Science Fiction



             Eight
         Episodes



                  By Robert Reed
                       Eight Episodes
                       by Robert Reed




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         Copyright ©2006 by Robert Reed

       First published in Asimov's, June 2006


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                         Eight Episodes
                         by Robert Reed




    With minimal fanfare and next to no audience, Invasion of
a Small World debuted in the summer of 2016, and after a
brief and disappointing run, the series was deservedly
shelved.
    One glaring problem was its production values: Computer
animation had reached a plateau where reality was an easy
illusion, spectacle was the industry norm, and difficult tricks
like flowing water and human faces were beginning to
approximate what was real. Yet the show's standards were
barely adequate, even from an upstart Web network
operating with limited capital and too many hours of
programming to fill. The landscapes and interior shots would
have been considered state-of-the-art at the turn of the
century, but not in its premiere year. The characters were
inflicted with inexpressive faces and stiff-limbed motions,
while their voices were equally unconvincing, employing
amateur actors or some cut-rate audio-synthesis software.
With few exceptions, the dialogue was sloppy, cluttered with
pauses and clumsy phrasing, key statements often cut off in
mid-sentence. Most critics decided that the series' creators
were striving for a real-life mood. But that was purely an
interpretation. Press kits were never made available, and no
interviews were granted with anyone directly involved in the
production, leaving industry watchers entirely to their own
devices—another problem that served to cripple Invasion.
   Other factors contributed to the tiny audience. One issue
that couldn't be discussed openly was the racial makeup of
the cast. Success in the lucrative North American market
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meant using characters of obvious European extraction. Yet
the series' leading man was an Indian astronomer working at
a fictional college set in, of all places, South Africa. With an
unpronounceable name and thick accent, Dr. Smith—as his
few fans dubbed him—was a pudgy, prickly creation with a
weakness for loud shirts and deep belches. His wife was a
homely apparition who understood nothing about his world-
shaking work, while his children, in direct contrast to virtually
every other youngster inhabiting popular entertainment, were
dim-witted creatures offering nothing that was particularly
clever or charming.
    A paucity of drama was another obvious weakness. The
premiere episode involved a routine day in Dr. Smith's life.
Eighteen hours of unexceptional behavior was compressed to
fifty-three minutes of unexceptional behavior. Judging by
appearances, the parent network inserted commercial breaks
at random points. The series' pivotal event was barely noticed
by the early viewers: One of Dr. Smith's graduate students
was working with Permian-age rock samples, searching for
key isotopes deposited by ancient supernovae. The student
asked her professor about a difficult piece of lab equipment.
As always, the dialogue was dense and graceless, explaining
almost nothing to the uninitiated. Genuine scientists—some of
the series' most unapologetic fans—liked to point out that the
instruments and principles were genuine, though the
nomenclature was shamelessly contrived. Fourteen seconds
of broadcast time introduced a young graduate student
named Mary—a mixed-race woman who by no measure could
be considered attractive. She was shown asking Dr. Smith for
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help with the problematic instrument, and he responded with
a wave of a pudgy hand and a muttered, "Later." Following
ads for tiny cars and a powerful asthma medicine, the
astronomer ordered his student to come to his office and lock
the door behind her. What happened next was only implied.
But afterwards Dr. Smith was seen sitting with his back to his
desk and his belt unfastened, and the quick-eyed viewer saw
Mary's tiny breasts vanish under a bra and baggy shirt. Some
people have interpreted her expression as pain, emotional or
otherwise. Others have argued that her face was so poorly
rendered that it was impossible to fix any emotion to her,
then or later. And where good writers would have used
dialogue to spell out the importance of the moment, bad
writers decided to ignore the entire interpersonal plotline.
With a casual voice, Mary mentioned to her advisor/lover that
she had found something strange in the Permian stone.
   "Strange," he repeated.
   With her thumb and finger, she defined a tiny space.
"Metal. A ball."
   "Ball?"
   "In the rock."
   Smith scratched his fat belly for a moment, saying
nothing. (Judging by log tallies, nearly 10 percent of the
program's small audience turned away at that point.) Then he
quietly said to her, "I do not understand."
   "What it is..."
   "What?"
   She said, "I don't know either."
   "In what rock?"
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   "Mine. The mudstone—"
   "You mean it's artificial...?"
   "Looks so," she answered.
   He said, "Huh."
   She finished buttoning her shirt, the back of her left hand
wiping at the corner of her mouth.
   "Where?" Smith asked.
   She gave the parent rock's identification code.
   "No, the metal ball," he interrupted. "Where is it now?"
   "My desk drawer. In a white envelope."
   "And how big?"
   "Two grains of rice, about."
   Then, one last time, the main character said, "Huh." And,
finally, without any interest showing in his face, he fastened
his belt.
                             ****


