Superf Er Vol 08

SFer #8: Armageddon part 1

It was fitting that the press release came out on Friday the 13th. Three groups of astronomers had confirmed the presence of a growing, unexplained shadow partially obscuring the view of Neptune. At last, the antimatter comet whose pending collision with Earth would obliterate most of your solar system had shown itself to terrestrial observers.

I had known this day would come for twenty years, of course, ever since that fateful day when my Interplanetary Motion Simulator first predicted this collision. On that very day I began a quest to try to save your planet by cross-breeding with human females, trying to create an army of hybrids that might inherit some of the special abilities of my species that could perhaps be used to avert the impending collision. Sixteen years ago I retired from my relentless inseminate-one-human-a-day regime, as any further offspring would be too young to be of any value to the effort to save earth. I had gone more or less into hiding, taking up residence with Amy, a human that I think I can truly say I had grown to love as well as the director of the foundation I created to provide financial support to the mostly unwed mothers of my 500 or so children. We lived as if we were married, and I became essentially a stay-at-home dad. "Little Billy" was still a toddler when daddy came home to stay, but in short order he was joined by "the twins" Genny (short for Genevieve) and Quinn--not really twins, but the girls were less than a year apart in age and looked so similar, everyone thought they were. The most obvious difference was that while Genny inherited her mother's flame-red hair, Quinn's was a soft strawberry blonde. My excess fertility (a function of ovulation-stimulating hormones present in my semen) was a big problem, and as I feared when I really got excited my extra-sized extraterrestrial dick would pop a condom like a balloon. We discovered that diaphragms worked well, however, with my plus-size penetration actually improving the seal, although in a scene reminiscent of a certain popular cable-TV serial set in our city, it sometimes took some work to retrieve them. It was not a perfect solution, as evidenced by three-year old Joey, but it had allowed for as stable a domestic situation as a human and an alien from 300 light-years away could ever ask for.

Five hundred children is a lot, especially when you consider that even the act of fornicating with local species is strictly forbidden in any code of ethics. But while it was lucky that cross-breeding between species from different galaxies worked at all, it was far less than the 800 offspring I had hoped for when first undertaking the project. I was concerned about the numbers; for any given one of my traits, each offspring had at best a 50:50 chance of inheriting it, and I anticipated that the more "alien" the trait, the less likely it was to have been inherited. But there were some indications that some of my traits had indeed successfully passed on in some cases. The most evident were the cases of what you might call "super-strength," a product of more efficient muscle design (a necessity in gravity many times stronger than on Earth). For instance Eddie, (my first child with Crystal, my other human helper), had just been the first freshman to be named the best player in college football after having rushed for a record 3000 yards in his first year. Scouts were already projecting him to test out as the fastest AND strongest player in the draft combine when he became eligible in two years. The Commissioner of pro football had already begun working on ways to protect the integrity of the game for fear that any teams that got off to a poor start might throw the rest of the season in order to finish 0-16 teams and have a chance to draft him with the #1 overall pick. There were two seniors in high school that some scouts thought might challenge his record next year. It wasn't just boys; there was an interesting story in SI, ironically entitled "Supergirls," discussing the phenomenon of three high school volleyball players who were destroying the record books in New York, Nevada and Texas. The article marveled at the similarity between them, in particular their astounding vertical leaping ability. It noted that all three were also the product of single mothers without going to the next step and speculating that they might share a common father.

All of my children, however, were known to the Starr Child Foundation and had been carefully monitored from a distance. Amy had been an organizational whiz since day one, and kept everything flowing smoothly. Now, after all this, the time was coming to go public with the true nature and purpose of the Starr Child Foundation. Each of my children received the following letter:

Dear ...

Have you ever wondered who your (biological) father was? Have you ever experienced yourself as being somehow different from all of your friends? Can you do things that others around you don't seem able to? Have you ever wondered why YOU were chosen to receive support from the Starr Child Foundation when probably no one else you know does?

All of these questions will be answered, one time and one time only, at a special convention of the Starr Child Foundation. Please make every effort to attend.

