One Hundred Years Earlier.

PLANET EARTH was dying.

The world was indeed in a parlous state. In the early 2040s, over twenty years of prevarication and compromise over Climate Change and plastic pollution had been argued about amongst the big players—and, unsurprisingly, target after target had been missed. The wild dream, at the beginning of the 2020s, of limiting Global Warming to 1.5°C, was just that: a dream—a dream never to be fulfilled. Even the fallback option, 2.0°C, soon became unattainable. Indeed, by the year 2043, the 2.0°C threshold—the rise in average global temperature—had already been reached, and the consequences were being felt worldwide. Was it not enough to point to the catastrophic heatwaves of 2041 and 2042? In South East Asia—Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines especially—an estimated 27 million people had perished from the extreme heat and humidity. At times a wet-bulb temperature in excess of 36°C had been reached, which is not survivable even for a healthy adult after more than an hour’s exposure. China, Russia, Korea, and even Japan, did not escape the worst effects either, losing an estimated 18 million of their combined population.

In Europe and North America, the effects were less dramatic—although parts of Europe had experienced heatwaves surpassing even that of 2003, with 131,000 deaths as compared with 75,000 in the earlier canicule. Meanwhile, a large part of Eastern North America was experiencing the opposite extreme: fortnight-long blizzards with 20-foot drifts and all communication lines cut—this alone claiming some 30,000 lives. The extreme cold snaps, unfortunately, had lent fuel to the Climate Change deniers’ rhetoric: “Bring on Global Warming—we could do with a bit of it right now” had been their frequently-uttered mantra.

On top of all this, recent worldwide crop failures had been devastat­ing and had led to widespread famine. With the wheat harvest down some 60%, maize down 43%, and almost continual drought, most of sub-Saharan Africa was affected, with famine being recorded in just about every country. Rice appeared to be one of the few crops that had prospered in the heat—but the human race had discovered it could not live on rice alone. Even in Southern Europe people were starving, and Government after Government, unable to cope with the crisis, had collapsed.

The ubiquitous microplastic particles permeating the world’s oceans had poisoned much of the marine ecosystem. Many of those people who subsisted on fishing were likewise suffering famine. The increasing acidification of the waters was also having noticeable effect: molluscs and corals which depended on their calcium carbon­ate shells were on the decline—as were the marine life that fed on them. All the way up the food chain species had been placed in the ‘critically endangered’ category.

And then there was the rising sea level. Not as extreme as the scientists in their worst fears had forecast—an average of fifteen centimetres since the year 2000, This was however enough to lead to greatly increased flood risks in many coastal areas. Almost all the sea-ice north of the Arctic Circle had gone—putting marine mammals like the Polar Bear and the Walrus on the Critically Endangered list—but of course sea-ice melts do not in themselves lead to rising sea level. Some progress had been made in stemming the flow of polar glaciers by pumping out the melt-water beneath them—but it was only buying a few years. And the pumping itself had consumed yet more energy, which could ill be spared.

This catalogue of calamities would surely have been sufficient to reduce human morale to a low not seen since Mediæval times—but it was not all. At least three devastating pandemics had shattered the human spirit as never before in history. In the early 2020s—and again in the mid 2030s—the death tolls, at just over ten millions worldwide in each case, had been devastating but endurable. However, the far more deadly virus that afflicted Earth from 2043 onwards had claimed over 370 million lives in its first two years alone—more than the entire population of the United States. A pandemic of depression had been an inevitable side-effect, with suicide rates at an alarming high and birth-rates plummeting: few were keen to raise a child in these circumstances…

The divide between rich and poor had inevitably widened beyond all compare. Democracies had foundered: terrorism and violent crime were soaring, most of the world’s major cities were overwhelmed by slums and shanty towns, and for many folk it was not safe to venture outside their home—if they had one.

Pundits were predicting that the human race would not survive more than another generation before descending into barbarism…

Was it pure coincidence that the Overlords—or at any rate their robots—had arrived in the nick of time?

All that humanity knew was that first contact—of a kind—had happened: Earth’s first encounter with an intelligent alien civilisation. What physical form those mysterious aliens took—aliens quickly dubbed ‘Overlords’ although many people disliked that word—remained a mystery: their main fleet of spaceships remained in orbit around Neptune’s moon Triton, beyond the reach of any Earthly spacecraft. There had been clamour for a repeat launch of the Voyager probes which had successfully passed and sent back images of the outer planets—but this was now impossible, the space scientists explained: the giant planets which had been used as ‘gravity slings’ were no longer ‘lined up’ as they had been in the 1970s and 80s.