    The next three episodes covered not days, but several
months. Again, none of the scientific work was explained, and
nothing resembling a normal plotline emerged from the
routine and the tedious. The increasingly tiny audience
watched Dr. Smith and two of his graduate students working
with an object almost too small to be resolved on the
screen—another significant problem with the series. Wouldn't
a human-sized artifact have made a greater impact? The
ball's metal shell proved to be an unlikely alloy of nickel and
aluminum. Cosmic radiation and tiny impacts had left the
telltale marks one would expect after a long drifting journey
through space. Using tiny lasers, the researchers carefully cut
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through the metal shell, revealing a diamond interior. Then
the diamond heart absorbed a portion of the laser's energy,
and once charged, it powered up its own tiny light show.
Fortunately a nanoscopic camera had been inserted into the
hole, and the three scientists were able to record what they
witnessed—a rush of complex images coupled with an
increasingly sophisticated array of symbols.
   "What is this?" they kept asking one another.
   "Maybe it's language," Mary guessed. Correctly, as it
happened. "Someone's teaching us ... trying to ... a new
language."
   Dr. Smith gave her a shamelessly public hug.
   Then the other graduate student—a Brazilian fellow named
Carlos—pointed out that, whatever the device was, Mary had
found it in rock that was at least a quarter of a billion years
old. "And that doesn't count the time this little machine spent
in space, which could be millions more years."
   After the show's cancellation, at least one former executive
admitted to having been fooled. "We were promised a big,
loud invasion," he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone. "I
talked to the series' producer. He said an invasion would
begin right after episode four. Yeah, we knew the build-up
was going to be slow. But then aliens from the dinosaur days
were going to spring to life and start burning cities."
   "Except," said the interviewer.
   "What?"
   "That's not quite true. The Permian happened before there
were any dinosaurs."


