useful - it's fiction, but the science looks interesting...

I knew it was going to be an uphill battle convincing them, especially given that the germ of my theory had come to me via a work of fiction. I'd thought long and hard about planting the conceptual seed in their minds in a way that would yield their sober consideration, rather than their reflexive - and absolute - rejection.

The fact is that even before human beings lived in space, the genre of science fiction had a bad reputation. People thought it was for kids - even the serious, well-thought out and well-researched titles. That's probably why there's so little of it left from Earthdays. Now, post-Earth, much of what we've taken the time and trouble to preserve... or, more precisely, what I, as the one tasked with curating the resources of literature and history, have managed to preserve... falls into the category of well-regarded classics: The plays of Shakespeare, of course, and the works of Milton; the novels of Updike and Mailer and Bosch; the single surviving short story by Pancake; the epic poetry of Homer, and the epic memoir of Proust; even The Bible, which, if you haven't read it, is a mixture of tribal lore, genealogies, and poetry and, in my opinion, the closest thing aside from Sargent and Robinson we still have to science fiction. After all, come on: This is a book about a superior intelligence that speaks to primitive humanity from the sky.

Not everyone agrees with me, though. Albert and Jane are two examples of a fresh revival of the old superstitions. It shocks me profoundly that people living in an environment where the harsh realities of the cosmos... and an utter dependence upon, and familiarity with, technology and the laws of the sciences are indispensible factors for survival... there can still be such a thing as Biblical literalists, but they do exist and their influence is growing.

I know that in waning Earthdays there was a significant fraction of the total populace that believed The Bible's words were literally true (contradictions and scientific inaccuracies notwithstanding), but that, I feel, is a testament to the peace and plenty, the luxurious nature, of living on a planet. They had everything, in overwhelming abundance, those people; they had water, and air, and space to move around. They had other people, which - as Jane and Albert correctly insist - is our single greatest resource. They didn't have to surrender their sperm and their ova early in their lives for storage in heavily shielded areas of the various stations, the Mars colony, or in the Lunar vaults. They could form life-long attachments to whomever they pleased, and even have children with their chosen life partners. I'm not sure I could handle the terrors of living in wide-open spaces the way they did, but the idea of that much food and personal freedom does appeal to me.

It was out of a need to escape the confines of the station where I grew up that I started reading. Then, in order to unlock the books hidden away in the disused and outdated parts of the library system - and the personal devices used by the pioneering astronauts - I began to teach myself about computer sciences and electronic engineering. Even after graduating mandatory education at age 16 and beginning my career as a communications and analytics technician, I lobbied for permission to continue my literature restoration project. That's the fancy name I came up to justify the labor and the access to precious intact samples of original Earth technology. The resource management committee must have liked the name I gave my one-woman initiative because they gave me special dispensation to access whatever technology I liked, and to proceed with study, repair, and download of whatever I could scrounge off old devices.

The Lunar miners proved to be the biggest source of personal slates, tablets, readers, and Dataglas units. The shuttle pilots and research station crews had a lot of personal entertainment, but much of it was music or movies; a lot of it had also been garbled or destroyed over time, thanks to long exposure to cosmic rays and other forms of hard radiation. In the old days, living space in the shielded portions of the stations and orbital facilities was at such a premium that nonessential tech, spare parts, and other supplies were routinely relegated to low-shielded or no-shielded areas. That didn't make a lot of difference to the crates of clothing I had pawed through (trousers, tunics, blouses, and shirts made of smart synthetics, bound for the Moon and then never delivered in the heat of the emergency) but it was catastrophic for the delicate electronics of the MyQuads and USlates that were tossed in and forgotten.

I found the book while I was in the midst of identifying, downloading, and documenting the contents of personal devices that had been collected and boxed over the course of the years in the main complex of the Lunar mines. At first I didn't pay the book any special attention; it was, I thought, an international thriller. What I'd been able to recover of the book was missing the initial chapters. It was only when I happened across a backup copy - probably a pirated copy ripped by the original owner for the reading pleasure of a friend - that I was able to see how the book started.