Amy signed it as foundation director, and it was sent with a round-trip airline ticket, voucher for two nights' accommodations, and a ticket to the event. RSVPs started flying in almost immediately; eventually we got over a 90% response rate.

While Amy was sending out the letters, I placed a call to Dr. Martin Humbre, the astronomer that had been the spokesman for the groups discovering the shadow on Neptune. "You don't know who I am," I whispered into the phone, sounding more cloak-and-dagger than I intended, "but I know what it is that you're seeing casting a shadow on Neptune. It's something you've never seen before, but it's very, very important. Perhaps you have also received calls from crackpots claiming the same, but know that I am soberingly sane by giving you this prediction: within three days time you will begin to see brief flashes of light within the shadow, accompanied by gamma radiation the likes of which you've never seen. This will just as suddenly cease, only to start again sometime later. Perhaps when this prediction comes true, you will take this message seriously and call...." I hung up the phone, confident that it would only be a matter of time before the return phone call came. It took ten days.

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"Ladies and gentlemen....thank you all so much for coming," Amy began, addressing the crowded ballroom at the Convention. "My name is Amy, and I'm the COO of the Starr Child Foundation. Many of you may recognize my name; I've been the one signing the monthly checks your family has received on your behalf, as well as any letters you have received. As you know, our organization has been a rather mysterious one. Our stated mission has been to 'encourage the development of greatness by supporting individuals with special potential.' Today, we will be sharing with you exactly what the meaning of this mission has been. It will amaze you and astound you; many of you will remain skeptical of what we tell you today, just as I was for a long time. But hopefully by the end of this session you will have a greater understanding of who you are, why you are here, and all-important mission you have been called upon to do.

"Now...I'd like to introduce you to your keynote speaker today. He is a man that perhaps none of you have heard of, but he is the reason you are all here today. He is the founder of the foundation and has been its sole financial support for the last 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen...Bill Starr."

I stepped on to the podium to polite and now even more confused applause. Amy had suggested I use "Starr" as a last name, which made sense; in the last twenty years I'd used dozens of them, although always the first name "Bill" because it sounded a little like the second syllable of my real name, which is unpronounceable in any Earth language. I was wearing a basic business suit, wanting to appear as "normal" as possible. I was surprised at how nervous I was heading to the microphone, given that I'd been orchestrating this moment for 20 years. But then again, how else should you react when you're facing and meeting more than 400 of your children for the first time? And about to tell them all that half of their genes came from outer space?

"Thank you Amy," I began quietly, "I've waited a long time for this day, and it is with excitement almost beyond words that I stand in front of you today. I wish to tell each of you the story of who you are. But it is an amazing story...so amazing that it would be asking a lot to expect you to just believe it from the telling. So before I begin, I would like to ask all of you some questions, and I would like all of you to answer them honestly. You are all a very special group of people, but I'm not going to try to prove that to you. I just want you to answer each question honestly, and draw your own conclusions. OK?"

There was a slight murmur in the audience. "All right. Now let's start with something simple. How many of you consider yourselves athletes?" About half raised their hands.

"All right, now keep your hands up... now, if you're a really good athlete, please keep your hands up, otherwise you may put them down. And I mean good, like ELITE." About half of the hands went down.

"Now, those of you with your hands up...how many of you are freakishly athletic? I mean, how many of you can jump twice as high as your friends and teammates, or lift twice as much?" About one-tenth of the hands remained up.

"Wow...quite a lot, really," I continued. "There's only a few handfuls of truly elite athletes in the world, and yet in this room of 400 or so people, we have about 40 of them. What are the odds of that?" I paused to let that question sink in, for it was my thesis.

"Here's a related question...how many of you can bench press 300 pounds?" Again about one-tenth raised their hands, not all the same ones as with the previous question. "Very impressive. How many people can bench 300—maybe one tenth of one percent? One in a thousand? And yet in this room, there are 30 or 40 of you. As I say, you are a SPECIAL bunch."

