Content note: Historical racism and misogyny
[Time Reference Unavailable]—August, 1946
The watchseed is planted in a watery hemisphere of a watery world. The place spins around a yellow star, wearing its magnetic field like a proud little hat. It’s ridiculous with life.
Hence, a watchseed, with the best of intentions. Let’s give the seed-planters that much. They mean well. Crawling from star to star at not-quite-c, they make their surveys, consult their charts, launch a seed now and then. Old thinkers, they make an endless circuit of the galaxy on behalf of young thinkers. Young thinkers are rare and precious and must be protected, particularly from themselves, because young thinkers are stupid as hell and prone to misadventures with anything they can dig out of their planetary crusts. Hydrocarbons, radioactives, anything.
This planet is rich in ingredients for misadventure. Down goes the seed.
Two hundred thousand solar orbits, more or less, pass quietly. Then the watchseed wakes up with the unmistakable taste of an atomic weapon in its mouth.
The explosion can’t have been close, but particles of strontium-90 (in the local parlance) must eventually drift down even into the saline blackness of the aphotic zone, twenty-four hundred feet (local parlance) beneath the Pacific Ocean (you get the idea). That isotope has no honest business in the natural world. Created as a fission byproduct, it’s as good as a signature on a confession.
Things begin to happen. Here’s some fine print: receptor polyps close on their activating specks of beta-emitting isotope like eyelids wincing shut over a piece of grit. Sleepy cellular machinery brews hormonal triggers. Pulses of neurochemical go-go-juice hit the ganglial centers of an organism that last twitched before the Great Pyramid was built. Clouds of polysaccharide mucous trickle into the lightless water, forming nutrient bubbles around expansion points. The dormant watchseed has long resembled twenty meters of undistinguished rocky pancake. Now it grows new mouths, strains at the sea, gains mass. The accumulation process will require some time. Then the mass will be used to get someone’s attention.
The seed-planters mean well. In the abstract, they love young thinkers. But young thinkers must be protected from their own worst impulses.
Protected good and hard.
October, 1954
The meeting is ad hoc, a fraction of the presidium. No minutes are kept. The ministers speak through a smokescreen. The tips of their cigarettes glow like airport landing lights in a heavy fog, and there is murmuring and whispering around the table even after the briefing begins.
“…bringing the total to six confirmed sinkings in two days. One American submarine, one American destroyer, two Japanese fishing vessels, and two cargo ships.”
“Comrade Minister of Defense, this is…with all due respect—”
“A waste of your valuable time, Comrade Minister of the Maritime Fleet? You would counsel disinterest?”
“Not at all.” No need to be so fucking arch, you goatee-stroking dramatist, thinks the Minister of the Maritime Fleet. “The situation should be monitored, comrade, but the phenomenon is located in the American Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. There seems to be no present risk to our assets.”
“This risk moves, comrade.”
“Comrades.” The Minister of Medium Machine Building is hoarse, his voice cracking like frost on a windowpane. “However severe these…incidents are, I hope I might be forgiven my skepticism that the cause is a sea monster!”
“Vyacheslav Aleksandrovich.” The voice of the new speaker is cultured, pleasant. Its owner could use it to curdle milk. All the whispering stops when the chairman of the new Committee for State Security speaks, and he continues: “Imagine your skepticism if someone had told you thirty years ago that an entire city might be destroyed by a single bomb. These days you build them.”
Dutiful chuckles around the room. Beria has been ten kilograms of black grit in a communal grave for nearly a year, but glad-handing the Lubyanka man remains a quality-of-life reflex.
“The American navy has photographs of the creature,” says State Security. “Reuters has film from the deck of one of the cargo ships. First Directorate is still working on securing a copy, but we are confident this footage exists.”
“Or we’re meant to be confident that it exists,” says Medium Machine Building.
“Yes, thank you, comrade, I do recall certain briefings on the fundamentals of disinformation, somewhere in my school days.” If it is possible to light a cigarette with dangerous languor, the chairman of the KGB now does this, perhaps using some kind of sorcery.
The Minister of the Maritime Fleet nervously sucks his own cigarette, tastes the smoke of a dozen others. Someone in the room smokes Gauloises. He wishes he knew who to ask for a favor.
“It is most curious, is it not,” says Defense, “that each of these attacks has taken place in daylight and somehow left behind a significant number of survivors. This beast that can outswim a destroyer and tear open a steel hull always attacks at a pace just sufficiently relaxed to allow men to abandon ship.”
“If these incidents are a fabrication, eyewitness accounts would be essential to that fabrication!” says Medium Machine Building.
“Have you any idea what a pain in the balls prepared witnesses are?” State Security jabs the smoky air. “Every one of them needs ideological clearance, briefing, rehearsal, follow-up scrutiny. Don’t get me started. Using hundreds of them would be madness. Our comrade Minister of Defense is correct to point out that this beast seems to want to show itself to witnesses. The witnesses are genuine.”
“But it could—”
“Comrade Minister of Medium Machine Building, if these were the bad old days, now would be the point at which I note that Siberia is lovely at this time of your life. Fortunately we have all recently stumbled into a more forgiving world. Also, I brought something with me that settles the issue.”
There is a series of rustling, swishing noises as aides flick documents onto the table before each minister. The men must have sonar, to operate so precisely in this haze.
“Two hours ago,” says State Security, “the American resident in Moscow made contact with the offices of both the First Secretary and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. You have his letter there. The President of the United States urgently demands formal clarification that this ‘anomalous entity’ didn’t hatch out of an egg from any basket of ours. ‘Anomalous entity,’ his words, on the diplomatic record. This would invite a historic humiliation for the Americans if they did not have absolute confidence this thing is real.”
“I still worry that Eisenhower has moved from bourbon to antifreeze.” The Minister of Communications speaks for the first time. “If we had a sea monster under our control, why would we use it to sink fishing boats in Micronesia?”
“Because proving its soundness of function would damage their narrative of global preeminence. And create the implication it might be sent somewhere more interesting,” says Defense. “Pearl Harbor, for instance. Or Chesapeake Bay.”
“Very well, comrades,” sniffs Communications. “Assuming it was an act of deliberate genius on our part to recruit the Loch Ness Monster and send it to eat palm trees, that’s still immaterial, because we don’t actually have a sea monster, do we?”
Defense and State Security are both silent.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” says Communications.
“My people didn’t make a sea monster,” blurts the goggle-eyed old stick from the State Committee for the Introduction of New Technologies. “We don’t even have an applicable basis in theory! So who did? Comrade Lysenko?”
Not bloody likely, thinks the Minister of the Maritime Fleet. If the aquatic beast is alive, that’s sufficient disproof of Lysenko’s involvement. This is not the sort of opinion one shares; he takes a long drag on his cigarette, as though forcing the thought back into the depths of his skull, away from the daylight into which it must never stray.
“Comrades,” says Defense. He uses a familiar, grandfatherly tone of voice that implies a train is leaving the station and everyone present is expected aboard. “Let us not get hung up on the question of whether or not we possess a…sea monster. Of course we don’t. The real issue is, now that sea monsters are a recognized factor, the current strategic calculus does not allow the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to fully disavow the possibility that it possesses or could some day possess a…sea monster.”
“So we merely claim the beast is ours,” says the New Technologies man. “As an act of military and scientific intimidation?”
“Jesus,” says State Security. “You must come to my office to play cards sometime. Bring a lot of money. Be sensible, comrade.”
“We would be very excited to get our hands on a current-generation American atomic device,” says Defense. “We are less interested in receiving several hundred at once. So no, we will not be claiming any direct responsibility for sinking their fucking warships.”
“Also, if we claimed we had a monster, our fraternal socialist comrades in North Korea would claim they had a bigger one,” says Foreign Affairs. “Yap yap yap, those bastards.”
“So…we disavow responsibility for this specific entity,” says the Minister of the Maritime Fleet, slowly, believing he gets the idea. “Yet simultaneously imply that its existence is no surprise to us…and we may already be experimenting with the deployment of a similar…asset?”
“Precisely,” says State Security. “To be ominous yet unverifiable. That is living the dream, comrades.”
“And what will the Micronesians or the Japanese think about all this?” says Communications.
