Wednesday, January 13, 2021

"Birthday Present" - a short story by Adam Carlton


I don’t take much interest in birthdays. Just another arbitrary date, I tell myself.

Although I’m equally sure that human life is barely imaginable without ritual.

When I entered the living room she was already up.

“Happy Birthday!” she said.

I uttered some low-key thank you and then she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get you a card. I didn’t really have an opportunity to go out by myself.”

Believe me, I contain my disappointment, as I leave for a meeting at the church.


I return in the early afternoon, calling out a welcome, but there’s no reply. Curious, I wander through the house looking for her.

Our bedroom is bathed in that colourful, pastel light of low winter sun, which streams through the large window. On the bed, in bright illumination, is a large wrapped present, about 160 cm long, curved and creased in its wrapping. I move across to inspect it: and find a festive label addressed to me.

Happy Birthday,” it says.


I stop and consider.

“This must be that humanoid robot I’ve always wanted,” I say aloud.

“Just think: from now on it will do all the housework, cook wonderful meals, fill the washing machine, empty the tumble dryer, do the ironing, hoover the carpets.”

The parcel, formerly so still, now seems to be shaking slightly, wheezing and trembling.

“What a wonderful present!" I say, "I wonder who could have given it to me?”

I advance towards the bed and begin near the label in the middle, shredding the paper with my fingernails. Through the gaps I see something decidedly not manufactured.

I continue ripping paper, advancing towards the head of the bed. I unveil a discreet pink bow around her neck, the embodiment of pet-kitsch, followed by her face, framed by long, flowing hair.

“I’m not going to do any of those things,” she murmurs.

I rub my chin, considering...

“Seems like I’ve got a pretty useless birthday present then, huh? Pretty much good for nothing.”

Our eyes meet for a timeless moment. 

She says: Unwrap the rest of me... and you might just change your mind.


Tuesday, January 12, 2021

"Mock Recall" - a short story by Adam Carlton

 


Mock Recall

It is summer, a sunny afternoon in this remote village in the deep Ardèche.

We walk together, just the two of us. No-one else around. The sun, high in this dark blue sky, pours forth its torrents of heat. It's so hot.

We pass by the village school. “Remember,” I say, “when you were fourteen? How I used to offer to carry your books home for you?”

I had a satchel,” she scoffs.

“And when I thought no-one was looking, I'd take your hand; we'd shyly walk hand in hand?”

The school would never have permitted us to do that in the street,” she says primly, squeezing my fingers.

The French have this utopian delusion of la France profonde - all pretty villages and delightfully-inefficient small farms. Economic reality, however, is this: this dilapidated main street with its small, decrepit park.

We sit on the ancient, sun-blasted wood of the bench.  On the other side of the road is a small games-pitch of scraggy. dried-up grass: intermingled tufts and bald patches. On the far side, deserted swings and a seesaw.

The silence is immense: everything bakes.

I say, “Even in those days I thought your skirt was remarkably short.”

Like now, I think.

“I looked at those few centimetres of gray pleat and wondered what your teachers thought; how you managed to defy your mother's iron will."

It wasn't short,” she says.

“Sometimes we used to sit together, at the back of the class,” I say. “Remember those ancient Greek lessons: ‘The Iliad’? Dr Thompson was pretty scary, wasn’t he? The way his eye would rove around the desks, looking for the next victim to pick up the passage, standing up to read aloud from the page, translating from Greek into French in real time. How we’d sit quaking, hoping his eye would not catch ours!”

She doesn’t react. Perhaps she doesn’t know where this is going. Or perhaps she does.

“So much relief when someone else was called out. Driven by unbearable anxiety and tension, I’d put my hand on your knee - under the table, out of sight - running the palm of my hand up the curve of your leg. Knowing you'd not dare make a scene; hoping you’d put your little hand on mine. What mysteries, I thought as my hand encountered the hem of your skirt, would I encounter next?”

“You never did any of that. We never sat together. I did not study Greek.”

“In my first technical job - I was a programmer in a small accountancy company - the marketing director was a handsome, boyish thirty-something guy with fashionably long black hair. He had such confidence and charisma, and his girlfriend was his young PA. She was exquisitely fashionable, dressed impeccably, with stunning good looks. What a couple they made! I remember being sat next to her at the Christmas dinner (he was opposite her) when he was called away for an unexpected phone call.

“The PA excused herself and went to the ladies room. When she got back she smiled at me and said by way of explanation, “I’ve got a surprise for him,” And she opened her hand to show me her rolled-up underwear.”

"You're making that up," she says, "In a pathetic attempt to..."

"No I'm not," I say, "That actually happened; it really happened."

I extend my arm slightly and push my palm between her knees - which part slightly. No overt reaction but suddenly my hand has been tightly gripped.

Locked in position.

Nowhere to go.

Our car is close. What a joy to get back into the air-con! We both drink from the water bottles we’d brought along in the cool-bag. On the drive back I ask her whether she thinks it’s true that men and women have quite different attitudes to sexual exhibitionism.

“When I read the English novelist John Fowles’s notebooks, I was struck by one passage where he describes a walk with his wife Elizabeth - in the woods surrounding Lyme Regis, where he had made his home.

“He wrote that the two of them were overcome with desire for each other, and they went off the path to find a shady nook, where they made passionate, languorous love.

“I think that only happened once, although I am sure that if it had been up to John Fowles that would have been the outcome of every walk. Yet women seem curiously reluctant.

“In fact, as we’re driving now I can’t help but recall how, in very similar countryside, we were once returning from your parents. I had my hand on your thigh and you were quite responsive. We were looking and looking and then we pulled over in a forested lay-by, we got out and there - just a few metres inside the treeline - was a perfect, isolated spot. Do you remember - as I do - all the details of what we both did next?”

We pull up at our hotel, park and scamper across the baking tarmac into the air-conditioned reception area.

None of those things ever happened,” she says fiercely, “We didn’t even meet until university!

I smile at her mockingly, “And then I recall…”

Shut up!” she says, turning on her heel. 

I’m going up to our room now to lie down!

She takes a few paces, then stops and turns with a look of mock puzzlement, mock recall,

You coming?

Monday, January 11, 2021

Arguing Catholicism with a Secular Atheist

Claude reflecting on his argument

---

I wrote recently about my first meeting with Claude at a café adjacent to the Left Bank. To my great surprise Claude had made the transition from being an active member of the Parti communiste français to becoming an active member of his local Catholic church.

-


-

Just a few days ago I’d been selling the paper, Lutte ouvrière, at the métro station and was in need of a rest. I found myself back at that same café and there he was again, reading his paper and generally relaxing.

“What,” I asked Claude, joining him at a table in the back, “is up?”

He told me he’d recently been visited by his brother-in-law, André, also a leftist, and a staunch atheist. Claude had persuaded André to accompany him to Mass, and afterward - once the congregation had left - they had had a spirited conversation in the nave. The parish priest, a learned man, had been meditating quietly near the altar but had plainly also been keeping half an ear on their conversation.

“So how did it go?” I asked.

Well, said Claude, André is a well-liked member of our extended family. He's a middle-aged man, successful in life, with a family. He considers himself rational, secular, utilitarian and sensible. He has no patience with fluffy superstition, in which category he includes Catholicism. He's proud to be an atheist and cannot imagine that anyone with half a brain could disagree with his position that all this God talk is nonsense.

