9 - Ex Machina, Deus?

Nathan caught himself picking his fingernails. His mother would have been furious, had she seen him doing this in front of an alien Orb that didn’t have fingers.

The Orb pulsed. Its whole body changed to a light shade of grey and the tabletop, which Nathan had assumed was just made of the same stone as the Cavern’s floor, darkened like the AntiSol windows they had on south-facing school buildings. Three dimensional clips played across the entire table, crisp and sharp. Nathan reached up to adjust his VR glasses then felt foolish because he wasn’t wearing any. His father had programmed the TV to filter out really bad news, but he heard about it at school. Why did adults feel that children needed to be shielded from the real world? He wasn’t a kid anymore. Even his sister knew more about events in the world, and she ate a steady diet of trash from FoxNet. 

He saw a montage of Middle Eastern Conflicts. He winced, as he always did, when the Twin Towers collapsed. He saw wars of Christmas past, and environmental catastrophes. He saw the mushroom cloud (Hiroshima probably), and grainy CCTV footage of scientists dying inside a laboratory. He saw an unspeakable ghetto, and a battery chicken farm so congested that he gagged at the thought of the smell. The clips closed with a series of black and white photos of skeletons, both alive and dead, in concentration camps.

Every clip had obviously been chosen to make a point, and Nathan got it. When you added them up, you got the answer: humanity was screwed.

“F**k.” Nathan sat down heavily, put his head back and rubbed his temples.

The Orb swayed slightly from side to side. “My language references tell me that your age precludes the use of that word.”

Nathan, angered by what he had been shown on the table-screen, found this condescending. He was in no mood to be lectured by an alien that he guessed had no experience of when, and when not to use inappropriate language. Still, there were more important things to worry about than his hurt feelings. “Stuff it,” he muttered and stood up. “Can you fix us?” He asked, already knowing the likely answer.

“I regret that is beyond my individual capabilities, Nathan Stromberg,” said The Orb, with a tone of regret. “If our planets were closer, it may have been possible for us to influence events without local interaction…”

“Local interaction?” interrupted Nathan.

“You.” 

Nathan felt his cheeks redden, partly from embarrassment but mostly because he realized that The Orb must have considered this question stupid. “Sorry, of course. Please go on.”

“There is a word which, from my study of Standard English, I believe it is appropriate. You will correct me if I have misinterpreted it?”

“Naturally.” 

“The word is ‘intervention’. You use it, I believe, when it has become necessary for a third party to intercede in the affairs of another, primarily out of concern for their wellbeing.”

Nathan paced around the table and thought about it. “Intervention, that’s about right I guess. You’re saying that we need help, even though we don’t realize it.”

“It is worse than that. You realize you need help on an individual level, but owing to your fractured social order you are unable, and unwilling to broadcast it. But any intelligent being can see that you are hopelessly lost. In your vernacular, your species is a blind person walking towards a cliff with no idea where the edge is. Sometimes you step backwards, and sometimes sideways, but inevitably you edge closer to the precipice. Unchecked you will eventually take a step too far, and plunge your species into the Universe’s history book.”

Nathan stopped pacing. “Is there a Universal history book?”

“No. Only that History which has been compiled from the development of my species.”

“Oh.” Nathan would have liked to have read a history of the Universe. “So you’re here to whip off the blindfold and lead us back to safety, right?”

“Not in the way you describe. This is your planet, not mine. I will pursue a course of non-direct intervention, offering guidance and the full extent of my resources. But the decisions are yours.”

Nathan stumbled backwards, as if The Orb had pushed him. “Me? Why me?”

“You have been selected.”

Nathan wasn’t going to let it off the hook that easily. If the future of the world was at stake, he at least wanted to know why it was him who had to make the decisions. “C’mon, are you telling me my name was pulled out of a hat?”

“You humans really do have the most colorful vocabulary. No, there was no protective head gear involved. I reviewed the population of Earth, and selected you as the primary candidate.”

“Primary? You mean there are others?”

“Naturally. Should you decline the honor I will approach the secondary candidate.”

Nathan pondered the implications of that. “How will you deal with me if I refuse? I could go to the press and reveal everything.”

A peculiar color appeared at The Orb’s crown. It was greenish, but only in-so-far as green was related to the mottling of a leaf on a tree in shaded sunlight. “It will be a matter,” The Orb said, “of erasing the memory engrams from your brain relating to this encounter. The procedure is painless, and you would have no scaring or mental incapacity.”

“Oh, that’s nice to hear,” shouted Nathan, then thought about it and calmed down. “Actually that would be quite useful I imagine.”

“Indeed.” 

Nathan got the sense The Orb wasn’t telling him everything, but let is slide. “So, how do you propose to fix the almighty mess we’ve gotten ourselves into?”

“We cannot proceed until you have accepted the responsibility being placed on you.”

“Why not? You can tell me, then just wipe my memory if I don’t like it.”

“Yes, but the engram deletion takes time, and decisions need to be made now. There are already events in motion that demand action, and time is critical.”

“Ok, ok.” Nathan thought about it. Who was he to make decisions effecting the rest of humanity? On the other hand, The Orb was right. There was no indication that anyone was making good decisions for the world. He listened to his friends, and his father and his friends, and he spoke to his mom and his sister. Everyone said the same thing when you boiled it down. They were living in a s**t show. So, if an alien race concluded that he was the person to do what needed to be done to turn humanity around, then he was good with that. “I’m in,” he said.  

“So be it!” The Orb exploded in golden light.

The light didn’t hurt Natan’s eyes this time, and he was able to look right at his new friend. Its radiance blazed like the sun, tendrils of light flaring out in random directions. Then the light dimmed, and disappeared. “Wow.” Nathan sat back in his seat. “So, what’s the plan?”

The Orb drifted back to the table. “You need to recruit your committee.”

This was said in such a matter of fact way that Nathan thought he had misheard. He stood up and banged his knee on the underside of the table. “Ouch!” he exclaimed. “What do you mean by ‘committee’?”

The Orb’s color changed to a deep magenta. “What you are going to take on is the biggest responsibility any person has ever assumed in the history of your species. It will be impossible to do it on your own, even with my considerable resources. So you need to load balance. You might think of it as a gang, which I believe is the age-appropriate expression is it not?”

Nathan rubbed his throbbing kneecap, and tried not to laugh. “I haven’t been in a gang before. I think perhaps ‘team’ is the better expression.”

“Very well, team it is.” 

An idea formed in Nathan’s mind, an idea so marvelous that he knew it must work. “Do you have to agree to them, or is it just my decision?” 

The Orb rose higher in the air than Nathan had seen it do thus far. “The decision is entirely yours. I can recommend and advise, but having accepted this responsibility for all humankind you accept the responsibility for deciding who should join you.”

“Excellent!” Nathan said. “Time to make a few calls.”