“You know, I’ve been here for some time, and I’ve never noticed a Ministry for Apologizing to the Japanese anywhere in this complex,” says Defense.
“Who took this decision?” insists Communications.
“The Soviet people, comrade, in their usual fashion.”
“No, I specifically mean—where are comrades Khrushchev and Malenkov in all of this?”
“Opening one another’s mail,” says State Security. “Sending me requests to open the other’s mail. Casting hexes at each other. I don’t know, the usual shit. They’re happy, comrade, and you should be happy for them. They’ve been consulted. They love being consulted.”
“Comrades, I have no desire to be an obstructionist,” lies Communications. “I am merely concerned we could talk ourselves into looking like real assholes if the Americans make some fresh discovery about this thing that casts our statements into doubt!”
“I can acknowledge some justice in your worries, Comrade Minister of Communications,” says State Security. “However, we will only be inviting the Americans to leap to a conclusion. Our purpose, as ever, is to instill as much doubt as possible in the American decision-making process.”
“Comrades,” says the New Technologies man, hesitantly, “should it not also be our purpose to determine the true origin point of this anomalous entity, for cultural and scientific reasons?”
“So long as it continues to express a preference for assets of the capitalist bloc in its dining habits, its true origin is irrelevant. Thank you, comrades.” The Minister of Defense pushes back his chair with an ear-piercing scrape. “I believe that covers everything. Additional directives will be issued as circumstances require. This unrecorded meeting related to matters of special importance to the state did not take place.”
“Remember, Siberia is lovely at this time of your life,” says State Security with a grin.
The Minister of the Maritime Fleet has just decided he might make it out of the room alive when, in the press of wide-eyed slump-shouldered men trying to squeeze out the door, he feels the hand of State Security take him softly by the elbow.
“Comrade Minister,” the man says in a low voice, “we note that you have already used informal channels to reroute some of our far east shipping even further away from the apparent danger zone. You are to be congratulated for your discretion. You should prepare additional instructions to this effect. Expand the zone of exclusion by two hundred nautical miles on all sides, indefinitely, and effect this change with the same degree of subtlety.”
“I…uh, of course. I serve the Soviet Union, comrade.” Some of the sudden chill in his bowels goes away. Some. “Do you, uh, really think we can convince the Americans that Marxism-Leninism might have a live dinosaur on its payroll?”
The Chairman of the Committee for State Security raises one eyebrow, a pale brown scruff imbued with concentrated promise of dread. Then he smiles and waves a hand at the other departing ministers.
“As if it’s entirely without precedent?”
July, 1947—September, 1954
The watchseed drifts across a hazy boundary of self-awareness and realizes it can think.
The seed-planters designed its consciousness to grow slowly, adjusting gently to each new unfolding of comprehension. Two hundred thousand local years would be a long time for any living thing to cling to an undersea ledge, let alone something with the power to wreak planetary havoc. Psychological stability must be assured in a monstrous visitation from the stars.
Marine snow fuels physical growth. Its mouths are like a field of gray flowers pulsing open and closed, sifting the detritus of plankton and scraps drifting down from the light-touched layers above. At a certain body mass, enzymes crack the seals on ancient biomolecular databases. Suddenly it understands why it has been given this bulk, this power of thought. When it weighs about twenty tons, it detaches itself and swims upward. The things it plucks from the top layer of ocean are interesting—the locals would be able to identify several dolphins, an equal number of sharks, a dozen flavors of fish, and a single surprised saltwater crocodile.
The seed studies these meals, copies their useful features. Back in the darkness, it spins some of its new mass off into a remote espionage bureau. Snake-like fragments of itself wriggle out, bearing all the mundane senses as well as organs for scanning the electromagnetic spectrum. After a few weeks hidden in kelp or a mangrove swamp or a garbage patch, a fragment will swim back, carrying its recorded data in the form of DNA strands, ready to be literally digested.
More detonations are detected, including a thermonuclear event. Urgency is required. The seed learns rapidly. It identifies the local young thinkers, the idiots with the atomic weapons. It catalogs their settlements, radio signals, watercraft, flying machines. Biological factories churn, stretching the watchseed’s body into an aggressor configuration, generating overlapping scaled surfaces harder and lighter than steel.
This is a place of islands and atolls, this area nearest the seed’s original resting place. There is much native traffic here, by sea and by air, but no major industrial facilities. An ideal place for a demonstration; here the prized technology of the natives can be challenged and defeated without threatening their population centers. Seven solar cycles after waking up, the watchseed weighs eight hundred tons and is finally fit for duty. It adjusts its thinking one more time. It names itself.
Messenger.
The first attack is a food-gathering vessel. Messenger pulls it around by its nets, yanks its cranes out of their housings, shatters its hull with a tail-lash, and finally towers threateningly over the ruptured, listing vessel as terrified natives jump into the sea. It gives them a lingering look before roaring and plunging back into the depths. Next, Messenger finds a war-vessel, striking it from beneath. As it rolls over, water rushes in to douse the hot machinery that drives the ship. A great column of white steam rises from the wreck. Messenger stands wreathed in the mist, holding the upper half of its body twenty meters above the waves, before turning away and vanishing. It has a stage magician’s sense of timing; its creators have imbued it with razzle-dazzle from beyond the stars.
Messenger swims to and fro in the warm saline sea. It smashes another food-gathering vessel, then a couple of cargo haulers, and then another sort of war-vessel, one designed to sink beneath the waves. Messenger helps it with that.
The seed-planters resigned themselves to the impossibility of personally standing watch across millions of years and hundreds of thousands of light-years. The seeds are their solution. First, identify likely young thinkers in the dawn of their development. Then hide monsters under their beds and scare the little pinheads nearly to death if they start experimenting with civilization-destroying forces.
Messenger is programmed to operate in escalating stages, with generous intervals of time to allow for the locals to reflect. The seed-planters desire to inspire a sense of awe rather than desperate panic; to provide a focal point for a moment of pause in the face of a power beyond primitive conception. A rampant watchseed is meant to inspire philosophical development and social unity. That it does this by breaking things and killing people is regrettable, but the fates of worlds and species are in question.
Messenger carries out its orders with placid self-confidence, tearing ships open, swatting helicopters from the sky, posing for the little flashes of cameras whenever it notices them.
Several local months into its intimidation cycle, Messenger notes that the natives have withdrawn their battle-vessels some distance. Perhaps the message is already sinking in. Perhaps the locals, as is the case in 62 percent of all watchseed awakenings, are already re-assessing their presumed mastery of the universe in a healthier fashion.
Then Messenger, while submerged and drifting quietly, detects a fresh atomic explosion. The center of the blast is approximately six hundred feet directly above its head.
December, 1954
“When the hell are we finally going to do something about that thing swimming around in the Pacific?”
“Well, season’s greetings to you too, senator.” The National Security Advisor studies the ice cubes swimming in his bourbon, sighs, and expertly shakes a crumpled pack of Viceroys so that one cigarette pops out as a sacrifice.
“It’s embarrassing!” The senator sits and takes the cigarette in mid-harangue. He and the NSA have a lot of practice lighting up while yelling at one another. It’s a cornerstone of their semi-friendship. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I hear in committee.”
“I would,” sighs the NSA. “I probably hear them before you do.”
“Safe and sound in your lovely executive rooms, you mean. You might be a cook, buddy, but I’m waiting the tables. I have to talk to the customers now and then.”
“In the broadest sense, you and I are manning the walls for God, mom, and apple pie together. In a more immediate sense, I only have one customer, and he and Mrs. Eisenhower are currently sound asleep. As you and I would be if we had anything noteworthy perched atop our spines.”
The senator squints at the NSA, decides it’s a when-in-Rome kind of night, and fetches a bottle and a lowball glass for himself. The two men are seated in a glorified closet in the basement of the Executive Office Building, a sort of official speakeasy, with a liquor cabinet and a door that locks from the inside.
“There are rumors about the Russians—”
“Oh, Christ.” The NSA drains his glass, pours a reinforcement. “You need a skepticism transplant. Look, wherever that thing came from, I guarantee you nobody ever taught it to sing ‘The Internationale.’”
“If there’s any possibility, any at all, then the need for us to take action is even more—”
“Give it a rest. You and I both know that if the Russians had uncorked a sea monster from some EC Comics laboratory it’d be floating belly-up in the Aral Sea like a pet goldfish waiting for the flush. They disavowed the fucking thing, and for once I believe ‘em.”