So humans had to be content with the arrival of an uncrewed ship of the Overlords which went into orbit around Earth—not, repeat not, a satellite of Earth origin, the space agencies insisted. It was assumed that the first all-enveloping broadcast to humanity had been transmitted from this ship. The broadcast in which Karellen had first introduced himself, and announced that his race had come to help set right Earth’s current state of distress…

But there was a price to pay. Humanity was now to be utterly sub­servient to the Overlords’ rule—and Karellen took pains to assure his audience that this was in humanity’s best interest. In a few days robots would be sent down to Earth’s surface to enforce—without using violence—this edict.

It was not, of course, to be expected that humans might take this news calmly. The robots duly appeared—and rather unimpressive they were at first glance. Simple smooth metallic spheres, about six inches in diameter, which floated in mid-air, usually just above head-height. They had no visible apertures or control surfaces, and made no sound except a faint hum—but they were active: sometimes they would dart from one place to another at lightning speed. They never hit nor even touched anything. They did not need to.

There appeared to be millions of them. They swarmed all over Earth: no-one could escape their vigilance. Not surprisingly, many people tried to take the robots out, but it was futile. At first they simply dodged bullets—and even more deadly missiles aimed at them—as easily as an adult could dodge a ball tossed by a child. Later on, any gun aimed at a robot would mysteriously jam.

And that was only for starters. It was soon discovered that any gun or similar weapon would also instantly jam on being aimed at another human—or indeed at any harmless animal. Many owners in desper­ation resorted to gunsmiths, who took the weapons apart, reassembled them, tested them, took them apart again—but remained totally perplexed. Any bomb planted would simply fail to explode. As to less deadly instruments: knife-wielding or club-wielding ruffians soon found their weapons turning red-hot in their hands whenever they tried to use them aggressively. Some thugs resorted to thick gloves—but the only result was that the gloves became hot in their turn. Even a fist drawn back in anger (except in legitimate boxing) would instantly suffer painful cramps.

As to rape and other sexual crimes—it was soon evident that the oldest—and most natural—impediment to such behaviour was at work here. Some men might feel embarrassed—but was that not a price worth paying?

How the robots were achieving all this was a complete mystery, but many people—in fact all those who were not of a violent disposition—came to accept this situation. Violence and terrorism were being eradicated: at a painful cost but what was worse than this cost? And more was on the way…

Somehow the infection rate in the deadly 2043-nCoV pandemic was plummeting. Epidemiologists the world over were baffled: no effective vaccine had been deployed or even developed, and face­mask rules, social distancing, and isolating were having only limited effect. But every day the death rate was dropping. It must be the robots again: perhaps they were combating the virus with nano­technology. No-one knew for sure.

At least the means by which the visitors were counteracting plastic pollution and Climate Change were less of a mystery. Plastic-eating bacteria were busy in the oceans, gradually converting the waste plastic into harmless compounds. Millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide had been deployed in the upper atmosphere, with the effect of reflecting back into space some of the Sun’s radiation. At the same time, larger robots with carbon-sequestering capability were adrift in the atmosphere. As to persuading the human race to consume less fossil fuel, and in other ways to reduce their carbon footprint: the Overlords were apparently leaving it to humanity to face that decision.

Could humanity be trusted to play fair?

In another age the inertia which had stymied almost all these necessary changes would have been the inevitable sticking point. Especially in the developed world, people had been simply too attached to their cars, their travel options, their abundance of varied (often imported) food and consumer goods… But by the mid 2040s Earth’s inhabitants had become so enfeebled by the four-fold blows of heat-wave, famine, pandemic, and terrorism, that they were content to accept any measure which might bring back the standard of living to its level of the early 2000s. So was the stage set for the Overlords’ intervention.

There were deniers and conspiracy-theorists all along, of course. They lost no time in rallying their adherents and protesting against—denying the existence of, even—the Overlords and their imposed policies. But the Overlords had an answer even for that. For the first two or three years, they did nothing: they allowed the lies, the hate mail, the death threats, to circulate unchecked. But gradually it was noticed that abusive e-mails would fail to be delivered; that conspiracy-theory websites would suddenly crash for no reason; that gradually the means for such people to communicate with one another were being obstructed. No doubt the robots were still hard at work!

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Unable to contact each other, the extremists rapidly lost their momentum. People in general accepted the measures. They consumed less power. They travelled less, and used sustainable energy for trans­port as much as possible. They ate less meat, switching to vegetables instead. They eschewed single-use packaging as far as possible…

There were however some obstacles to humankind’s total accept­ance of the Overlords. Why had they done all this good work wholly to Earth’s benefit? Was their motive entirely altruistic? And why—above all—did they not come to Earth in person and meet humans face-to-face? Not so much as an image of an Overlord had ever been seen by anyone on Earth. Why did they remain stubbornly in orbit around Triton? Earth’s most powerful optical and infrared telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, had indeed observed the giant ships of the Overlords’ main fleet orbiting that moon—although only as tiny dots. There was little doubt that the Overlords were telling the truth when they explained that they were remaining on board those ships for the time being. Only robot ships had been allowed to penetrate deeper into the Solar System.

