10: Welcoming and Condemning Unexpected Guests

Josh was positioning their newest ‘guest’ into one of the many chairs in his new rescue craft after the guys helped him carry him in, when Becky spoke up, “I don’t understand it. All these people, virtually everyone you’ve met, take in these scary, potentially dangerous creatures into their homes, put them into their own beds despite their having a serious illness they may expose their own family to, but none of them even think to call the police or an ambulance. Are the people in this state really that anti-government?”

Josh simply looked at her without speaking as he finished getting their newest ward as comfortable as he could. Standing up, he turned to her, taking the time to address her question seriously.

“It’s not that they hate or even distrust the government. This isn’t about the government. This is about individuals. The people of this area, especially those out in the country where they’re encountering these aliens, are used to a hard life, one where they are used to helping people during tough times. When they encounter these ... beings, they see someone in distress.”

“But still, just look at the claws on that one,” Becky said, pointing at the sharp claws dangling harmlessly by its side, claws which Josh knew from experience were neither offensive or defensive weapons, but actually incredibly precise and nimble fingers. “Why would someone expose themselves to what it could do when it got its strength back? Hell, for that matter, what will you do if one of them turns against you?”

The others in the craft drew closer, interested in understanding the odd relationships too. And since Josh’s response to Becky’s emotional outburst were soft and calming, they had to draw even closer to understand what he was saying. Soon, the pouring rain and those still waiting for them were forgotten for the moment.

“It isn’t that these people aren’t afraid of them, but it’s like if you stumbled across a big scary black man in a black trench coat lying bleeding in the middle of a dark alley. The man could very well be dangerous, why else would they be injured in a dark alley wearing such attire. You could run away, never looking back, or you could try to help. Most people will try to help despite the potential threat to themselves. And just like this case, the bleeding man is rarely as scary as they first appear, especially when they’re hurt and bleeding.”

“OK, but what about the other risks? They take these ... creatures into their homes, exposing themselves, their wives, their children and the rest of humanity by taking care of something which might not even make it. Why do all these people make the same choice? Wouldn’t you expect a few to refuse?”

“But you haven’t stayed away yourself,” Josh countered. “Shouldn’t you be asking why you haven’t backed away, or more accurately, why I haven’t?”

“OK then, why haven’t you?” she asked, peering into his eyes as if trying to comprehend how his mind worked. “I’m involved because you’re a special case. You’ve decided to help not just one sick individual, but to put everyone you know at risk to help all of them. What made you decide to do that? What is it in you that makes you decide that these ... things you don’t even know, are worth more than those you love?”

Josh suspected there was more to this question than what she was asking, but given the circumstances, he decided to address only the issue on its surface. He even ignored her insistence on calling those he was helping ‘things’, because he realized she was making a rhetorical point. He’d tackle her question first, then approach her unasked question before he’d tackle her assumptions about the worth of people you’re unfamiliar and uncomfortable with.

“I took Barbara in because she needed help. Once I did, and—”

“Excuse me. Barbara?” Becky asked, her forehead wrinkling in confused concentration as she tried to remember anyone named Barbara in their recent dealings.

“It’s what we’re calling the first alien we rescued,” Josh explained, waving his hand as if brushing aside the issue as a minor annoyance as he returned to explaining his thinking. “Once I showed I was interested in more than just easing their pain, that I was interested in their wellbeing and in protecting them from outside threats, she asked me to seek out and take care of her people. That’s not the kind of request you can easily ignore,” he told her, hoping she’d finally get it.

“Sure you could,” she countered. “People do it all the time. Sometimes someone is bleeding emotionally right in front of someone, and everyone around them simply walks away. And when they learn that they’re in pain and struggling with their issues, they simply run away faster.”

Ah, there it is, Josh thought. This is deeper than she was presenting it as. The more she painted the scene and illustrated her concerns, the more she revealed about her interest in the question. But still, because they were in mixed company and had so little time, Josh decided to focus again on the plain question that she was asking.

“If you don’t know what pain someone is in, you can’t be expected to soothe it. Just as someone encountering these ... individuals can’t determine their true threat. All they see is what’s on the surface. But in these cases, they’re clearly ill and unable to take care of themselves. If any of these aliens tried to hurt them or their loved ones, I’m sure these same people would deal severely with them. But that isn’t the case. Instead all they see is someone who is sick. You can’t deal with what isn’t in front of you.