“Boy, I’d save myself a lot of time if I just skipped the questions and had you yell the answers at me in any order you preferred.”
“Why climb the mountain if you don’t want to hear the wise man?” The NSA grins. “Drink up.”
“General MacArthur certainly shot the works at you and your boss on the radio this morning.” The senator lets the NSA pour for him, first generously, then irresponsibly. The liquor lines his cracked lips with heat as he tosses it back. “He speaks for a lot of dissatisfied people.”
“You’d think he’d be shy about picking a new fight with a president, considering what the last one got him.” The NSA mimes an exaggerated yawn. “What a strategic view the general must possess from that penthouse at the Waldorf-Astoria. Of course he wants us to blast the damn thing, he wants open warfare against half the countries in Asia. The sea monster’s just the latest straw for him to grasp at.”
“If your boss wants a second term he might consider taking that straw away from MacArthur.”
“I’m gonna let you take a mulligan on that bullshit. If MacArthur were a credible candidate for president I’d still have most of my hair, because it would be 1946.”
“You scoff. But if you let Moby Public Relations Disaster swim around un-harpooned much longer, Ike might be surprised what rough beast slouches toward the ’56 primaries to be born.”
“Dick Nixon not rough enough for you? Anyway, how many more destroyers should we feed the thing, senator? We’ve lost seven. How many more planes and helicopters? How many sailors?”
“We should stop this goddamned piecemeal approach.” The senator hadn’t needed to drink so fast, but he did, and now his grievances are limber. “I’m talking about multiple carrier battle groups, the whole Pacific fleet with bells on. And there are proposals for a multi-national strike force. The French want in, the Canadians, the British—”
“Hey, that’s swell,” says the NSA. “I have a seven-year-old who’d love to go out there and have an adventure on a big ship. They could all play together.”
“I’m serious, dammit. That thing is tearing the Marshall Islands apart. We’re being upstaged by a sea monster. The UN General Assembly…oh, don’t give me that face, you look like you’re having a stroke. Who’s calling these shots, exactly?”
“The American people, buddy, in their usual fashion.”
“Does the president want hearings? Because this is how he gets both houses of Congress right up his ass. What the hell is really going on?”
“The trouble with this place is that it’s full of people meeting in smoky little rooms to get drunk and spill secrets after hours.” The NSA sighs and clinks his glass against the senator’s. “Look, you’ve done some favors for me and the boss, so now I’m gonna quid your pro quo. But if you ever try to tell anyone I spilled the beans, you’re gonna find that I was verifiably out of town tonight.”
“Okay. Get spilling.”
“What we’ve been doing for the last couple weeks is working hard to avoid the damn thing, not to challenge it. But we’ve saturated the area with high recon flights, plotting the thing’s movement. Now, we have no interest in the general fleet engagement you propose, senator, but we’re still plotting the thing’s movement. Very precisely. And gathering an unusual number of weather reports. Why do you think that is?”
“Atomic release?” says the senator. “Is that why you were a couple drinks ahead of me when I got here?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m bullish on atoms for peace, but even when you know it’s the right decision it does make the ol’ ballsack tighten up a bit.”
“Is it the right decision?”
“The president signed orders to that effect just before dinner, so it’s now the only decision.”
“How soon will we—”
“About ninety minutes ago. That sea monster is now somewhere between over medium and over hard.”
“Already done? Christ. The islanders and the Japanese are going to love this.”
“Senator, if God cared what the Japanese thought about the Pacific Ocean he wouldn’t have made us so good at building aircraft carriers.” The NSA drains his glass and belches through his cigarette. “Ninety minutes ago we had a sea monster problem. Now we’ve got an exciting news day and a bump in the polls. The president is dreaming untroubled dreams. Just as you and I should be.”
Ninety Minutes Earlier in December, 1954
Let’s make a list. Title it “Top Twenty Ways to Seriously Annoy an Awakened Watchseed.”
The bottom nineteen items are irrelevant. Just leave ’em blank. At the top of the list, write: “Tickle it with an atomic bomb.”
The drop is lucky, a pickle straight into the barrel. The parachute-slowed Mark 7 is fused to airburst at fifty feet, with a yield of twenty-two kilotons. This is a compromise setting, meant to allow deployment whether the Mid-Pacific Entity is submerged, surfaced, or stomping around on an island. Half a dozen observation aircraft are monitoring at a presumably safe distance, gulping data from this unprecedented combination of atomic field test and public-relations bonanza (assuming things shake out; if the monster swims out of the mushroom cloud unharmed, a lot of film canisters are going straight into a vault at Pearl Harbor).
The water column above Messenger eats most of the thermal and hard radiation pointed in that direction. Several hundred feet of water vaporize, leaving a goodly amount to be compressed by the blast wave, which follows merrily in the wake of the X-rays and gamma rays, turning the immediate area into a hell of hydrostatic shock. As a fresh white plume of radioactive steam and condensation rises somewhere southeast of Eniewetok Atoll (Merry Christmas, Marshall Islanders, and, not for the first time, surprise!), Messenger sinks in a slow flat spin, oozing clouds of blood.
Self-repairing, stuffed full of modular biofactories, Messenger has nonetheless underprepared for direct violence of this magnitude. The sudden overpressure cracks its carapace and fills its joints and hollows with thousands of seeping fissures. This is a setback.
Yet only that. Messenger is still in the game, already calculating food requirements for repairs and improvements, visualizing a larger, tougher battle configuration to help these primates grasp the points it needs to make. Remember those gradually escalating stages of violence, those generous intervals of time for reflection? Oh, that’s done.
Overhead the handshakes and promotions are already starting. Messenger flutters back down into the cold blackness, making a list and checking it twice.
February, 1956
“I’m sorry we had to wake you, Mr. President,” says the NSA.
“Story of my life.” The president groans, settles into his chair behind Teddy Roosevelt’s old desk, stares at his cigarette before puffing with guilty resignation. “What do we have?”
“It’s more a case of what we don’t have,” says an admiral with a seamy face and a cap that looks more comfortable than parade-ready. “Seventh Fleet has lost contact with the USS Catfish—that’s a submarine—and the destroyer Frank Knox. Also, uh, looks like an oil tanker and a Japanese fishing ship failed to make requested status checks. And, uh, Jacques Cousteau is missing. All of this in—”
“Please don’t say the Marshall Islands.”
“Yes, sir. The Marshalls again. And we have a picture of the, uh, primary suspect, from Seventh Fleet photo recon. Right here.”
The president stares at the glossy eight-by-ten. “Coffee,” he says at last. “And there’d better be brandy in it. So we have another one of these goddamn things.”
“Near as we can tell, Mr. President.” The NSA steps in, making gestures at his aides, large and expansive ones to indicate the size of the pour on the requested brandy. “Mid-Pacific Entity One was about a hundred and twenty feet; MidPac-2 must be twice as long. Same general look, though. Scales and everything.”
“And we dropped the bomb on its little brother,” growls the president. “Well, we won’t play the waiting game this time. Pacific fleet to maximum readiness. I want some very sugar-coated notes for the Chinese and the Soviets, explaining ourselves, and I don’t want so much as an unscheduled fart from our forces in Europe.”
“Respectfully, Mr. President,” says one of the suits in the entourage of interchangeable suits, “assuming a deferential posture to the reds could have adverse consequences for the election—”
“Damn it, I’m gonna let them know it’s lizard hunting season again, not volunteer to wash Khrushchev’s feet for Holy Week.” says the president. His brandy arrives, plausibly disguised beneath a thin layer of coffee, and is subjected to immediate attack. “There’s no room for ambiguity if we’re going to be throwing lead at this damned thing.”
“Do you want us to put the vice-president in the picture?” says the NSA with a thin smile.
“Still an open question if Dick’s going to be on board with us for November.” The president sets his empty mug down atop the photo of MidPac Ulcer Fuel Two. “So let him sleep. He can read his briefing in the morning like everybody else. Unless the joint chiefs come up with some urgent contradiction, I want Entity Op Plan Three. And this time I want a piece of that thing. Knuckle, eyeball, anything. I’ll have it mounted in the Lincoln Bedroom.”