But they had set a date, over fifty years in the future, when they proposed to finally visit Earth in person. Why leave it so long? Human life-expectancy was improving again, after its dramatic drop in the 2020s, 30s, and 40s, but a large proportion of people alive today could not possibly live to meet an Overlord in person. The Overlords were coy in offering an explanation for this long delay—they merely stated that the human race was ‘not yet ready’ for the encounter.

Although this pledge was met with grudging acceptance by most, many others were nowhere near satisfied. Among them was Rikki Stormgren, a young and highly intelligent astrophysics, mathematics, and computer science student, originally from Finland but now studying for his PhD at Princeton. Being only in his early twenties, he stood a good chance of living to meet the Overlords, but he was impatient nonetheless. For much of his life, his hero and idol had been Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician and codebreaker, a man who had been cruelly persecuted for his homosexuality and driven to an early death back in the 1950s. Stormgren, himself in a same-sex relationship, felt a sort of kinship with the long-dead genius. And he felt that his sexuality was in no way in conflict with his devout Christian values, which he had cherished all his life.

Turing had been instrumental in cracking the Germans’ Enigma code during WW2: similarly, could Stormgren somehow interpret the signals which the Overlords were transmitting to their home planet? He determined to find out, working in secret: he would not confide even in his partner and fellow-student Pieter van Ryberg, nor in their close friend Pierre Duval. This was altogether too sensitive a matter!

It had for some time been known that the Overlords were constantly in communication with their home planet. Aside from the spaceships, the JWST had detected another object orbiting Triton: a slightly elliptical shape nearly ten kilometres across. From the changes in its appearance over the course of a year, astronomers had correctly de­duced that it was a circular disk—in all probability a flimsy parabolic antenna, always maintaining the same orientation relative to the stars. And when the Earth’s alignment was most favourable, a very faint modulated radio signal—evidently not intended for human consump­tion—could be detected. Astronomers had figured out that the Over­lords’ home planet lay somewhere in the constellation Scorpius [see note]—but there was no way of telling which of the myriads of stars in that region it orbited—and hence how far away the Overlords’ home might be. Clearly any two-way conversation between the travellers and their comrades back home must take many years…

And no-one had been able to decipher, or even detect any pattern in, this faint signal. Stormgren was determined to try.

He worked patiently, secretly, and alone. NASA had helpfully put a copy of the intercepted signal in the public domain—in the faint hope that someone, somewhere, might be able to decrypt it. The Overlords must have known about this, but they didn’t appear to be concerned. Perhaps even they realised that they would be seen as over-oppressive if they tried to suppress even this information—which they never expected humans to interpret.

Over the course of a few months, Stormgren managed to separate out the modulations of the signal into three distinct streams: data, audio, and video. The data stream was packaged in a way not entirely dissimilar to internet protocols used on Earth—although he could of course make no sense of the symbols being transmitted, which were nothing like any human symbols, alphanumeric or otherwise. The audio stream, which Stormgren recognised as such from its lower bandwidth, also yielded to his painstaking analysis. There were sounds there which seemed to be rapid-fire speech—though over a wider frequency range than any human speech. By playing back the sounds slowly, Stormgren could pick out groups of sound which occurred frequently—like commonly-used words in a human lang­uage. He was convinced that this was the Overlords ‘talking’ to each other. What they were saying, of course, was a total mystery.

It was the video stream, of course, which excited Stormgren’s interest the most. It could safely be assumed that the Overlords were transmitting imagery captured on Earth itself—so if he succeeded in cracking the code, some of the images would be recognisable. This gave him a useful start. But there appeared to be several levels of encryption. For months Stormgren tried this and that, without success. He was almost ready to chuck in the whole enterprise; or pass it over to Pieter—or even Pierre Duval—to get a fresh mind working on the problem. But at last, after over a year’s work, he had a breakthrough.

Some of the patterns in the data stream, which he had dismissed as indecipherable, appeared to repeat themselves with only slight vari­ations—but precisely at those moments when a video transmission was about to begin. Were these transmissions in fact the keys to decrypting the videos? Was it as simple as that?

