"Their patience is running out."
Sophia's statement was not made from a position of stable authority. Such a statement is an admission of instability, disequilibrium, looming chaos. She might as well have said, "I cannot control my people's actions"; the meaning would have been approximately the same. President Martinez should have known her words were a statement of weakness and not "a threat". Sophia rules a house divided.
In fact, the 97 and the dozens among us are split into no less than three factions. If only the president understood this. He could exploit the knowledge to improve his position. But by next week the President of the United States will understand only one thing: two hundred innocent civilians were murdered by a foreign entity possessing super-human intelligence and superior weaponry. He will not understand this as a threat. President Martinez will understand this as a declaration of war.
3:10 To Yuma
Yuma was not a random destination. It is the sunniest location on the face of the planet, with clear skies during 93% of daylight hours. Yuma is in the middle of the desert, with an average high temperature of forty three degrees (108 F) during July. In fact, it is the hottest city in the world with a population greater than eighty thousand.
Yuma is an old city. I don't mean old as in the California Gold Rush of 1848. The city's history began three hundred years before the gold rush, in 1540. Hernando de Alarcón, one of the leaders of the Coronado Expedition, stopped at the crossroads that eventually came to be called Yuma. He mapped most of the Colorado River, though many history books mistakenly credit his patrón, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.
De Alarcón was better known in his day as a great navigator, and he makes an appearance in my second novel, Cartier's Ring (http://pearsonmoore-gets-lost.com/CartiersRing.aspx). More important to The Event, though, may be the objective of his journey into the interior of the continent: Coronado and de Alarcón sought the Seven Cities of Gold.
While Coronado and de Alarcón never located their high-value objective, I believe the 97's able-bodied brethren may have found precisely what they needed at this ancient crossroads. At the very least, the dry weather and the sunny skies provide the most hospitable environment for the dozen or so military gunships they appear to have requisitioned and borrowed. But Yuma may have particular appeal for yet another reason, and I will be discussing this possibility in the next couple of weeks.
Not of this World
They're not little green men. They're not Organians, either. Little green men are not scary, unless they like to eat people. Organians (Star Trek TOS 1.27, see http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Errand_of_Mercy) are not scary, either--they are too advanced for anything as primitive as strife or war. The aliens in this series are much scarier than anything we have before confronted, and part of the reason for this is that they are not little green men.
We are right to sense capacities for violence from these 97 and their brethren. They are closest in likeness to the most violent species on our planet. Their vehicle crash-landed in Alaska near the end of the great conflagration we call World War II. Though Germans, Japanese, British, and Americans share the same DNA, we managed to find more than adequate reason to exterminate over eighty million of each other during the war.
We should fear them not because they are different from us. We should fear them because they are like us.
The Event poses the question of alien visitors in a sobering and fascinating manner. In fact, The Event asks one of the great questions of science fiction, and is taking a difficult path toward the answer. The question is simple, and is central to every genre of fiction ever written: What is the essence of our humanity?
Although the question of humanity underlies all of fiction, science fiction poses the question in a way that causes us to think with greater breadth and depth than is required in any other genre. Does our identity range only as far as the natural variations within the human genome? Do taxonomy or physiology or brain chemistry suffice to fully define us? Do our beliefs make us human? Do our emotions define our humanity? Which characteristics must we consider the essential requirements of a human being?
The question has many facets but lacks facile resolution. It is tempting to just open the tent to anyone, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial. "Come on in. As long as you believe as we do, you're welcome." Just what do we believe? I suppose we would sew into the fabric of our tent, near every entrance, a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anyone who believes in these is admitted to the tent. That ought to cover just about everyone.
Unfortunately, our interpretation of the Universal Declaration excludes large portions of humanity. The Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc nations (Eastern Europe) did not vote for the Universal Declaration when roll was called at the United Nations in 1948. But they did not exclude themselves from the tent. The Western World did.
On March 8, 1982, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was "the focus of evil in the modern world" and "an evil empire". Not only did Reagan boot Russia out of the tent of humanity, he took it upon himself to subvert United States law in order to carry out his great crusade to wipe out Communism. His administration secretly sold illegal arms to Iran to fund its illegal war against the Sandinistas (Central American Communists) in Nicaragua and El Salvador. In Reagan's mind, and in the opinion of like-minded supporters, the ban on trade with Iran did not apply to a holy war against Communism. Any action, legal or illegal, was justified, since the Soviets were not human.