March, 1956—June, 1958
The First Pacific Entity War (also known as Second Contact or the Marshalls Misconduct) begins with a series of air attacks from United States Navy Task Force 77. While the sight of a Ray Harryhausen creature grappling with a model of a warship might be delightful to movie audiences, the real navy understands that sending its surface combatants into hugging range of MidPac-2 would be a mistake. Naval vessels are bad at hugging. Entity Op Plan Three, prepared in 1955 by the most underappreciated staff weenies in American military history, calls for unrestricted air attacks while the fleet itself masses for a decisive confrontation. No penny-packet approach this time.
The only fault with this sensible course of action is that Messenger can move at forty knots while submerged, at depths of who-the-hell-knows-how-many feet, for hours or days at a time. The humans do not always receive adequate warning of its approach, and Messenger transforms three radar pickets, another submarine, and an Essex-class carrier into war memorials as they might have been designed by Jackson Pollock. It does this despite a constant rain of rockets, torpedoes, and depth charges that barely knock flakes off its carapace.
Britain, Australia, and New Zealand send warships that are grudgingly integrated into Taffy 77. The Soviet Union sends “fishing trawlers” that skirt the exclusion zone, monitoring the vessels desperately shooting and maneuvering inside. The CIA sends “commercial mineral surveyors” that shadow the fishing trawlers. Kim Il-sung announces that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has acquired and trained a Great Beast Entity of Progress many times mightier than the one the imperialists have angered. Nobody pays any attention.
The Marshallese people are once again crated up and involuntarily shipped off to even more obscure corners of the Pacific as their islands and atolls are blasted past usefulness. The president, thinking electorally as well as strategically, authorizes further use of atomic weapons. Several dozen nuclear depth charges are dropped on or near Messenger, glancing blows. Bob Hope jokes that the president’s world-famous Atoms for Peace initiative has been replaced with Atoms for Pisces. Bob Hope and his DC-3 are eaten by the sea monster, which has had a lot of fresh practice throwing things at aircraft, while en route to a USO show in South Korea.
Here we see that even beings as ancient and experienced as the seed-planters are capable, for honorable and optimistic reasons, of initiating a pooch-screw. They, like the majority of the sapient species they have met or observed, are fundamentally cautious in a way that homo sapiens (consider motorcycle racing, sword-swallowing, the running of the bulls, fireworks displays, snake handling, eating fugu) spectacularly isn’t. Messenger has avoided direct communication because the seed-planters prefer to let primitive cultures draw their own inferences from the looming symbolism of an awakened watchseed, but the only inference these idiots keep drawing is that they need to push more buttons.
After two years of shooting, sinking, screaming, and smashing, more atoms are being liberated from captivity in bomb cores than before Messenger first stood up to offer itself for symbolic interpretation. The French accelerate their weapons development program. “Hooray for France, proudly armed with the highest science!” announces General de Gaulle as a mushroom cloud rises over Polynesia. And then another, and another, and another. The anxious British irradiate a few more test sites in the Australian desert. Israeli and Indian physicists begin to share meaningful glances over coffee at international conferences. The Americans, having turned the Marshalls into ghost islands, resort to area bombing with ever-larger thermonuclear devices. Every time they make a hydrogen bang, the Soviets feel compelled to show off an equivalent or larger bang somewhere over Novaya Zemlya. The Chinese are up to something energetic in the deserts of Xinjiang.
The Japanese curse, condemn, and protest all of this through every diplomatic channel available. Nobody pays any attention.
Messenger is perturbed by the evident failure of its program. Battered and irradiated, it willfully retires at last to the black depths, visualizing an even more resilient battle form and wondering how to employ it so this suicidal species will finally take the hint.
May, 1961
“We have been challenged twice by dangerous entities from an unknown origin,” says a new president, a younger president, in front of a cheering crowd at Rice University. “And so long as that origin remains unknown we must look for it on every frontier science can open to us. We choose to orbit a permanent military observatory around the earth in this decade, not because it is easy but because it is hard, because it is as much a test of character as an act of necessary self-defense!”
August, 1963—September, 1965
“The skybase race,” the competition to launch permanent anti-monster observation posts into earth orbit, dominates the aerospace rivalry between east and west. Plans to go to the moon are shelved. Everyone makes mistakes in their haste to shove bigger payloads up the gravity well. Flaming rocket parts rain on Florida, Texas, and Kazakhstan.
Messenger re-emerges after five years, now 150 meters long, sporting a gleaming black carapace capable of shrugging off atomic fire as if it were sarcasm. The Second Mid-Pacific Entity War is an even bigger mess than the first. Exclusion zones are a thing of the past. Messenger sinks ships and smashes infrastructure from Yokohama to Singapore, from Adelaide to Auckland, from Rarotonga to Vancouver, moving through the depths at twice the speed of steam and steel. Atomic weapons are hurled in strings across the open sea, chasing Messenger’s wake, signifying nothing except a great many dead fish. Rachel Carson’s 1964 book Hot Water suggests that relentless irradiation of the oceans is probably going to bite everyone in the ass. Nobody pays any attention, except in France, where the book is banned.
The United States, having trouble keeping its logistical chain out of the mouth of a giant radioactive sea monster, withdraws its “advisory forces” from South Vietnam in 1965. President Johnson declares victory, announcing: “Vietnam is ready to take a proud place in the vanguard of the free nations of the world, and stand against communism on its own feet.” About a month later, that week’s president of that month’s junta proudly abandons South Vietnam, ready to take a stand against sobriety somewhere on the French Riviera. Red flags rise over Saigon. President Johnson grapples with a private certainty that he won’t be re-elected in ’68. Somewhere, Richard Nixon has a spring in his step.
Prominent American science fiction writers pen an open letter to the White House, condemning what they call an “epochal failure to attempt meaningful communication with the Mid-Pacific Entities” and “the reckless overuse of nuclear weapons.” An equivalent number of their peers sign a counter-screed, insisting that “soft-headed, idealistic flinching from confrontation is precisely what the Communist Bloc and these hostile entities both desire of us.” At the next World Science Fiction Convention (in Cleveland), Harlan Ellison is arrested for punching Robert Heinlein, who is arrested in turn for knocking Harlan unconscious with a large bag of jelly beans. Nobody pays any attention. That night, Messenger knocks the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay.
January, 1969—CBS Evening News Partial Transcript—Walter Cronkite Interviews James Baldwin
MR. CRONKITE: What is your reaction to those Americans now claiming that the maintenance of an active civil rights movement is an unaffordable or irresponsible distraction is this time of struggle against the Mid-Pacific Entity?
MR. BALDWIN: It is not lost on any Black American that the activities of his oppression have not ceased, have not ceased, despite the so-called urgency of the situation. Only the activities of his liberation must be abandoned; the routine of his oppression and all the resources thus wasted—that goes on as though no entity had ever appeared. We are told our cooperation is desired, but the situation was not so urgent that Congress felt moved to pass the 1968 additions to the Civil Rights Act. The situation was not so urgent that the man who murdered Martin felt compelled to set aside his gun and do something constructive instead. The entity has brought us no new situation. This is the oldest situation in America.
MR. CRONKITE: You contend that you derive, or perhaps the Negro more generally derives, no benefit from the government expenditures on this crisis?
MR. BALDWIN: Billions of dollars may be allocated in the name of the downtrodden and the displaced, without ever being of any benefit to those persons. Such monies may be used, and generally are used, to build an infrastructure of contentment for the sensibilities of the subjugator, rather than the material needs of the subjugated. Billions have been sent to Oregon and Alaska and California to build fortresses and gun emplacements and sea walls and other fantasies, billions have been allocated for the longshoremen thrown out of work by the total collapse of Pacific trade. But those men are not being cared for. Those walls are not being built. The money goes in, and it goes as far as the contractors and the concrete suppliers and the banks and the insurers but it never quite reaches the coast, it never reaches the unemployed, it never reaches the people who need their savings restored or their insurance paid out. And there are men in, for example, Governor Reagan’s office, who could tell you exactly where the money goes, if they cared to. If they were to ever stop laughing behind their hands.
MR. CRONKITE: So you no longer believe that the progress of 1964 was noteworthy?
