The Praxtu battleship, somewhere in space…
“I don’t believe this.”
The room was quiet, all eyes on the Captain as he pored over the holographic display at the center of the table. He was known for taking his time, and news like this was nothing to rush through. He closed his eye, took a deep breath and hung his head.
“Jandu, remind me,” he muttered. “Whose charts are these?”
The room’s gaze shifted to the far corner, away from the command center, to a small, blue man quivering in his seat. “W-well,” he replied, “those would be mine sir. You see, I’ve been tracking the same patterns on Earth for deca-“
“I DIDN’T ASK WHERE THEY CAME FROM, JANDU.” The quivering stopped. Jandu knew, from years of mess hall gossip, that men had been thrown into the brig, or worse, thrown from the ship, for far lesser insurrections than displeasing the Captain. He stared at the floor in silence. He wanted desperately to scan the room, to find some sort of sympathy among the Captain’s lieutenants, but he knew better than to risk locking eyes with the big man himself, and the likelihood of one of those brutes putting their neck on the line for sad, pathetic Jandu was laughable.
“Since these are yours,” the Captain continued, “why don’t you do us the favor of sharing what they say.” His eye was open again, and Jandu felt it boring into his temple as the rest of the room broke out in nervous laughter. Without moving his body, Jandu rubbed his thumb across his wrist display, and the holograms at the center of the room changed from numbers to a large blue sphere, pocketed with sections of green and brown. “Well, you see, this is Earth.”
The room exploded in laughter. “We know what Earth is, you fool! One more moronic comment like that and maybe you belong among them!” Jandu looked up, scanning the room for the source of the insult. “Ah, Xarka,” he thought, seeing a tall, amber colored woman with a blaster strapped to her thigh, cackling beside the Captain. “That bitch always hated me.” He swallowed slowly.
“Of course, how foolish of me.” Jandu stood up from his chair. “If I may?”
“Yes, step forward.” The Captain gestured him towards the hologram.
“Well, sir, this is the Earth. But it’s different than normal.” He pointed towards the hologram and clapped his hands together, zooming in on one particularly large expanse of blue. “This is the Atlantic Ocean, sir, and it separates what the humans call the Americas from a place they call Europe. And these” – Jandu clapped his hands together one more time, bringing into focus faint, hardly visible lines crisscrossing the ocean – “are airplane routes. Airplanes are one of the more barbaric ways these humans travel. They take hours, and run on inefficient, and, might I add, quite expensive fuel, by human standards of course, and-“
“Get to it, Jandu!” Xarka again. Jandu shook his head and focused.
“Of course, of course. At any rate, these airplanes usually crisscross the ocean at fairly astronomical rates – my team has seen upwards of 2,000 flights per day – but recently… it’s just the strangest thing… recently there have been hardly any. Just today, in fact, we counted two. Just two! And the weirdest thing…” – he was stammering now, unable to control his excitement – “is that heat signatures showed the airplanes to be practically empty!”
The table let out a collective groan. One particularly menacing Lieutenant, who Jandu remembered vaguely as being responsible for fleet strategy, banged his fists on the table so hard that the hologram flickered. “We’ve listened to this garbage long enough,” he growled. “What kind of low-life, asteroid barnacle calls an emergency meeting, drags us all away from our battle preparations, for this?” The veins around his eye were bulging with hatred. “And on the eve of our invasion! Captain, please, toss this pile of blaster fodder into the brig. Or throw him from the ship! The crew could use some entertainment.”
Jandu shifted in his seat and allowed himself to look directly at the Captain, who had reclined back and was gazing out across his commanders. His meaty forearms, which were the stuff of ship legend and which, according to Jandu’s bunkmate, Kartix, made it possible for him to crush a man’s skull with one hand, were folded across his chest, and his standard issue revolver lay on the table in front of him, pointing, in a bit of ominous cruelty, straight at Jandu. The Captain smiled.
“Now, now, Tork,” he said, “let’s hear Jandu out. The crew will have plenty of time for entertainment. Why rush things?” He unfurled his arms and motioned for Jandu to continue. “Why should we care about these stupid airplanes? What does this possibly have to do with our war?”
