Something Coming Through

7. Bob Smith

London | 6 July

‘We came in peace,’ the alien said, ‘for all humankind. And I’ve come here today, Mr Chairman — and please forgive me if I’m being presumptuous — to remind you of that.’

Eleven o’clock on a drowsy summer morning in Committee Room No. 3, the fifteenth floor of Kingdom Tower. A chill edge in the air-conditioned space, tall windows polarised against blinding sunlight, dimming the view of the huge construction site where the half-completed reconstruction of the Palace of Westminster stood inside a cofferdam. The Jackaroo avatar had walked into the committee room during the chairman’s opening remarks, causing a major stir and forcing the chairman to wait a full five minutes, grim-faced, before the fuss had died down and he could resume his speech. Dressed like an old-school rap star in a brand-new black Adidas tracksuit and box-fresh sneakers, vintage Ray-Ban Aviators masking its blank eyes, the avatar sat behind a table cluttered with microphones and plastic-wrapped glasses and sweating jugs of ice-water, an unscheduled special witness facing the four members of the Alien Technology Committee.

In the early days of First Contact, the Jackaroo — or rather, their avatars — had been everywhere, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe, but in the years since they had pulled back, become more like ambassadors than tourists, appearing at government functions and ceremonies, occasionally interviewed on news or talk shows, but rarely seen at large, out in the world. Years ago Chloe had glimpsed, from the top deck of a bus, an avatar ambling up Walthamstow High Street in the middle of a scrum of officials and police. Bus passengers crowding to the windows, passers-by gawping, traffic slowing in a blare of horns as the avatar and its followers crossed the car park towards the town hall. That was the closest she’d been to one, before today. Now, sitting with the rest of Disruption Theory’s crew in the first row of chairs and waiting her turn to be questioned, she could almost reach out and touch it.

She supposed that its appearance was what Daniel had meant by ‘the best kind of support’, wondered if it had something to do with Ada Morange, who was being shadowed by a!Cha that was collecting her life story. The!Cha had arrived with the Jackaroo, although it still wasn’t clear if they were servants or hitchhikers, clients or secret masters, or something else. Insatiably curious, they travelled inside tough mobile aquaria that could, as several gangs of would-be kidnappers had discovered, shoot skywards at high velocities. There weren’t many of them: a hundred or so. Beautiful Sorrow. Brilliant Mistake. Strange Attraction. Useless Beauty. Actual aliens wandering the world, searching for wonders.

Yes, it was possible that Ada Morange’s!Cha — it called itself Unlikely Worlds, Chloe remembered — had reached out to the Jackaroo, had asked them to give its friend’s employees a little help. Or maybe Unlikely Worlds had heard a rumour on some kind of alien gossip node that the Jackaroo were planning to make an appearance before the select committee, and had given the entrepreneur a heads-up.

Daniel was at the far end of the row, tall and rumpled in an ancient Savile Row pinstripe suit and a silvery waistcoat decorated with bright green banana leaves. During the preliminary announcements and the beginning of the chairman’s opening remarks he had slouched in his seat, studying something on his phone, but like everyone else he’d turned his full attention to the Jackaroo avatar when it had arrived, watching now as it placed its hand on the copy of the Bible held by the clerk of the committee. It was rare to make witnesses to select committees swear to tell the truth, but the chair, Robin Mountjoy, had insisted on it.

The avatar recited the oath with apparent sincerity, but added, to general laughter, ‘You will note that neither I nor your sacred book have burst into flame.’

No one had ever seen one of the Jackaroo in the flesh. They could be devils with bright red skin and horns and hooves and barbed tails, or angels, or anything in between. Gas bags evolved to ride the frigid winds of an exoJupiter. Machine intelligences. Self-organising magnetic fields. No one knew. And no one knew whether or not the Jackaroo actually inhabited their floppy spaceships — the tangles of restless vanes that had somehow towed the mouths of fifteen wormholes, each mounted on the polished face of an asteroid fragment, into L5 orbit between the Earth and Moon. Soon after the Jackaroo had revealed themselves, one of their ships had been vaporised by a thirty-kiloton nuclear bomb delivered by a Chinese Long March rocket. The Chinese had immediately claimed that it had been the act of a rogue element in their army, and the whole world had held its breath, waiting for the Jackaroo’s response, but the other ships had simply absorbed the debris and the Jackaroo had never mentioned the incident, had deflected all questions about it. It was possible that the ships were no more than relays transmitting signals from elsewhere, although no such signals had been detected. Or that the Jackaroo were clones or machines who had no concept of individual death. Or that the ships weren’t really ships at all, but decoys to divert attention from the Jackaroo’s actual presence (whatever that was). Props to satisfy human tropes of alien invasion. In the end, the destruction of the ship and the lack of any acknowledgement or response proved only that nothing, really, was known about the Jackaroo.