His arguments against Catholicism are many, Claude continued. He doesn't see how anyone could believe in the “Sky Fairy” - as he calls God; he thinks the Bible is a self-contradictory mess of primitive, often bloodthirsty beliefs; he thinks dogmas like the Virgin Birth and Resurrection are utterly implausible and beyond stupid; he thinks heaven and hell are childish delusions - wish-fulfillment fantasies; he thinks going to church and attending Mass are a waste of time, just a demeaning superstitious prostration in front of a non-existent feudal-style lord who anyway can't hear the pointless and supine praises heaped upon him.

He can't understand why so many of our family are in fact practising Catholics.

“Well,” I said, “That’s quite a mouthful. And all at once as well. I imagine that got the priest’s attention!”

Claude replied that he had calmly pointed out to his brother-in-law that dogma and theological foundations were not the reasons he joined the Catholic Church. Like JD Vance, another recent convert to Catholicism, he believed Catholicism represented an organisation of like-minded people who stood up for communitarian and high-ethical standards. In this age of atomisation and nihilism, that was a battle worth joining. 

“Good points,” I agreed. “Did your brother-in-law see that dogma was, perhaps, not the central concern here?”

Claude’s expression of distaste suggested the contrary. He told me he would reconstruct the conversation as it had unfolded. It went like this, he said.


André: Let me be blunt with you. How can anyone with half a brain believe in the “Sky Fairy”? An invisible God up there, doing his invisible thing. It’s obviously ridiculous.  

Claude: OK, well thanks for laying it on so honestly! Let me start by suggesting that the concept of God you’re rejecting is one many Catholics don’t accept either. 

Think of God not as some supernatural person up in the sky but as that part of reality we engage with when we consider: why we exist; what it means to be a person with choices; and what we should do with our lives. Values not facts.

The term “God” gives concrete framing to such profound questions. It may help some people to have a personified authority figure in their minds, but you can go deeper than that. In particular, theologians do not personify God in the (pejorative) way you describe - God is described as ‘mysterious’.  

André: So you’re just redefining God to avoid embarrassment?  

Claude: Look, we should put ontology to one side - the question of the kind of existence God might have. More importantly, without some anchor of absolute meaning it’s hard to avoid a collapse into nihilism and selfish hedonism. Religions provide a framework for community, for the practice of normative ethics and for resisting less pleasant social behaviours. Human beings being what they are, Church cohesion is best served by a transcendent leadership with a rich cultural backstory.  

André: Let’s move on. The Bible - you’ve called it ‘human wrestling with deep questions’; I call it a mess. It’s self-contradictory, outdated, full of barbarism. Why should anyone care about it today, let alone read it?  

Claude: The Bible absolutely contains contradictions and harsh passages. It’s a library of texts written and honed over centuries by people with different perspectives, trying to understand life and morality, and to define themselves.  

The Bible and Catholic Liturgy invites us into a conversation, not blind obedience; process rather than absolutely fixed outcomes. We need to engage it critically and ethically, just as those who wrote it over the centuries did. We know more today than those early writers - standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say. 

André: And what about the dogmas? Virgin births, resurrections: preposterous.  

Claude: These claims were certainly unusual in both Roman pagan and Jewish cultures of the time. But the Biblical texts we have are better understood as works of theological argument than of historical documentation. Jesus was crucified but the movement continued. Jesus’s status was debated and magnified in the years following his death, a reframing partially derived via exegesis from the Jewish scriptures, but given a very concrete form.

The Virgin Birth attempts to ground the narrative of Jesus’s dual nature: human and divine. It is a theological concept, not historical.  

As for the Resurrection, St. Paul best explains the theological centrality of this belief. Jesus, the movement's leader was executed in the midst of expectations of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven - which at the time meant the liberation of the Jewish people from the Empire. His personal resurrection was the key belief that kept the movement going in those dark times. Again, the concept was derived from exegesis, but presented as a historical parable. 

André: You’re dodging. These stories were presented as literal facts. If they’re not true, what’s left of Christianity?  

Claude: Historical literalism is a modern obsession; that's not how ancient people understood these stories. What matters isn’t whether every event happened exactly as described but whether the stories reveal enduring truths. Christianity doesn’t have to be about accepting tabloid-style ‘astonishing miracles’ - it’s about how we live: within individuals, communities, and societies. The parable-forms help many people internalise these rather abstract notions. 

André: Heaven and hell—childish delusions. Eternal reward for the good, fire and brimstone for the bad. Pretty primitive, isn’t it?  

Claude: Again, concrete but symbolic expressions of deep questions. The real questions are these: how should we live our lives - to what purpose? How do we create and maintain our communities? Jesus wasn’t preoccupied with an elsewhere afterlife. He spoke about “the Kingdom of God”: a vision for human society rooted in fairness and love happening right there in Israel.  

Early Christians used images like heaven and hell to dramatize this vision. They weren’t writing travel brochures for the afterlife but urging us to act correctly here and now.  

André: And yet millions of Catholics spend their Sundays kneeling in church, mumbling obsequious praises to an unhearing deity. It’s quite degrading.  

Claude: I see how it might look that way, André. But consider this: people are creatures of ritual. We need spaces to reflect, connect, and renew our sense of common purpose. For Catholics, Mass is that space.  

Think of the Eucharist. At its heart, it’s not about appeasing a “feudal lord” but about solidarity. Bread and wine symbolize sharing and community - a counter to division and scarcity, atomisation and alienation. It's rather beautiful.  

André: Solidarity? Come off it. The Church is a global power with a terrible track record - support for wars, so-called holy inquisitions, endless abuse scandals. How can you defend an institution so corrupt, so uninterested in reform?  

Claude: The Church has done terrible things. But it’s also been a force for immense good - building hospitals, schools, and advocating for the poor. And it’s a place where people can express their highest ethical choices. The contradiction reflects human nature: it’s built by people who are what they are.  

Catholicism is at its best when it remembers Jesus’s radical call to community and high ethical standards. At its worst, it becomes an institution that protects its own power - an arrogant clericalism. The challenge isn’t to abandon it but to hold it accountable and insist it lives up to its own ideals. Don’t conflate the message with the institution.

André: Isn’t life simpler without these childish stories, rituals, and institutions?

Claude: Life may seem simpler without them, André, but is it richer? People need meaning as much as they need food and water. Stories, symbols, and communities help us make sense of existence, illuminating our desires to live in the right way.  

Religion, at its core, is a way of organizing hope. It’s not about escapism; it’s about confronting reality - suffering, death, injustice - within a framework - processes, if you like - of courage and compassion, and building communities around high moral principles.  

Catholicism isn’t the straw man you described earlier. It’s a complex tradition, deeply flawed yet deeply human, rooted in the search for meaning and for managing our journey through life in the best way.


“And André agreed?” I asked him.

“Of course not, and then things got worse. The priest, noticing we had come to a standstill, called me across. André took the opportunity to get some fresh air, saying he’d see me outside.”

I thought this sounded ominous.

“Oh oh, so what did your priest have to say?”

“I said he was a very learned man," Claude replied, "and his expression was somewhere between concerned and amused. He said that surely I was aware that the Magisterium would insist on the historical realities of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the dual nature of Christ, and that the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) reflects the real unity of truly-existent divine persons.”

“What’s the Magisterium?”

“It’s the Pope and Bishops in their role of defining the teachings of the Church.”

