Bart Blog

THE MESSAGE

On the 14th of March 2028 we received the first, and so far only, message from them. It was in pristine but rather dated English.

“Your electromagnetic emanations impair our communion with God. He is saddened, for He loves His children and wishes to speak with them. In forty-four years hence we shall arrive and destroy your world so as to silence you. You have time enough to make your peace with this.”

The broadcast repeated for one hour. We were quite lucky to even notice it. Satellite dishes turned, one by one, toward the signal. We learned the rough direction and nothing more specific than that. Scientists unanimously agreed it was real.

For the first week people mostly did not believe it. For the second week they believed it and pretended not to. By the third week they believed it and said so on television, where a man in a nice tie explained that the aliens were forty-four years away, which was, he pointed out, longer than most mortgages.

This was considered comforting.

Stock markets fell and then rose and then fell again and then settled, because markets will settle around anything given enough time, including their own funeral. Churches filled up. Bars filled up. The churches and the bars reported roughly equal attendance, and in some towns it was the same building.

A great many committees were formed. The committees formed subcommittees. The subcommittees issued statements. The statements said, in essence, that something would be done, and that the something was being looked into by a committee.

So it goes, more or less.

THE FACTIONS

Within a few years, humanity sorted itself into three groups. Not neatly, not officially, but inevitably, the way oil and water and the third thing floating on top of both will sort themselves if you leave the jar alone.

The Silentionists

A religious cult. Surprisingly large. People had been claiming God existed for some time already, so the narrative fit them like an old coat. They could not persuade anyone outside their own ranks, but they did not need to. They abandoned most of the modern technology that was doing the polluting. The fanatics went nomadic and smashed cell towers with sledgehammers and wept while doing it. The moderates kept wired internet but unplugged the Wi-Fi, which they regarded as a kind of original sin you could at least opt out of.

An odd thing happened. After abandoning the tech, the Silentionists’ lives became, on the whole, more pleasant. Their rates of depression dropped. Their use of psychiatric medication dropped. They slept better. Children read books again, and some of the books were even good.

This was noticed.

People began joining the Silentionists not because they believed an alien civilization was communing with God on a frequency humans were jamming, but because the Silentionists looked rested. A woman in Oregon told a reporter she had joined for the theology. Pressed further, she admitted she had joined because her neighbors stopped shouting at each other after they gave up their phones. The reporter wrote both things down, and only the second one was true.

The movement had a problem, which was that it depended on communication to grow. Its preachers had to travel. Its pamphlets had to be printed and distributed. Its converts had to find it. The Silentionists resolved this contradiction the way all large movements resolve contradictions, which is to say they did not resolve it, and simply proceeded.

The Militarists

These were, basically, the combined powers of the governments. And the people who somehow still believed governments. Governments have militaries and they have diplomats. Diplomacy was no good here, the aliens had said what they had to say and then stopped talking, so military it was.

The United Nations, which had spent eighty years failing to agree on what a war crime was, agreed within eighteen months on a unified command structure for planetary defense. It was the most impressive diplomatic achievement in human history, and all it produced was space mines.

The mines were thermonuclear and self-propelled. There were eventually four hundred and some of them, placed in a great loose shell around the Earth on the side facing the direction of the broadcast. They cost, collectively, more than every war humans had ever fought, adjusted for inflation. Serious people in serious rooms did serious work on a problem their tools almost certainly could not solve, and they did it well, because seriousness is a skill independent of usefulness.

The Militarists and the Silentionists did not get along. The military needed radar and satellites and the whole screaming electromagnetic orchestra the Silentionists blamed for the whole mess. Occasionally a Silentionist cell would blow up a relay station, and occasionally a military court would imprison a Silentionist for blowing up a relay station, and everyone involved agreed that the other side had started it.

The Bullshitters

They called the whole premise a load of crap.

They were, for the first two decades, the majority. They were not ideological. They had not sat down and reasoned through the evidence and concluded the aliens were not real. They had simply decided that they were not going to let some forty-four-year countdown rearrange their Tuesday. They were annoyed by the military spending. They were annoyed by the no-Wi-Fi cafés run by Silentionists, which played no music and served tea in silence. They were annoyed, above all, by being asked about it.

Their denial was a lifestyle, not a philosophy. Lifestyles are more durable than philosophies, because they do not require you to be right.

THE MIDDLE YEARS

Year 5

The first permanent Silentionist community was founded in Vermont. It had six hundred people and no electric lights after sundown. A journalist visited and wrote a long article about it that was read on phones by millions of people who envied the six hundred and did nothing about it. They were practically Mormons, with a different god, no manual skills, and a better wardrobe.

Military research concluded, after several promising years, that we had nothing new for the aliens. We had, in that time, developed many new and exciting ways to kill people on Earth. None of them were any use in space. The old-school approach it would have to be.

The Bullshitters held normalcy rallies. The rallies were well-attended and involved a lot of hot dogs. Nobody could say exactly what was being protested, because the Bullshitters’ position was that there was nothing to protest, and they were gathering to demonstrate it.

Year 20

The halfway mark.