This one called itself Bob Smith. Like all of its kind, it appeared to be male (‘We prefer not to challenge certain social norms,’ the Jackaroo said, when asked about this), had translucent golden skin and was blandly handsome, its features a composite of an international selection of film stars with just enough artful asymmetry to avoid the uncanny valley effect. A machine passing for human: an animated, remotely controlled showroom dummy as hollow as a balloon. X-ray spectrometry, multispectrum imaging and other forms of remote probing suggested that the musculature and circuitry of Jackaroo avatars were entirely contained within their skins, but no one had ever managed to analyse one directly. They evaporated if trapped or damaged, fizzing away into water, gases, and trace elements. The ultimate golden vapourware.

Bob Smith gestured languidly, its body language a precise simulation of a person in command of their facts, relaxed and happy to cooperate. Answering, in a mellow, agreeable baritone, questions from the four MPs about the latest discoveries of ancient alien technology on the various new worlds. Stuff excavated from ruins and tomb cities, found in forests and deserts, fished from alien seas. Agreeing that these things could be dangerous, ‘But only if used in the right way.’ Claiming to know very little about Elder Culture artefacts. Saying, after being challenged about this, ‘We do not spy on our clients. We try to minimise contact. We try not to influence them. We let them find their own way. So we do not know what our previous clients left behind. By now, in fact, you probably know more about that than we do. You are a clever and versatile species. Very adaptable. Very plastic. We are sure that you will discover interesting new uses for everything you find.’

The Jackaroo were masters of flattery and misdirection, deflecting hard questions with humour, salting their sweet talk with a smattering of obscure cultural references to flatter the cognoscenti. With their outsider’s perspective and millions of years of experience in dealing with no one knew how many intelligent species, they understood people better than they understood themselves. Bob Smith’s imitation of a human was somehow more than human: a behavioural superstimulus like the red ball a male robin, believing it to be a rival, would exhaust itself attacking.

Chloe definitely felt the avatar’s film-star allure, its fairyland glamour. Glancing around, she saw that almost everyone else in the room — witnesses, advisers, journalists and members of the public packing the rows of seats, even the security guards standing at the door — had a kind of avid shine to their gaze. They felt it too.

She was dressed in a black Jaeger trouser suit which Helena Nichols had lent her. It wasn’t a bad fit, but it felt like a costume for a play. Her palms were sweating. Stray lines from yesterday’s rehearsals kept running through her head. She hoped that the avatar’s appearance would deflect attention from Disruption Theory, from herself, but she also knew that people all over the world would be watching it, that specialists would be analysing every word, every gesture, and pretty soon they would be watching her, too. Trying not to think about that invisible audience, as per Helena Nichols’s advice, was kind of like not thinking about a white rhinoceros while you tried to turn boiling water into gold.

Robin Mountjoy was making a decent attempt to appear to be unaffected by the avatar’s charm. He was in his mid-fifties, a burly man with thinning blond hair and a florid complexion, dressed in an off-the-peg suit. Although he was a multimillionaire, having made his fortune constructing and servicing displaced-persons camps, his PR painted him as a bluff, no-nonsense man of the people whose common sense cut through the incestuous old boys’ networks of the Westminster village.

He put on his gold-rimmed glasses to read something on his tablet, took them off again and leaned forward, blunt fingers laced together. ‘It seems to me that after thirteen years you have nothing new to say to us, sir. You offer only the same platitudes, the same empty reassurances.’

‘You ask why we do not change,’ Bob Smith said. ‘We are as we always have been because that is how we are. The question should be: have you changed?’