“So you’re a heretic?”

“I said to the priest that there have always been currents within the Catholic Church at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy: cafeteria Catholicism is a thing. And I’ve always been a revolutionary.”

At this I had to smile. The PCF? Really?

“The orthodoxies of today,” he continued, “are the heresies of yesterday - or at least they struggled with other currents of thought as one peer amongst peer contenders.”

“Not, I fear, a good answer!” I said.

“The priest said that I needed to appreciate that religions which endure need to speak to every part of society, not just to intellectuals who want to focus on the consistency and scientific and historical plausibility of its conceptual content. Religion is a complete human experience, speaking to emotions and human relationships more than the intellect. Most Catholics do not spend a lot of time worrying about their own theology, not should they.

“He pointed out that when people tried to set up religions based on abstract principles, on a purely symbolic, secular concept of divinity, they had always failed. He mentioned the Culte de la Raison (Antoine-François Momoro et al) and the Culte de l'Être suprême (Maximilien Robespierre) during the French Revolution.

“‘Catholicism needs its heavenly family,’ he said - its rich backstory and homely metaphors. The Catholic Church has had two thousands years of successful adaptation in securing its mission. And if the Church teaches these eternal human truths in the guise of the concreteness of the divine, are the people of faith really to choose to praise, glorify and pray to mere abstractions? 

“Still, the priest continued, the Church sees questioning and wrestling with faith as part of a spiritual journey. Your misguided engagement, he said, even when overly critical and misplaced, I see as a sign of a living faith rather than a lack of it. He suggested I study and reflect further on these matters and not give up.”

“I see,” I said. “And do you think it likely you will come to terms with the supernatural aspects which are so central to the theory and practice of Catholicism in the Liturgy and Eucharist? Or do you think you will persist in seeing everything as symbolic, believing everything to be no more than parables?”

“Let us just say that I see and understand the paradox and dilemma of Catholicism,” Claude replied enigmatically. “I think that Catholicism is - shall we say it quietly? - a broader church than the priest envisages.”

And with that we bid our farewells. I’m looking forward to further encounters with Claude - it looks like this journey has scarcely begun!

Sunday, January 10, 2021

“Extinction Event” by Adam Carlton


Prologue: Mara

Its discovery was a remarkable accident.

The Spaceguard programme searching for Earth-impacting asteroids had been in progress for more than twenty years. In 2017, one of the Spaceguard telescopes, Pan-STARRS 1, discovered the first interstellar asteroid, ‘Oumuamua’. But that discovery came very late, almost as it was leaving the solar system.

Dr Mara Ayrton worked at Yale on asteroid early-warning. The usual method used a blink comparator with images taken ten minutes apart. The stars remained stationary; the asteroid, moving along its orbit, 'jumped' between the two images. It was a procedure which was easy to automate but depended on the asteroid actually being visible, being illuminated.

Mara knew that incoming interstellar asteroids were initially too far away, too dim to be seen. But there was another way.

She had pressed for the upcoming mission-design to search for stellar occultations. This would happen if the asteroid momentarily went in front of a star, blocking its light. Such a blink would last only for milliseconds: an asteroid's star-shadow is only its size, only miles across. The orbital telescopes - like the Earth in its own orbit - would flash through that in an instant.

Still, Mara insisted, at fifty frames per second such blinks could be caught. And astronomers were used to digitally adding thousands of frames together to build brighter images. Her proposal was accepted provided she agreed to develop the software.

Another stroke of luck. This particular asteroid came in from the constellation Scorpio. It passed in front of the globular cluster M80. Thousands of closely-packed stars cast a mosaic of spatially-clustered shadows, duly noted by the asteroid-hunting telescopes.

Mara's correlator, linked to a pattern-detecting neural net, went crazy. Alerts flashed across her screen, chirruped at her phone.

There was a protocol. Mara called her head of department who confidentially alerted the other observation platforms. Within twenty-four hours they had the details pinned down. It was indeed interstellar. It was big: bigger than the impactor which had killed the dinosaurs. It was travelling faster too, and had a very good chance of hitting Earth. Its impact energy would be 15-20 times that released at the Yucatán Peninsula.

It was death.

There was a protocol about that too. What to do next. It was idealistic.

It was stupid.

Mara's head of department called the United Nations.

Had anyone thought through the consequences? The likely popular response? The utter inability of the UN to keep a secret?

Major governments moved as one to clamp down on the end of the world. The first few reports were squelched, the presenters vanished. And behind the scenes, in conditions of the greatest secrecy, the powers of the world met in all their awesome pomp to consider the only question that mattered: what can we do?

They needed a name of course. It was customary to honour the discoverer. And so the asteroid was called 'Mara' - which means 'bitter' in Hebrew.

It is not recorded what Dr Mara Ayrton's reaction was.

The first the public heard was more than four years later, when - finally - a sombre announcement was made across all the countries of the world.

"We have ten months left. There is no hope."


The Policeman and the Priest

I wouldn’t normally post this, but what the hell, what does it matter anymore? Last night my lover, Brute, confessed to me, his second confession of the day. He’d heard the news, he said, and then he'd done something he hadn’t done since childhood. He'd gone to Mass.

The priest gave a sermon. God knows where he got it from. Brute said he was euphoric, inspired, speaking of the Rapture. The faithful were going to be uplifted to heaven.

I withdrew my arm from his chest and sat up.

“Listen,” I said, “It’s a space-mountain, a dinosaur killer. No-one is going to be ‘sucked up’.”

I’m the physicist. Brute is the policeman.

He defended his pastor.

“We don’t know that, not exactly. The priest said it was the anti-Earth. As foretold in the end-times.”

I snorted. An Earth-sized impactor would raise tides a hundred miles high. Would draw the atmosphere into supersonic winds. Forget bodies wafting skyward. Besides, we knew how big it was.

I sank back into the sheets, resignedly pulled up the duvet.

“What happened next?”

“I went to Confession.”

I raised my eyebrows in the darkness.

“When was the last time you confessed to a priest?”

I rubbed my fingertips through his curly chest hair.

“I didn’t tell him about us, what would be the point of that? No, I needed him to tell me what life was for now. As a Catholic.”

“And he had good advice, this rapturous priest?”

“He said that all moments exist in eternity. He asked me why I was a policeman.”

I was suddenly interested: “What did you say?”

“I told him the truth. I told him I hated injustice, that I despised the rich and powerful riding roughshod over ordinary folk like myself. Their only defence was the law I upheld.”

I nodded to myself. It reminded me of why I’d been attracted to Brute in the first place. One of the reasons.

“The priest said that all my acts, all my deeds were bricks in the wall of civilisation. That if the good outweighed the bad, if my intentions were pure, then I was part of God’s plan. Then he started to forgive me."

"Did you ...?”

“And then I interrupted him,” Brute exclaimed.

“Why?”

“I said: ‘Father, after the impact, there will be no people, no future. So how can my little life have any significance?’”

“And what did the priest say?”

“Nothing. He just concluded his blessing and sent me on my way.”

The next day I was on my way to the university - yes, life goes on and we still teach physics - when I saw that very priest spouting his ethereal nonsense on the pavement. Very Christlike. I thought the Catholic Church had abandoned all that long ago. He was in his robes, wearing his Jesus sandals and holding a staff.

I stepped into the road to avoid his small audience. I saw a uniformed policeman walk up, making his way to the front of the group where he knelt down and kissed the charlatan’s feet.

