THEN: MARCH, 2015

After the probe disasters, the rest of the world had an appropriate moment of shock, mostly from the discovery of intelligent other-worldly life.

People panicked, assuming more attacks were coming and a little confused why two of the attacks seemed pizza-oriented, but once a few weeks passed without more attacks everyone started to calm down and assess the damage. There was an outpouring of aid and sympathy. For a brief moment, tensions between nations calmed in the face of a global threat.

Ecologically, the planet had gotten off lucky. The tiny fusion drives in the probes, while vaporizing a five km circle in three of the attacks, did little damage beyond that. Most of the damage went horizontally. There were no giant craters, no tons of dirt and debris thrown into the sky. There was some mild radiation in the surrounding areas that clean-up crews could take care of. The Prince Rupert explosion resulted in a trillion or so tons of water converted to steam (plus a few vaporized cruise ships,) but not enough to cause any kind of serious climate damage.

The Americas didn’t do as well, though, in the aftermath as the rest of the world did. The EM pulse from the attacks knocked out infrastructure across swaths of the U.S., Canada and Mexico; electrical grids and telecommunications staggered back to life fairly quickly, but for a few weeks life was disrupted as repair crews fixed downed power lines and internet outages. Supply chains were disrupted and interstate commerce struggled with state borders in the US being closed as states tried to figure out what the hell just happened.

Devices were replaceable, but the loss of nearly all the federal government wasn’t. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was in town to give a speech (which got delayed due to a security issue until nearly 8 P.M. - right at the same time of the disaster) so attendance was high, and House members and Senators from both parties that didn’t go to the address congregated in nearby D.C. venues to make their own media appearances.

Due to a scheduling screw-up with a conference, all of the Cabinet Secretaries and Deputies were also in town within the fusion blast or the subsequent shock wave. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Fox was the “designated survivor”, and was watching the Notre Dame vs North Carolina broadcast at a safe space: just across the Potomac in the basement of the Sheraton in Arlington. Notre Dame had just started to rally, and his last comment on earth was “nothing can stop them now, not even an act of god!, hey what was that flash?”

Seconds later, the D.C. strike shock wave collapsed the hotel on top of him, which was only mildly worse than actually staying at the Sheraton.

Days after, the chain of command was still hopelessly disrupted. State governments took control with a soft martial law and tried to keep order. The U.S. had a cultural bias against central response as it was; in the land of opportunity, many saw this as a chance to claim that the government failed them and make a play for their state to simply leave the union. Add to that all the aid pouring in from the rest of the world and it was hard to see who exactly was in charge. UN observers moved into various population centers as the government dug itself out and tried to figure out who was left. Scientific communities from around the world stationed themselves at the impact zones and got about the business of sciencing.

The U.S. also struggled to figure out where to direct their anger over half a million casualties. The probes were definitely not of this Earth, but they hadn’t come with a declaration of war or conquest. Saner minds tried to make sense of it and calm down the insane parts that wanted to go to war with, well, somebody. Others were hoping it was an accident and Earth would hear from the aliens at some point.

There was also the likely possibility that since these probes weren’t detected until they literally crashed into some satellites, that other undetectable probes were still up there as well. That just raised more speculation. If more probes were up there, and they saw what happened, why didn’t they send an apology? Were they some kind of automated thing, not designed to interact? Or was this purposeful: maybe the probes did their jobs, then the senders just deorbited them out of spite.

A few more weeks passed. Infighting started in the remains of the government. Nobody could figure out exactly how to restart things. Some states had systems in place to appoint senators or hold elections for new House members, but the legal lines were murky. You needed living House/Senate members to swear them in, and they were all dead. Nobody was alive in the House to promote another House member to be a new Speaker, and then promote to become President. There was also the terrifying fear that the attack on D.C. was in fact a deliberate attack to take out any centralized government, and the minute anybody started declaring a new capitol or appointing a new Senator or scheduling a special election they’d get bombed. Without a primary Cabinet, Senate or House, analysts said that this reduced the succession presidential choices to diplomats and possibly remaining deputy secretaries, but no single individual had come forward. A single acting Secretary could have locked it, but none of the surviving Under-Secretaries were expressing any desire to step up and possibly get glassed from space.

Not just the government was missing. All the primary lobbyists, the advisors, the shadow-advisors, the deep state, the PAC committees, liaisons, aides, White House workers, secretaries, support staff, soldiers to protect folks, admin staff - literally everybody had been killed. There were plenty of people to step into those roles, but there wasn’t anybody to hire the people to do hiring, or appointees to appoint people. It was going to take a while. A president might be able to start pointing and start picking, but there wasn’t one.

Calls for a new election were floated but the Democrats felt that since a Democrat had won the election, it should be a Democrat president. The Republicans argued that since it was getting close to a new election anyway, then the U.S. should just jump-start the primaries and have a national election. It was obvious that rules or no rules, at some point people were just going to declare something and if the majority of the surviving government went along with it…well? There were discussions in the military that they needed to appoint an acting someone, but that seemed to set a dangerous precedent too.