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    With a shrug, the ex-executive brushed aside that mild
criticism. "Anyway, the important thing is that bad-ass aliens
were supposed to come out of the rock. They were going to
grow huge and start kicking us around. At least that's what
the production company—EXL Limited—assured us. A
spectacle. And since we didn't have to pay much for those
episodes, we ended up purchasing the first eight shows after
seeing only a few minutes of material...."
    Invasion was cancelled after the fifth episode.
    The final broadcast episode was an artless synopsis of the
next twenty months of scientific work. Dr. Smith and his
students were just a tiny portion of a global effort. Experts on
six continents were making a series of tiny, critical
breakthroughs. Most of the story involved faceless
researchers exchanging dry e-mails about the tiny starship's
text and images. Translations were made; every shred of
evidence began to support the obvious but incredible
conclusions. The culminating event was a five-minute news
conference. Dripping sweat, shaking from nerves, the
astronomer explained to reporters that he had found a
functioning starship on Earth. After a glancing thanks to
unnamed colleagues, he explained how, in the remote past,
perhaps long before there was multicellular life on Earth, an
alien species had manufactured trillions of tiny ships like this
one. The ships were cast off into space, drifting slowly to
planetary systems scattered throughout the galaxy. The
vessel that he had personally recovered was already ancient
when it dropped onto a river bottom near the edge of
Gondwanaland. Time had only slightly degraded its onboard
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texts—a history of the aliens and an explanation into the
nature of life in the universe. By all evidence, he warned,
human beings were late players to an old drama. And like
every other intelligent species in the universe, they would
always be small in numbers and limited in reach.
   The final scene of that fifth episode was set at Dr. Smith's
home. His oldest son was sitting before a large plasma
screen, destroying alien spaceships with extraordinarily loud
weapons. In what proved to be the only conversation
between those two characters, Smith sat beside his boy,
asking, "Did you see me?"
   "What?"
   "The news conference—"
   "Yeah, I watched."
   "So?" he said. And when no response was offered, he
asked, "What did you think?"
   "About what?"
   "The lesson—"
   "What? People don't matter?" The boy froze the battle
scene and put down his controls. "I think that's stupid."
   His father said nothing.
   "The universe isn't empty and poor." The boy was perhaps
fourteen, and his anger was the most vivid emotion in the
entire series. "Worlds are everywhere, and a lot of them have
to have life."
   "Millions are blessed, yes," Dr. Smith replied. "But
hundreds of billions more are too hot, too cold. They are
metal-starved, or married to dangerous suns."
   His son stared at the frozen screen, saying nothing.
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    "The alien texts only confirm our most recent evidence,
you know. The earth is a latecomer. Stellar births are slowing,
in the Milky Way, and everywhere, and the production of
terrestrial worlds peaked two or three billion years before our
home was created."
    "These texts of yours ... they say that intelligent life stays
at home?"
    "Most of the time, yes."
    "Aliens don't send out real starships?"
    "It is far too expensive," Smith offered.
    The boy pushed out his lower lip. "Humans are different,"
he maintained.
   "No."
   "We're going to build a working stardrive. Soon, I bet. And
then we'll visit our neighboring stars and colonize those
worlds—"
    "We can't."
    "Because they tell us we can't?"
    "Because it is impossible." His father shook his head,
saying with authority, "The texts are explicit. Moving large
masses requires prohibitive energies. And terraforming is a
difficult, often impossible trick. And that is why almost every
world that we have found to date looks as sterile as the day
they were born."
    But the teenage boy would accept none of that. "You
know, don't you? That these aliens are just lying to us?
They're afraid of human beings, because they know we're the
toughest, meanest things in the universe. And we're going to
take them on."
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   For a long moment, Dr. Smith held silent.
   Then the boy continued his game, and into the mayhem of
blasters, the father mouthed a single dismissive word:
"Children."
                           ****


   Eighteen months later, the fledging Web network declared
bankruptcy, and a small consortium acquired its assets,
including Invasion of a Small World. Eager to recoup their
investment, the new owners offered all eight episodes as a
quick-and-dirty DVD package. When sales proved somewhat
better than predicted, a new version was cobbled together,
helped along by a genuine ad budget. The strongest initial
sales came from the tiny pool of determined fans—young and
well educated, with little preference for nationality or gender.
But the scientists in several fields, astronomy and
paleontology included, were the ones who created a genuine
buzz that eventually put Invasion into the public eye.
    The famous sixth episode helped trigger the interest: That
weak, rambling tale of Dr. Smith, his family and students,
was temporarily suspended. Instead, the full fifty-three
minutes were dedicated to watching a barren world spinning
silently in deep space. According to corporate memos, the last
three episodes arrived via the Web, bundled in a single
package. But it was this episode that effectively killed the
series. There were no explanations. Nothing showed but the
gray world spinning, twenty minutes before the point-of-view
gradually pulled away. The world was just a tiny speck of
metal lost in the vastness of space. For astronomers, it was a
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fascinating moment—a vivid illustration that the universe
could be an exceedingly boring place. Stars were distant
points of light, and there was only silence, and even when
millions of years were compressed into a nap-length moment,
nothing was produced that could be confused with great
theatre.
   But what the astronomers liked best—what got the buzz
going—were the final few minutes of the episode. Chance
brought the tiny starship into the solar system, and chance
guided it past a younger Saturn. The giant moon, Titan,
swung close before the ship was kicked out to Neptune's
orbit. Then it drifted sunward again, Mars near enough to
reveal its face. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, Titan
was bathed in a much denser atmosphere, while Mars was a
temporarily wet world, heated by a substantial impact event.
Experts in those two worlds were impressed. Only in the last
year or two, probes had discovered what Invasion predicted
on its own, including pinpointing the impact site near the
Martian South Pole.
   In much the same way, episode seven made the
paleontologists crazy.
   With its long voyage finished, the tiny starship struck the
Earth's upper atmosphere, quickly losing its momentum as
well as a portion of its hull. The great southern continent was
rendered accurately enough to make any geologist smile,
while the little glimpses of Permian ecosystems were even
more impressive. Whoever produced the series (and there
was a growing controversy on that matter), they had known
much about protomammals and the early reptiles, cycads and
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tree ferns. One ancient creature—lizard in form, though not
directly related to any modern species—was the only
important misstep. Yet five months later, a team working in
South Africa uncovered a set of bones that perfectly matched
what a vanished dramatic series had predicted ... and what
was already a cultish buzz grew into a wild, increasingly
public cacophony....
   At least forty thousand sites—chat rooms and blogs and
such—were dedicated to supporting the same inevitable
conclusion.
   By means unknown, aliens had sent a message to
earthlings, and it took the form of Invasion of a Small World.
                             ****