It was Brute. This was the man I shared my life with. Scales fell from my eyes. This was a man, I realised, I had never truly known. My stomach churned.

I bent over double and vomited into the gutter.


A Turbulent Priest

From the Paris Correspondent of The Guardian Online.

'At first sight it seemed just another service in a Parisian church but little about Saint Bernard de la Chapelle was ordinary. The presiding priest, Father Léopold Damas, had been a regular thorn in the side of the Church authorities with his liberation theology and militant leftism. I had received a tip-off to attend.

Saint Bernard was a beautiful old church in one of the poorest parts of inner Paris. The interior was bathed in light; billowing incense in the still air gave shape to the sunbeams. Fr. Damas spoke from the altar, his amplified voice echoing over the congregation.

Behind me I was surprised to see pews occupied by men dressed in the dark suits of Bastion Social, the fascist organisation with links to Opus Dei. They stood as if on parade, hands crossed in front of them, their presence impossible to ignore.

I was standing with the regular congregation, the aged, huddled people of the Goutte d'Or, this forgotten slum close to Sacré-Cœur. There were twenty or thirty of them listening with rapt attention to their minister.

Further forward, towards the priest himself, I noticed that the front two rows were occupied by burly men with red armbands. I recognised volunteers from the defence organisation of the Parti Communiste Français. There had long been rumours of a local, highly-unofficial alliance between the Red and the Black in this parish. Here surely was the evidence.

But with fascists to the rear and communists to the front, it was plain this Mass was a tinderbox.

Fr. Damas, in his old man's voice, was discussing eschatology. Despite Damas's firebrand reputation I was half-expecting the standard homilies but the presence of two hostile camps should have alerted me. This priest was never going to speak the orthodox clichés.

"Yesterday I heard a prominent atheist-biologist on television, an Englishman," he was saying, "The professor explained that - as we were all no more than atoms obeying the laws of physics - life was ultimately meaningless and we should therefore just get on and enjoy it."

There was a quiet hissing from the back rows.

"Yes, I believe in evolution ..."

At this there was more hissing from the back, louder now, and more chilling.

"All life is one. The dinosaurs were obliterated but their lives had purpose. In harmony with their nature they lived, reproduced and died as living beings always do.

"It's only people who agonise whether an ethical life is enough, whether we should be doing something more.

"And I say to you there is not. We should strive to cultivate our best and true natures, help each other and refrain from harm. And do this even if the skies will fall."

It was at this point the first stone was thrown. I could not see the perpetrator, somewhere behind me, just the missile's falling path. It hit the priest in the face, scouring a deep cut in his right cheek. Blood spurted over his white alb. His voice faltered but he persisted, duty-bound it seemed to get his message across.

"When this Mass is ended you must leave ...  not in despair ... face the end in peace ... death happens to us all ... God is in our better nature and we must seek him there ... ."

The flung cobblestone hit Father Damas in the head and knocked him flat. The assembly, the ordinary participants around me, began to flee into the aisles, bunching and jamming in their haste.

The PCF contingent turned as a disciplined phalanx to face the rear, returning fire using hassocks and prayer books, whatever was to hand.

Pushing and shoving, I made a dash to the exit at the rear of the nave. As I left the church a pitched battle was developing lit by the flickering flames from the first of the petrol bombs.

As I write this I see from the TV that the last bodies are being removed from the smoking ruins of Saint Bernard de la Chapelle, ending almost two hundred years of its sacred history.

The fate of Father Léopold Damas is currently unknown. His body was not recovered.'


Into the Fireball

I am posting his last letter on this, the last day. People should know what my husband is doing. The price he’s paying. We’re all paying.

---

Dear Nikki,

We said we were going to watch the end together. We said we would face the ocean, watching for that distant shimmer on the horizon. The incoming wave which would end our precious days together.

Even this consolation will now be denied us.

I am unbearably sorry.

I had to get this to you through a friend. He's going off-base and will email it to you - against regulations. We are on lock-down: from now to the end.

I could not believe the orders the squadron was given. An hour before the asteroid arrives we’ll deploy into the west, flying out over the sea towards the setting sun. Twenty five miles separation. A chain of aircraft, heading for the impact zone, linking back to Edwards Air Force Base.

The information must get back.

The asteroid will enter the atmosphere over America, flying towards the Pacific. It will go over our heads. My aircraft - the lead plane - is instructed to fly directly into the fireball, with the others following.

Our F-35s have been modified. We’re carrying every sensor imaginable. This will be the most observed asteroid impact in history.

Why? What is the point?

We asked ourselves that as we left the briefing room. Talked amongst ourselves. The United States Air Force does not do suicide missions. We are not kamikazes. That’s what we told ourselves.

Someone said, “What’s the point of this operation? Everyone’s gonna die regardless.”

Someone else said, “That’s the military for you. I’ve had some stupid orders over the years ... but this ... to take us away from our wives and families.”

That was my view as well. We were all feeling pretty bad. The mission seemed senseless. We asked questions and got no answers.

That night - this was just a day ago - I was lying on my cot brooding. I knew there would be no more time for reflection. Just days of exercises and preparations, and then we would fly the mission. So I lay there, and really thought.

Nikki, there can be only one reason for this mission. They will never tell us but there must be a plan… Somewhere a group, perhaps buried under the biggest mountain they can find, is preparing to survive. They will have to stay safe for years. I’ve seen the scenarios - the Earth does not recover. They will have to use those years to prepare - somehow - to come out and survive in the aftermath.

Impact information will be priceless. They can refine the computer models; predict the climate collapse, the far-distant recovery, the total energy dumped on the planet.

That’s why we’re flying.

And that’s why I can’t come home.

Nikki, ...

---

The rest of the letter is kind of personal.

If you read this, please remember us.

All my love,

Nikki

XX


A New Star

It was a bright dot in the east as I left my apartment. A new star. Cold and motionless.

I wasn't fooled. It's interstellar, they said, which accounts for its excess speed and energy; if you can see it, it's close. It will hit the Pacific in a few hours.

The San Andreas Fault will probably go first. California will crumple into the sea before the tsunami strikes. The Rockies should block the flood before it reaches Cheyenne Mountain. Not that we would care, buried as we are in the NORAD command centre. The safest place in the world.

We’re invulnerable.

My name is Katy Thompson. I am a Communications Security Engineer at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. I have the highest security clearance.

And I am invisible.

And this is the last day.

The global Internet is still working. This is the greatest achievement of mankind: the largest, most complex, most sophisticated, most reliable machine ever created. Engineers like me have kept it working, acolytes at the altar of humanity's nervous system.

We are still a global community.

I'm at my desk. There's half a mile of mountain above me. They say we could work here undisturbed while a nuclear war raged outside, a war in which we would be a target. This will be tested for the first time during the next few hours.

Every meeting here is securely recorded. Everything. I don't think the generals and the politicians really know that. It was an early decision in the security architecture.

Someone has to review those recordings. For classification and quality control. Someone invisible. Katy Thompson. Me.

I understand that you who are reading this have gone through every stage of grief. That you are abandoned to despair. That you accept that there is no hope.

You watched all the options paraded in the media. The prudent ones. The far-fetched ones. You felt your hopes rise: something of us will survive! And then those hopes were cruelly dashed, shot down by experts armed with the ring of truth.

