FLAWED EVOLUTION
Brian Trent
They awakened her around 2 A.M. and said it was an emergency. Her first thought was that Ezekiel had come back to life—it was always trying. Throwing on her clothes, Dr. Marguerite Chapman of the National Defense Research Committee went from her trailer to the mobile command center—really, just a larger trailer on the India-China border. Adjusting her glasses, she studied the monitor array.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“It’s the Chinese team,” Colonel Andrews explained, standing at her side. “Inside Ezekiel.”
Briefly, her eyes flicked to the monitor showing the downed extraterrestrial craft that lay a half mile north of their position. She would have preferred to be closer to the crash site, but that was impossible. The Himalayan valley was a bubbling, toxic landscape. It was the same with the two other vessels comprising the UFO invasion. Wherever they went, they poisoned the environment around them. No one knew how to even begin discussing cleanup.
It also meant that analyzing the alien craft was challenging. Researchers from America, India, and China rotated shifts inside Ezekiel while donning bulky hazmat suits that would slowly erode in the polluted conditions.
“I see them,” Chapman said, indicating a monitor that displayed the eight-person research team from the People’s Republic of China. They were busy collecting samples from Ezekiel’s fleshy interior.
“What do you notice?” the colonel asked.
She studied the onscreen activity, looking for anything unusual.
Of course, the whole thing was goddamn unusual, she thought. There was nothing inside the alien craft corresponding to human notions of an aircraft or a ship. No cockpit. No engine room. No cargo bay. No crew quarters. Ezekiel was an unmanned thing, and despite first impressions—when it and two others entered Earth’s atmosphere and began toxifying swaths of the planet like malevolent crop dusters—it didn’t appear to be a machine in the traditional sense.
It was far closer to being a lifeform, she mused. And a hardy lifeform at that, since it had taken days of sustained bombardment to bring them down.
And they kept trying to heal.
Kept trying to return to the sky to resume their poisonous mission.
The only solution had been to physically restrain the UFOs with a netting of steel cables, and cutting into their bodies with industrial drilling equipment. The research teams snaked cameras into the exotic flesh. They sawed off tissue. They cracked bony protrusions to collect strange fluids in an attempt at understanding how the vessel worked.
“The Chinese researchers are taking samples,” Chapman said with a shrug. “How is that unusual?”
Colonel Andrews shook his head. “Look at the guy crouching by the wall.”
“What about him?”
“He’s been there quite a while.”
“So?”
“Everyone else is moving around like ants over a roadkill. That guy hasn’t moved for at least an hour.”
She felt a flash of irritation at having been awakened for this. “Maybe he’s running a camera there. I still don’t see why you—”
The colonel tapped the keyboard. A different view—one she’d never seen before—appeared onscreen.
“This is from a hidden camera,” he said. “I had several installed around Ezekiel in secret, to keep a watchful eye on our Indian and Chinese friends. What do you see now?”
Chapman stared hard at the real-time image and adjusted her glasses. “He has both arms buried in the wall, like he’s feeling around for something. So?”
“He’s downloading data from Ezekiel’s neural network.”
“Excuse me?”
He indicated the diamond-patterned flesh into which the Chinese scientist was plunging his hands like a plumber working on a waterline. “This is neural tissue back here. You said it yourself—the challenge in learning about these ships is that they don’t seem to have traditional mechanical properties. No computers or engines. No weapons array. You suggested they might really be alive. Living things should have a nervous system.”
“That’s one of the theories.”
“It’s not a theory anymore. These things have brains, and it’s possible to download data from them.”
Chapman rotated in her chair to face him and glared behind her glasses like an angry schoolmaster. “How the hell could you know something like that?”
He sighed with the resignation of someone about to unburden a dangerous secret. “Because our researchers managed to do it—three days ago—with the UFO that went down in Wichita.”
Aboard the train, Dr. Chapman closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She was exhausted, going on twenty hours without sleep now, and much of that time spent hauling her equipment into a truck for the long drive to a train. Nonetheless, she couldn’t sleep. Too much was happening. Finally, she turned to the window to regard the night-shrouded vista as the train rattled south to the Indian port of Haldia.
Colonel Andrews sat across from her, the lines on his face as deep as scars.
“Where are we?” she asked numbly.
“Just north of Jamshedpur.”
“The bomb went off?”
He fumbled with a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag. “The nuke detonated two hours ago. It’s the lead story on social media.”