Stormgren’s heart was pounding madly in his chest as he performed what he hoped would be the final stage of decryption. And. stagger­ingly, there it was!—perfect holographic images springing into life before him. Most were recognisable: many images of different types and races of humans were there, some of them clothed, some naked, some even engaged in sexual activity—also familiar animals like dogs, horses and cattle. Stormgren was almost ready to dance all around his cramped workshop in his exultation—instead he was content to sit back in his chair, tears welling in his eyes.

There were images of well-known buildings on Earth, as well as many familiar artefacts. The Statue of Liberty; the Eiffel Tower; the Coliseum; the Kaaba; the Great Buddha of Thailand; the Pyramid of Chichen Itza; and more. A set of knives, forks, and plates; a wine bottle; a portable phone; a stethoscope; a lavatory; a lawnmower; a teddy-bear; a set of Lego; even a gallows. There were shots of wildlife taken in many parts of the globe—those parts where wildlife still persisted, that is. There were images of the main polluters: giant factories, power stations, cars and other vehicles, factory farms, and the like: clearly the Overlords had been studying the causes of Earth’s woes. Microphotographs of the Coronavirus which had wreaked so much havoc. But also video of the repair work humans were putting into place to set things right and hoping to usher in the promised ‘Golden Age’.

But no images of the Overlords themselves; nor of their home planet; nor of their own artefacts. Stormgren had not expected as much. He scanned through hour upon hour of videos: and it became clear that not all of them were of terrestrial origin. There were scans of the Moon and of other planets: even some images of Triton, the moon they were orbiting—which Stormgren carefully compared with the images sent by Voyager 2 more than half a century earlier.

At last he discovered a snippet of video in which the Overlords had made a tiny slip. They were sending imagery of what appeared to be some maintenance work being carried out aboard one of their own ships. The camera, it seemed, was facing down a short passageway watching the little robot spheres zooming around as they worked on an open service panel. Suddenly a hatch opened at one side. A large bipedal creature emerged—considerably larger than a man, it seemed—paused for a moment examining the robots’ work, then quickly disappeared through a hatch on the other side. It had been in view for only a second or two, but that was enough. The creature had to be an Overlord. But what a creature! Stormgren replayed the scene, to make sure…

The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail—all were there. A terrible legend had come to life, right before Stormgren’s eyes. He slumped to the floor, retched, and threw up. He—indeed the whole of Earth—was not ready for this.

Having collected himself, Stormgren knew what he had to do next. He raised himself, but only to his knees, and prayed. He prayed, desperately and hopelessly.

He had always cherished the belief that God was not merely the God of humankind, but of other sapient beings from other worlds. This was surely the true meaning of the phrase ‘Lord of the Universe’. So any beings from another world would have had to have been created in His image too. Stormgren had always supposed that the Overlords, too, would have been formed in God’s image.

Now he realised that, for the sins of humankind, Earth had somehow summoned up a creation of Satan, not of God. These beings were not in God’s image. And he had compounded the Sin by un­covering the true identity of the Overlords. Indeed, he now recog­nised himself as the world’s greatest sinner.

Would any amount of prayer expiate his sins?

Stormgren’s soul was already compromised—he knew that. He had caught a glimpse of the personification of Hell and there was no redemption. He had read somewhere the tenet that the mere sight of the Devil was the most extreme calamity the human soul could suffer. In fifty years time, the whole of Earth would suffer that calamity. Armageddon would be upon humanity as had been foretold for millennia. But was it Stormgren’s duty to bring forward this Apo­calypse? Which would be the more grievous sin—telling the World of his discovery, or remaining silent? And would his soul be eternally damned for committing the most unforgivable sin of all, the ultimate sin: permanently silencing himself?

It took more than an hour of prayer before Stormgren made up his mind. Earth would be spared any premature Apocalypse. Having cleaned up, he carefully shredded and burnt all the paperwork he had amassed, and destroyed all the drives and memory chips in his computers. He spent a little while pondering the most appropriate place to carry out the deed he was planning. Golden Gate? Beachy Head? No: both those places were too well guarded. He recalled a holiday he had spent in Ireland some years before. Having made up his mind, he gathered his remaining savings, bought a ticket, and boarded a flight to Dublin. He had sent no message to Pieter—Pieter would only try to stop him, of course. Once outside the airport, he lost no time in stealing a high-performance car, and motored at high speed straight across country to the fabled Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, which reared their head 214 metres above the Atlantic. Not hesitating for a moment, he swerved off the road near O’Brien’s Tower, kept his foot hard down on the pedal, and, muttering a quick prayer for forgiveness, and before the Gardaí patrol were even aware of his presence, drove the car straight over the edge…

So whatever secrets Stormgren held went into the cold Atlantic waters alongside him. Planet Earth would have to continue to wait another half-century. She could afford to wait. Whether Earth had been saved, or whether Earth had been doomed, was this waiting not the best course?