The End Is Now

• Extreme involuntary fear bradycardia—a parasympathetic nervous system response to violence. Heart rate drops, oxygenation lowers, muscles stiffen, the amygdala-periaqueductal gray pathways are disrupted. There may be sweating. There may be fainting. There may be death.

• Heightened nurturing, due to increased oxytocin.

The kicker was that all these states were normal, within limits. Sweets pushed the limits. They were epigenetically altered from the ground up, fashioned by their DNA into much nicer people than the rest of us. Too nice to destroy each other, to destroy us, to destroy animals (they are of course vegetarian), to destroy the environment. They were just fucking angels.

But weren’t people more than their biology? Every day human beings resisted in-built biological urges in favor of cultural ones like monogamy. Or saving people in burning buildings. Or not killing the asshole who snatches your purse.

And the big, gazillion-dollar question is: why were the Sweets this way? There were a hundred theories drifting around the Internet. Yahweh, bringing about the End Times. Sheer Darwinian chance. The Earth, Gaia-like, fighting back to protect itself from polluters and frackers and over-fishers and those of us who own plastic water bottles. Or—

On the pathway through the settlement, I glanced up at the blue April sky.

But of course there was nothing to see. The alien ship was in orbit between Earth and Mars, too far away for anything dangerous from Earth to reach it.

* * *

“They took copper,” Carrie said. “Stripped out wiring and pipes. I guess they needed it for themselves.”

“So that makes it okay?”

“Of course not, Sophie.”

My sister had the sort of mild face a Sweet should have, a face from another century: calm eyes, pale oval face, fair hair in frizzy ringlets. Put a ruff and a stomacher on her and she would look like one of those obedient ladies in some patriarchal seventeenth-century court. As always, since we were children, she brought out the bully in me.

“How far along are you?”

Carrie blinked. “Mama told you?”

“Of course Mom told me. Why else would I be here? You have the right to get shot by some looting asshole if you want, but you don’t have the right to get my niece or nephew killed because you won’t defend yourself.”

“I don’t think—”

“Already obvious. You’re coming back with Ian and me.”

“No.” An actual shudder ran over her entire thin body, as if the mere thought of living with us was a toxin. “Sophie, I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I won’t.”

“All right, in that case, I’m not doing this anymore. Do you hear me? Baby or no, this is the last time we’re risking our lives for people who won’t do anything to help themselves. But before I go, let me ask you something: Why won’t you come with me?”

And then Carrie said the stupidest, most wimpy thing I’d ever heard her say during a lifetime of stupid, wimpy things. She said, “This is the only place I feel safe.”

In anger, in resentment, in contempt, I turned my back on her and walked out.

* * *

The first clear picture of the alien ship flashed onto the wallscreen, caught by a Chinese unmanned spacecraft, the Hope of Heaven, on its long exploratory voyage to the Oort Cloud. The alien ship, a long tapered cylinder of some grayish metal, had three weirdly-shaped projections at seemingly random places on one side of the hull. The magnified image revealed zero about the craft’s occupants. Remotely controlled signals, sent in a variety of forms and in a variety of wavelengths, went unanswered. The aliens were not interested in prime numbers, Fibonacci sequences, or pi.

“Fuckers,” I muttered. Ian and I sat on the sofa in our pajamas, eating pizza. Our apartment on the fortified APBRI compound was small and hastily constructed, but safe. Nobody was going to take our copper wiring. We had a tiny bedroom and a great room not much larger, furnished with a second-hand sofa of a particularly hideous plaid, a table and wobbly chairs, and a very good multipurpose screen. Researchers knew what mattered. I’d made the pizza since pizza chains were few and no longer delivered: too dangerous. The crusts were burned.

Ian, to my surprise, put down his plate and reached for my hand. He is not usually a demonstrative man. “Sophie . . . you have to stop being so angry.”

“But just look at them! Sitting up there all lordly, waiting for everything to unravel on Earth even more than it already—”

“I don’t mean angry at them.”

I looked into Ian’s eyes. In some lights the gray was flecked with silver. Those eyes are my home, a thing I have never said aloud: too silly. “You mean I’m angry at Carrie.”

“No. That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what—”

He dropped my hand. “I’ll let you figure that out.”

“You know I hate it when you go all superior-paternal on me.”

“I’m not,” he said, took another bite of the mediocre pizza, and changed the channel.