And that was when the pieces started falling into place.

***

It was ninety-three years ago that the Earth shattered, melted, shrank into itself, and vanished. In its place - as discovered by the two service vehicles that tried to probe the emptiness where the planet once had been - was a black hole. At least, it certainly acted like a black hole; there was the clear demarcation of an event horizon beyond which nothing that approached could escape the gravity well. There was Hawking radiation, though not a lot. For a black hole, it was tiny, and that led to decades of debate. Was it really a black hole? Or could it have been some other phenomenon? Could the Earth have been in the path of some sort of wormhole, and been pulled through to some other place - in fragments - when the wormhole pierced the cosmic membrane and emerged into normal space-time? Maybe the black hole was the result of an experiment to create a wormhole and travel to other star systems? Or maybe it only looked like a black hole and was some other, more exotic phenomenon? One of our scientists, a Dr. Chong, had postulated that the Earth had vanished into what he called an "information negation zone," which - he insisted - would give every appearance of being a black hole, but which would have no singularity at the center of its event horizon's circumference.

The survivors had no time to engage in theorizing. The disappearance of our home planet left the orbital manufactories, the staging platforms for the asteroid belt missions, and the five under-manned, under-equipped orbital research stations in a desperate state. They weren't like the Lunar mines, which had been designed to be self-sufficient. Then there was the problem of orbital transfer flights and other space-hop travel; fifty-four thousand people on their way from one part of the planet to another, not to mention the tourists, guests shuttling to and from the five near-space hotels. Who knows how many flights and transfers happened to fall within the event horizon when the planet crumbled and the empty, inescapable gravity well took its place?

There had been hours - according to some accounts, as many as several days - of increasing signs that something was wrong. The Earth's magnetic field had weakened and become erratic; the poles had flipped several times in as many hours; severe lightning storms had scoured parts of the surface, and major earthquakes had become a constant. Communications had become unreliable between ground control, orbiting outposts and vehicles in between. Reading the old diaries of those who had witnessed the Earth's end, it seems that everyone was afraid, but no one knew of what; certainly, no one expected the entire planet to disappear.

For two decades afterwards, the numbers of the survivors plummeted thanks to equipment failure, lack of supplies, and multiple skirmishes as panicked human beings fought one another for scarce resources. The Lunar miners repelled attack after attack. One of the space stations was destroyed in an act of piracy that went too far; two of the space hotels were similarly lost, one of them deliberately destroyed by vigilantes claiming that pirates and free agents were operating from its premises. (It turned out they had bought into a fake news article being circulated by a radical capitalist group trying to generate fear and help implement strict social control.) The other, a swank facility called Stratus Hotel, was destroyed by panicked officials trying to contain a herpes outbreak; evidently, in Earthdays, herpes was a widespread, but harmless, affliction that only troubled its victims intermittently. The space-borne variety, however, was gruesome, crippling, and highly contagious. It swept through the hotel and threatened to spread to the other orbiting stations and eventually to the Lunar outposts; strict quarantine was the only avenue to control the outbreak. Security forces modified on old hunter-killer satellite as a last resort at containment, and when a desperate group attempted to leave the hotel in a small shuttle the satellite was deployed. The hotel had housed 1,100 people; there were no survivors. It was a controversial move and there were hearings conducted afterwards, but thanks to the horrific nature of the disease it didn't become a scandal at the time. (Nowdays, though, conspiracy theories ran rife, and those who subscribed to them had made the slogans "Remember Stratus Hotel" and "Stratus Martyrs" their catch phrases.)

Eventually a fragile equilibrium established itself, but the losses were beyond comprehension. Eleven billion people died when the Earth folded into nothingness; of the estimated fifty-seven thousand survivors of the initial incident, another thirty-two thousand died within the next few months, and then a few hundred each year until finally, twenty-four years after the Earth perished, the population held steady. Then the numbers started, slowly, to rise. Human ingenuity and persistence, combined with sheer necessity, brought solutions to the most pressing problems. New Lunar colonies were begun and plans drawn up for the colonization of Mars.