It was not the first time a "freedom-loving" government took illegal action against an entity it defined as "evil" or "not human". From February 13 to 15, 1945, the RAF and the US Army Air Corps dropped four thousand tons of incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany. Dresden had little or no military significance, but it was a centre of German culture. The round-the-clock bombing didn't just destroy buildings. A firestorm unlike anything ever before experienced by human beings engulfed the city. Everything within a forty square kilometre area was incinerated. Those who escaped underground suffocated; the fire consumed every molecule of oxygen in the city. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians died in the hellish maelstrom, some of the bodies vaporized to dust. There was no Nuremburg Trial for the pilots or their commanding officers. Any action, legal or illegal, was justified, since the Germans were not human.
The 97 and their able-bodied brethren are physically and biologically almost indistinguishable from us. But who are "we"? Are we Soviets and Nazis and evil-doers and those who oppose them? Or are we Russians and Germans and other imperfect people and those who share in their humanity? Do we exclude due to ideology? Or do we include out of respect and love? This is a most fascinating query, and I look forward to learning the way in which The Event will address the question.
The Three Factions
Simon is one of them. So is Thomas. I believe we have met at least one other "able body" who escaped Inostranka before the OSS arrived in mid-November 1944 to imprison the injured. No, not Vicky Roberts. I believe we will also come to consider one of the characters as sharing at least a few things in common with the aliens, for reasons I will explain later.
Thomas is Sophia's beloved. We do not yet know whether they are related by blood, marriage, friendship, or command structure, but we know they are emotionally close. Their kind shares the human propensity for physical expression of emotion, and they made their feelings for each other clear on November 2, 1944, when the (P36? I'm not a WWII expert!) fighter passed overhead.
Thomas is one of those whose "patience is running out". During the attack on his son's birthday party the president would have been right to consider Thomas a threat. It now appears President Martinez could legitimately consider Thomas an enemy of the United States. Thomas knew where to find the passenger jet in the Yuma desert, and he almost certainly approved or conspired in the slaughter of everyone aboard.
Opposite Thomas, on the left side--the peacenik side--of Sophia, sits Simon. If Simon didn't leak the Inostranka file to President Martinez, he would have approved the leak. This is a reasonable assertion, since we know from his conversation with Sophia that he wanted to "at least warn them" (the US government) of The Event. For Thomas, familiarity has bred deep contempt. For Simon, intimacy with humanity has kindled abiding affection in his heart.
We first met Simon forty-six years ago, as a Science Officer under Captain Christopher Pike. Except his name wasn't Simon Lee then, it was Mr. Spock, and we came to know him well during his service as First Officer under Captain James T. Kirk. Spock was the half-Vulcan, half-Human who became sympathetic to human tradition out of love for his human mother and out of admiration for Captain Kirk, whose humanity far surpassed any limitations of logic. When Spock died after the Enterprise's disastrous encounter with Khan (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), Captain Kirk said at his funeral, "Of my friend, I can only say this: of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human."
I look for Simon Lee to become the moral centre of The Event. There is no Star Trek without Mr. Spock, because Star Trek is the statement of humankind's destiny to overcome every obstacle to Universal Human Rights, and Spock, even though he was only half human, was the supreme expression of Star Trek's optimistic philosophy. In the same way, I believe Simon Lee at some point will draw a line in the sand, making a statement to the effect that he is ninety-nine percent human and he casts his lot, making himself one with us "on the good Earth" (Frank Borman, Apollo 8).
The Aliens are divided into three camps. Thomas leads those who believe they have suffered long enough. Simon and others among the 97 believe Sophia is not doing enough to help the humans. Sophia is left with a constantly-shifting, ever-shrinking base of supporters who look to her for wisdom and leadership. "Their patience is running out." It is no threat. It is a call for help from a beleaguered and frustrated leader.
The Great Question
Michael, like those commanding the helicopter gunships at the beginning of the episode, is a pilot. His wife was murdered by the aliens. Why his wife? Why not his daughters? I suppose his daughters were spared for the same reason he was spared, and his wife was killed because... well, I suppose because Thomas has no love for humans, and he was trying to teach Michael a lesson. Michael Buchanan was not among those murdered by the alien-controlled gunships. He was intentionally segregated and allowed to live. Why? The answer may not be evident to every reader, but I believe it will become obvious when we pose the biggest question of the episode:
Just how old is Leila Buchanan? And if she is really only twenty-something and not going on 65, does she know her father is over a hundred years old, and landed in Alaska sixty-six years ago?
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