   The eighth episode was a genuine treasure.
   Dr. Smith reappeared. Several years older, divorced and
with his belly fat stripped off by liposuction, he was shown
wandering happily through a new life of endless celebrity. His
days and long evenings were spent with at least three
mistresses as well as a parade of world leaders. Accustomed
to the praise of others, he was shown grinning confidently
while offering his interpretations of the ancient message. The
universe was almost certainly sprinkled with life, he
explained. But despite that prolificacy, the cosmos remained
an enormous, very cold, and exceptionally poor place. The
gulfs between living worlds were completely unbridgeable. No
combination of raw energy and questing genius could build a
worthy stardrive. Moreover, even direct communication
between local species was rarely worth its considerable cost,
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since civilizations rarely if ever offered each other anything
with genuine worth.
     "Technology has distinct limits," he warned the starlets
and world leaders that he met at cocktail parties. "Humans
are already moving into the late stages of scientific endeavor.
What matters most, to us and to any wise species, is the
careful shepherding of energy and time. That is why we must
care for our world and the neighboring planets inside our own
little solar system. We must treasure every day while wasting
nothing, if only to extend our histories as far as into the
future as possible."
  "That strikes me as such depressing news," said one prime
minister—a statuesque woman blessed with a starlet's
beautiful face. "If there really are millions and billions of living
worlds, as you claim, and if all the great minds on all of those
worlds are thinking hard about this single problem, shouldn't
somebody learn how to cheat the speed of light or create free
energy through some clever trick?"
    "If that were so," Dr. Smith replied, "then every world out
there would be alive, and the giant starships would arrive at
our doorstep every few minutes. But instead, human
experience has discovered precisely one starfaring vessel, and
it was a grain of metallic dust, and to reach us it had to be
exceptionally lucky, and, even then, it had to wait a quarter
of a billion years to be noticed."
    The prime minister sipped her virgin Mary and chewed on
her lower lip. Then with a serious tone, she said, "But to me
... there seems to be another reasonable explanation waiting
for our attention..."
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   "Which would be what, madam?"
   "Subterfuge," she offered. "The aliens are intentionally
misleading us about the nature of the universe."
   Bristling, he asked, "And why would they do such a thing?"
   "To cripple our future," she replied. "By convincing us to
remain home, they never have to face us between the stars."
   "Perhaps you're right to think that, madam," said the old
astronomer, nodding without resolve. Then in his final
moment in the series' final episode, he said, "A lie is as good
as a pill, if it helps you sleep...."
                               ****