“I agree sir,” Jandu replied, “very astute of you. On it’s own, I myself would see nothing to worry about from a transportation change like this one. But it’s not the only thing that has changed.” He clapped and swiped his hands a few times, rotating the Earth and dialing in on a small sliver of land, crisscrossed by tiny, gridded lines. “This is New York, sir, a major human city and their crown jewel. Picture it like one of the slums of Fargon-12. It holds 10 million humans and is one of the busiest places on their tiny little planet.”
“Ok, go on…”
“Well, the place, which I’ll remind you is the busiest place on Earth, is completely deserted.” He clapped his hands five times, zooming in. “I’ve done my research, and have tracked these people for years. And this…” – the hologram froze on a particular intersection of two lines – “is Grand Central station, the busiest transit hub in the busiest city on earth.” Jandu paused now for effect, making a point to look directly at each person seated at the table. “It’s completely empty, Captain.”
Those seated near the head of the table squirmed in their chairs. Xarka scoffed, but her usual snarky comment didn’t come. All eyes were on the Captain.
“Ok,” he replied, “that is odd. But what does this mean, Jandu? What’s the significance?”
Jandu straightened his back and cleared his throat. “Captain, sir, taken individually I would say there is no significance, that all of this is coincidental. But too many coincidences make me nervous. Air travel has all but stopped, the humans aren’t going outside anymore, and even China, which we believe to be an entire country devoted to industrial production, has stopped making much of anything. Factories – and we track these things, sir – that previously made useless trinkets, their pathetic analog computers and those air blasters they use on their hair, are being retrofitted to make other things.”
“I get it, Jandu,” the Captain said, interrupting the small man’s digression. “A lot of strange coincidences. I agree. This all seems worrying. Focus on my last question. What does this all mean?”
Jandu paused. The room was silent. Even Tork sat quietly, grinding his fist into his palm.
“They’re preparing for war, sir.”
The Odysseus Apartment Building, Murray Hill, Manhattan. Apartment 16B
“Mom. Mom. Listen to me. This is serious.”
Samantha’s mom stared back at her from the screen. “Oh Sam, I know this is serious, but you called me right as Dad and I were getting ready to go out. Let’s talk tonight, ok?”
“HI SAMMY!” She and her mom both looked in the direction of her parents’ kitchen, where Sam’s Dad was yelling her name and waving to the camera. “Hope you’re staying safe up there – remember, the subways are off limits!” Her dad laughed just as hard as he had two weeks ago, when he first made the joke. The subways had been shut down earlier that month, and he knew it.
Sam groaned. Her parents had always hated the city, and her decision to live there, but ever since De Blasio’s announcement that he was closing down restaurants and bars, her parents had been treating the city like a war zone.
“Believe me, Mom, I haven’t left my apartment in a few weeks. I’m going insane as it is. But can you and Dad please stop going out? This thing is serious and you’re both over 65. I don’t see any reason why-“
Sam was cut off by her mother, who pulled the phone closer to her face and rolled her eyes. “Florida isn’t the same as that grimy place you live, Sam. Everyone down here is still having fun, which is why Dad and I moved here in the first place. We won’t share anyone’s drinks, if that’s what you’re worried about. And we’re meeting Jack and Donna, they don’t seem like the types to get corona.”
“Oh my GOD Mom, that’s not-“
“-now Dad and I love you, but we need to go.” The FaceTime froze on her mother’s amused expression as she hung up the call. “The types to get corona?” Sam thought to herself. “They’re insane. Absolutely insane.”
Sam looked up from her phone and set it down on the coffee table. She sat down on the left side of her couch, where she had sat for the last seven years, and started scratching at the armrest’s threadbare seam, picking up where she had left off. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, pushing her mom’s stupidity out of her mind. She took five long, slow breaths. “Everything will be ok,” she told herself.
Sam’s eyes snapped open. Nothing was ok. She had been in her tiny studio for four straight weeks. She was afraid to do laundry, so she’d been cycling through the same four pairs of sweatpants and ten t-shirts, and she was a couple days away from having to forgo underwear all together. Her back was constantly sore, from sitting awkwardly on the couch and spending half of the day in bed, and she’d put on over fifteen pounds from eating nothing but pasta and delivery paninis. She was vitamin D deficient, without a doubt, because her only window backed up to the building next door, which blotted out the majority of her sunlight. She was a hermit.