“But that’s part of the problem. When it’s a matter of you and someone in need, the tradeoff is immediate and apparent. They need your help or they’ll die. You don’t get the luxury of debating it. You asked why these people don’t call for help. Why they don’t call either the ambulance or the police. It’s because they know the inherent conflicts. They took this creature in because it was sick and needed care, but they know what would happen if they requested aid. They’re not about to endanger the very person they’re trying to save, despite the potential risk it theoretically represents. But why calling for assistance is so problematic requires more explanation.

“This isn’t a case where someone rescues an injured gang member hurt in an assault. In that case, they’d be happy to turn them over to the police where they’d be cared for but where they’d also have to pay for whatever they’d done. This isn’t nearly as clear cut.

“Instead they have to consider how someone else, someone not as involved with this individual, will respond. As you’ve pointed out, these individuals are scary. Someone asked might question helping. Someone further removed—say a radio dispatcher—would have even more reservations. The key is it’s all a matter of perspective. If you’re facing someone in need, then the need is very immediate. It’s there, right in front of you. But the farther removed it is, the more remote that need becomes.

“The EMTs and police are all decent people. But the more people you involve, the more the complications increase. An EMT worker has to document everything they do, and they’re required by law to report any potential threat. They’d try to save the patient, but they’d also have to report it up their chain of command. And each person that’s included is that much more removed from an individual relationship. Each person will consider the risk, and instead of deciding to face those risks they’ll each push it along the line. Until eventually they hit someone who takes the risk more seriously and the threat to the sick individual less so. Then they’ll decide that it’s more important to protect people than the one solitary sick individual.”

“He’s right,” Phillip answered from behind the row of seats. “People individually are honest, hardworking and dedicated, for the most part, but people in groups grow positively ugly.”

“It’s not that anyone is ‘evil’,” Josh tried to explain, turning to address Phillip and realizing that everyone there had the same question for the first time. “It’s not that government is bad or that the Police want to do wrong. It’s that the further away from someone in need you get, the less you consider their needs and the more you focus on only a single need.

“That’s why power is so dangerous. If the people called the ambulance, the EMTs would have to call the police, and the police would report it up the ladder until someone called the army. Even the individual members of the military might be concerned, but each person has different responsibilities, and once it’s no longer a one-on-one relationship where they have to weigh need against risk, those ‘minor’ concerns become major.”

“He’s right,” Jeff agreed. “I’ve seen it time and again.”

“Once you’re dealing with a lot of people,” Josh continued, not letting the interruption distract him from the point he was making, “the different interests become paramount. If our friend is removed, the police will secure him to control the risk. If the army gets involved, they’ll isolate them—to reduce the potential risk. The politicians that learn of the threat will try to shut down reports of aliens—because they want to reduce the risk of panic. But the problem is power minus responsibility corrupts. It wouldn’t be long until someone responsible for research suggests ‘studying’ the creature in order to ‘understand’ the risk it represents, and those who haven’t ever dealt with it will decide that makes perfect sense. Since the alien has already been removed from society and they aren’t interacting with it anymore, it’s no longer so much a living thing as simply another interest. Thus it won’t be long until someone suggests slicing it open. In order to sell others on their idea, he’ll suggest how it might be dangerous, and each person up the chain of command will exaggerate it a little more, and soon, instead of assisting a sick individual or trying to talk to it, suddenly they’re dissecting it, trying to learn whatever they can about eliminating a remote potential risk.”

“I can see that happening,” Molly said, holding her jaw as she considered the situation.

“See it? Hell, I’ve seen it time and again,” Fred told her and the others in the crowded craft. “I’ve got friends on the reservation, people in serious need, but when they call the police for help they refuse, saying it’s a ‘reservation matter’. If a white man comes on the reservation and shoots someone, the tribal police can’t investigate it or arrest him if there’s no direct threat, and the white police don’t have the authority to investigate anything that happens on tribal land. It’s all a matter of distance. None of them are dealing with the situation directly, instead they’re all dancing around the potential issues.”

