The Gradual War

We saved humanity by destroying it.

Let me start over. Back in ’53, the Great War began. You’d think we’d know by now not to spout phrases like that. It’s right up there with “home by Christmas,” or “just one more push.” If I didn’t know how the whole thing started, I’d probably want to smack the next person who used that term.

But it really was a great war, from an adversary we never expected. And no one expected the aliens to speak Earth languages, no matter that we’d been beaming broadcasts into space for more than a century.

It was only looking back that we pinpointed ’53 as the year it began, piecing together memories and pieces of archival records that remain.

Let’s face it, we barely noticed when the information war began. We were busy with our insignificant lives, years before anything kinetic kicked off. Sure, we saw the disruption and the dissent, but the clips were exaggerated flashes on the nightly news. Used to be only around the holidays when you couldn’t find the turkey or the latest hot toy for your kids. Used to be, riots and shortages were rare.

It sounds ridiculous now that we didn’t see it coming. Maybe it was denial.

Most people paid little attention when small crises popped up worldwide. The transport strike couldn’t possibly be related to the race riots, and the religious zealots wreaking havoc over there were nothing compared to the hacker collective going after data to release your secrets to the world. Or the other one, sneaking in your systems until your data’s corrupted beyond recovery, slowly succeeding in tanking the worldwide economy.

No one expected the aliens to be able to code, even though that’s just another language. No one expected them to transmit a signal back. Certainly not with subterfuge, disruptive signals hidden within noise.

One fire, after another, after another. Each aimed at weakening the intangible lines of stability that hold the whole system together. Hell, even some days I don’t believe it all built into disaster rather than rebalancing, and I was one of the Informed, on the front lines watching it all happen. Even we only had a vague wiggle of awareness.

The aliens were strategic geniuses, flat out. Their campaign targeted all of Earth, a single operational environment. Our brains can’t handle that much information without decomposing the problem into something smaller. I heard the concept called the monkey bubble once, where we can only handle so many relationships before we lose someone else from our personal world bubble. Our poor monkey brains broke the issue into limited, local situations out of self-defense.

We even chose our destruction, diving further into the information bubble and isolation to the point where disputed facts destroyed it all. Friendships, marriages, alliances, the whole world splintering.

It looked like bad luck.

By the time we realized it was all related, we’d been at war for years without even knowing. And we were losing.

That’s exactly what they wanted. You can’t underestimate the demoralization effect that comes with knowing you’re about to be crushed.

Worse, we’d done it to ourselves. Torn ourselves apart over petty differences, while aliens cackled madly from the stars.

And we were out of time.

When kinetic war finally arrived, it came at speed and scale we couldn’t interpret. Most of us were busy fighting for survival by ’57.

Doubt, more than anything else, killed us when we should have lived. Doubt, and skepticism over whether or not aliens existed, when it didn’t take the Webb telescope to see the coming clearly, headed steadily and straight for Earth.

The silver rings in the sky over Kansas – well, it gave new meaning to the phrase about not being in Kansas anymore, because you could be, but there was no denying the blue sky above the prairie was different from what it should be. There’s no getting used to the shock. Who looks up at the moon expecting to see an alien megastructure surrounding it?

The nanobiologists were the ones who let us compete. I doubt Sir Tim anticipated what his creation would become once unleashed upon the world, not sixty-some years after the internet went live. Deep brain implants were the tale of science fiction, up until they weren’t. Oh, there were a few unwieldy efforts with electrical stimulation and such, implanted into neural nets.

This was different. We couldn’t afford human slowness. The remnants of command were desperate by then. Scared men, desperate women – at the end of the day, none of them knew what to do. A redneck hiding in the woods had a better shot at survival. Maybe still does.

Humanity needed three things. A strategic view to make the connections between disparate pieces of information. Faster decision-making to preempt the aliens’ next moves. And the ability to regenerate, without having to wait for arduous levels of physical therapy and pain that shocked the human system into unconsciousness.

’Nanos offered us the ability for all three.

They called us the Watchers, and later, the Informed. At first because we were the ones to see the connections, see it coming, just barely before the bombs went live. Later, because our nano-enhanced ability to see everything at once lent us an inhuman air.

Notice, of course, that we were never called the Wise. For all our insight, what we did was little better perceived than those shattered, shaking Generals who insisted at full volume that we had the unique quirks perfect for the first testing.

They gave us power, and we seized it with hands that no longer ached from never being warm enough once the electricity died. The nanos did their job. All that was asked for and more.

Speed – the vaunted and oh-so-desired speed that we needed to struggle our way to stalemate – came at the cost of skipping over explanations and debate. We skipped over the doubt and skepticism we’d fought against back in ’56, bare months before the missiles screamed into the holiday evening and disrupted millions of summer barbeques.

We made decisions. We pushed the aliens back, stopped them at the moon. Only a few hundred lost when the base went dark, and that an acceptable loss. And we did so at speed.

It made us incomprehensible. Unpredictable. Suspicious. Never mind that we were right, that our decisions worked. Bio-nano testing stopped. Banned worldwide, except by the Neo-Russkis and one or two other holdouts.

They used us nonetheless, in part because we were incapable of breaking at this point. The ‘borgs are what will let us win the war, one of our new jailors told us, and praised our sacrificed humanity and freedom as support worthy to the cause.

We didn’t know the ‘nanos were contagious until the alien attack on our command post failed. When one of our captors dug out of the rubble a day later, covered in dust, already having regrown a cybernetic arm.

I laughed for hours after that one, long into the moon-ringed night.

Humans can acclimate to anything. Even being inhuman.

They’ll have to.

***

This week, I took nother Mike’s prompt of “The rings in the sky told them they weren’t in Kansas anymore…” to a dark future landscape. My prompt went to Padre: Twelve towers were built by the gods…but there is another tower that no one knows exists.

Check out these, and more, at MOTE!