MR. BALDWIN: I treat every victory, Walter—I treat even incomplete victories as water in the desert. But I do not lose sight of the fact that we remain in a desert, and this desert is not a natural circumstance. This desert was built and maintained by a white world that still, to all evidence, disdains true mutuality and would prefer to spend the budget of a paradise on the maintenance of a desolation.
June, 1971
“Well, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, you spent months working through Mr. Rebozo to convince Erlichman to get you in here for ten minutes, and what you’re telling me is that I’m a dope who can’t win this war.”
“No, Mr. President. What I’m telling you is that you don’t have a war to win.”
Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States, peers at Eugenia Aldrich-Haines, knowing he is scowling over the bridge of his ski-jump nose. She’s some sort of Manhattan ice queen, this woman from Atherton Brightwell Haines LLC, with cat’s-eye sunglasses pushed up on a raven-black bob, here in the Oval Office to lecture him about the basic facts of the universe. What the hell has he done to deserve this?
“Eight years now we’ve been trying to stop that thing, ma’am. Eight hundred ships, three million dead, thirty-three—”
“Thirty-three major cities attacked,” she cuts him off. “Three hundred nuclear weapons deployed, to no effect, and those are just the American ones the public knows about. Two other monsters were apparently killed, but this one has been shrugging it all off for two presidential terms. More than Johnson got. More than you should expect if you can’t manage the monster either.”
“My preference for frankness aside, ma’am, in this office I am not accustomed to being interrupted.” The president steeples his fingers below his nose, fully aware that it creates the impression of a chalet below the ski jump. “Anyway, the American people lost confidence in Johnson because Johnson lost Vietnam to the communists.”
“They didn’t care that we had advisors in a skinny little country in southeast Asia for four years and pulled them out, Mr. President. They cared about the unkillable monster the size of an office building and the way it denied us the Pacific and shifted our economy on its axis. Johnson failed to manage the monster!”
“ABH does advertising work, correct? Well, you’re quite the ball-buster for a little lady from the land of laundry soap jingles. You trying to end your career?”
“Or get it properly started,” she replies. “It’s not a war if only one side can hurt the other. It’s just a situation, and situations are handled via management. When Vietnam became unsupportable, did President Johnson go on TV and tell the American people ‘sorry, we blew it’? No! He declared victory. We’d done our part and it became somebody else’s problem.”
“And he lost the goddamn election!”
“Not because of Vietnam, he didn’t. It was his inability to get his hands around the monster situation. Treating this mess as a war is leaving money on the table, Mr. President, and locking yourself out of a second term.”
“Uh, on the one hand, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, go to hell. You’re way out of line. On the other hand…” The president spreads his hands. “Why not? Keep talking.”
“When you can’t win,” she says, “you can still reframe the narrative as if you had. Move the goalposts. Change the terms. You know, the Japanese have these—cults, you might call them. Schools of thought relating to the entity. They call it the Daikaiju, the ‘giant strange monster.’ They have books and comics and movies. They frame it as a force of nature and reckoning, a misunderstood messenger. Meanwhile, we call it the Mid-Pacific Entity. MidPac-3.”
“If renaming the goddamn thing a dicky-joo would guarantee me 270 electoral votes I’d do it,” says the president, “but your point remains hazy.”
“My point is that our branding is godawful. We’re fighting the so-called Second Mid-Pacific Entity War. Give me a break. This shouldn’t be the monster’s story. It shouldn’t even be the world’s story. It should be an American story; our monster, our nemesis, our heroic struggle! This thing should be the PACIFIC FREEDOM WAR. Burn that into the pages of history. Write it in letters a thousand feet tall. Let’s make the whole world use OUR words for this thing, and buy OUR movies and comics about it, and see OUR version of it, even in their own heads! We’re just muddling through when we should be using this mess to revitalize the American spirit and the American reputation abroad. Hell, back in the fifties, the Russians tried to hint that they could make a monster, and the North Koreans still claim they’ve got a bigger one in a cage—”
“North Korea says a lot of asinine shit,” mutters the president.
“The big difference is that we can make our asinine shit stick,” says Aldrich-Haines. “Why let the Russians and North Koreans and Japanese dare what we won’t? Whether we can kill the beast or not seems to be in God’s hands, Mr. President. In the meantime we can name it, claim it, slap trademarks and copyrights on every available surface, and flood the market with our version of the story. Use that story to sell America. Even to Americans. You know in your heart we’ve got a pretty good product, Mr. President. Let’s make the world want to buy it ag—”
A knock at the door precedes the sudden arrival of an out-of-breath National Security Advisor.
“Don’t suppose you brought a butterfly net, did you Henry?”
“Mr. President, it wants to talk!” Kissinger waves a roll of thermal paper. “The MidPac-3 entity. It sent a message by radio fifteen minutes ago. It’s intelligent! It wants to have a sort of, uh, parley! With you and other world leaders. On an atoll in the Marshalls, in about twenty-six hours. It claims the offer will not be repeated.”
“Oh, the Secret Service is going to love this.” The president’s mouth creases upward at the thought of all the browned trousers among the security men, whose blood pressures rise when he steps out for so much as a walk in the Rose Garden. “Ms. Aldrich-Haines, I’ll have the secretarial pool put as much of a travel kit together for you as they can manage before we leave.”
“Mr. President, you want me to—”
“Yes. Come with. You’re completely nuts. But maybe that’s what the situation needs. Let’s go talk to a sea monster.”
June, 1971—The Messenger Summit
Speaking directly to the local sapients is always a near-final resort, but what’s a watchseed to do? These natives are as stubborn as plate tectonics.
The meeting is held on a bright sand beach on Likiep Atoll. Naval vessels prowl the topaz water at a distance, and delegations from various countries and blocs wait at the lagoon’s edge, some strolling bare-footed in the surf (which Messenger has assured them is not particularly contaminated). It has also left them chairs extruded in glistening black polymers from its own spinnerets, but the humans seem reticent to lounge in the alien beach furniture.
Shortly after local noon a shadow rises from the sea and glides carefully into the lagoon, taking care not to send waves crashing over the tiny figures awaiting it. The watchseed’s third and most successful battle configuration centers all four of its car-sized eyes, scintillant with sungleam in thousands of facets, on the humans below.
Greetings, young thinkers. In proximity I can speak to you via your minds and foster a common understanding among you regardless of your throat noises. I am Messenger. It is regrettable that we must meet directly to discuss your cultural shortcomings.
“I’m…very sorry you believe we have cultural shortcomings to discuss,” says Richard Nixon. Henry Kissinger, assorted aides, and Eugenia Aldrich-Haines stand nervously behind him. He gestures as though offering to shake with the gigantic creature. “I’m the president of the United States of America, generally acknowledged as the leader of the free world, and on behalf of my friends and allies, I’d like to welcome you to this historic—”
“My honorable colleague is so excited by this unique opportunity,” says the president of France, Georges Pompidou, “that he speaks prematurely on behalf of all of us, who do indeed welcome you to this historic—”
“My very good friend is, of course, trying to lighten the burden of this great moment by humorously underplaying the objective significance of the, ah, United States,” interrupts Nixon. “As is his, uh, charming custom.”
“My most excellent ally readily grasps that this affair is far too important,” says Pompidou, “to allow the unremitting egotism of any one nation to dominate it.”
“Our friend and comrade Messenger,” shouts the Soviet premier, “the people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and our comrades from East Germany, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and…sigh…North Korea…greet you warmly!”
“We agreed to offer separate statements,” says Mao Zedong, who looks more at ease with the towering monstrous form than he does with the bright sand and surf.
“Comrade Messenger,” says the Soviet premier, “we are a unified bloc, and by mutual assent our communication will be handled by myself.”
“We agreed to separate statements!” says Mao, “And we intend to give comrade Messenger some mangoes as a gesture of—”
“Comrade, if I have to hear about those damned mangoes one more time, I swear—”
Many things about your species have been confirmed or clarified by this interaction. Please accept my invitation to relax.
“Messenger, if I may,” says Ted Heath, prime minister of the United Kingdom, “you have yet to tell us where you come from and who or what you represent.”
I represent the community of the galaxy. I bring you the good wishes of the seed-planters, who, in their wisdom, placed my embryonic form in your Pacific Ocean long ago.