A sick feeling spread through her stomach. “Jesus Christ.”
“We had no choice.”
“We killed all those people! We killed our own people!”
“It had to look like a terrorist attack,” he explained, the cigarette trembling between his lips. “We leaked a story that rogue elements from Myanmar smuggled a nuclear device to the site.”
“Myanmar?” she scoffed.
“There’s been suspicion they’ve had a nuclear program for some time. At any rate, Ezekiel has been destroyed.”
“Our people—”
“Did you think we could just pull every American out, conveniently before the detonation? It was challenging enough getting you out, with Chinese satellites breathing down our necks.”
She felt her anguish sharpen into rage. “I want to know why this was necessary! Those were my people! Ezekiel was my project!”
“The President didn’t come to the decision easily.”
“What the hell did we learn in Wichita, Colonel?”
He puffed his cigarette, the smoke moving around his mouth like tendrils. “The alien technology is centuries ahead of us. Weapons, advanced flight theory, tissue regeneration, communications . . . whoever learns to reverse-engineer it will decide the fate of the world. You want it to be us? Or Red China?”
She considered that. Slowly, her scientific pragmaticism pushed through her anger, and she said, “What I want is to understand why the aliens came here to begin with.”
“Whatever their reason, they failed,” he said with pride.
“Tell me how Wichita figured out how to access their UFO’s biological databanks.”
“Do you know what a brain-machine interface is?”
“Of course.” BMIs had been discussed in scientific literature since the 1970s, and first achieved in 2008. They allowed the communication of electrical signals between an organic brain and a microchip. Successful experiments allowed monkeys to control a robotic arm with thought alone. DARPA was actively researching how BMI chips might allow paralyzed people to walk again. There were even experiments to connect a human mind and a computer . . .
The realization hit her like a thunderbolt.
“We connected a person to an alien vessel?” she cried.
Colonel Andrews shook ash from his cigarette, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Our intel told us that the Chinese were preparing to attempt it. We fast-tracked our own experiments to beat them to the punch. This isn’t the kind of contest where we can afford to place second. One of our researchers in Kansas volunteered to be implanted with a cutting-edge BMI . . .”
He explained the rest, and Chapman listened with fascination and a measure of horror. The Wichita experiment had worked. The researcher connected her own brain to the UFO. She received images. Most were meaningless, but some helped the research team understand how the alien craft could heal at such an astonishing rate. There were radial structures that directed proteins to stimulate tissue repair. It was even possible to choose what parts of the craft you wished to rebuild—which suggested it might be possible to grow one UFO off another, in the way that splitting a starfish could result in two separate organisms.
How far did that regenerative skill go? What else was possible?
“You understand why we’d want to keep this under wraps?” the colonel asked. “If it’s possible to develop our own UFOs, we don’t want the Chinese to know that.”
Chapman adjusted her glasses and looked at him. “It would appear they already learned to do it.”
He took a long drag of his cigarette. “That’s why Ezekiel had to be destroyed. Whatever China learned from it is all they’re going to get. We still have ours in Wichita.”
“There’s a third one in Kenya,” she pointed out.
He shrugged. “It sank to the bottom of Lake Naivasha. That puts it a bit outside China’s jurisdiction, so I think it’ll be a while before they can access it.”
The Boeing C-17 crossed into Kenyan airspace and was descending to Naivasha Airport when an explosion rocked the aircraft.
“We’re taking fire!” the pilot shouted over the intercom. “Buckle up! It’s gonna get dicey!”
Chapman strained to see outside a window in her cargo compartment, surrounded by the equipment she needed to get a new lab up and running. Black smoke vented from one of the engines. Beyond that, the city of Mombasa was a palette of orderly buildings bisected by tropical vegetation.
The plane veered sharply to the left. Another missile streaked by, so close she could see the vapor trail.
“Holy shit!” she cried.
Colonel Andrews was strapped into a nearby seat, and he touched the Bluetooth at his ear. “Shoulder-mounted missiles,” he said, apparently receiving reports from the ground. “Fighting has broken out in the city.”
“Fighting between who?”
“Officially? Chinese soldiers and Kenyan insurgents.”
She was getting tired of his games—she’d received approval to set up a research base in Kenya to study the submerged UFO there, and wanted nothing more than to work in a laboratory again. The breakthrough in Wichita proved that alien tissue could be grown in vitro.