And so you are resigned, not just to personal extinction but to the loss of all you believe in. Everyone you hold dear. Everything that has ever been achieved. The extinction of the world.

And so I break the rules of a lifetime. Betray my duty. And post this ultra-secret transcript of a meeting that took place five years ago. Post it to the public Internet.

I could find no records at all of any follow-up. I don't know if Plan Z was ever executed.

This is all the hope we have.


Beyond Secret

It was beyond secret. A meeting held 2,000 feet inside Cheyenne Mountain, the nuclear war command centre for NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

In the diary it was itemised as ‘Scenario Briefing’, the blandest title they could find.

The President was difficult to manage: volatile and aggressive with a short attention-span. Bill Patterson knew he would be walking on eggshells. The meeting was as small as possible. Just the science advisor, the President and the Secretary of Defense, a thin, birdlike man who could pass for an actuary. This was three weeks after the discovery of the impactor.

“Mr President, Mr Secretary, three weeks ago our Spaceguard network discovered the asteroid on a collision course with Earth. As you know, the predicted impact is five years away. I was asked to convene a task force on mitigation, reporting as soon as possible. This meeting constitutes my report.”

The President looked interested. His florid face was that of a man who much preferred activity to sitting in a chair. But if he had to listen it had better not be boring.

The Defense Secretary expressed his concern at the lack of a written brief.

“Mr Secretary, for reasons you will shortly hear, this is a verbal briefing only. Governments already enforced a global blackout on the impact itself. We all know the reasons for that. But what I am going to tell you today is far more important. It must not go beyond this room. There must be no leaks.”

Patterson had their full attention.

“You will already have seen the classified forecast on the event itself. It will be far bigger than the Yucatán impact. The asteroid will dig a crater 20 to 25 miles deep. The rebound will eject a fan of molten rock beyond the atmosphere spreading like an aerosol. That will re-enter - to fall on the entire surface of the world.”

Patterson shaped his hands, sculpting a soccer ball.

“Gentlemen, from horizon to horizon, to look at the sky will be to look into the maw of an erupting volcano. The land will burn, the oceans will boil.  If the worst happens, and it lands in the Atlantic or the Pacific, a mile-high tsunami will cross our coasts and scour half our country down to bedrock.

“Let me repeat what you've already been told. This is an extinction-level event. In the firestorms and in the freezing aftermath, almost all plants will die, all large animals will die. The Earth’s ecology will stop in its tracks.”

The President didn’t seem fazed by this cataclysmic prospect, seeming to relish it more as a challenge.

“This is America. We can do this, right? We can get some Americans through this, the best of the best, and rebuild on the other side.”

He gestured around the room.

“They tell me this place can survive a 30 megaton nuke just a mile away. That people here could survive a nuclear war. Just tell me what you need and you get it.”

So this was Patterson's job here, to lead his distinguished audience down the ladder of increasingly-unpalatable options.

“You're describing Plan A, Mr President. You’ll hear about it soon from our Survivability Task Force. They’ll tell you: sea, bunkers, space. They’ll tell you that people in nuclear submarines, deep in the vast oceans, will survive the impact; that bunkers distant from the impact site will remain secure; that people sufficiently distant in space will be insulated from its effects.”

The President nodded: it sounded plausible.

“We can even provide enough supplies to wait out the immediate aftermath. The toxic air, the climate-collapse, the nuclear winter. After five years, plus or minus, it might be safe to come out on the surface, at least with breathing apparatus. But what then?

The Secretary of Defense said, “And then we rebuild.”

“Unfortunately, Mr Secretary, we can’t. I need to emphasise this. The global economy has collapsed - almost everyone is dead. There are no trees, no flowers, no visible animals, few insects and no useful ones. No fuel to power machines, crops will not grow, the climate will have changed utterly.

“It’s tempting to think that after the supplies run out and we’re done with scavenging - and by the way, there will be precious little lying on the scoured surface - it’ll be like the Waltons, homesteading in Virginia."

The President smiled. That had been one of his favourite shows.

“Nothing will grow,” Patterson insisted, “Crops we plant by the sweat of our brow will die. The soil has been removed, or is poisoned. There are no birds or insects to pollinate. Agriculture will not be possible for tens of thousands of years. After the Yucatán impact the Earth became Fern-World for millennia. I repeat: once their supplies run out, the survivors will starve.”

“Well, if we have to, I guess we’ll get back to hunting and gathering, like the Native Americans did,” observed the President.

Plan Z

Patterson sighed inwardly, and tried to console himself. He had had longer to think about these things than his audience.

“Mr President. There are no animals left bigger than rats, and they exist only in a few protected habitats. What the ecologists call refuges. There are no plants to feed on, only the remnants of rotting vegetation. There are almost no fish in the sea - the plankton which holds up the food chain has died. Our survivors will see a sterilised landscape.”

He felt their concentration. There's something about disaster scenarios which fascinates everyone.

“How can I put this? In biological terms, human beings are large animals at the top of the food chain. There will be no ecological space for such animals. After the dinosaur extinction, large animals had to re-evolve; they didn’t come back for five million years. That’s how long it took the ecology to recover.”

The Defense Secretary objected.

“We can kick-start the process. Biobanks. Things like that.”

“Yes we can. That’s Plan B. You’ll hear a lot from the Recovery Taskforce currently putting together their proposals. Unfortunately, the food chain starts with plants. And they will not grow in the post-impact world. It will take millennia to re-green the Earth, to recreate the soil, to get basic things like grass and wheat and barley and oats to grow and reproduce. One problem I’ve already mentioned: pollinating insects barely exist.”

The Defense Secretary considers this, muses.

“We can’t store people for hundreds or thousands of years, can we?”

Of course not.

Patterson breathes a sigh of relief. They’re getting it. Finally he can move on. Begin to broach the unthinkable. But first to summarise and remove any remaining illusions.

“Gentlemen. The impact transforms the Earth into an alien planet, one which will not support life beyond scavengers and the eaters of detritus. Terraforming it will take centuries, millennia, even under the best conditions.

“We took submissions from people who wanted us to build a generation-ship, like those starships which take ten thousand years to cross the interstellar gulf. Some suggested we build a relativistic spacecraft and loop it round the local group of galaxies: subjective-time thirty years, universe-time ten million years. Come back when the planet’s healed. That was Plan C.

The President said with renewed interest, “Can we do that?”

Patterson shook his head. "No. No, we can’t."

“OK. I think we get the picture,” said the Secretary of Defense, “This event is unsurvivable for the human race. We can get some folk to live through the impact but building a sustainable population in the aftermath is impossible. The post-impact Earth will not sustain human life. Is that what you’re saying?”

Patterson nodded slowly. A good synopsis.

“Well,” said the President, “Assuming we’re not wasting our time in this meeting, what is it you’re proposing?”

Bill Patterson took a deep breath. This was the point he had been dreading. He is no salesman, and this is the most difficult sale in history.

“Let’s go take a coffee,” he said.

The President and the Defense Secretary left together, talking quietly. Patterson got himself off to the restroom. Sat in a stall and shut the door. Peace.

Trapped in Amber

It's a considerably subdued pair who re-enter the conference room. The President, who Patterson thinks lives in the moment, seems - incredibly - to have treated the whole issue as something of a lark up to this point.

The Defense Secretary with his bureaucrat’s heart has failed, Patterson thinks, to raise his eyes to the bigger picture. But something has changed.