Everyone was mostly still digging out and processing the tragedy, so everyone waited to see what would happen.

-

The only people who seemed organized in the U.S. were the scientists. Researchers from around the world descended on the sleepy Jersey shore community of Beach Haven, Long Beach Island, NJ, where the one surviving probe landed. The crash site was scoured for data. There wasn’t enough room to properly work in the middle of a residential community (albeit mostly beach empty rentals in the off-season) so an ad-hoc base was thrown together in the bird sanctuary in Holgate, a few miles away at the southern end of the Island. The sanctuary was mostly beach and woods, so space was available and not really bothered by anybody, except for retirees birding.

Scientists (and military minders) from around the world came to study the wreckage and share data. If there had been a strong federal response, the U.S. might have controlled it better, but the local state forces had problems enough just keeping the peace. In their absence, each visiting group set up tents and labs and did their best to share their findings.

For the most part, the technology wasn’t so advanced that it was incomprehensible. A lot of the materials were things postulated by engineers on Earth already: honeycombed metals, new alloys, various forms of aerogel-like insulators and patterned plastics with unusual strength levels. Earth didn’t have the manufacturing ability to make most of it yet, but it wouldn’t be impossible to tool up in a generation. Secrets of how some of the bigger innovations (like the micro-fusion reactors) worked were slowly being teased out.

The biggest mystery was still how the quantum technology worked. A lot of it seemed to rely on the exotic matter that was omnipresent in varying amounts in all the computing devices. Theories were floated that it was all quantum entangled matter, capable of light-speed data transfer, or at least exchanging information about spacetime to allow other quantum entangled processes to work. The composition of it was a mystery and seemed to defy analysis. It seemed like a manufactured element. There were also computer commands that talked to hardware the translators were starting to refer to as a “Tunneling Ring”, although no such ring had been found yet. It was probably destroyed when the probe jettisoned its rear half.

QEM seemed to be extremely dense but brittle, so handling it was difficult. The bigger problem in analyzing the QEM was that it seemed incredibly toxic to humans. It didn’t have a traditional radioactive output you could pick up on a Geiger counter but it was definitely emitting something. If you got close to higher concentrations, it would cause mild hallucinations, language issues, and general nervous system disorders. Nothing was found that shielded whatever was radiating from it.

And, if you were unlucky enough to touch it, some of it got absorbed, and that led to stark raving lunacy and soon after, death. Autopsies suggested the material traveled through the blood and collected in the brain. Procedures had to be adopted when investigating it: short durations, protective gear, robotic waldos and other engineering was developed. The probe didn't have a lot of QEM, either, so experimentation was limited. The scientists and team members rushed to find out what they could before more surprises from space showed up.

-

Dr. Andrew Wimtz, a computer science researcher from Princeton, was part of the computer team from the U.S. He had only gotten the position in a stroke of luck. His family had owned a house down here on L.B.I. for three generations: His grandfather, Ralph Wimtz, was a union electrician (IBEW Local 98) out of Philadelphia. Like most Shoobies (tourists to L.B.I. who weren’t Bennys, which were tourists to L.B.I. from Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, and New York) the Witz’s came down just for the weekends. Once Ralph got higher up in the union and made better money, they bought a small saltbox on the island; when money got tighter his son Tony started renting out the weeks they weren’t there in the summer season. Off-season the property was still available for the family, and grandson Andrew, now all grown-up, came down weekends on his own when he could, or brought his wife, Gwen. He maintained ties to a couple of big government tech firms (and had a security clearance to match), so when the probe blew up the arcade and pizza joint and he was playing mini-golf a few miles away he was able to get onsite fast.

Since the site was moved to the bird sanctuary, the teams of computer techs and computer-adjacent scientists were mostly trying to crack the internal architecture of the computer hardware. All of the known QEM had moved to the materials engineer’s areas. Andrew and a hundred other people divided up the hardware and started analyzing, breaking it down, mapping it, electron-scanning, and downloading the code of the components.

One night just before Andrew was packing up, he was idly rooting around some of the debris and his eye caught one of the strange fasteners that seemed to be used internally: A poker-chip sized hexagon of one of the known alien plastics. It had a rainbow sheen and a small hole cut through each of the six points. It was magnetic, and they had found them holding pieces together, but aside from that they didn’t seem to do anything. There were a few dozen of them just filling a paper coffee cup with “hex fasteners” written on the side in sharpie.

Andrew remembered that there was a local jewelry store Gwen liked to root around in when she was down with him at the shore house, and they had a little silver chain that he remembered she had hesitated over. It was small enough to thread through the fastener.

“It would look like one of the Wicca thingees she liked,” Andrew thought. So he pocketed the hex.

He smiled to himself. They hadn’t had much time together the last few months since all the disasters, and both of them were frazzled. Her job had been thrown into chaos like a lot of folks. She was the assistant to the Under-Secretary of Education, and when the Department of Education office got glassed, everybody still alive in the department had to work from home. She was understandably having a hard time trying to work with her colleagues and hadn’t taken a break in weeks.

Bringing home a little gift might be just the thing to cheer her up.