“And unofficially?” she demanded.
“Chinese soldiers and US contractors.”
“What the hell are either doing in Kenya?”
The colonel explained it as the plane made a nauseating series of evasive maneuvers to avoid ground fire. The PRC had maintained a presence in several African countries since the early 2000s, looking to press its economic partnerships. This included the construction of a railway connecting Kenya with neighboring countries. To protect its investment, China had troops on the ground. Since Ezekiel’s destruction, those troops had increased tenfold . . .
. . . especially around Lake Naivasha.
“We know the Chinese are running deep-submergence rescue vehicles to the lake bottom,” Colonel Andrews said.
Chapman glared at him. “And we’ve tried sabotaging their efforts, right? No wonder they’re pissed! Isn’t it enough that we’ve got our own UFO in Kansas?”
He opened his mouth to reply when another explosion rocked the plane. This time it blew a hole in the wall, and the Boeing tilted into a screaming dive.
We’re going down! she thought in horror. Crazily, she realized she was about to die without ever understanding why the aliens had come to Earth.
The last thing she remembered was her research papers flying around the cargo compartment like little UFOs of their own. They snapped out through the breach and into blue sky.
She didn’t remember the crash.
When she opened her eyes, she found herself in a hospital bed. A nurse was removing an IV from her arm.
“Where am I?” she croaked in a paper-dry voice.
The nurse looked at her in surprise. “You’re on the USS Roosevelt. In the Aegean. You were airlifted here three weeks ago.”
Three weeks?
Thinking of her papers flying around the doomed C-17, Chapman asked, “Where’s Colonel Andrews?”
The nurse began to sweat, and she recoiled from the bed as if unnerved by her patient. Something was wrong. It was in the woman’s eyes. “You . . . you were the only survivor of the crash,” she stammered. “To be honest, I didn’t think you would survive, considering the extent of your injuries, but—”
Chapman sat up with a suddenness that made the nurse shrink to the other side of the room. “There was an attack!”
“Ma’am? Please take it easy.”
“Tell me about the attack!”
“You were shot down in Mombasa.”
But she violently shook her head. “I’m not talking about Mombasa! I mean Wichita! There was an attack there! Lots of people killed, my God!” She hesitated, realizing what she was saying. “I’ve never been to Wichita. How . . . how could I know there was an attack there?”
A man appeared in the doorway. He might have been handsome if not for the odd scarring on his face and neck. He wore a polo shirt and black pants. Probably a CIA spook—they had a bearing about them that was unmistakable.
“A lot’s happened since your crash,” he said, and as he neared her bedside she gasped. The scars on his face and neck were peculiarly diamond shaped, and from each point of the diamond a line extended to connect with other diamonds. This was not the work of shrapnel or medical surgery, but deliberate scarification.
“The Wichita lab was attacked,” she said.
“The Wichita lab was nuked.”
“How?”
“An unidentified craft invaded US airspace. It stopped over the research station. A black-ops unit rappelled out, grabbed computers and laptops, and planted a nuclear device. Wichita is a smoking and irradiated crater.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe this.”
“It happened. You know it happened.”
“Where did the craft come from?”
“China.”
“I don’t understand. You said it was an unidentified craft. How does a Chinese aircraft penetrate American airspace then use a dozen guys to attack a high-security base—”
“It wasn’t a dozen guys,” he countered, his eyes oddly luminous in the dim hospital room. “It was six Chinese operatives. They grabbed what they needed and jumped back aboard—and I do mean jumped aboard, even though their aircraft was hovering six meters above them. They escaped before the nuke went off.”
Understanding came in a flash. “China has reverse-engineered alien technology. They managed to build—or rather, grow—their own UFO.” She thought again to her papers in the C-17. In one of them, she’d speculated about the possibilities of using alien tissue for a number of adaptive purposes. Experiments had indicated that it was remarkably adaptive.
Chapman closed her eyes.
She didn’t remember her C-17 going down. And yet—somehow—she remembered viewing a security recording of the Kansas attack. Remembered sitting in the White House Situation Room, talking to the President! Remembered other things that she couldn’t possibly have participated in.
What the hell was going on?
The memory of the Wichita attack was especially vivid.
It’s 0300 on the security feed when the hangar wall collapses around the gliding shape of a particularly unusual UFO. A metal door has been added to the side of the craft. Like a silver scab. The alien flesh is swollen around it.