Sam reached for her phone and went right to Instagram. Scrolling through her feed, she saw that the latest corona hashtag, “#MyQuarantineDinner”, had yet to die out. “How is anybody still going to Trader Joe’s?” she thought, as she flicked through similar shots of frozen mac and cheese, turkey burgers and pre-made salads. Her mind flashed to the three hour wait at the Union Square Trader Joe’s she’d seen on the news a few nights back. People were stupid, waiting in line for basic frozen foods and snacks they could get anywhere else much faster. She paused for a second on kleinBrandon’s hashtagged photo, of a rare hanger steak and roasted vegetables. “You seem to be doing just fine,” she thought. She clicked on her ex’s profile and scrolled through photos she knew by heart: Brandon’s bachelor party in Vegas, the wedding, a house in Santa Monica. He looked good.
The rest of the day passed slowly. Sam watched a few hours of The Office, like she always did, and spent a couple of hours lying in bed, under the covers with the lights on. Some of that time she spent worrying about her parents, who she knew were one karaoke trip away from dying, and the rest she spent focused on herself. Last week the government had put a permanent hold on the stock market, and the US had reached 10,000 deaths. Despair came easy.
The day before, on the phone, her mom had given her the usual pep talk. “Oh Sam, you’re so negative,” she’d said. “You chose to live up there all these years, how bad can it be? We’re having a wonderful time down here.” She’d bitten her lip and smiled, but it had all felt surreal. “The is the end of the world,” she’d thought, looking despondently at her Mom’s face. “Even if we don’t die, what’s there to live for? How are you not getting this?”
Sam’s eyes teared up at the memory. Her parents would die. She had long come to terms with that. As for her, it was unclear exactly when, but she didn’t expect to live out the year. Her thoughts were a dark, dark place to be, this long into a quarantine.
Sam checked her watch and decided that 7:45pm was a reasonable enough time to go to sleep. She took off her clothes and kicked them into the pile of laundry at the foot of her bed. “I’ve lost all hope,” she thought, as she cried herself to sleep.
The Praxtu battleship
Jandu woke to a subtle ringing sound in his temple. He quietly tapped the side of his head and turned off the alarm. He looked across the narrow walkway at the bunk across from him: still asleep. It was about four hours before regular wake up, and his quiet alarm was the only thing keeping him from being torn to shreds by his bunk mates. He sat up, swung himself out of his bottom bunk and slipped into his standard issue jumpsuit, allowing himself the extra minute for it to self dry clean and vacuum fit to his body. The Captain expected his men to be prompt, sure, but more than that he expected them to be spotless, and the last thing Jandu wanted at this point was to blow the progress he’d made and get thrown in the brig, all for having a sloppy suit.
He wound his way upwards on the ship, past the weapons hold, the galley and mess hall, and then walked through the officer’s quarters to the Captain’s suite. He paused by the titanium door, and heard muffled sounds coming from the other side. “They got started early,” he thought to himself. Things had been tense the last couple of weeks.
Jandu took a deep breath, straightened his back, and held his finger to the sensor. Somewhere, on the other side of the door, he was being announced to the room, he knew, and somebody would be groaning, wondering why he was still being included in key decision making. The last thing he needed was a reminder that his presence wasn’t appreciated. Analysts were never brought in for strategic sessions.
Immediately following that initial meeting, Jandu had spent hours combing through flight records, with the Captain over his shoulder, showing him that practically everything had been halted worldwide. They checked street patterns in all the major cities Jandu knew about – London, São Paulo, Tokyo, Berlin – and found that all of them had practically no foot traffic. Based on heat signatures, the world’s major laboratories, which the Captain considered to be critical first targets, were working 24/7, and the major houses of government were locked in constant deliberation. Their initial conclusion had been validated – the humans were preparing for something.
The big door slid open slowly to reveal the makeshift war room inside. The sitting area, which was where, according to ship lore, the Captain brought any young female shipmate that caught his eye, had been shuffled around to fit more seating, and was now filled with a few of the Captain’s key lieutenants. Scanning the room quickly, Jandu recognized Tork, Xarka and Jargo, the fleet’s lead pilot.
“Jandu,” Tork said as he entered. “We were all wondering when we were going to be blessed with your invaluable presence.” He looked at the Captain for effect. “We were just talking about invasion strategy and fleet maneuvers, but it’s high time we heard more about your humans and their stupid little metal cards.”