“Good God, it’s aliens after all,” says Nixon. “Well, greetings! Greetings from earth! We’ve certainly had some, ah, misunderstandings, haven’t we?”
We have not. My mission has been clear to me at all times. Your collective response has proven less than desirable. As a result, I have been forced to initiate this dialogue.
“What is your mission, comrade?” says the Soviet premier.
I am here to educate you in the folly of unrestrained high-energy warfare. Your civilization is your most precious possession, and it is more fragile than you comprehend.
The human delegations stare up in puzzled silence for a long moment.
“You’ve got a…well, pardon me, but you’ve got a pretty goofed-up way of delivering that education,” says Nixon.
“Yes, you have killed several million people,” says Mao Zedong.
“Look who’s talking,” mutters Pompidou.
“Oh, you’ve got some fucking cheek,” says the prime minister of Vietnam.
I am empowered to reluctantly generate limited fatalities as a form of instructive stimulus.
“Would it be out of bounds,” says Heath, “if we were to respectfully ask you to stop producing that instructive stimulus?”
I will gladly cease generating educational fatalities when you collectively embrace a constructive long-term plan for moving beyond your present recklessness. You must renounce atomic warfare and its instruments.
“So this is just a goddamn ultimatum, huh?” says Nixon.
“The surrender of our national arsenal of dissuasion is not an acceptable topic for discussion at this time,” says Pompidou.
“And what happens if we disarm ourselves?” says Nixon. “I suppose we just trust you not to waltz in unopposed and put us all in some sort of…god-damned petting zoo!”
I do not dance. I am not interested in imprisoning your species and forcing epidermal contact.
“You must understand, comrade,” says the Soviet premier, “that so long as any other nation refuses to relinquish its nuclear stockpile, the reduction of our own could not be contemplated.”
“What else would you offer us?” shouts Mao. “What are you willing to teach us? What progress can be ours if we determine your requests are reasonable?”
I am not empowered to share scientific knowledge.
“Now surely you can see the limited utility of such a bargaining posture,” says Heath.
I am not bargaining or empowered to bargain. I am communicating.
“We’re not going to let you tell us what we can and can’t do on our own planet,” bellows Nixon. “Go tell your high-and-mighty masters—”
I cannot contact them.
“Comrade Messenger,” says the Soviet premier, “if you are out of contact with your own people, surely you must perceive your disadvantage. You are a formidable opponent, but we have dealt with two of your kind before—”
“You didn’t deal with shit, Alexei,” says Kissinger.
Your misapprehension is easily corrected. You presume that you have vanquished organisms such as myself before. You have not. I am the only one of my kind ever seeded on your planet. I have withdrawn and reconstructed myself twice to be better able to resist the efforts of your armed forces. My present configuration seems eminently satisfactory.
“We have bigger bombs,” says Nixon, “and if you think we won’t use them on you until you’re Spam on toast, you’re out of your alien mind. We will not be dictated to!”
You agree amongst yourselves that anti-proliferation and arms reduction treaties are desirable things, yet when I speak to you of similar concepts you grow unreasonably belligerent.
“You don’t know what ‘unreasonable’ is! We will oppose you for the sake of self-determination!”
And if a small child opposed your prohibition against drinking poison, for the sake of self-determination?
“You condescending space bastard! We’re not small children!”
Opinions vary.
Eugenia Aldrich-Haines screams in frustration and runs toward Messenger, waving an envelope.
“Messenger! Please! Are you familiar with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works?”
No.
“If you were to represent yourself as a sovereign nation, I’m confident we could find a means to make you a legal contracting party, which would allow us to offer you very generous compensation packages in exchange for exclusive likeness rights and other considerations—”
I do not understand the purpose of compensation. Your local currencies are consensual hallucinations. I have no use for them.
“Ms. Aldrich-Haines, I did not give you permission to speak!” shouts Nixon.
“What is this?” yells Mao Zedong. “Messenger, comrade, this is some unworthy reactionary ploy! I implore you, sign no business documents this woman offers you!”
I doubt any document your limited ethical systems could present to me would apply to or restrain my activities.
“Messenger, you don’t have to agree to anything now, but consider my proposals at your own leisure! And keep my contact information!” Eugenia flings the envelope as hard as she can, and a black tendril plucks it from the air. “We could operate within another paradigm entirely!”
“Traitor,” yells Henry Kissinger, jogging toward her.
“Opportunist! No one has the moral right to privatize negotiations with comrade Messenger!” Mao cannot run very fast, but he is definitely running in the same direction. Eugenia scampers.
“Privatization isn’t the vice you make it out to be,” huffs Nixon as he joins the pursuit. “The real issue is—”
Shouting, screaming, and multi-directional accusations fill the beach. After a few minutes, when it becomes clear that the natives are intent on having a brawl, Messenger turns and departs as carefully as it entered the lagoon.
August, 1971—October, 1972
When Messenger reappears, it isn’t a pretty scene. Tokyo is mauled, Vladivostok is flattened, Seattle and Valparaiso and Brisbane are forcibly redecorated. Singapore takes a haircut, Brunei is stomped, Taipei and Manila are turned upside down. As each attack unfolds, Messenger broadcasts telepathic messages in the local languages, urging survivors to pressure their leaders, to demand atomic disarmament and international unity, but inasmuch as the huge creature has a heart (it has five circulatory centers), that heart is beginning to ache with something like a traumatized sense of futility. How many cities must it destroy in order to convince these young thinkers to prevent the destruction of their cities? The seed-planters do not program their watchseeds to give up, but neither do they prevent them from learning. From the natives of this planet, Messenger has finally learned how to be depressed. It ceases attacks for a month or two and drifts quietly somewhere in the midnight zone, three thousand meters down. Bioluminescent things flash little blue-green lights at it, and Messenger flashes back. This is relaxing. Alone in the dark, it makes a pocket inside itself containing manipulators and optical stalks. At last, it begins to examine the materials Eugenia Aldrich-Haines threw at it.
Economic turmoil reigns on the surface. In the United States, massive disinvestment in coastal regions and the displacement of millions of people are sharpening intolerance. Shipping and ocean drilling are bottomed out; railways and coal are roaring like the clock has been turned back a century. Production of nuclear weapons is up 250 percent, and Richard Nixon is polling at an all-time high. “DRAGONSLAYER DICK,” say the buttons handed out by the thousands at the Republican National Convention. “Not a penny for tribute!” he proclaims in his stump speech. He’s the guy who told that moralizing space monster where to stick it, the guy who’ll lead the world in showing that thing it can have our planet when it pries it from our cold, dead, irradiated hands!
He hasn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it, of course, but in the end he’s applied some of that crazy woman’s advice after all. Managing the monster—but in his own way. Sure, things are a bit of a mess, and the riots are getting a little out of hand, but what’s important is that George McGovern is absolutely going to eat a dogshit popsicle on November 7th.
Then one morning he finds Eugenia Aldrich-Haines sitting in his office again.
October, 1972
“You are leaving here in handcuffs, ma’am. Handcuffs! That is the end of this ridiculous matter!”
“You can have the Secret Service do whatever they want to me. I can’t personally resist. But if my liberty is curtailed in any way, my client will take a leisurely swim up the Potomac and you’re going to have to find a new house, Mr. President. It’s lurking not far from here. I know you’re aware that it walked across Panama a few days ago.”
Aldrich-Haines is wearing a gleaming black dress that looks knitted from the stuff they make spy planes out of. With a start, the president realizes it resembles the carapace of the thing he met on Likiep Atoll. That thing made it for her.
“Your collusion with that entity, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, raises more legal questions than I can imagine, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it might go as far as high treason.”
“I am now Messenger’s sole authorized representative for all affairs legal, political, and financial on this planet, Mr. President. So while I intend to maintain my New York domicile and pay my income taxes, all the broader questions of citizenship and allegiance just went weird and you know it. If anything happens to me, my client the skyscraper-sized alien monster will start smashing things again. It’s that simple, Dick. Let’s cut the shit.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Could it have something to do with that time you pretended to consider my proposals and flew me to the middle of the Pacific—”
“I didn’t pretend anything, ma’am! I gave you genuine consideration!”