In the hangar, American troops converge on the craft from every direction. They unload hundreds of rounds into it. The UFO responds by emitting a circular spray of toxic chemicals from its lateral vents. Soldiers dissolve on contact, melting like novelty candles.
The metal door slides open. Six figures in full protective gear hop out of the craft. Four of them grab unscathed computers, laptops, and binders. Two carry a crate that contains the nuke. One by one, they leap back into the UFO with the ease of kangaroos jumping on the moon.
Chapman opened her eyes and regarded her mysterious visitor. “China did more than grow its own UFO.”
“I know,” he said.
“They enhanced some of their people with extraterrestrial DNA.”
“Yes.”
“Superior musculature. Lightning-fast reflexes.”
He nodded.
She sighed. “Are you certain this attack came from China? Other countries might have learned to grow their own alien tissue by now.”
His glowing stare reminded her of certain nocturnal animals. “Not only do we know it was the Chinese . . . but also I can tell you the names of all six men involved. I know the cities and villages where they were born.”
“How?”
“In the same way you’re going to tell me my name.”
“You haven’t told me your name.”
“Try.”
She closed her eyes.
As with her inexplicable knowledge of the Wichita recording, she became aware that an entire reservoir of outside knowledge was available to her. No, not just one reservoir, but many. At a whim, she could extend mental fingers into any one of those wellsprings. They burned softly with a suggestion of names and places.
“Your name is Daniel,” she said at once, connecting with his mental presence. “You were born in Boston. Before the invasion you worked as a translator for the NSA. You saw that security feed in Kansas. You briefed the President. You’ve been waiting for me to recover from being paralyzed because . . . wait . . . I was paralyzed? The crash paralyzed me?”
From the back of the room, the nurse said, “Your spinal column was pulverized. You broke thirty bones throughout your body. The decision was made to—”
Terror flooded Chapman’s mind. Peeling back her hospital sheets, she saw the diamond-shaped scars over her chest and arms. “You . . . you . . . grafted that alien tissue onto me!?”
Daniel took her hand. “It was the only way to save your life. We need you, Marguerite. You were project leader at Ezekiel. America has—”
She saw the end of his thought before he could say it, and said it for him: “—fallen dangerously behind China in this arms race. You need me, and as many of America’s brightest minds as possible, to combat their efforts.”
“Yes.”
She ran her finger over the scars. At the same time, she became aware that one of the mysterious reservoirs in her mind was reaching out to her. Trying to connect. Trying to read her thoughts. It wasn’t coming from Daniel. It was further away, but flaring close, like a shooting star trying to strike her.
“Think of a wall,” Daniel said quickly.
“Excuse me?”
“Imagine a wall! Do it fast!”
“I don’t understand what you—”
An image leapt to her mind of a large green wall—the Green Monster from Fenway Park in Boston. The foreign mind in her head battered uselessly against it.
“That’s how we shield our thoughts from the enemy,” Daniel explained. “I’m sharing with you the image that I use, when China’s agents try reading us. Everyone enhanced by alien cells becomes—”
“Part of the same telepathic network,” she said, reading it from his mind.
“Yes.”
“We can all communicate with each other?”
“That’s why it’s imperative that we shield our minds. It isn’t difficult—you just imagine a barrier. There’s a guy in China who actually imagines the Great Wall.” He chanced a smile, saw she wasn’t sharing it with him, and said, “I know this must be difficult for you.”
He said the rest through his thoughts. A new age of espionage had dawned. China’s enhanced agents tried spying on America’s. In turn, America tried spying on China. Day and night, the two telepathic networks attempted to snatch little bits of intel from each other. The location of labs. The progress they were making on adapting alien technology.
Through it all, Chapman struggled with how to feel about these new rules of the world. Did the aliens know their invasion would cause such chaos?
“It isn’t chaos,” Daniel told her. “Where they failed, we’ll reap the benefits.”
She stared at the diamond patterning on his face. “Did they fail?”
“We’re here, and they’re not.”
Chapman stood from the bed, testing out her legs. She expected that her muscles would have atrophied in three weeks. To her surprise, she felt strong enough to run a marathon. Her thoughts, too, seemed bolstered by a clarity she’d never experienced.
“The toxifying clouds,” she said suddenly. “Have we learned anything about why the aliens were poisoning our environment?”