“So let’s get this straight,” says the President, “What you’re saying is that a hundred years from now, give or take, there will be no more people, period? That despite anything the United States of America can do, we’re finished?”

“That is exactly right, Mr President. There are no loopholes. There is no way out. Perhaps if we'd had a self-sustaining Mars colony ... but the asteroid has come too early.”

And now to engineer the topic-shift: gently does it. This will be a hard sale.

“Do you remember, gentlemen, that scene in Jurassic Park?” says Patterson, “They get dinosaur DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber. One that had fed on a dinosaur’s blood?”

The President smiles, he remembers it.

“Everybody rubbished it from a scientific point of view. Until they started to sequence Neanderthals. Bodies a million years old. The problem is that DNA degrades with time. It needs extreme cold to preserve it.”

Patterson pauses, gently does it.

“And we have the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, sitting on 9,000 feet of ice atop bedrock.”

He waits to see who’ll run with this. Come on!

It’s the Defense Secretary.

“You’re suggesting storing human DNA samples in the ice in Antarctica?”

“Essentially, yes. We have five years. We can get a lot done! We can transcribe the genetic code of key individuals and animals into indestructible plates. We can write a primer on how to decode DNA. We can give helpful hints on bringing them back.”

The President nods, “You mean, like the hairy mammoth?”

Yes, exactly like the hairy mammoth.

“Of course,” says Patterson carefully, “we only get one shot at this. One only. We need to make this as easy as possible. The mammoths were found frozen in the permafrost. This works best if we get human beings and preserve them whole in the Necrosphere. Give the reincarnation engineers all the information we can.”

“What did you call it?”

The Secretary of Defense sounds alarmed, his academic calm finally jolted, a surprise too far.

“The Necrosphere. That’s what we’re calling it. A giant hardened sphere, maybe two hundred feet across. An ark across time. Millions of years. Frozen people, frozen plants and animals; records and manuals. A time capsule ready to be reborn. When the conditions are right.”

The Defense Secretary works to restore his competent, slightly-bored persona.

“And this - time-capsule - will survive the impact?”

“If Plan Z is approved, gentlemen, then I assume there will be unlimited resources. We will build the sphere here in the US, transport and assemble it at the South Polar station and sink it into a deep trench. It will have heating elements in its outer skin. The ball will melt its way two miles to the bottom of the ice. We’ll sink markers around it, radius maybe half a mile. Scanning anomalies: dense metal, radiation sources, obvious artefacts. Things which shouldn’t be there.”

The President works to connect the dots.

“You’re saying anyone capable of resurrecting people should at least be able to do deep scans through the ice.”

“Yes, Mr President. That’s a kind of gate-keeping thing. If they can’t even find the Necrosphere, they’re unlikely to be able to open it, or do human cloning. “Of course, in seventy million years the ice-caps may have vanished anyway.”

It’s the President who asks the killer question.

“Who’s going to be doing the resurrecting, Mister? Space aliens?”

Those Who Come After Us

Patterson has been waiting for this question, has his crafted reply ready.

“We’re not planning on the assumption of space aliens, Mr President; we’re looking at natural processes. It took sixty-six million years to get from small, scavenging rubbish-eaters to people who can almost clone themselves. I’m suggesting we give the biosphere a fighting chance.”

What is Patterson talking about?

“We will build survival arks regardless of all you've heard today. How could we not? We'll re-engineer our nuclear submarines, re-purpose bunkers like this, we'll do something ambitious in space. There’ll certainly be humans alive post-impact. But they will all sadly die - leaving no descendants."

Patterson takes a breath. Here is the ultimate brutal truth.

"Gentlemen, I already explained that the post-impact Earth is an alien planet. It cannot support human beings. However, it can support some kinds of animals. Smart, questing, rapidly-reproducing omnivores low in the food chain, scavengers of what's left. We can kick-start a future ecology - it's just one that doesn't have space for us: not directly, not immediately."

His audience is puzzled. Once again they don't see where this is going at all.

“Our gift to the future will be biology. Carefully-optimised rodents. Hundreds of thousands of small mammals bred to thrive on post-impact Earth. We’ll edit-in some human genes. For intelligence and cooperation. Something of us will survive.

"We have five years to get it right, to fast-track their evolutionary path. Don't forget. This has already happened! But last time it took tens of millions of years. We can do better this time.”

And again Patterson stops. He has given them all the facts. They have to draw the final conclusions for themselves.

The Secretary for Defense with dry, immaculate logic tries to put it together.

“So let me get this straight. This is Plan Z? You’re asking for a Presidential Directive to design our evolutionary successors?”

Patterson nods. Mouths a yes.

“And you hope that after millions of years, they will bring us back?”

Patterson spreads his arms.

“Mr President, Mr Secretary. Understand that this is the last throw of the dice. Apart from this there ... is ... no ... hope. We are dead men walking. We are about to become extinct.”

He takes a deep breath.

“If anyone ever finds out, Plan Z will fail. You can imagine the responses: ‘America bio-engineers rats to take over the world’. The ridicule, the horror, the disbelief. How many supporters would it have? None. None at all.”

He’s talking to two politicians. They look at each other. Now they know why this meeting is beyond secret. Why Plan Z will be wrapped up in lies without end. No-one must ever know the truth.

“And it gets worse,” says Patterson, knowing that all the cards must now be on the table.

“We need at least one hundred and fifty people of all ethnicities. To provide genetic variation for a sustainable future population down the timeline. Those people need to be medically prepared and placed in special pods. They need to be properly frozen - without tissue damage - and then the Necrosphere sunk deep in the ice weeks before the asteroid arrives.”

He looks at their stunned faces.

“Yes, gentlemen, we’re going to have to euthanize those people well before impact. And for all the obvious reasons, we cannot tell them. Ever.”

He speaks quietly now and mainly to himself: “The lies will never cease.”

Plan Z will get the green light of course. Truly it is the last fling of the dice. But there is no alternative.

None at all.

And Patterson has a choice to make himself.

He had discussed it three weeks ago with his wife Patricia, when the news broke - against all regulations.

His daughter, Alicia, will be 18 at the time of impact. She’s of good stock; he could probably swing it.

His wife had taken his hand in her own and said dreamily, ‘We’ll be standing on the porch of our ranch in Wyoming: Alicia, you and me. We’ll watch it together, holding hands. We’ll watch the sky turn red, and then perhaps we’ll go inside and wait for the end.’

But in Bill Patterson’s mind there’s an alternative. Patricia and himself sure, on the porch awaiting Armageddon. While the corpse of their daughter lies on a cot in a metal sphere, one thousand feet beneath the ice and sinking still. Perhaps to wake again in an unimaginable future.

Almost certainly not.

His daughter would never know the truth. The protocol would not permit it.

But his wife would. And would she ever forgive him?

And would that even matter?

Not Happenstance; not Coincidence

Bill Patterson thought the meeting had finished when he packed his briefing materials and departed. He could not have been more wrong.

After a brief break, the President and the Secretary of Defense are joined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Arthur Taylor.

General Taylor is a thoroughly modern soldier. Now in his fifties, he had flown ground attack aircraft in those endless middle-eastern wars. He had led the new Space Command. He had shown himself open-minded and imaginative in addition to possessing the necessary martial virtues.