Molly leaned forward, eager to share her feelings on the topic. “That’s why, if you kill one person you can spend twenty years in jail, or lose your life if you kill a few, but if someone kills tens of thousands, they’re a national hero. It’s just as Josh says, it’s all about the distance from the situation and perceptions of risk to the group versus those to the individual.”

“Again, it’s not that the local police are bad,” Josh continued, his voice finally rising as his emotions grew and he realized that more people were listening. “They’re each doing their job. It isn’t the individual members of the military, or even those of the CIA, who want to do bad things. Each one is trying to do their best and to make the world a better place. But when that much power resides in people that far removed from the people in need, especially when the risks versus rewards are so heavily skewed, there’s almost no chance our friends would ever get a fair shake.”

Becky, who’d started the whole discussion, realized it had grown out of hand. She’d asked the question because she was really conflicted about what motivated people and about how caring and distrust overlap, but she realized it had progressed too far. The crowd was behind Josh now, especially since they had an example of a ‘dangerous’ looking but helpless individual shivering in front of them—someone that Becky was now preventing them from helping. She realized she had to shut the discussion down. Hopefully she could tackle it with Josh again, but she’d have to pick a better time and place, even if she couldn’t ask him the question she really wanted to ask.

“OK, I think we get it,” she said, wiping her brow of rainwater. “People are good, power is bad, government equals power so it’s bad. But we—”

“No, that isn’t it at all,” Josh responded rather stridently. “It’s a questions of conflicting interests and—”

“Excuse me,” Becky insisted just as stridently. “But now is not the time to be thrashing this out. We’ve got a sick ‘individual’ here and we have several more that need us just as much as this one does. You can lecture me later, but we’ll do it when we have the time for me to be properly chastised. But right now we’ve got a job to do.”

Josh just stood and stared at her, having trouble separating himself from the discussion he’d been gearing himself up for. Shaking his head, he conceded she was right. Turning, he strode to the door and closed it before turning and dodging around people to access the control seat, where he exposed his arm once again, tapped the next yellow light and told the craft to find them.

“Samuel!” President Atkinson shouted as he slammed his phone down, terminating the already discontinued conversation.

There was no response for several moments and President Alan was about to page his secretary when the door opened and she poked her head inside.

“There’s no one here at the moment, Sir. I’ll send someone for him, but is there something you want me to tell him?”

“Yeah, tell him I want to know what the hell is—”

“I’m here, I’m here,” Alan’s Chief of Staff said as he hurried through the outer office. “I was trying to nail down some information before reporting in.”

“What the hell is going on?” the president demanded. “I’ve been fending off various Congressmen, Governors and political advisors, each complaining about some supposed broadcast none of them knew anything about.”

“That’s why it took me so long to get to you about this,” Samuel explained, still a little out of breath from rushing through the halls of the White House. “It was very difficult determining what happened. We were alerted almost immediately that something was up when the CIA bureau chief informed me that their agent reported that their actions had been publicly exposed. The Arizona Governor’s office also alerted us, but trying to track down what they were referring to was frustrating.”

Samuel flexed his hands, the past several hours had been highly stressful and he hadn’t had a chance to relax for a long time. Despite his wish to cover this topic in detail, the President was in no mood to offer him a seat, so Samuel simply sucked it up and got on with it.

“It seems there was a widespread broadcast which went out over the open air, as such it was invisible to anyone getting their news via cable, satellite or internet sources, and thus no one here in Washington heard it. Even those who did hear it, mostly those too poor to afford better connections, were unable to record it because their DVRs generally don’t operate with broadcast signals, and the broadcasters had no evidence of it since it didn’t originate from them.”

“So where did it originate from?” Alan asked, cutting to the chase of the matter.

Samuel shrugged, showing he had no clue, although his expression countered that message. “As I said, it wasn’t any traditional broadcast and we couldn’t detect a broadcast source. Since the TV and radio waves are from the previous century, they aren’t as actively monitored anymore, so no one was monitoring new transmission sources.”

“Wait. Television and radio are heavily monitored,” President Alan reminded him.

“Yes, the broadcasts are, but no one actively monitors what’s transmitted over the open airwaves. Somehow someone intercepted the normal broadcast transmissions and overrode it with their own telecast. Thus very few people were able to either pick it up or record it.”