The first Martian colony was almost fifty years old when I was born. That's how long it took for anyone to think about collecting any surviving literature from the debris of our common civilization. My luck in getting approval - and an officially assigned position - to track down, retrieve, and preserve Earthdays literature had held out and I was able to parlay that into a spot on the resources committee, though over the objections of some - like Randovy - who viewed literature as disposable, rather than inherent and essential to our humanity. No, we wouldn't starve, desiccate, or suffocate if we didn't have literature. Not in a physical sense, at least. But in a mental sense? A moral sense? There's more to human life, more to being a human creature, than just eating and breathing. That had been my argument, and it had worked.

To justify my position, I had to create a working library, and make regular additions of recovered titles to its collection. I also posted monographs - two or three each month - to the SysNet. These works focused on the practical applications of what I was recovering in the literature project, ranging from reconstructing pharmaceutical formulae to rediscovering hi-tech physics work; I also wrote about Earthdays systems of law and jurisprudence. Randovy didn't like the conclusion I had come to in some of the legal and social monographs, but as a resource specialist he had not been able to argue with either my logic or my conclusions. He seemed to maintain an active resentment toward me for it, and one of his regular refrains was to question the validity of my post on the committee.

Apart from Randovy, there were still plenty of skeptics who questioned the utility of my work. The Biblical crowd presented a real and growing problem: They uniformly rejected the idea of literature as part and parcel not only of our heritage but our core humanity. This, despite all I had done to piece together every salvageable chapter and verse of both the Old and New Testaments, resorting sometimes (though I never told anyone this) to the Quran and the Book of Mormon to fill in some of the gaps.

All this meant that I had to introduce my newest findings and conclusions with great delicacy and care, acknowledging the source material while fixing attention firmly on the hard science: The probe readings, the computer models I'd created, the great void where Earth itself once hung. If I failed to make the proper impression, I'd be dismissed and possibly lose my post, and therefore my voice, with the committee. Literature and history would have no official champion if that happened, and I could predict how that would dovetail with the rise of the Biblical crowd. What then? Watch as our fragile civilization burst itself into unsustainable pieces, greedy Biblical literalists snatching up bits of our infrastructure for themselves as "chosen people," enslaving and executing those who were not similarly "chosen," and eventually - that eventuality not taking long to come about - exterminating all remaining human life as a result of their wild-eyed, self-centered madness.

I truly believed the future of all humanity was at stake, and it galled me no end that the Achilles Heel of my argument was that its central thesis also happened to be part of an old science fiction novel.

***

"Wait," Randovy said, before I had uttered more than three sentences. "This is from that book you recommended, isn't it? What was that called - 'The Singularity?' "

Goddamn him, I thought. Aloud I said, "The title is just 'Singularity.' No definite article." I tried to keep my tone of voice neutral, but I could hear brittleness in my words, and feel it on my face as I strove to maintain an open and sober expression.

"I think I've heard enough," Randovy said.

"I have not," Dagmar said sharply. Bless her!

"Please," Albert drawled. "Let her go on. Give her all the rope she needs to hang herself."

"I think we should listen to her without prejudice," Jane said, surprising me. "This is a matter of science, isn't it? We're supposed to approach our responsibilities objectively and with regard to the realities of any given situation."

"But a science fiction book?" Randovy asked, incredulous.

Linus spoke up then. "One of the books Ms. Hoang has recovered for us was written in 1865 by a man called Jules Verne. Its title? "From the Earth to the Moon." In his day, no one would have given any credibility to the idea of people living on the Moon, and yet here we've been - for generations. And," Linus said, his voice rising as Albert tried to interject, "may I also note the fact that if the United States had not turned its back on science - and labeled the marvels that other nations began to invent as 'fake news' - we might have had a more extensive Lunar and orbital infrastructure to fall back on when the planet disappeared."