“They’re called cars, actually, and they’re a major way that people get around. All of the small ones are off the streets at this point. And-“
“Enough,” the Captain interrupted. “You’re here for thirty seconds and already spouting facts. Just sit and be quiet.” He gestured towards an empty chair next to Xarka. “Tork, continue.”
“Thank you sir. As I was saying, before I was interrupted” – he glared at Jandu as he took his seat in the group – “this is still the perfect time to strike. Our firepower will overwhelm them. We can destroy that little turd of a city, New York, in one strike, and the others will fall easily after that. These humans are still just bugs, waiting to be crushed.”
The Captain nodded. “Xarka? What do you think?”
“I agree, sir. The men are ready. They’ve been preparing for this invasion for weeks, and morale has never been higher. We can’t call it off now.”
“Jargo?”
The pilot stared ahead calmly. “You know I love killing, sir. Let’s do it.”
The Captain nodded his head knowingly and sat back in his chair. “I agree with all of you. No amount of preparation on Earth can change our superiority in every single category. There’s no question we’ll be able to wipe them off the face of the galaxy. And yet…” The room tensed up. “I received no direct instructions from command to invade Earth. This has always been a rogue mission, as you all know, predicated on the idea that we could do this with zero casualties and zero damage. And now I’m just not sure. What do you think, Jandu?”
Tork stood from his chair. “Sir, if I may, the opinion of that little runt means nothing. What does he know of war?”
“I agree, Tork, and yet, he has given us critical information time and again. His opinion should be heard. Jandu?” All eyes turned to the analyst.
“Sir, you know I love killing more than anyone,” he replied. Xarka snorted beside him. “There’s no doubt we could kill them all. But they are preparing for something. Preparing more than they’ve ever prepared for anything else in their short history. I’ve thought about it every way that I can, and I just don’t see any reason for what they’re doing, other than as preparation for war. And if they are preparing for a fight, it seems highly unlikely they would choose to do so at the exact moment in time that our ships are moving towards them. It’s possible, sure, but highly improbable. So that means they are preparing to be invaded.” Jandu sat back in his seat.
“And what if they’re preparing? What could they possibly have to stop us?” Jargo asked.
“Nothing. There is nothing the humans can develop that could hold back an invasion from our fleet.”
This time Xarka nearly jumped from her seat. “There we have it, sir! The bookworm has spoken. Can we toss him from the room now?”
“One moment.” The Captain waved his hand, and Xarka sat back down. “Were you finished, Jandu?”
“Well, no, sir, in fact I wasn’t,” he replied. “The humans have nothing to stop our invasion, sure, but could they hurt it? Could they damage a ship? Destroy one? I’m not really sure. I’ve gone back to their early history, sir, and it’s rather astonishing the progress humans have made in a mere 200,000 years. That’s about a millionth of the time we’ve been around, you know, and in that short span they’ve more than doubled their lifespans, figured out space travel, and found ways to harvest energy from the sun. They’re a pretty scrappy species, it would seem. I’d hate to think what they’re capable of if the entire planet directs its energy towards something. And if that something is us? I think our invasion is doomed, if not to fail than to be more of a headache than it’s worth.” Jandu stopped, weighing whether or not to ask his final question. “Why, if I may ask, are we invading the planet in the first place?”
“Because I’m bored,” the Captain replied, smiling. “I’m bored of patrolling a galaxy that no one at command gives two rations about. And besides, the men could use some practice. They’re getting complacent and fat.”
“Then maybe, if I might interject, maybe it’s worth calling this whole thing off, sir.”
“Maybe it is.”
The Odysseus building
Sam stared at the quarter as it spun its way around her coffee table. She had spent the better part of the morning flicking the circular piece of metal, trying to get it to stay up for longer than 30 seconds. She hadn’t gotten it past 22 so far.
When the quarter began to wobble, Sam swept it off the table and sighed. “I’m losing it,” she thought, running her hand through her greasy hair. She had showered twice in the past month, and her thick brown hair had become shiny and matted. She wore a stained white t-shirt, a pair of old running shorts and wool socks. The same thing she’d worn the day before. Earlier that morning, she had struggled to recognize herself in the mirror.
Sam’s phone vibrated on the table. May 22nd. “NYC Crematoriums Accept Bodies As Morgues Overrun.” She flipped the phone over and laid back on the couch, playing back the news from the past few days: more than 50,000 dead in New York City alone, martial law imposed nationwide, international food shortages. She had read a few things about progress towards a vaccine, but weeks had passed and she hadn’t heard anything else.
