Entropy first contact, p.12
Entropy (First Contact), page 12
Jillian knew she was in another world.
Crashing in the Amazon rainforest, being kidnapped and force-marched to a native village, Jillian found herself thrust into yet another, distinctly different world—not her world, not the world she longs to inhabit once more—and now the world is changing yet again before her as she follows a strange man through the long grass. The English-speaking native has carried the injured pilot to the edge of the clearing. At first, Jillian thought the two of them were being rescued, but the strange native stepped up and through the hollow of a broad tree on the edge of the village rather than stepping around the thick trunk. Her mind reels at the impossibility of what she’s seeing, but this is not her world. She doesn’t belong here. She has to step from this world into the next, hoping—trusting—that one day she’ll step back into her own world in Miami. To her, though, that desire feels impossible. Miami seems to have evaporated.
Against her instincts, Jillian steps forward. The fine hairs on her arm stand on end as she passes through a curtain of light. She knows she’s stepping into a new world once more. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Behind her, children play in the wet grass. Rain drips from the native huts. Birds soar through the jungle canopy, but Jillian is stepping into another world—an unnatural world.
The tree towering over her looks the same as all the others. Its bark is smooth. Knots have formed on the trunk. Scratches mark the wood. Instead of stepping around the tree, she’s following the strange native carrying the pilot—and he is strange. He speaks English. He looks like the others, and yet he doesn’t. He’s all of them and none of them at once. He shares all their features, and yet he’s featureless. If all the villagers were to stand in a row, he’d be the person no one remembers. Shadows hide his face.
Jillian follows him, walking inside the hollow of the tree itself.
The tree is old. Lightning has struck it, killing the center, burning out its heart, leaving a cavern barely wide enough to stand within, and yet the native and the pilot are gone. They stepped inside and disappeared. She steps forward. Light shimmers around her. She doesn’t want to follow them, but she has to do something. As much as she’s afraid of the villagers, she’s even more afraid of being abandoned and alone. Jillian has to stay with the pilot. He’s all she’s got. He’s her only link with what she considers the real world.
She steps through the wood at the rear of the hollow tree. Her skin tingles. The opening is narrow, scraping against her arms, forcing her to turn sideways to fit.
Jillian turns and looks back. She can still see the village. No one has noticed them. They’re all looking at a hunter returning from the jungle carrying a hairy pig over his shoulders. There’s shouting and rejoicing. Everyone’s excited as the hunter plops his prize into the long grass near the main fire. The women crowd around. Jillian looks for the young man who caught them and led them back to the village, but she can’t see him anywhere.
“Come,” the stranger says, walking up stairs that appear beneath him with each step. Somehow, he’s walked through the tree and out onto the other side. It’s as though he’s stepped through lace curtains swaying in front of a set of open glass doors, hiding the tiled patio around her pool back in Miami. To her mind, he’s walking in mid-air. It’s impossible, and yet it’s not, as he’s continuing up into the canopy. Ferns sway. Vines hang down around him. Every time he steps up, a shimmering flat surface appears beneath his bare feet. Light vibrates around his heel, causing a kaleidoscope of colors to reverberate away from each step as though he were stepping in water. Rainbows ripple out from his toes.
Jillian follows close behind him, watching the fall of her feet. There’s nothing there. Within seconds, she’s suspended easily ten feet in the air, and there’s nothing beneath her shoes, but with each step, she, too, sees colors ripple outward as though she were playing in the street after a heavy rain, splashing in the puddles.
Beneath her, she can see the jungle. Water drips from the leaves. Plants sway with the wind. Sunlight cascades down from above, catching in the branches. Birds peck at berries. A monkey swings past. Branches bend under its weight, flexing and propelling the primate on through the forest. And as soon as it has come, its hairy arms are gone, disappearing into the thicket. The animal howls as it calls to others.
Jillian climbs higher, walking on thin air, trusting each step to be there as her shoe comes down on yet another invisible ledge within the jungle.
“What is this place?” she asks the native.
There’s no reply.
Having been left hanging in the trees after the plane crash, Jillian is nervous about returning to the canopy. She’d rather be on the ground. Looking down, she loses sight of the jungle floor. It’s hidden by the mess and chaos of branches and limbs and vines crisscrossing the air beneath her. Birds fly beside her, darting between the branches of a tree towering over her.
Up ahead, the native walks on what seems to be a glass floor. Like the stairs, light shimmers beneath each footstep. She hurries, wanting to stay close behind him. On reaching the ethereal floor, Jillian marvels at how it flexes slightly with each step. Its existence is marked only by the ripples of light rolling out from beneath her feet.