Everyone, even Albert, seemed mollified by this.

"Okay," Randovy sighed, gesturing. "Go ahead, then, Hoang."

"Thanks for you kind permission, which - if I may point it out - I don't actually need," I said, no longer caring how brittle I sounded.

I'd lost my place, so I simply started over with my presentation.

"In 1908, a mysterious object stuck the Tunguska province of Russia," I said, recapping and condensing my earlier remarks. "Despite widespread destruction, there was no impact crater. The most likely explanation seemed to be a comet made of water ice, or perhaps ammonia ice, had entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded before hitting the surface. In any case, the event unleashed more energy than an early nuclear weapon."

I'd found an image of a flattened forest from the site. I projected that image on the small screen.

Most of the committee members studied the screen intently. "Could be fake," muttered Albert. "The whole story could be fake."

"I've seen it referenced in several books," Dagmar said.

"Books dug up and accessioned by her," Albert snapped, pointing at me accusingly. "Who knows what she's simply made up?"

"Nein," Dagmar said. "Not the books I grew up with, she didn't. Written in German. With this picture, that I have seen also before."

"Yes, I probably got this image from the book you're talking about," I told her. "But that's not really the point. What I'm trying to say is - "

"If I remember the plot of the book in question," Randovy cut in, "a small black hole collides with the Earth, causing the Tunguska event but leaving no impact crater - because despite the enormous energies involved, the size of the impact itself is no bigger than an atom. Then the singularity spends a century orbiting the planet's center of gravity, submerged inside the planet's mantle. Because it's so small, the singularity passes through solid rock as though traveling through air. It takes a long time for the singularity to slow down, because its minute size results in very little friction as it passes through the rock, and its great speed of travel takes a long time to decrease to the point that the singularity succumbs to the Earth's gravity and sinks to the planet's core. But once that happens, the singularity begins pulling in mass, and the more it grows the faster it pulls mass to itself - until it quite literally swallows the entire Earth."

"Yes," I said, "but that's not how the book turns out."

"I didn't read the whole thing," Randovy said. "Once I got the idea, I had other things to get back to."

"In the book, the heroes pull the singularity out of the Earth's crust, before it can sink lower," Albert said in a disdainful voice.

"Actually," Dagmar corrected him, "the Russians do that. They capture the singularity and keep it in a magnetic field for their own purposes. An American becomes involved, and he secures the singularity."

"What has all this to do with resource allocation?" Randovy asked.

"I'm getting to that." I selected a new icon and brought up the rest of my presentation. "The Far Worlds probes have discovered that Sedna - a dwarf planet in the Oort Cloud, at the solar system's periphery - is not actually a naturally occurring body at all, but rather an alien artifact."

Arnold snorted.

"If not alien," I asked him sweetly, "then where did it come from?"

"It's a total fabrication," Albert said dismissively. "The whole thing."

"For what reason would the governing council make up a story about Sedna being an artificial construct of gigantic size?" Dagmar asked him, sounding both icy and acidic. Dagmar had never concealed her contempt for Albert; more than once she'd called him an idiot in front of the whole committee.

"Sedna is artificial, made of non-natural alloys and polysilicates," Randovy said, as though his word should settle the matter. It wasn't that I disagreed with him - it was true; we'd all seen the same data; but his attitude rubbed me the wrong way.

"Now, I know that the story in 'Singularity' is fiction," I said. "But the author, Bill DeSmedt, offers a scientifically plausible hypothesis to back up his story. In a quite detailed introduction to the book, he documents a number of associated phenomena, including a French astronomer picking up unexplained radio waves in the weeks before the Tunguska impact. Extrapolating from what DeSmedt says, plus the taking information from the astronomical database - which can be verified from multiple sources, since all the spacecraft and orbiting facilities have been using that database since Earthdays - I have created this model of the solar system."