Humanity had, by this point, produced six blockbuster alien-fighting movie franchises and roughly twenty-seven streaming television series with multiple seasons. In all of them, we won. In all but one, we won cleanly. The exception ended in a draw, mutual annihilation, and had required a non-Hollywood European production to make it.

A generation had now been born that had never known a world without the countdown. They were, on the whole, a quieter generation. They did not throw themselves off buildings, as some early commentators had predicted. They simply made fewer plans. They got many more mortgages. They had fewer children, and the children they had, they held a little tighter.

The Silentionist health data had by now become impossible to ignore. Insurance companies began offering discounts to policyholders who could prove membership in a Silentionist congregation. This was the point at which the Silentionists stopped being a cult and became, in the eyes of actuaries, a lifestyle choice.

The first space mine was deployed that year. There was a ceremony. A general gave a speech. The speech was broadcast on every channel, which was the sort of thing the aliens had specifically complained about, and nobody at the ceremony mentioned this.

The Bullshitters’ ranks began to thin. Not dramatically. A man would stop showing up to the normalcy rallies. A woman would quietly unplug her router. They did not convert, exactly. They simply stopped defending the position out loud. The position remained, unmanned, at its post.

Year 35

The final decade began, and tension climbed into everything, including the weather, which was bad but no worse than it had been for other reasons already.

The global military budget had quietly overtaken everything else combined. Nobody knew where it was coming from, and economists had stopped asking.

The nomadic Silentionists escalated. A cell in Austria brought down a regional power grid and sang hymns while doing it. The Militarists revealed the full scope of the defense network, which had grown, by this point, into something genuinely impressive and almost certainly useless. The remaining Bullshitters became louder and angrier and a little frightened, in the way people get when they have been right for thirty-five years and are starting to suspect they will not make it to thirty-six.

Children born in year 20 were now fifteen. They did not understand what any of the adults were arguing about. They had always known the world was ending. It struck them as an odd thing for grown-ups to make such a fuss about.

ARRIVAL, YEAR 44

The spaceship arrived on the opposite side of the planet from the mines.

It was small. This surprised everyone who had prepared for forty-four years to be attacked by something much bigger, and multiple. It sat in orbit for three months and did nothing.

The Silentionists prayed. They prayed in the wired, moderate way and in the nomadic, weeping way, and both kinds of prayer were, on the whole, calm. They had made their peace some time ago.

The Militarists ran calculations. The calculations all said the same thing, which was that the mines were on the wrong side of the Earth and could not be moved in time, and that the entire defense of humanity had been aimed, with great precision, in the wrong direction. The generals did not share this with the public. The public had other things to worry about.

The Bullshitters went very quiet. For the first time in forty-four years they had nothing to say.

CONTACT

On the ninety-first day, the ship made contact.

They asked if we could lend them some liquid helium. The ship was broken and they wanted to go home.

Never before had everyone on Earth gone silent at the same time.

We asked, as delicately as we could, whether they were planning to attack.

They said no. The attack had been cancelled. The armada had turned back quite some time ago, actually, years ago, but this particular ship had suffered an engine malfunction and could not reverse course. It had needed Earth’s gravity to stop. That was the only reason it was here at all. Sorry about the fuss.

We asked why the attack had been cancelled.

It turned out that the original message about God and the emanations had been a long-running joke by a group of scientists. They had thought it was funny. The scientists had wanted to punish people for believing in myths. When they realized their colleagues were actually preparing to come and destroy us on the strength of their joke, they had come forward and explained.

There had been an inquiry. The scientists had been reprimanded, their research budget reduced by 30%. The joke was universally evaluated as a good one. By aliens. The armada had turned around.

This had all happened, they said, around our Year 6.

Outside the United Military Headquarters a group of generals stood looking at the sky.

“Helium. I say, just nuke them.”

“For fuck’s sake, Fred. Go home.”

And this is how the military efforts ended.

We sent the helium, together with some quickly assembled gifts. There was a brief debate about the chocolate, but it was good chocolate, and we decided to risk it.

AFTER

The Bullshitters were in an awkward but comfortable position. They had been wrong. They had also been correct. It had been a joke. They settled into this contradiction the way they settled into everything, which is to say they did not settle into it at all, and simply carried on.

The Silentionists were either installing Wi-Fi or making very sure they were still far from it. Their lives, on the whole, were not so bad.

The military complex lost its meaning. This took longer than one might expect. Meanings are load-bearing, and when you remove one from a structure that large, the structure keeps standing for a while out of sheer habit. Besides, keeping the mines in orbit was not the best strategy going forward. Some of them were already getting a little close.

It turned out that we had managed, as a species, to live in relative harmony for forty-four years. This surprised the historians, who had not been expecting to write that sentence, and had to revise several textbooks.

But we had problems.

Two billion children had not been born. You do not want to raise a child just in time for the apocalypse, and so people had, quietly and without coordinating, decided not to. The children who had been born were surprised to discover they now had much more time on their hands than they had planned for. Some of them were angry about this. Most of them got over it.

All in all, the outcome was positive. But we were lost in a general sort of way. As a species, we had made no plans past Year 44. The new plan, arrived at quickly and without much debate, was to make babies. Lots of them. We had no better ideas.