Looking around, Jillian notices the way tree trunks curl around them. Back in Miami, her father insists she cleans the swimming pool once a week. The gardener takes care of the chemicals and water level, but she has to empty the leaves out of the filter and use a pole to scoop out any leaves that have settled on the bottom. Apparently, chores are going to make her a better person or some bullshit like that. Jillian doesn’t get it, but she understands her allowance being cut, so she goes out each Sunday morning before church and does her one chore. Sticking the pole into the water, though, is a lesson in physics. The pole bends. It’s an illusion. The dead-straight aluminum pole she uses to gather the leaves from the bottom of the pool seems to suddenly shoot off at an angle once it's under the water.
Jillian asked one of her teachers about the way the pole bends, and he said it’s to do with the refractive index of water—whatever that means. He waffled on about prisms and rainbows, but she’s more interested in biology and chemistry than physics. As much as she’d like to ignore the illusion, Jillian gets it. Strange quirks like a pole bending when it’s stuck in water hint at deeper underlying truths about the way the world works. Peculiarities challenge assumptions. Instead of taking things at face value and simply blithering on mindlessly, it’s a flag, a signpost, a neon billboard telling her there’s more to learn. And now she’s seeing something similar high above the forest floor. The trunks of the trees around her swell outward, curling around some invisible structure suspended between them. Jillian may not know what is happening, but she understands that light is bending around her.
As the native puts the pilot down on an invisible ledge that shimmers in response to his touch, she says, “You’re not from Earth, are you?”
“No.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Jillian asks, seeing the pilot collapse limp before her. Ripples of light give the impression that the pilot is sinking into a soft surface like a mattress. His head lolls to one side. Jillian’s not sure how she knows, but to her mind, the pilot is asleep, not dead.
“He’ll be fine,” the pseudo-native says, wrapping the pilot’s leg in what must be a blanket, but not only is it invisible to her, it causes his leg to disappear in a shimmer of light. The native reaches under the cover, and his hands disappear as well. Seconds later, they emerge holding the bandage and steel braces.
“You’re fixing him.”
“I am, but it will take some time.”
Jillian fumbles with her backpack, reaching around and unzipping a side pocket so she can grab her phone. She won’t get any reception this far into the jungle, but she can take photos, perhaps even videos, as long as her battery holds. No one’s going to believe her when she tells them they were rescued by an alien.
“It won’t work,” the strange alien native says.
“Why not?”
“It’s been disabled by my vessel. Right now, it’s just another rock in the jungle.”
“People have to know,” Jillian says, pressing the power button on the side of her phone.
“No, they don’t.”
Her phone screen goes white. She taps the touchscreen, willing it to life, but the brilliant white fades to grey before returning to black.
“Please,” he says. “Have a seat.”
The native, dressed only in a loincloth, gestures toward two leather armchairs set on a plush rug, floating easily a hundred and fifty feet above the jungle floor. They’re just there. They weren’t there when Jillian emerged on this clear, floating platform high above the forest floor, obscured from below by the thicket of vines and branches crisscrossing the jungle. Jillian didn’t see them materialize. She simply turned, and there they were, looking uncomfortably ordinary and yet suspended seemingly in mid-air. The chairs are dark burgundy in color, being the kind used by lawyers and psychiatrists. Dozens of buttons pull the leather tight, forming a firm cushion with stiff backing and high armrests. There’s a small wooden table between them. It’s ornate, with three legs spreading out from the base and a single polished pole supporting a circular tabletop barely wide enough to hold a laptop or a few magazines.
Jillian recognizes the setting instantly. It’s from her father’s private office in New York City. Her father’s apartment overlooks Central Park. As it’s facing north, the sun sets behind a wall of skyscrapers on the western side of the lake. ‘The study,’ as he calls his home office, is an austere room with a floor-to-ceiling antique bookcase on one side, the leather seats on a distinct, one-of-a-kind Persian rug, and the absurdly small wooden table set in between. He should have a coffee table. Instead, it’s the kind of table that is normally kept as a nightstand beside a bed. There’s a broad desk on the other side of the office, but this setup has definitely been lifted from there. Those seats are the centerpiece of his office. It seems the alien can read her mind, mining it for memories.
To call her father a perfectionist is an understatement. The business desk is devoid of clutter. There’s an Apple MacBook, but rather than dominating the desk, it’s set at an angle, off to the side. Jillian’s never seen the lid raised. The desk has a plush, inset leather writing surface that appears pristine. A small antique clock sits on the other corner, facing the high-back leather business chair. Time is all her father ever cared about, not her, not her mother or her brother. And now time is the one thing he no longer has. Hundreds of billions of lifeless greenbacks will live on without him because he ran out of time, not money.
Jillian’s not allowed in her father’s study, and that fills her with rage. At night, she’ll sneak in and sit in one of the chairs, alone in the dark, looking out over the lights in the buildings running along either side of Central Park and the American Museum of Natural History. The alien must know this, as the native is no longer wearing a loincloth. She blinks, and he’s dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a white cotton t-shirt. There’s no logo. Her father wears these kinds of shirts under a suit jacket. Jillian is wary. This isn’t convenient or accidental. The alien is toying with her. Saying no to her desire to share this moment with others is infuriating, and deliberately so. An otherworldly intelligence is treating her like her father once did, treating her like a child, challenging her assertion that humanity has a right to know that it’s here on Earth.