“Only one thing so far,” he said. “The poison zones aren’t lifeless anymore. Plants have begun sprouting in them.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “That’s great news! We were afraid the UFOs had permanently sterilized those areas.” She felt the grimness of his thoughts. “When you said plants . . . you didn’t mean terrestrial plants, did you?”
“No.”
“Alien vegetation is growing in them?”
“Yes.”
“Is it spreading?”
“Beyond the poisonous zones? No, thank God. It appears to be strictly contained in the areas ‘dusted’ by the UFOs.”
Chapman felt a ripple of discomfort. “The UFOs were trying to terraform our world to suit their tastes.”
“If so, they failed. At the moment, we have a more pressing problem, and that’s—”
“—to catch up with China.”
Despite her unease, she felt a certain undeniable exhilaration at her burgeoning telepathy. And she knew—felt it in her mind—that there was an entire network of fellow telepaths, capable of instant communication that went far beyond the clunkiness of smartphones and the limitations of language.
This was communication as it should be. In this regard at least, the alien way was better.
“Come on,” she said, looking around for her glasses and then realizing, to her amazement, she no longer needed them. “Let’s go find it.”
Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Find what?”
“The location where China is growing its own UFOs.”
Twelve hundred miles from mainland China lay the Spratly Islands.
Though in international waters, since 2010 they’d been artificially expanded by the PRC to serve as naval bases. This had transformed the South China Sea into one of the most hotly contested areas in the world. It was only a matter of time, experts predicted, before war broke out there.
The war was in its fourteenth day when Dr. Chapman leapt from the American-made UFO as it made a low pass over one of the islands. She landed easily on the beach and considered her surroundings.
It was a cloudy night, and the air smelled of rain. The island was a rocky beach. Beyond it, the South China Sea presented a surreal vista: the expanse of black water stuttered in strobelike illumination as American and Chinese navies clashed, while the black sky was streaked by American and Chinese aircraft. Aircraft carriers, destroyers, and cruisers blazed like funeral pyres on the sea.
She sighed, wondering how things had gotten to this point.
“Flawed evolution,” she muttered to the Network in her head.
There were some chuckles at this—it had become a running joke among America’s telepaths. For them, it was obvious why the world was in such a chaotic state. The rest of humanity was cut off from each other. Communication between regular people was a pinball game of flawed linguistics and assumptions. Their isolation stunted them. Made them neurotic. Clearly, Earthly evolution had gone wrong.
From the UFO hovering above, three Navy SEALs rappelled down to the sand.
“Follow me,” she told them.
Up from the beach was a rocky formation with a small alcove. It appeared to be natural, but around here, appearances were deceiving. Chapman ducked inside and found the hidden keycard scanner set into the recess.
She smiled. Even though her Network had concluded a secret base was here, it was exhilarating to be right. It had taken weeks of psychic assault on the Chinese Network to gather clues. Probing at their individual minds. Looking for cracks in their mental walls. Catching snippets of memory. Of dreams. Like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces.
Yet it had worked.
An image of a beach.
A Chinese researcher glancing at the night sky while smoking a cigarette.
A glimpse of a submarine’s serial number as supplies were delivered to the lab through an undersea sub pen.
Backtracking the movements of that sub to narrow the search.
Chapman pressed her fake biometric card to the scanner. A green light blinked. There was a pressurized hiss, and the rock wall slid aside to reveal a set of stairs descending into the island’s bowels.
The SEALs went in first. She followed, preparing herself for what was to come. The mission was dangerous. The odds of success—of even surviving it—were exceedingly thin.
Then again, if the war continued on its current trajectory, everyone’s odds of survival were minimal.
The nuclear attack in Kansas had been followed by a nuclear strike in Kenya. The last of the alien UFOs was destroyed. Earth’s victory against the invasion was complete, and there was speculation that global tensions might return to normal.
Instead, the war between America and China spread. Manmade UFOs struck military bases and laboratories alike, and as they weren’t precision weapons, the damage was becoming catastrophic. Poisoned zones multiplied tenfold. Economies were crashing. The global food supply was drying up as more and more farmland was targeted in an effort to starve the enemy into submission.
At the bottom of the stairs, a short corridor opened into a cavern. The SEALs took position ahead of her. Chapman followed them, and then froze.
“Holy shit,” she muttered.
It was as humid as a rainforest in the cavern. It even looked like a rainforest, with strange vines and bulbous vegetation filling the underground space. Less a laboratory than a greenhouse, and Chapman immediately saw why.