All of his creativity has been tested to the limit by this unexpected challenge. What he confidently believes will be his last assignment. He had of course listened in to the previous briefing from a parallel room. There had been no need to spook Patterson by giving him a larger audience. In any event he was familiar with the details. Only the politicians had been out of the loop until the final briefing.

As he takes his position at the front of the small briefing room - the spot Patterson has so recently vacated - Taylor breathes deeply to steady himself, reflecting that fantastical as the previous meeting had been, this is going to top it.

“Mr President, Mr Secretary,” he begins, “This presentation is entirely complementary to the plan outlined by Dr Patterson. The US Military was also asked to do a crash study on the implications of the projected asteroid strike. I will now present the results.”

The Defense Secretary has not been party to what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is about to say. He waves his hand with a degree of irritation.

“General, we are in close contact with the Governments of Russia and China, as well as our allies. We are working together and sharing our preparations. We can all see we're in this together. I don't think we should spend too much of our time worrying about national defense at a time like this.”

His tone of voice conveys that time is short and he has much work to do.

The President is less impatient. His duties are less well-defined… and he always enjoys a talk by the military.

General Taylor moves to suppress any qualms.

“In the military we deal in capability not intention. If someone can do harm to us, we plan on the assumption that one day he might well do it. And so we prepare, no matter how smiling and friendly our adversary may appear to be today.”

“A well-known philosophical point,” mutters the Secretary, still impatient to leave.

The General persists.

“When the news was announced, even as the security blanket came down, we put a team together as did every serious military organisation.

“It didn't take long before we realised how unlikely this whole catalogue of events actually was. Think about it. We detect an asteroid with just the right parameters to eliminate all higher forms of life. And it just happens to be on a collision course for Earth. We did the math assuming a prior distribution of random intercepts of the solar system. The probability of this happening by chance is essentially zero.”

There have been too many shocks this morning. The President's mouth hangs open. The Secretary of Defense looks stunned. A man who prides himself that he's always one step ahead of the action, he has never considered this possibility. Never. Not once.

“I'm going to keep this brief, gentlemen, because all we need from you today is a green light. You will get more detailed proposals down the track. They are going to be very expensive but you are going to want to make very sure that that doesn't matter.”

The President, still disoriented, waves his hand. Continue. Please.

“Our highest probability scenario, an order of magnitude by the way, is that the Mara asteroid is not an unlikely accident at all but a hostile act. A civilization-killer. A species-killer. A real-estate grab.

“We expect that some years after the impact, we can't know how many, some kind of incursion will present itself. A probe bearing an alternative biological package. The new inhabitants of Earth. It's ruthless but it makes sense.”

The Secretary of Defense grasps at implications.

“So Patterson's proposal: let the biosphere recover, the work of ten million years; kick-start evolution to smarter animals; bring us back later - maybe. None of it's going to happen if we're taken over, is it?”

Taylor nods.

“Plan Z is finished before it even gets started if we permit an incursion. It sounds like science-fiction, but hell, in a few hundred years time we could run this scenario. If there was a planet we particularly wanted and we were desperate enough”

The President shows his legendary resilience.

“You're the Military. Give me proposals, General!”

Taylor smiles showing his gleaming white teeth, says formally:

"The US Military has determined that we face an existential threat from hostile actors unknown. We are requesting permission to do whatever it takes to deal with it, sir.”

“Carry on, General, let's see what you have for us.”

The plan General Taylor outlines calls for a capability to repel and destroy an unknown invading force arriving at an unknown time. Surprise would be of the essence given the unknown capabilities of the enemy.

“Still,” Taylor says, “There's not much an adversary can do against a Terawatt laser slagging its target to plasma.”

Within five years, he explains, highly-automated forts would be buried in the lunar far-side regolith, immune from asteroid-impact effects. Breakthrough Starshot lasers would be repurposed and re-sited off the Earth. Multi-Megaton missiles would lurk in stealth orbits around Mars and Venus and at their Lagrange points. Gigantic telescopes and late-stage radars would hide within the inner solar system.

This would be the last gasp of a dying Earth. All of its resources, those of all the countries of the world, would be deployed to keep the biosphere-recovery plan on track.

To give Plan Z the time it needs without interference.

“We'll have dedicated volunteers on the Moon. On Mars, if we can get them there. Bases provisioned with as many supplies as we can. Their task is simply this: to survive, to observe, to man the weapon systems. To develop the AIs to continue to serve after they die.

“We have five years, gentlemen. I assure you: we can do this.”


After the Impact

What can you do in more than a century of furious military preparation? Driven by AIs of exponentially-increasing capabilities with one imperative: Protect the Earth.

Build a solar system bristling with sensors and weapon systems - out into the Oort cloud.

Prepare retaliation: space-fabs turn out von Neumann machines - replicators with lethal competences; the survivors will breed to overwhelm any intruder. There are war-games in the asteroid belt.

Propelled on laser fire the AI strike force is an expanding shell, light years out. They share their threat assessments; wait to target the invaders.

The incoming bio-probe is detected and back-tracked. Layered defence systems move to readiness: titanic energies wait their moment of release.

The nearest AI attack-swarm is tasked and vectored on the bio-probe's source. A gargantuan death-cloud poised to exterminate Earth's killers.

---

Beneath the tunnelled debris of damp mulch and rot and new-grown ferns, the rat-things gorge on roots and flies and bugs. They are the first ones, the evolutionary generalists.

They chitter amongst themselves, tell simple stories, puzzle over strange lights in the sky. The lights which keep them safe.

The nascent civilisation of their new masters.

Saturday, January 09, 2021

"Triptych" - by Adam Carlton



"Triptych" - by Adam Carlton


1. Fourteen

She is sitting at the very back of the chemistry lab: on the left hand side, by the aisle, her best friend Jeanette to her right. She has her hands on her lap, below the level of the worktop in front of her. She’s surreptitiously painting her nails while the teacher drones on at the front.

Miss Dawson is in her late forties and severe, spinsterish. She is speaking to the whiteboard on which her laptop has projected today's experiment. It's almost impossible to see in the glare but it appears to involve copper sulphate, zinc and redox reactions.

The lab consists of rows of lengthy workbenches with the usual gas outlets and power sockets. The students are perched on bar stool seats. The benches are ancient wood: flat and dark, stained with chemicals and gouged with graffiti - a hundred years of romantic entanglements, eroded and barely legible.

Three rows forward, at the front on the right hand side is Robert  the class bad-boy. His golden locks run over his shoulders. He's slim and wears tight jeans. Although he's only just fifteen he sings with a local rock band. He's good.

Robert is not popular with the teachers. Though bright he underperforms - they think he's ‘cocky’. He's sitting next to Melissa who's the top girl here. On a slight cue from Miss Dawson, Melissa languidly rises from her seat and begins to collect maths homework books. How traditional.

Her skirt is just a little shorter than any of the other girls, her hair a little longer and blonder, and she sways as she walks, like a model.

Robert turns to gaze back across the class, smiling at the girl at the far end of the back row, shrugging his shoulders in mock helplessness.

“He likes you,” says Jeanette, “He really wants to come to your birthday party tonight. Thing is, his mother and Melissa's are like that," She links her fingers, "They fixed up that date for tonight.”

Jeanette continues in a low hiss, “Trust me, she knew what she was doing.”

She's talking about Melissa who has approached and is holding out her hand. Jeanette passes her own book: homework neat and tidy, all done.

Nothing from our girl. She couldn't be bothered. She'd figured out simultaneous quadratic equations two years ago.