The animation I had created appeared on the screen, replete with colored dots (planets, comets, asteroids) following colored paths around an icon that stood in for the sun. A bright red dot represented Sedna. "Now look," I said. "If Sedna was essentially a great gun, loaded with a singularity... and if that gun was triggered by something, some observation or emanation concerning Earth and its level of technical progress..." A smaller red dot emerged from Sedna, then sped across the solar system, zipping past the orbital paths of Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter, and then crossing the asteroid belt into the inner solar system. "Here's where the French astronomer began picking up radio waves," I said, as the small red dot started to radiate thin, curved lines rendered in white. "And here..." The blue dot representing Earth swung into the red dot's path; the two dots merged.

"Tunguska," Linus said.

"Yes. And almost two centuries later, the Earth disappears, swallowed by a black hole that's come to rest in its core."

"The black hole theory has long been accepted as the most probable hypothesis," Randovy said. "But why claim that any artifice was behind it? Why not simply accept that it was a random, naturally occurring encounter?"

"I did, until the readings from the Far Worlds probe came in," I said. "And when I realized Sedna was an artificial construct - hollow, engineered, with what look to be enormous energy facilities and huge storage bays - I started to wonder what its design could mean, and why it was stationed at the edge of our solar system. On a hunch, I designed and then ran the simulation I just showed you. Sedna's orbit and position; Earth's orbit and position; the speed of the incoming singularity, as indicated by the French astronomer's readings; they all line up. They paint a vivid and convincing picture showing that the Earth was targeted for destruction."

"Sedna's an alien weapon?" Jane asked.

"I believe so," I told her. "A weapon 1,000 kilometers in diameter, orbiting the Sun every 11,400 years in a highly elliptical orbit. It's a convincing replica of a dwarf planet, camouflaged - by design or as a result of a long residency at the edge of the solar system - with an icy, tholin-coated surface that made it look like just another transneptunian object. But that fa�ade fell away when our probes scanned it with radar, thermal, and X-ray sensors."

"But why? Why use it against us?"

"To find that out, we'd need to go find the aliens who destroyed our planet," I said. "Something that would not have been possible before now. But I trust you all read the reports recently sent over by Dr. Hsu at the Martian colony's spaceflight research facility?"

Randovy, of all people, was nodding his head.

Albert was not. "More fakery," he said. "Designed to keep us looking in the wrong places. Meant to convince us to draw crucial resources away from new habitat construction and Martian terraforming efforts."

"For Christ's sake, why?" cried Dagmar in exasperation. "Why would anyone want to perpetrate such elaborate lies?"

"To keep us fooled. To keep us controlled," Albert said.

Albert was alone in his convictions.

"Faster than light travel opens up a new search for a habitable planet in a different solar system," Randovy addressed me. "But you're suggesting we divert any colony effort to an attempt to find the aliens who targeted and destroyed the Earth?"

"There's no reason we can't do both at once," Linus interjected. "And because the galaxy is such a large place, and we don't know where to start looking for the alien aggressors, we might want to move forward with multiple colony efforts. That covers more space - and it also helps us spread out more quickly, increases our chances of finding a new home world, and - not incidentally," he smiled at Jane, "it means we have a better chance of increasing our numbers in less time."

"We don't know where to look for the aliens," I said, "but I think I know where we can start, if we want to search for clues to their identity and location."

"Sedna," Randovy said.

"We know what it's made of. That's a start. Its specific mineral content could give us an idea of what kind of star system it originated in. And what about its fuel and propulsion, if any? That could indicate its range."

"Sedna could have been built here," Linus said, sounding deep in thought. "Or, it could have towed here by another alien craft..."

"Examining its material composition will help clear up the question of where it was created, assuming its builders sourced their construction materials locally," Randovy said.

"Or it could have been launched as a rover," Jane said. "As an independent, self-guided mechanism. An AI. What if its purpose was to survey likely habitable systems, go check them out, and if it spotted planets with intelligent life, take steps to eradicate them? It could have been wandering out there for millions of years, wiping out planets along the way."