‘Voters elected thirty-six MPs in my party,’ Robin Mountjoy said. ‘We represent change. A change in attitude to your kind. We are challenging you. We intend to see through you.’

‘Everyone can see through us,’ Bob Smith said, with that very human shrug.

Robin Mountjoy waited out the laughter. ‘We see your avatars, but we do not see you. If you truly have nothing to hide, why don’t you show yourselves?’

‘When you have a telephone conversation with someone, do you treat them differently? Do you trust them less?’

‘You answer my questions with more questions. But our business is to get some answers.’

‘Perhaps you are not asking the right questions.’

More laughter.

‘There’s only one question,’ Robin Mountjoy said. ‘Why are you really here? You say you want to help. What do you expect in return?’

‘We hope that you will discover your better natures.’

It was a statement that the Jackaroo had made a million times. Chloe realised that Robin Mountjoy wasn’t interested in digging out anything new. He was not vain enough, not foolish enough, to think that he could succeed where thousands of politicians, scientists, philosophers and journalists had failed. Even the infamous Reddit AMA had failed to get inside the Jackaroo’s mischievous sophistry. No, he was grandstanding, playing the role of a fearless interrogator armed with what he would no doubt call good old-fashioned English common sense. The appearance of the avatar had put him in the spotlight, and he was milking the opportunity for all it was worth.

He said, ‘The business of the committee, sir, is not airy-fairy speculation about human nature. It’s the important and immediate question of dangerous and out-of-control technology.’

‘Ah! The best kind of technology.’

And so it went, back and forth. Despite the presence of an actual fucking alien right in front of her, Chloe’s attention drifted. The seats facing the committee were set out in a horseshoe; although she was seated in the front row, she could watch part of the audience. Some were taking notes, some looked as bored as she was beginning to feel, a few watched with the avid rapture of true fans. A woman clutching a copy of the order papers to her chest. A man with a stony intent expression, sitting as still as a statue. Another man sketching on a pad, shooting quick sharp glances at the avatar.

At last, the committee ran out of questions and Robin Mountjoy thanked the avatar for taking the trouble to attend. Bob Smith smiled and said that it was always a pleasure to serve. ‘And let me reassure you that I do not allude to the culinary sense of the verb.’

Two security guards moved forward as the avatar stood, and someone else was moving too. A man rushing forward, a pen flashing in his hand.

No. It was a knife.

Chloe saw everything clearly. The man’s blank expression as he sidestepped one of the guards, the avatar turning towards him. It was still smiling. Its hands spread as if greeting an old acquaintance. She saw the man raise the knife. Saw that its fat handle was wrapped in black tape. Saw that it had a double blade, two finger-length spikes. Saw fat blue sparks snapping in the narrow gap between them as the man stabbed the avatar in the chest. There was a pungent smell of burning plastic, the avatar shuddered and collapsed against the man, and Chloe shot to her feet and grabbed one of the jugs of water from the table and swept it up and around, intending to hit the man. He ducked away, but water cascaded over his chest and arms. The knife exploded in his hands, and then both he and the avatar were down on the floor, jerking and flailing like landed fish, and a security guard caught Chloe around the waist and hauled her backwards. She was breathing as hard as if she’d just run a ten-kilometre race. Her heart jackhammering. She was shocked and amazed by what she’d done, wondered if the guard thought that she was an accomplice of the assassin, wondered if she was going to be arrested.

Robin Mountjoy was shouting something, but no one in the room was paying any attention to him. The security guards roughly lifted the man, the assassin, to his feet. The avatar was face down on the navy-blue carpet, twitching and shuddering, a crown of white smoke burning off its head, white threads rising from the wrist and ankle cuffs of its tracksuit, its golden skin turning black, splitting, flaking, disintegrating.

People were jabbering into phones, taking photos, putting on spex. Someone was stupidly calling for a doctor. Someone else was shouting about death to aliens, long live the Human Resistance. It was the assassin, raving at the cameras aimed towards him as the security guards dragged him away. Chloe saw Daniel Rosenblaum hunched over in his seat, one finger in his ear as he talked urgently into his phone, saw Ram Varma snapping on a pair of vinyl gloves, saw him kneel by the collapsed tracksuit and unscrew the cap from a bottle of mineral water and scoop something from the floor.