The End Is Now

He was so much smarter than I was about science, but not about things like this. “To justify the violence against Sweets. Not the violence that’s already happened. Something more. Something big and coordinated.”

“That’s a little paranoid, Sophie.”

I hoped so. I really hoped so.

* * *

For the next week, all I did was watch the news. In our apartment I watched it on the wallscreen. In the APBRI cafeteria I tried to stay as much as possible in the back kitchen and I kept the screen tuned to news channels. Eventually Ted and Sarah and Kayla, the new cook, objected. “All that doom and gloom,” Sarah said, switching to a rerun of some show so old that cars thronged New York City. A half hour later I said I felt nauseated, went home, and stayed there, watching news shows whenever they were broadcast. A few times I even got recast European and Asian news, with and without translations. I told Kayla that I had the flu.

In seven different countries, children were attacked and mutilated. Each time, the alleged attacker, for whom there was “forensic evidence,” was another Sweet. A little boy in San Diego, twin girls in Munich, children in Cairo and Shanghai and Mumbai and Rio and London.

Louis William Porter was everywhere, vomiting out his poison that it was no coincidence the alien ship had appeared just before Sweets “went vicious.”

Attacks against Sweets ramped up around the world, became more organized and deadly.

My mother phoned constantly; eventually I stopped taking her calls. A dozen times I picked up the phone to call Carrie and then set it down again. What would I say? “Come here?” APBRI was not sheltering anyone but its own personnel. Go somewhere else? She wouldn’t go. Arm yourself for an attack? She wouldn’t.

Eventually I settled for calling her a few times every day, hearing her say, “Sophie?” and then cutting the link. As long as her voice was calm, the settlement was okay.

More murdered and mutilated children on TV.

Scientists fought back. On Understanding the News, Ian took his turn explaining that the biology of Sweets “as it is understood now” simply made such violence impossible to them. It was this objective fairness that sunk him. Fifteen minutes after Ian’s broadcast, Louis William Porter proclaimed triumphantly, practically licking his lips, that “science as it is understood now” implied both incomplete understanding and the possibility of change. The Sweets had changed, and the aliens had caused it. (Porter had changed his mind about their existence—they were now not only allies of the Chinese but were in fact controlling Sweets “like the soulless puppets they are!”)

When Ian got home, I turned on him. “Why the fuck did you say that?”

He stood in the doorway to our apartment, and for a moment I saw it through his eyes: blaring wallscreen to keep me awake, dirty dishes with the bizarre food combinations left in the pantry, myself even dirtier than the dishes. It had been days since I showered. The place reeked. But Ian didn’t look all that great, either: pale, heavy-eyed. He knew he’d screwed up.

He said, too evenly, “I said it because it’s true.”

“Ian McGill, the great acolyte of Truth! And now more people will die because you needed to preserve your scientific purity!”

He took a step forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Ian, who was never violent. But neither was he a Sweet, and I knew that in my anger I’d crossed an important line. But he mastered himself, threw me a look so terrible that it seared itself onto my brain, and went into the bedroom. I heard the door lock.

I picked up my cell, called Carrie, and hung up when I heard her voice.

* * *

A few days later, the attack came. Not on Carrie’s settlement—the other attack I’d been waiting for.

Only cynics like me believed that what was left of the United States government was mistaken about China’s space capabilities. Was mistaken, or was lying, or was protecting diplomatic secrets—in the end, all three came down to the same thing. NASA said no one on Earth had nuclear missiles that could accurately reach the alien ship, but at 2:47 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on May 14, China hit the alien spacecraft with enough nuclear power to blow up greater Los Angeles.

Our one remaining orbiting telescope caught the attack on camera. The missile exploded and the ship did not. The photo wasn’t a close-up, but it was clear enough to see that the ship emitted a blue haze a nanosecond before the missile hit, the missile disappeared, and the ship floated serenely in the void, its fragile-looking and oddly-shaped projections still intact.