“So you suspect Anton for this?” President Alan asked pointedly, raising his eyebrow.

“That’s the most logical assumption, especially given what was occurring at the time.”

“You said TV and radio?” Alan asked, leaning forward as he tried to calculate the extent of their problem.

“Yes, Sir. Apparently they cut in on all the open airwaves on each major channel on the major TV and radio channels.”

“Geez, the TV signals would have been a problem, but combined with radio...”

“It gets worse than that,” Samuel warned, clasping his hands behind him so the President couldn’t see him flexing his hands in frustration. “While those listening on TV generally didn’t have access to the internet, those on the road did, and when they got home they all went online to discover what was happening. Those without internet access apparently did much the same, calling their friends and asking them what was going on. It seems many people initially thought it was some new commercial for some new movie, but as it went on and the language got more and more coarse and threatening, they realized it was real.”

“Do we have any record of what was said?” Alan demanded, trying to identify what information was revealed.

“Sadly, no. Our CIA man wouldn’t allow anyone to record anything on their end, and so far we haven’t found anyone who’s recorded anything from it.”

“Well, maybe we can simply deny it ever happened,” Alan offered. “How broad an area was this broadcast over? If they were jamming the public airwaves they couldn’t have affected a very wide swath.”

“That’s one tactic, but as I said, after it was broadcast, the social media lit up with millions of people asking what it was about. That caused everyone to search for it, looking for the original broadcast, which then triggered a widespread discussion about why we were restricting everyone’s access to the information.”

“Shit! So now we’re being blamed for censoring the internet even when we aren’t?” Alan asked, pushing himself back from his desk as he sighed in frustration.

“Well, from what I can gather, the broadcast was pretty clear that the government was involved, although no specific agency was identified. But the figure being interviewed specifically asked whether our agent was from a ‘known’ agency or from a ‘secret organization’.”

“Damn! That’s all we need,” the President groaned. “If the rest of Congress realizes we went around them, they’re likely to start asking questions. We’re likely to be wasting all our time trying to defend ourselves before Congress if we can’t get this under control.” Alan Atkinson leaned forward, once more trying to get a handle on their exposure. “Do we have any idea of how many people heard this broadcast?”

“Nothing definite at the moment, Sir. Since no one was tracking it, we don’t know how far it extended, but we’ve been fielding phone calls from across the country. Most media measuring agencies are now geared to estimating overall market reach. We really aren’t sure how many people are currently listening to broadcast signals, as it’s an ever decreasing figure.”

“So there’s a good chance that most people would never have heard it then?” Alan asked hopefully.

“Most people haven’t heard it, but the topic is trending. We know it was heard by people in the states surrounding the interview, but we’re not sure how many others heard it live or simply heard about it from someone else. But it’s the leading search result and the media is scrambling to explain why they didn’t immediately report it. It’s becoming a major issue and is likely to get worse.”

“Shit! Is there some way to block these transmissions in the future?”

“Blocking broadcast transmissions is pretty old-school, as we’ve been doing it for most of the past century, but we don’t know where the transmission originated from and it wasn’t a specific broadcast on a single frequency, but a blanket transmission on ALL the broadcast frequencies. We’d have to shut down all broadcast TV, radio and emergency broadcasts in order to prevent this from recurring, and we simply aren’t equipped for that. This isn’t some fly by night operation; this was a concerted effort accomplished with some amazing technical precision.”

“So I’m assuming it was our people who were involved. Do we even know if it was an actual recording and not something invented to make us look bad?”

“No, from everything I’ve heard, the actual facts were pretty near perfect,” Samuel lamented with a helpless shrug.

“Damn!” the president swore again. “Do we at least know what was revealed?”

“The participants each tried to guess what they’d specifically said, and there was a fair amount of discussion about secret governmental organizations, secret camps, nonpublic internment, unofficial funding and the government’s willingness to ignore established regulations concerning our response.”

“Damn right, we are,” President Alan insisted, slamming his fist on his desk causing the knickknacks on his desk to jump. “We’re not about to let some idiotic restrictions designed to protect guilty US citizens prevent us from stopping a damn invasion from another planet!”