The lab was growing UFOs.
It called to mind a kind of nightmarish pumpkin field, with vines connecting to swollen alien craft. America’s burgeoning UFO program was being conducted in more sterile environments, where engineers shaped alien growth around metal struts and prefab chambers to accommodate human occupants. China had taken it a step beyond. This discovery alone made the mission worth it.
Through Chapman’s eyes, her telepathic colleagues were spreading the word.
America needed to expand its program.
Needed to develop greenhouses like these.
One of the SEALs motioned to her, indicating a Chinese researcher in a white lab coat. The woman typed at a portable computer station, unaware of the intruders.
Chapman nodded. The SEAL crept up behind the researcher. He clasped his hand around her mouth, jabbed her with a tranquilizing syringe. Quietly, wary of raising an alarm, he eased her limp body onto the ground and dragged her toward the corridor.
This was it, Chapman thought anxiously. The mission’s success or failure hinged on these next few moments.
Kneeling by the woman, she looked into her dazed, barely conscious eyes.
No one had ever managed to infiltrate the Chinese Network. Likewise, no one in China had managed to breach the American one. The mission had been greenlit, therefore, to incapacitate an enemy researcher. Attempt a full breach. Steal as much as possible, learn as much as possible, before the walls came down.
Chapman pressed her hands to the diamond-shaped patterns on the woman’s face. Then, with the full weight of her Network behind her, she went inside.
Into the woman’s mind.
Into the enemy Network.
It was like a supernova in her thoughts. She instantly knew the woman’s name—Jianmei. Knew she was from Guizhou Province. Knew what achievements had been made in the island lab . . . in all the labs.
And then, before Chapman could react, the Chinese Network looked into her.
Into her mind.
Into her colleagues.
There was a fleeting moment when she felt the American Network scramble to impose a wall on the intrusion—just as the Chinese were scrambling to impose their own. But then something happened in those precious seconds. The camaraderie she’d felt with her enhanced colleagues was amplified a hundredfold. The Chinese felt it too. Even the men who had attacked Wichita were plugged into that perfect moment, and all jigsaw pieces assembled . . .
Chapman began to laugh.
In locations across the United States and China and India and Kenya, others began to laugh too.
Why had the UFOs come to Earth? Chapman had sweated the question since the invasion began. China’s scientists struggled with the same query. Yet now, the combined Networks realized the question was irrelevant. Maybe when the planet-seeders set out from their homeworld, Earth had yet to develop civilization. Maybe the UFOs were single-purpose drones incapable of understanding the damage they were causing to terrestrial life. Maybe they understood and didn’t care; after all, a human farmer doesn’t think twice about destroying an ant colony to make room for his farm.
It didn’t matter why the UFOs had come.
What mattered was that humanity was a flawed product of flawed evolution. Human achievements were the crawl of an inchworm barely outpacing its own destructive habits. What were “Americans” and “Chinese” but petty enclaves of small-minded beings? Earth itself was flawed and fragile . . . but things were changing. The alien life growing in the “poisoned” zones was hardier, energy-rich, and better suited to feeding a global population, as long as that population was enhanced accordingly.
Earth itself could be enhanced.
A better world was possible.
And it was suddenly obvious how to do it.
Chapman withdrew from Jianmei and whirled to the nearest SEAL. “The Chinese are growing thousands of UFOs,” she said.
He blinked at her. “Thousands?”
“We’ve fallen far behind. We need thousands of our own to match theirs.”
In that same moment, American researchers across the United States were phoning Washington, telling the President the same thing. Thousands of new UFOs were needed! Thousands of people must be enhanced to operate them!
And in China, researchers phoned Beijing to report that the Americans already had a fleet of thousands. Tens of thousands of UFOs, with tens of thousands more people, were required to counter the enemy!
As quietly as they’d entered the lab, Chapman and the SEALs withdrew from it to the beach. The American craft hovered over the sand, its fleshy skin dappled by the lights of distant battle: Chinese and American forces attacking each other, like ants warring over a roadside puddle.
Chapman stared at the craft in new appreciation.
Three alien vessels had tried improving Earth, and had failed. But soon, we’ll actually be able to do it. Humanity would be improved with it. The future didn’t belong to—
“Flawed evolution,” she murmured, and the combined Network replied in one voice:
Not for much longer.