"Now if you're not one of our super athletes, don't worry, because each of you is special in different ways. Here's a strange one—how many of you, on your way here, went through an airport metal detector?" The vast majority raised their hands. "All right...now...how many of you find metal detectors to be strangely ticklish?" About 50 raised their hands. Damn...that was the telltale sign of inheriting my control over the magnetic properties of my body. THESE were the people I was most counting on to save the earth. About one-fourth of what I had anticipated needing.

"Strange, huh? And if any of you that find metal detectors ticklish have ever met ANYONE else that ALSO finds them ticklish, keep your hands raised." Every hand went down. I just nodded my head.

"Now this next one is just for us guys. I'm going to dim the lights in a minute, and when I do, I want you to snap your fingers as quickly as you possibly can. Like this." I demonstrated; the sparks this created could not be seen in the bright light.

"All right, we will dim the lights for a just a minute, don't be frightened. Now guys...when the lights go down, snap your fingers as fast as you can, and watch carefully. See if anything happens." The lights went down and I heard some people snapping. Then I heard three of four gasps, followed by murmuring as people around them saw what they saw. Some guys just learned, to their surprise, that sparks came off their fingers when snapped rapidly. Then I did it, and people in the front could see the sparks coming from mine.

"Bring up the lights again please." I waited while the house lights came back on. "Amazing, huh? Have you ever seen anything like it?" I had most of them wondering now, open to the strange but true story they were about to receive.

"I have one last question for now," I continued, "and then I have a couple of special guest speakers who have a few words to say. Are you ready?"

There was an apprehensive buzz. "How many of you were raised by a single mom or have a stepfather?" Ninety percent of the audience raised its hands. The audience was perplexed now.

"Now to introduce our special guests. First, all the way from England, Dr. Martin Humbre, distinguished astronomer and recent discoverer of a mysterious shadow on Neptune." I gestured towards the side and Dr. Humbre walked out, complete with lab coat. There was more murmuring, for Dr. Humbre had become a household name with all of the TV appearances he had been making explaining what was known of the mysterious shadow he had "discovered." He came up towards the podium, accompanied by another man. Both wore lab coats, by request, for effect.

"And...Dr. John Jenkins, Director of the National Foundation for the Sciences." His face wasn't quite as familiar, but as the top scientist in Washington his name was familiar and has been asked to comment frequently regarding the shadow on Neptune. I gestured their way and stepped aside to let them speak.

"Thank you," Dr. Humbre began in a traditional London accent. He waited for the murmur of the crowd to quiet down. "As most of you know, about three months ago our lab first started tracking a shadow crossing the face of Neptune. It looked exactly like an eclipse, only there was no known object between the sun and Neptune that could cast a large enough shadow to create an eclipse. We thought perhaps we had a spot on the reflector in our telescope, or perhaps were getting some strange refraction effect. But when we talked to other observatories and found three others that had observed the same effect, we announced the discovery of the mysterious shadow." This part of the story was well-known to most of the audience.

"Well, within minutes my voicemail was inundated with daft messages. People asking if this was the sign of the apocalypse, claiming it was an alien spaceship, that sort of rot. But I received one unlike the others. I didn't know the caller, but he too claimed to know what was casting the shadow—only he didn't say what it was. But on top of that he made a prediction—he predicted that within three days we would see flashes of light in a corona around the object making the shadow, along with a massive release of gamma radiation--and then they would disappear again. Science, as you may know, is all about testing predictions; here was someone that was not only not hysterical, but calmly making a very bold prognostication. I had no reason to believe this person know anything, since none of us so-called experts had any clue, but perhaps because it sounded like it could have been a scientist I didn't automatically delete it."

"Three days later the flashes appeared. I remembered the call, but thought it might have been coincidence, flashes aren't that uncommon, although the gamma radiation readings were. Until they ceased after four days, just as the caller had predicted. That's when I put in a call to my colleague Dr. Jenkins and informed him of my mysterious phone call."