We all looked at her. "Then why is it still here?" Randovy asked.

"Maybe the singularity that killed Earth was its last bullet," Jane said. "Didn't you say it had huge storage bays? Plural?"

"Empty spaces that certainly look like storage bays," I said. "But we need more readings to know for certain."

"Not just readings," Randovy said. "We need to go there. We need a manned mission to get inside that thing and investigate. It seems dead - no detectable energy emissions - but what if it's in standby mode? What if it does have an AI... and what if we can tap into whatever it uses as a computer system, extract data? The whole story might be right there."

"Either way," I suggested, "whether we find the answers at Sedna or have to go looking for them, the eventual objective would be to ensure the perpetrators can't come back to do us even greater harm."

"But Sedna could be thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of years old!" exclaimed Dagmar. "What we can do against such advanced race as built that?"

"If they're even still around," Jane said. "They might have died out. Someone might have beaten us to the punch - some other species they didn't quite extinguish."

"This room is full of questions," Linus said. "But the only answers we're going to find are out there."

Albert remained conspicuously silent, though I noted with satisfaction that his complexion had gotten a couple shades paler. Belief, indeed - he knew fact from fiction. He was just using superstition and people's willingness to believe as weapons against them, probably for his own benefit. Now that we'd come up with a pretty solid case for hostile aliens having taken our home planet from us - and raised the possibility that those same aliens might be back to finish the job - his cries of Supernatural Wolf had subsided. There was a real wolf out there in the stars, and once the people found out about it there'd be no stopping popular and political will. Dr. Hao would have what he needed to construct at least one superluminal ship, maybe a fleet of them.

And our first visit - because overall it would save us time - would be Sedna.

I distributed flash drives with all the data I had assembled, plus my animated presentation. Everyone filed out, Dagmar promising to track down the committee members who had not attended and show them the presentation ASAP. Jane replied that she was wasting no time in drafting her recommendation that the superluminal project be fast-tracked. "But what we really need is the energy resources chair to weigh in - sooner rather than later," she added, looking over her shoulder at Randovy.

"Yeah, you'll have that, don't worry," Randovy said, waving at her. He hung back as the others departed. "Well done," he said.

"I was surprised that you came around so quickly," I said.

"I'm not stupid," he said. "And I'm not your enemy. And as for our personal past, I don't hold grudges."

"You could have fooled me," I said.

He waved that off. "Things are different now. We can't ignore the theory you've put together - even if it did come from a science fiction adventure story."

"You love science fiction," I reminded him.

"Not something I want the others to find out," he cautioned, "so keep that to yourself." He turned to go, then hesitated. "But I do have to wonder... this theory, do you really believe it? Or is it something you cooked up because you're worried about the emerging divisions among the people?"

"The facts are the facts," I said. "False witness and fake news are, as they say, anti-human. That said, the data that confirms my theory couldn't be better timed. Divisions are inevitable, once people no longer need each other in immediate and indisputable ways for their own survival."

"You have a one-track mind," he said.

"You just don't like the conclusions my historical monographs tend to arrive at," I said. "We still do need each other, but life is getting a little better, bit by bit. And that can lead to certain kinds of blindness - and certain strains of ambition that our fragile community cannot withstand."

"So this is, at least in part, a means to restore unity," Randovy said.

"Only in part," I said.

Randovy shook his head and sighed. "There's nothing like an enemy to draw the people together and get everyone working toward a common goal," he said.

"You don't need to look at me that way when you say it," I told him. "Look at Paster. Look at how he's demonizing gay people. Making them the enemy. Casting them in vague, unanswerable terms -- as takers of resources; as corrupters of some invisible, impalpable idea of virtue."

"Point taken," Randovy said.

"Well, there is one thing that works better than the threat of a common enemy," I said, arresting him again as he started into the corridor.

A smile came over his face. "Love?" he asked, half joking, and - I thought - half in hope.

I hated to, but I spoiled the moment. "Revenge," I said.

With thanks to Bill DeSmedt