  For years, every search to uncover the creative force
behind Invasion of a Small World came up empty. And in the
public mind, that single mystery remained the final, most
compelling part of the story.
    Former executives with the doomed network had never
directly met with the show's producers. But they could
recount phone conversations and teleconferences and e-mails
exchanged with three apparent producers. Of course, by then,
it was possible to invent a digital human face and voice while
weaving a realistic mix of human gestures. Which led some to
believe that slippery forces were plainly at work here—forces
that no human eye had ever witnessed.
    Tracking down the original production company produced
only a dummy corporation leading to dusty mailboxes and
several defunct Web addresses. Every name proved fictional,
both among the company's officers and those in the brief
credits rolling at the end of each episode. Surviving tax forms
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lacked any shred of useful information. But where the IRS
might have chased down a successful cheat, the plain truth
was that whoever was responsible for Invasion had signed
away all future rights in exchange for a puddle of cash.
   The few skeptics wondered if something considerably more
ordinary was at play here. Rumors occasionally surfaced
about young geniuses working in the Third World—usually in
the Indian tech-cities. Employing pirated software and stolen
equipment, they had produced what would eventually become
the fifth most successful media event in history. But in the
short term, their genius had led nowhere but to obscurity and
financial ruin. Three different candidates were identified—
young men with creative minds and most of the necessary
skills. Did one of them build Invasion alone? Or was it a group
effort? And was the project's failure the reason why each of
them committed suicide shortly after the series' cancellation?
   But if they were the creators, why didn't any trail lead to
them? Perhaps because the consortium that held all rights to
Invasion had obscured the existing evidence. And why?
Obviously to help feed this infectious and delicious mood of
suspicion. To maintain an atmosphere where no doubts could
find a toehold, where aliens were conversing with humans,
and where the money continued to flow to the consortium like
a great green river.
                             ****

   The most durable explanation was provided by one of the
series' most devoted fans—a Nobel laureate in physics who
was happy to beat the drum for the unthinkable. "Invasion is
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true everywhere but in the specifics," he argued. "I think
there really was an automated starship. But it was bigger
than a couple of grains of rice. As big as a fist, or a human
head. But still small and unmanned. The ship entered our
solar system during the Permian. With the bulk of it in orbit,
pieces must have landed on our world. Scouts with the size
and legs of small cockroaches, maybe. Maybe. And if you take
the time to think it through, you see that it would be a pretty
silly strategy, letting yourself become a tiny fossil in some
enormous bed of mudstone. What are the odds that you'd
survive for 250 million years, much else ever get noticed
there?
    "No, if you are an automated starship, what would be
smart is for that orbiting mothership to take a seat where
nothing happens and she can see everything. On the moon,
I'd guess. She still has the antennas that she used to hear the
scouts' reports. She sleeps and waits for radio signals from
the earth, and when they arrive, she studies what she hears.
She makes herself into a student of language and technology.
And when the time is ripe—when she has a product to sell—
she expels the last of her fuel, leaving the moon to land
someplace useful. Which is pretty much anywhere, these
days.
   "Looking like a roach, maybe, she connects to the Web and
offers her services at a cut-rate price.
   "And that is how she delivers her message.
   "Paraphrasing my fictional colleague, 'A lie is as good as a
truth, if it leads you to enlightenment.'"
                               ****
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    The final scene in the last episode only seemed
anticlimactic. The one-time graduate student, Mary, had been
left behind by world events. From the beginning, her critical
part in the research had been downplayed. But the series'
creator, whoever or whatever it was, saw no useful drama in
that treachery. The woman was middle-aged and happy in
her obscurity, plain as always and pregnant for at least the
second time.
    A ten-year-old daughter was sitting beside Mary, sharing a
threadbare couch.
   The girl asked her mother what she believed. Was the
universe really so empty and cold? And was this the way it
would always be?
   Quietly, her mother said, "I think that's basically true,
yes."
   The girl looked saddened.
   But then Mary patted her daughter on the back of a hand,
smiling with confidence. "But dear, I also believe this," she
said. "Life is an invasion wherever it shows itself. It is
relentless and it is tireless, and it conquers every little place
where living is possible. And before the universe ends, all the
good homes will know the sounds of wet breathing and the
singing of glorious songs."
   Copyright © 2006 Robert Reed




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