Dr. Humbre stepped back and Dr. Jenkins stepped forward to continue the story. "Dr. Humbre forwarded to me the message he had received. Now, there's a lot of work to do at the NSF; we aren't usually in the practice of following up on crackpot phone calls. But here was this call that predicted exactly what had just happened. Since no one else in the world had any clue as to what it might be, I figured it wouldn't hurt to call the number back. I handed it one of our post-docs to follow-up. He came back that afternoon, wide-eyed, saying he thought I'd better speak to the caller myself. When I asked him why, he said 'because what he says is utterly impossible, and yet he has me completely convinced that he's right.'"

"I was more annoyed than anything when I called the number. But I soon learned that the post-doc had been right to refer the issue to me, and soon I found myself feeling the same way—what the caller said seemed utterly impossible, and yet the caller could substantiate his claims with high-level understanding of physics. And every question I raised had a perfectly reasonable explanation—reasonable, that is, except that the conclusion was absolutely absurd. But as a scientist, we must learn to let the data dictate our understanding of reality, even if it means accepting seemingly impossible conclusions. At one time Einstein's theory generated the same response, but now we understand how, within its sphere of definition, it is true."

"Then the caller asked a question that really sent shivers down my spine—he asked if we'd ever been notified of a run of strange genetic abnormalities 15-20 years ago. Indeed, in routine blood tests a number of babies had been located with strange genetic characteristics. The information was top-secret, as there were concerns that there could be a mutation occurring within the human race. In all, several hundred specimens were located...and then they suddenly stopped. No one outside the highest levels of government had known anything about it."

"'Who are you?' I asked the caller. He arranged for us to meet in a secret location. He also gave me some homework; he suggested I try something with the old genetics data that hadn't been done, may not even have been possible at the time I suppose. He suggested that I run correspondence analysis on the samples. That was a very wise suggestion, because by the time we had our meeting, I had already been convinced of the truth of two of the bombshells he was to drop on my that day."

"One, that all of the genetic variations shared a common father." Dr. Jenkins paused.

"And two, that their common father was not of this Earth."

The audience erupted in bewilderment. What was he talking about? Had the head of the NSF gone batshit-insane? He said a few words more, but they were lost in the din. They took a few steps back from the microphone, not used to inciting riots when they spoke in public.

Into this roiling commotion, Little Billy stepped towards the podium. He let loose an ear-popping wolf whistle to gain the attention of the crowd, then began to try to regain the crowd. "All right...everyone please sit down for a moment, because there's a lot more important stuff that you NEED to know. We ALL need to know. Because we were put on this Earth for a reason, and you need to know what that is."

Standing next to me backstage, Amy beamed. Little Billy was regaining control of the crowd, as we knew he would--he was just a natural leader, and had a way of talking that made people listen. Skeptically, people started to sit back down.

"My name is William Starr, but everyone just calls me Billy," he began. "And I am one of you. My mother is Amy, the Director of the Foundation, and just like each and every one of you, my dad is Bill Starr." Billy went on to explain the antimatter comet, that if we didn't divert it the Earth would be vaporized, and that the whole reason why "dad" fathered all those children was to try to save the world. He then explained that some of the audience had inherited special abilities--which he then demonstrated by levitating himself using his magnetic control ability. He was impassioned, he was direct, and he accomplished what perhaps no one else could have. He swayed most of the still-in-shock audience to sign on to the plan.

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Three weeks later, I was climbing into a space capsule at Cape Canaveral. They say nothing brings people together like a common enemy, and in the last few weeks we saw unprecedented global cooperation. NASA had shared thirty years worth of innovations with six different national space agencies and four private companies. All of them would be coordinating to simultaneously launch all of us into space. I had worked with scientists to develop a nuclear drive for each of the spacecraft to use once it was in space; it would not be enough to intercept this thing, we were going to have to be able to maneuver around it. Likewise, it wasn't going to work to simply make a beeline for it, because then it would just zoom by. We had to curl in around behind it so that our momentum allowed us to keep pace with the thing. It took a lot of people working a lot of hours in a short period of time and cutting through solid walls of red tape, but the launch was a go. In all 92 people would be simultaneously launched into space and travel further than any human had ever travelled, targeting an intercept somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn. Previous manned space flights had been all about minimizing weight and resources; this time, we had to get to the comet as far out as possible.