Armada (Page 48)
I cleared my throat loudly, and he pulled off his goggles and headphones.
I held up his flash drive. He nodded and stood up. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the nearest security camera before turning back at me.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I know a place we can talk in private.”
MY FATHER LED me through a maze of dimly lit corridors, then onto a turbo elevator. It whisked us upward, to the base’s top level, and the doors opened onto the observation deck. I now noticed that the transparent dome overhead was the exact same size as the domed ceiling down in the Thunderdome, and it offered the same exact view. I glanced around until I located the camera array suspended from the dome’s armored frame, which captured the 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape in high-definition and projected it onto the Thunderdome’s concrete ceiling, deep beneath the moon’s rocky mantle.
Without pausing to admire the view, my father crossed to the other side of the observation deck, to another elevator door. Unlike the other doors on the base, this one failed to open automatically when he approached it. Instead he flipped open a panel beside it to reveal a numeric keypad and punched in a long code from memory. The doors swished opened and we stepped inside. There was a single button, with a down arrow on it that lit up when my father pressed it. The elevator carried us downward, dropping us so fast I thought my feet might lift up off the floor for a moment. When the car opened, we stepped out into a narrow service tunnel lined with wires and metal tubing. I followed my father down its length, nearly sprinting to keep up. It was a very long tunnel, with a steep downward grade.
When we finally reached the other end, my father opened a circular hatch in the ceiling with yet another security code. After a short climb up a metal ladder, we emerged into a large, circular room with a clear domed ceiling. It provided a stunning view of the surrounding crater and of the armored sphere that was Moon Base Alpha, visible off to our right—a giant armored orb nestled into the adjacent goblet-shaped crater high above us, just beyond the lip of the larger bowl-shaped Daedalus crater in which we now stood.
“Welcome to Daedalus Observatory,” my father said. “Sorry about all the dust and trash—the cleaning drones never come down here, obviously. They closed the observatory down over two decades ago and made the whole place off limits.”
I spent a moment gazing out at the barren lunar surface, which stretched to the black horizon in all directions. The sight suddenly drove home the fantastic isolation of the place. It was no wonder my father and his friends behaved a bit strangely. The years of solitude they’d had to endure up here probably would have driven a lot of people nuts.
“You said this place was off limits?”
“It was,” he said. “It is. But I figured out how to get the power and life-support systems in here back online without alerting anyone back on Earth. And I left all of the hidden microphones and cameras in here disabled, so this is one of the few places in the entire base where the EDA can’t monitor or record me.”
He leaned toward a small microphone stalk protruding from a nearby security console and then spoke loudly into it.
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” he recited. “I said, please open the pod bay doors, HAL.” He grinned at me. “See? Sweet, sweet privacy.”
“Right, we wouldn’t want the Cigarette Smoking Man to eavesdrop on us,” I muttered. But he ignored the remark.
“Here,” he said, reaching over to flip a bank of switches, flooding the dim space with flickering fluorescent light. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
The other side of the control room was a chaotic, cluttered mess. Handwritten notes, diagrams, drawings, and computer printouts were taped up everywhere and stacked on every available surface. It looked like the lair of a homicide detective on some TV show—one who had spent decades tracking a serial killer no one else believed existed.
I crossed the room and walked through the paper jungle my father had created, studying his notes and printouts.
“I know how all this stuff must look,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “Like Russell Crowe’s garage in A Beautiful Mind, right?”
“I was thinking it looked more like a supervillain’s lair,” I said. I started punching random buttons on the console in front of me. “Which one of these is the self-destruct?”
“The first one you pressed, actually,” he said, pointing to an unlabeled red button.
I believed him for a split second—long enough for my eyes to widen in panic.
“Yes!” he said, grinning. “Got you, kid.”
“Fine, you got me,” I said. “You did all this yourself?”
He nodded. “I’ve never shared any of this with either Shin or Graham,” he said. “Shin wouldn’t take any of it seriously,” he said. “And Graham—well, Graham doesn’t have a very skeptical way of thinking, and I wanted to approach this scientifically.” He locked eyes with me. “But from what you said up in the mess hall before, I was sure you didn’t want to hear any of this?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been asking myself the same questions you and Graham mentioned. I just … didn’t think learning the answers could make any difference now.” I locked eyes with him. “Tell me,” I said.
He nodded and took a deep breath.
“You know who Finn Arbogast is,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.
“The fake founder of Chaos Terrain?” I said, recalling my brief meeting with the man that morning at Crystal Palace—a lifetime ago. “What about him?”
“I was his primary military consultant when he and the Chaos Terrain team were developing Terra Firma and Armada, as well as all of the early mission packs,” he said, and I thought I detected a tinge of pride in his voice. “I always dreamed of making videogames for a living when I grew up, so you can imagine how I felt when I got the chance to help design the videogames that might save the world.
“Arbogast and I collaborated for several months. Not in person, but we videoconferenced several times a week. It was his job to create the videogames that would train the world’s population how to fight off the Europans. So his training simulations had to be able to simulate their ships, weapons, maneuvers, and tactics—all with a very high degree of accuracy. To accomplish that, they gave Arbogast unrestricted access to all of the EDA’s data on the Europans—everything we’d learned about them since we made first contact.”
He sighed heavily. “And I managed to access some of that classified data.”
“How?” I asked. “When you were stuck up here and he was back on Earth?”
“He linked his computer network to ours,” my father said. “So that he could share new builds of Terra Firma and Armada with us as soon as they were ready for testing. That allowed me to gain access to his research files on the Europans—which contained a lot of the top-secret data about our interactions with them over the years … and everything I learned from them confirmed the theory I’d already been forming for almost a decade.”
I nodded, trying to hide how nervous he was making me.
“Lay it on me,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Here goes.” He took a deep breath.
“Ever since we made first contact with them, the aliens have been intercepting our movies and television broadcasts. Then they edit clips from them together and transmit them back to us, once a year, just prior to the Jovian Opposition,” he told me. “But only a handful of people have ever been allowed to see the transmissions.” He motioned to the screen. “Now I need you to see them, too.”
A barrage of these alien-edited video clips began to appear on the screen—and every last one of them depicted some form of human conflict. I glimpsed a lot of World War II newsreel footage, intercut with photos and video of the dozens of other large-scale military conflicts that had occurred in the following decades. But these images of real-life war were intercut with scenes from a lot of old war movies and television series. It almost seemed as if the Europans were unable to differentiate between reality and fiction. Either that, or they were intercutting the two on purpose, in an effort to make some kind of point.
Even weirder—I also began to spot brief scenes taken from dozens of science fiction films—all of them featuring hostile alien invaders of some kind. In the space of just a few seconds, I spotted shots from various films in the Trek and Wars franchises, mixed with shots from the various versions of War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, V, and even—God help us—Battlefield Earth. Nothing from the friendly alien movie genre, though. Not so much a single glimpse of E.T., Starman, Earth to Echo, or ALF.
“Look at these transmissions,” he said as the barrage of clips continued to flash on the screen, showing a grotesque menagerie of extraterrestrial invaders plucked from the entire history of science fiction films—Aliens, Predators, Triffids, Transformers—you name it.
“These images, and the way in which they’re arranged—I think it’s some kind of a message, Son,” he said. “An intentionally cryptic one. It’s like—like they’re holding up a mirror, so that we can see ourselves from their perspective.”