The stranger sits down and leans back in the seat, crossing his legs, looking relaxed. It’s a lie, of that, Jillian is sure, and yet he rests his elbows on the high sides of the leather chair.
Jillian might be a teenager, but she’s not dumb. Like so many in her generation, she’s grown up to realize that nothing is what it seems. Adults lie to children, pretending they have life all figured out. They lead kids to believe they have all the answers. In reality, they’re still children at heart. The difference is that the things they play with aren’t found in a toy store, and yet they’re little more than toys.
Capitalism dominates the world, and few people have dominated the modern world like her father, but she was never fooled by his prestige. What seems normal to her is distinctly abnormal. Her life is an aberration. Often, her father would criticize her for challenging the privilege she’s inherited, but he never understood why she revolted against him. Jillian has privilege. She understands that. And along with that privilege comes some breathing space. Rather than slaving away for fourteen hours a day in a sweatshop in Asia or growing tubers for food in sub-Saharan Africa or skinning animals in a remote village in the Amazon, she has the opportunity to reflect on life—and she does. Yes, she’s privileged beyond belief, living like a princess, but she’s not blinded by that privilege. If anything, it has allowed her to open her eyes. Instead of living in denial about climate change, the concentration of wealth by tech-bros like her father and the social impact of artificial intelligence, she refuses to ignore the damage being done in the name of progress.
Jillian feels conflicted. She loves her father, and yet she hates everything he stands for—stood for—and she struggles to reconcile her feelings with his death.
Jillian has listened in on too many of his conversations over the years. Her father thought he was teaching her business acumen, but what he actually taught her was how money binds and blinds morals. Hypocrisy is a convenient detour, a shortcut, an on-ramp to the highway, something to be ignored as you merge into the traffic and continue on your way. But Jillian could never think that way. She couldn’t pretend otherwise. Her tutor told her the word hypocrisy came from the Old French term ypocrisie, which had its origins as a Greek word describing actors in a play, and that fits with what she saw in her father. It was all an act. He pretended to care, pretended to have morals, pretended to have integrity, but his pretense never extended beyond his wallet. He’d object to others being duplicitous, but never himself. Jillian saw his protests as performative. He’d speak out about political corruption, and then donate millions to someone’s reelection campaign. Somehow, the alien knows all this and understands how triggering a few leather chairs can be, causing her moral compass to swing as though she were walking over a lodestone. Jillian feels as though the extraterrestrial is setting her up for a debate, but she doesn’t understand why. What is it trying to accomplish?
At the age of fourteen, Jillian got a bunch of gold letter stickers and stuck a quote from Plato on the door of her Manhattan bedroom: Don't force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own. To her father’s credit, he ignored her. She expected him to argue with her and force her to remove it. As it was, the Teitels moved around as a family, never spending more than three months in any one place, bouncing between New York, London, Paris and Miami, so it was a year later when Jillian arrived “home” in the Big Apple. It was another four weeks before she realized housekeeping had quietly removed the sign, and the real realization was that those four weeks meant she’d lost the argument. The moment was gone. Jillian scolded herself. Her father inadvertently taught her a valuable lesson: you win some arguments by outlasting, not outlouding, your opponent. Reason demands a response, but sometimes that response comes in the form of silence, shunning or ignoring debate. And Jillian saw parallels with climate change, where genuine concerns are routinely ignored, and silence becomes acceptance, allowing the status quo to dominate.
The alien is goading her, challenging her without uttering a word, provoking her with the leather chairs placed in front of her.
Instead of sitting opposite him, she walks around behind him, examining him, looking down on him, depriving him of the ability to see her for a moment as she shifts from one side of him to the other. She treats him like any of the other assholes her father brings for dinner, and brings him back to the point.
“People have a right to know.”
“No, they really don’t,” the alien says.
“This is our world,” Jillian replies, being strident, walking around the other side of him.
The native is gone.
Her father sits there, relaxed. He has his elbows poised against the high sides of the leather chair and presses his hands together, splaying his fingers wide, apparently contemplating her words.
“Dad?” she says, stunned to see her aging father sitting there among the trees of the Amazon rainforest. “No, no, no… You… It was you in the forest.”
“Yes,” the alien says, mimicking her father with far too much fidelity.
“Show me who you really are,” she demands.
“I’ll show you what you can accept,” the alien replies.
Seeing her father’s eyes narrow and the furrows of his brow, Jillian understands. The alien is challenging her to a debate.
“You have no right,” she says, protesting, but without any supporting reason, she knows her argument is weak. “This is our world. Our home.”
“Is it?” her father asks, but it’s not her father. He’s dead. And yet, this has the makings of a classic argument with her dad. This is the defiance and anger with which they fought over Christmas in London, or last weekend in Paris, or even on the flight over the Amazon basin.