Melissa's smile is pure malice as she carries the pile of books to the front, ready to place them on the teacher's desk.

Several things happen very quickly.

Melissa is standing with her back to the class, looking for space to park her load. Since nothing is apparent, she starts to force a gap, pushing the books diagonally forward like a wedge. The beaker of copper sulphate wobbles, a retort stand drops in front of Melissa and she makes a frantic grab for it.

Fatal.

Legs tangled up, Melissa falls onto her back surrounded by tumbling homework books. The glass of blue liquid totters and topples, its trajectory bending towards Melissa’s small but perfectly formed breasts, so almost on show.

And then the scream.

The books are ruined. Melissa is the colour of a smurf and the ambulance is already on its way. The class, prematurely dismissed, makes its way into the yard.

Robert ambles across: very casual, very assured. He brushes behind her, uses the tips of his fingers at her waist to pull her in against his chest. She can feel every contour of his body. He whispers: “Happy Birthday, babe. We’ll catch up at your party tonight.”

A tiny squeeze and he detaches, strolls off.

She permits herself a knowing smile. 


2. Twenty One

Speaking just to myself, to no one else, I would say that she was common. Common but sexy. A party girl (very different from the Party girls of my acquaintance).

Appearance. Curvaceous, big breasts, about five feet six. Her face was oval, full cheeks and lips, plenty of make-up and lippy. Her black hair cascaded over her shoulders.

Personality. She was lively, animated, lived in the moment, was unserious, always with a smile on her face, always up for a good time. Open, warm, a yes-person. Prepared to play a trick on you. Did not hold a grudge. Flirtatious, disinhibited, promiscuous even.

Friendly. Sexy.

I was not besotted with her but it was hard to say no. She borrowed my car, mentioned she needed it to pick up some sailor who had picked her up in town. I lent it with ill grace; got it back hours later: the engine did not sound right and the steering was tracking left. How amusing!

We went drinking once in an almost deserted, almost derelict pub near the docks. We sat on a bench seat by a window, snogging for what seemed like an hour or forever. She was a girl who liked to kiss, who liked to be cuddled.

I was in her attic bedsit, in her bed, late one evening. She was hedonistic, no big thoughts, no worrying about ‘how is it for you?’ - just enjoying every second. In the aftermath the fire alarm went off. I hastily dressed and was hurrying down the steps from her room when I encountered the landlord coming up to check on everyone. A unique look of suspicion and worse on his face as he paused to check me out, then passed on to her door.

But surprisingly, there were no consequences.

Once, when I was being more than usually pompous and overbearing, she surprised me. She looked at me intently and said, “Sometimes the art of concealment in plain sight is to give people what they expect.”

And then something new: an enigmatic smile.


3. Twenty Eight

When they eventually noticed her they gave her the usual training plus total immersion in Russian. In a breach of security they just translated her English name for her cover: Eva (Ива).

There was speculation about entanglement. The unconscious manipulation of amplitudes was championed by a follower of Penrose. ‘Like quantum suicide?’ someone suggested. But nobody knew. Useless to ask Eva - she just said she ‘got lucky’.

She's bouncing along in the back of an electric jeep, its balloon tyres scrunching on the gravel track under a dome of stars. It's cold. This is one of the ‘stans, where a group has stashed its stolen-or-donated nuke, prior to transhipment for practical use in the West.

The SF troopers, four of them, think they are the forward reconnaissance team, a stealthed insertion before the bunker busters rain in.

Oh yes, the terrorists are far from stupid: they're squatting with their prize in an old nuclear command bunker, buried in the heart of the mountain. Intelligence estimates put its yield in the low Megaton range. 

They think she's the translator, although like all of them she has useful backup skills.

They are wrong on pretty much every count.

It’s true that the American B2s are already prepositioned on their ocean island runways, tooled up with GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, 30 tons apiece. But that’s the mandatory contingency plan: insanely high-risk.

---

Twenty kilometres out the SAS captain calls a halt. They're ordered to hunker down in a depression, out of line-of-sight of the target, which climbs like a tooth three kilometres from the desert floor.

After surveying the scene with his binoculars he shakes his head doubtfully and beckons Eva over.

“I'm not a happy camper,” he says, “I don't get our value-added here at all. That -” he indicates the target - "has been designed to survive sequenced nuclear penetrators. We're not telling anyone anything they can't already see from space and aerial assets.”

The captain's communicator vibrates softly. Suddenly more alert, the captain relays orders to hunker down for an incipient nuclear strike. The exfiltration vehicle will be with you once conditions are flyable; destroy all your equipment as you go.

Eva also gets a call. She moves a little away from the quiet bustle of activity around her, pulling up her screen.  Her controller's voice hisses through the earpiece. GCHQ has tapped the fibre link tunnelled out from the bunker. They have decrypted real-time video. Another of our deep penetration operatives has been captured and is being interrogated inside the mountain as we speak, they’re streaming the results back to their HQ. Here it is. We have no way to rescue her. It's imperative she doesn't break. Anything you can help us with? Please?

To her shock and then horror, it's Melissa. She had no idea she'd also been recruited to the service. They're still working on her - aroused grunts from the men, whimpering from their broken victim. A stray thought crosses Eva's mind, a gibe against progressives:

Fundamentalist muslims sure know how to treat their women.

Her guts spasm as they react to what she's seeing: the red hot implement drawn from the fire. Her vision contracts to a point; her stomach heaves; an internal scream: make it stop! make it go away!

The screen abruptly goes blank. The captain, eyes glued to the mountain, swears under his breath, shouts “Get down! All of you!”

At the first millisecond following detonation there is an intense pulse of gamma and x-ray radiation. Plasma temperatures are in the millions of degrees. Yet all this ferocity is entirely contained by the millions of tons of rock. It takes half a second before the growing fireball breaches the integrity of the mountain.

The captain sees a sudden flash as the mountain bulges from its lower slopes, searing light erupting from cracks that tear down its face. The entire rock formation ripples and a massive fissure opens, belching smoke and debris high into the sky. The ground beneath the small team shudders violently, the shock wave tearing across the landscape with a sound like rolling thunder, building to an ear-splitting roar.

The captain continues watching, his binoculars automatically managing the glare, as the mountain collapses in on itself, sections of rock vaporising or blasting outward in jagged arcs. An enormous cloud billows upward, the unmistakable shape of a mushroom, churning and darkening against the sky. The desert has transformed momentarily into an ocean: he can see s-waves propagating across the desert floor like an oncoming tsunami.

He feels the blast wind next, a wave of force that presses against his chest and whips through his clothing. Rock and dust fragments begin to fall, a grim reminder of the mountain that just ceased to exist.

In the subsiding roar she can just hear the growing whup-whup of the exfiltration machines, coming to take them home.

Melissa was never recruited to SIS. She was not being tortured in that mountain fastness, GCHQ did not tap terrorist communications and the video was entirely contrived. It was cut-off at the precise moment of the detonation, when the neutrino burst was detected at the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a facility operated by the US and UK governments.

In the stress of the moment, ‘Eva’ was always going to believe… and subconsciously act.


Author’s note

This is a story about a young woman who has the power of magic, although she doesn’t know it. We can hand-wave some speculative physics (Penrose) to save us from Fantasy, but in the end it doesn’t matter because we’re interested in how she sees herself and how others see her - and make use of her.

Hi Ива, hope you liked it.