“You undercut me, Mr. President. I was ignored and silenced. Henry Kissinger kicked me into a lagoon. Then you had me detained for three weeks. Well, so what? Shake off the dust from your feet, and so forth. All I wanted to do at first was make some money and give you a public opinion turnaround. Now I have a client who takes my proposals seriously, which means the whole world is going to take them seriously.”
“Unbelievable. A megalomaniac soap jingle lady.”
“Actually, I never worked on soap jingles, Mr. President. I worked on applied psychology in public relations, just as I’m doing now. Changing minds professionally.”
“No credentials concerning that monster will ever be recognized in this country,” says the president. “No extraordinary status will ever be conferred to you or anyone who takes your place when you depart for federal prison.”
“Mr. President, you know my client will target you personally in retaliation. Stop pretending you don’t speak English.”
“You cannot threaten me, ma’am!”
“Can,” says Eugenia Aldrich-Haines. “Am. Get a space monster of your own if you don’t want to play ball, Dick.” She pulls a sheaf of papers out of her gleaming black bag (God, thinks the president before he can help himself, a literal Messenger bag) and tosses them onto his desk. “Here’s the basic structure of how we’re going to run things. Page one is your eyes only, for the moment.”
“Jesus.” As he reads, the president feels every individual blood vessel in his eyeballs preparing to burst. “Jesus, lady!”
“Just so you understand that we don’t want to have to resort to physical violence, no matter how easy it would be. You know Messenger can manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. If you don’t start convening the meetings we require, my client will jam every radio broadcast on the Eastern seaboard, and on those frequencies it will broadcast the words ‘Dick Nixon can’t get it up’ twenty-four hours a day until the election. That’ll go into the history books, Mr. President.”
“This is unseemly. No matter what sort of personal humiliation you concoct, you turncoat bitch, my position on that monster’s demands must remain immutable!”
“Well, I have good news. Messenger wants to cease operating primarily through demands. Starting immediately, we’re going to put down the stick and offer the whole world a tasty bite of carrot.”
A Few Weeks Earlier, 1972
Eugenia’s rented boat bobs gently on the twilight waters of the Sea of Cortez. Peach-colored clouds are sinking in a purple sky, and thin black tentacles have come up like periscopes beside her gunwales, the only visual evidence of the presence of Messenger directly below. They have been conversing for some time.
But as I have already explained, your currencies are a consensual hallucination. They are of no value to me.
“They are of no intrinsic value to you,” says Eugenia, lighting a fresh cigarette, taking care to avoid blowing the smoke directly into one of the creature’s appendages. “But considered as a form of potential energy you can wield to cause change, they become invaluable.”
I exist outside every monetary framework your species has devised to torture itself.
“We’ll get you declared a special something-or-whatever and you’ll have bank accounts in a couple of days,” she says. “Political and financial legitimacy is downstream of being able to flatten an entire continent. Now, do you want to swim around out here forever, getting no results? Or do you want to change paradigms entirely, and engage my services to meet the human race where it lives?”
Your species lives, metaphorically speaking, in a place of unreasoning, hyper-violent semi-sanity.
“Yes,” Eugenia says. “And if you want to save our stupid asses, I’m just the local guide to take you there.”
October, 1972—E-Day
It’s a balmy morning in Miami Beach and the sky is a washed-out haze of pink. On an arc of pale sand, four thousand of the great and good await the coming of the space monster. Upright citizens, all. Well, mostly. A lot of connected guys, and a lot of congressmen, and the overlap of those demographics is…let’s just say it’s America. Bankers, brokers, agents, advisors, senators, Elks, Knights of Columbus, mayors, aldermen. Cubans, of both the asset-nationalizing and the asset-stripped persuasions. Some of the CIA’s friends from South America are here, and if some of those guys look a bit Teutonic, well, heh, water under the bridge, you know. All the European neutrals and satellite people are here, the ones the Soviets definitely don’t use to maintain investment portfolios. The Saudis are clustered at one end of the crowd. The Shah’s people are here. Egyptians and Israelis are studiously pretending not to see one another, as are the Japanese and the Chinese, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Indians and Pakistanis. The waves lap gently against everyone’s feet, since furniture isn’t part of the deal this morning, but nobody wants to be seen cowering from the water’s edge. A very human pile of humans.
Ten on the button, and Messenger looms. It has smoothly perfected the art of not splashing the locals for these beach events. Black tendrils boil out of the surf, extruding polymers, building a speaking platform in a matter of moments. Eugenia Aldrich-Haines appears at the climax of this magic trick, waving, her sharply angled pantsuit as black as her sunglasses. Some sort of amplification technology carries her words across the crowd. Greetings, glad-handing, a concise dispensation of formalities. TV cameras roll atop two dozen cranes. Meat and potatoes time; she summarizes the previous day’s Special Declaration of Modified Equivalent Statehood at the UN, the act that makes Messenger whichever blend of individual, ambassador, corporation, and nation-state it chooses to be at any given moment.
“Now, here’s today’s first important note,” says Eugenia. “Messenger hereby pledges to cease all unprovoked attacks against the assets and persons of the human race. Our cities will be safe from harm. Our oceans will be fully open to commerce and travel once again.”
A scattering of applause becomes ripples, torrents, waves. Gofers at the edges of the crowd sprint for their parked cars or start shouting into walkie-talkies. Even as Eugenia speaks, the word goes out, straight to the hallowed tiles of the trading floors in New York City. Buy back into shipping, buy back into fisheries and oil platforms, dump those exploratory drilling projects in Wisconsin.
“In exchange for this guarantee of security, Messenger will collect from every nation on earth an annual service fee of approximately one-half of one percent of GDP. Penalties for nonpayment are probably quite obvious.”
The applause transmutes to consternation. Gofers trip over their own feet. Buy orders fresh from the lips of the radio men are desperately countermanded. Messenger has just proposed a payment larger than the annual revenue of GE or Exxon Mobil. Muttering turns to shouts of “extortion” and “shakedown.”
“We won’t pay a ransom for the use of our own planet,” yells a man in the center of the crowd. “We have nukes! You know we’re not afraid to keep using them!” This man is a Caucasian.
“Today’s second important note,” continues Eugenia, easily drowning out the un-amplified protests, “is that at the opening of the markets tomorrow, Eastern Standard Time, Messenger will commence an initial offering of shares in itself as a unique sovereign investment opportunity. Capitalized by the aforementioned service fee, Messenger can offer a baseline annual revenue of fifteen to twenty billion dollars US, with minimal labor or infrastructure costs, even leaving other financial activities out of consideration. Under terms that will be made clear later today, every citizen of earth will have the chance to buy a piece of the biggest thing that has ever happened to us. Today is E-Day. ‘E’ for equity!”
Protests turn to shocked silence, then back to ripples of excitement. Gofers start running again, radio men start babbling, but they hardly know what to say. Confirm those orders for shipping. Maybe short some positions related to national defense industries. Maybe short everything, maybe buy everything. Trading will be suspended for the day about an hour later after two floor brokers have heart attacks. Straight to Wall Street Valhalla for those martyrs of the bull market. There will eventually be a nice plaque.
“It’s joining us,” someone yells. “Praise God, it’s joining us! We’ve won! It sees things our way!”
“This is insane! It’s a giant fucking space monster!” cries someone else.
“Its money is still green!”
“It’s capitalizing itself with funds it’s stealing from our coffers! Funds that should be reserved for human private enterprise!”
“It IS private enterprise now, you goddamn fool! And once we buy in, it becomes human private enterprise!”
“Right now we have phone companies and oil companies and car companies,” says Eugenia, “and those are nice things to have. But General Motors can’t sink an oil tanker if its creditors don’t pay. Ma Bell can’t survive three hundred nuclear explosions. Messenger represents the first guaranteed, permanent, unassailable financial opportunity in our planet’s history, and the best part is, it’s a partnership opportunity. Messenger doesn’t want to hurt anyone ever again—it wants to share itself with all of us. And that’s just good business!”
November, 1972
Richard Nixon wins a second term in the quietest presidential election since sheep last grazed on the White House lawn. The whole world has gone Messenger-mad, immediately tripling the creature’s projected market capitalization, swamping the seven major banks the entity now owns with more paperwork than they can physically process. Messenger now exists above the financial stratosphere, a Ponzi scheme with the staying power of a fusion reaction. It could buy two General Motors. It has lifted its curse on the Pacific Ocean. And Eugenia Aldrich-Haines has cut Nixon out of the credit. He’s no longer the man who told a despotic alien monster where to shove it, he’s just the guy who had more name recognition than the governor of South Dakota.
