Chapter 3 - Home
Nobody really believed it until they saw it. The news reports had sparked panic across the entire global, even those parts without full network integration into the datasphere. Those few areas of the world where people were too busy, too distracted or too disconnected to have had their afternoon interrupted the news networks soon learned by the UN-override simulcast. The Secretary-General rarely deigned to speak directly to the world since the fracturing of the world into regional-isolationism, but the arrival of The Object changed all that.
The few remote and rare individuals who still hadn't heard about The Object, only had to wait until nightfall and look up at the sky.
The size of the moon. But in orbiting 4 times closer. It changed the night sky instantly and forever.
Being pure white and, upon initial investigation, almost entirely smooth and devoid of craters, only one conclusion could be reached. It was not a natural phenomenon. This was the work of a being. Perhaps a race of beings. Perhaps a rogue faction of scientists, or a heretofore unknown technological society hidden away on Antarctica, or in the vast Russian or Canadian wildernesses. Atlantis? Underdwellers from the core of the world?
Kat had dismissed all of these theories and guesses. She let the drill site that day, in the town centre of a rainy and cold Scottish town, and she never returned. She went to her apartment in the student halls, packed her bags and bought a flight home to Japan. She wasn't sure what she would do. But she knew that chemical sythetic research was no longer the most interesting or useful thing she could do with her life.
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Kat was on the last flight to Tokyo the next day. She'd had time to think. Sitting in Glasgow airport sipping a coffee, she was deep in thought, scribbling notes. Forget Atlantis, secret civilisations or a bizarre group of technologically advanced terrorists. No. She was no conspiracy theorist. She was a scientist. A scientist who had just realised 3 startling fact. First, given there were no reports of tsunami or natural disasters The Object may be the size of the moon but it must have nothing like the mass of the moon. Second, The Object was in orbit, and did not be appear to approaching or moving away from the earth. Third, global government was going to return, and return rapidly.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Kat had never been political. Growing up most in a quiet seaside town on the eastern edges of Japan's Kanto plains politics had barely come up. People paid their taxes, expected to be left alone and, for the most part, left each other alone. Her frequent trips to visit her mother's family in Scotland had really opened her eyes to politics and she hadn't liked what she had seen. Politics seemed to all talk. All bureaucracy. People deciding what other people should or shouldn't do. No thank you! She chose science. At least science was real and wouldn't change every week depending on the news cycle.
Kat had been approached by this political group and that political group when she had first moved to Glasgow for her chemistry degree. As a "half" in Japan she was accorded no special status, in fact, in a small town where everybody knows everybody and community relations went back centuries, not just generations, she'd never even noticed she was "not Japanese". To here she wasn't half Japanese and half Scottish, she was fully Japanese and fully Scottish. One does not detract from the other. Most of the people in her town understood this at a deep level as this had been the Japanese attitude to religion for as long as records had been kept. Just because you are, say Catholic, doesn't mean you can't also fully enjoy shintoism, or buddhism. The more the merrier.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was somewhat different. The Scottish Nationalists were not the force they had once been, and the Scottish and English peoples were on a new path of committed Unionism, where everyone was British, but also Scottish or English or Sikh or whatever.
She'd been sheltered from her status on family holidays to Scotland but turning up as a single unaccompanied student at the age of 17, things had been different. The Libertomarxists had approached her first "you'd look great on our outreach materials", then it was union of reformed workists, the URW, they asked her to model their trademark yellow "worker's jacket". And so on and so forth. She just wanted to study magnetoplastics, maybe make a few friends and hike some of the famous Scottish hill country. Barely one in three of her university-approved e-messages was about her academics, the rest were various forms of social or political organisation trying to recruit, convert or intimidate.
Thinking back on her early days as a student, only three years ago, Kat thought how hopeful she had been. Things hadn't gone badly, not really. Her grades were good. The subject matter was interesting enough. But she had always felt a certain lack of purpose, a lack of meaning. For Kat, The Object, no matter what it ended up being, provided that purpose. She was flying home to see her family in Tokyo. She had an idea. And she needed help.