Sam felt her throat tighten and her eyes start to tear up. “I am not ok,” she said out loud. Then she shouted. “I AM NOT OK!” She paused, listening for a response. “Jesus, Sam, you need someone to talk to,” she thought. Her parents were alive, as far as she knew, but she hadn’t called them in a long time and they hadn’t called her. Her friends were all in quarantine, but most of them lived with roommates, or with their husbands, or had gone back home to their parents. Sam was the only person who was alone. She had lost half of her 401K, not that she cared, and she expected to be furloughed at some point in the next few weeks. She would be out on the streets.
There was no doubt, Sam thought, where this all was headed. She had been caught up in these downward spirals before, had spent months on the couch, after Brandon broke up with her, in the same exact spot. A few nights before, Sam had stood at her bathroom counter, pill bottle in hand, but had decided against it in the end. “Knowing me I’ll just end up crippled,” she’d thought. She looked at the same pill bottle, which she had moved to the coffee table. “One day soon. One day.” Had she just said that out loud? She wasn’t sure. She grabbed her journal from the seat next to her, cracked the seam and wrote:
“Why survive in a broken world?”
The Praxtu battleship
The room had been quiet for some time. The Captain was hunched over in his seat, head in his hands, and the rest of his command knew better than to interrupt him when he was thinking. In their experience, once the Captain set himself down to think, the debate was over. He would make a decision.
Jandu had not received even a cursory glance since he pushed for calling off the invasion, which he now hoped was a sign that his message had been well received. Either that or the lieutenants were plotting ways to murder him in his sleep. He knew that the Captain’s decision was not just a strategic choice but a referendum on Jandu’s life. If the invasion was called off, he was right. If it continued as planned, he was dead.
As he waited, Jandu felt his thoughts wandering, oddly enough, to the humans. He had been so disappointed, at the start of his career, to be assigned such a lowly, insignificant race. He thought back to that first encyclopedia entry he had found: “Humans, the dominant animal species on Earth, are characterized by their small brains, binocular vision and primitive nature. Humans, though all contained on one, relatively small planet, speak a variety of incompatible languages, maintain independent sets of customs, and pray to different Gods. In spite of such differences, the human being is known for its pacifism, and the planet Earth has experienced relatively few wars and genocides in its short history.”
Jandu had spent weeks reading everything he could find on these humans, only to feel his shame grow. His career was doomed, he had decided, because no analyst was going to make a name for himself researching such useless creatures. When he’d been sent to the Praxtu, a relatively unknown destroyer assigned to patrol Earth’s galaxy, he had said goodbye to his parents and seen that same shame across their faces. Their son was an embarrassment.
That had been years ago, and over time Jandu had come to respect, in many ways, the subjects of his research. He kept finding things that were incompatible with his ideas of how species lived together: temples of opposing gods standing side by side, willful self-government, organizations with the sole purpose of helping out the poor. At one point, he stumbled across a story, one of the few translated into his tongue, about mutual disarmament between two of Earth’s major powers. Jandu had needed to search four dictionaries before he even understood the word. “So strange,” he had thought to himself at the time, thinking about all the other planets that had been destroyed under similar circumstances. “The humans want to survive.”
Now, as he sat in his chair, invisible to the room, Jandu was certain he was doing the right thing. The humans, he had found, operated like a single, beating heart. They worked towards the common good. And while they would all certainly die in an invasion, all seven or so billion humans Jandu had tallied up at last count, he knew they would fight together until the end. Something no species had done since he’d joined the Praxtu so long ago.
The Captain stirred in his chair for the first time in over an hour, and the room snapped to attention, all eyes zeroing in on their leader. Jandu winced as the Captain began:
“In all my years, I have never once taken seriously the analysis of a little speck like Jandu. I fear that if I do now, I’ll lose the respect of my ship.” Some of the audience nodded their heads. “But the reality is this – we’re in a tight situation. What once seemed like a fun war exercise has now become something else: a headache. And I refuse to damage this ship’s reputation over a lowly species like the one found on Earth.” Jandu smiled. This was a good sign.
“So here’s what I propose. We pass by Earth without batting an eye. They live to see another day. And in celebration of my decison…” The Captain looked straight at Jandu, and all eyes in the room turned towards him.
“We send him down there to live with them!”