That asshole who wrote the book about him once said that Nixon was followed around by some “genius of deflation,” an unseen force that put him in proximity to big, brave things but ensured he always looked vaguely ridiculous. Nixon never gave that observation much credit, but today, staring out at the gray drizzle in the Rose Garden, he can admit he feels haunted. He sighs. Fuck it. His house has a bowling alley in the basement.
April, 1973
The secret meeting with a fraction of the presidium is held on the Black Sea coast. Eugenia is there, along with one of the new “Remote Messengers,” an autonomous fragment of the creature’s ever-growing substance, about twenty feet tall and remotely connected to its mental network. The entity pretends to smoke a cigarette clutched in a thin tentacle, a performance it has developed to put humans more at ease. The Soviet premier speaks:
“You must understand, Ms. Aldrich-Haines—and comrade Messenger, of course—that while we congratulate you on your rapid acquisition of a less belligerent means of global influence, you have done so by operating within an aggressively capitalist framework that we cannot legitimize with our public acquiescence.”
‘Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other,’ as Marx himself wrote. Am I not sufficiently revolutionary for your tastes, comrades?
“Yes, but there’s a second half to that particular argument, comrade Messenger,” says the premier.
I represent an unprecedented focus for the popular human consciousness, an economic nexus that incorporates the bourgeoisie but has not been constructed to its preferences and most importantly, does not answer to it. Surely that is a promising basis for ongoing cooperation, comrades.
“Hmmm,” says the premier, smoking his cigarette nigh-down to his fingertips. “Hmmm. Maybe you’re onto something. It’s good to see you exploring a more sound political and social ideology, comrade Messenger. Certainly we can look at…cooperating.”
The meeting breaks up, about as cheerfully as such things ever do. Before the Remote whisks Eugenia away in its usual mysterious fashion, one of the Soviet ministers runs over for a huddle.
“I was wondering,” says State Security, “if I might be able to put you in touch with my people in Switzerland and make a few moves. Take my points out of British Aerospace, for example. And Uniroyal. And shift them over to, uh.” He gestures at the Remote. “You know.”
“Leave it with me, chairman.” She takes his notes and folds them up. “I’m always happy to help with a bit of revolutionary transformation.”
May, 1973—December, 1977
Messenger is absolutely rolling in it.
Eugenia’s personal staff balloons to the size of an army regiment. Messenger takes possession of office buildings in a dozen major cities. Its people have quasi-immunity from all earthly laws but they pay their rent, their bills, and their parking tickets. Purchasing more banks is an inevitability. Messenger begins offering loans large and small, undercutting existing credit markets, leveraging its holdings to secure more of everything. It buys controlling shares in Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Dassault, and three dozen other global defense contractors. It pumps the brakes on their operations, giving raises to its personnel while cutting their duties, subsuming them as footnotes into its vast bubble of profitability. Golf games on six continents improve drastically. Messenger buys effective control of non-communist uranium production and makes subtle inroads on the rest of it. Men who would have torn out their chest hair rather than surrender their nuclear weapons are suddenly content to accept healthy paychecks to simply not build the things.
In 1976, Messenger buys the Olympics. It endows think tanks at nine major universities. The next year it starts buying its way into petroleum.
January, 1978
The secret meeting with the Archbishop of New York is held in one of the nicely furnished oubliettes the Archdiocese maintains for miscellaneous chicanery somewhere under St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The Remote Messenger arrives by truck.
“His Holiness has asked me to emphasize that he regrets the recent outbursts of hysteria, which he believes have no basis in scripture and need not in any way reflect the official position of the church,” says the cardinal. “My opinion was not requested. So far as his Holiness is concerned, we must be reconciled to living in this world of God’s great mysteries, and must understand the inevitability of gray areas. Isn’t that just special.”
Your Eminence, I appreciate this gracious consideration.
“Stow it. I’m an errand boy.” The cardinal takes a report from the Opus Dei man to his left. “We have word that you are now handling significant investments on behalf of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
That much I can confirm.
“And we also understand that you, or perhaps your agents, have guaranteed them an annual rate of return not below eleven percent.”
Yes.
“Eleven. For that circus down in Nashville, eleven. Now what might you offer in exchange for a larger investment, from a more, ah, mature and international portfolio of holdings?”
I could very easily see myself offering twelve point five. Even thirteen.
“Thirteen,” says the cardinal, sucking his teeth. “Thirteen. Now, that’s an agreeable number, but it does have a certain unfortunate superstitious connotation. Can we go thirteen point five?”
Thirteen point five, then. If I concur that your investment is a significant enough percentage of your overall holdings.
“Well, rejoice. His Holiness will be so pleased. As his preeminent banking clerk in this zip code I might even get a taste. Who the hell knows?”
‘He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.’
“Look, you alien cash machine, if you’re going to quote the good book at me, don’t give me King James. Memorize the version with all the chapters. We’ll be in touch about our hedge funds.”
August, 1980
Messenger’s final form, at least for the present era of planetary development, is stationary. Its main body crouches like a vast gleaming temple near Likiep Atoll. It has distributed so much of its brain function, become such a creature of networked awareness, that no single attack could possibly destroy it. Even a lone Remote could eventually grow itself into something of this size, with no loss of memory or ability. Remotes are at work across the Marshall Islands, scouring contaminated sands, concentrating the radioactive elements within themselves and exuding clean water and soil. This is all part of the reparations the entity has agreed to, reparations for all the vessels it sunk, reparations for all the cities it smashed, reparations for all the families bereaved.
It can well afford this; it now represents 41 percent of the economic activity of the human species. It is paying back the young thinkers in their cherished hallucinations, but they are paying it more, many times more. It is the bank that can never break, the vault that can never be cracked, the insurance that never refuses. All human currencies are now stuck to it like glue. It does not entirely understand why it had not sought a public relations professional before Eugenia entered its calculations, but perhaps it does not matter. Its task is not to save individuals, or even cities, but the future of all sapient life on this planet. Whatever games it must play toward that end are immaterial, and the only thing that worries it is the question of how long it must persist. Humans do not take hints; they prefer paychecks. How long will Messenger need to hand them out? A hundred local years? A thousand?
The future of this species is paperwork.
March, 1984
“We got you, you son of a bitch.”
Richard Nixon is seventy-one and feeling it. This morning his joints are unusually full of sand. New York weather is the price to be paid for leaving San Clemente, stepping out of exile and back into the world. He looks around at the tastefully appointed private waiting room, at the subdued lighting and rich wood panels. He sets a hand against the wood, as though stroking the carapace of that creature in the Pacific, which in a sense he is.
“We got you. You think you won. You think you tamed us, but the truth is we tamed you.”
His Secret Service man, his legacy security, stands blank-faced in the corner, pretending as always that the former president speaks a language he does not understand.
“You used to be a monster. Now you’re just a clerk, a giant bank clerk, planted there in the middle of nowhere. You bent to us, fucker. You hear me? We made you that. We made you that.”
“Mr. President! What an absolute honor. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, I came as quickly as I could.” The branch manager is a perky middle-aged woman with soft dark skin and proud gray cornrows. All of Messenger’s people wear some form of the creature’s extruded resins as a badge of authenticity; hers are gleaming black bangles clattering on both arms. “I’m so pleased. I voted for you twice, you know.”
“That’s…that’s a brave admission, ma’am.”
“How can I help you?”
Nixon grits his teeth. He thinks of Kissinger. Henry bought in early, the shit. Of course he did. While the 37th president of the United States of America has coasted through his wilderness years on intermittent speaking fees and inadequate savings, Kissinger rode the goddamn space monster like everyone else. Early retirement. Bought himself a yacht. Nixon has seen it. He never knew they made yachts that big. Nixon sighs.
“Well, ma’am, I suppose I’d like to open an account.” He takes his hand off the wall, squares his shoulders, and grunts. “And I guess I’d like to…take a look at your damned investment schedules.”
(Editors’ Note: Scott Lynch is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2025 Scott Lynch
