How Jerry and Betty Became the Least Entertaining Couple in the Neighborhood (Section 14)
Phones, tablets, TVs, anything with a screen lit up as syndicators’ camera crews hustled to be first with the news.
None of them beat people videoing with their phones. Governments across the globe shut down all non-priority communications and mobilized their militaries. Government officials and senior staff disappeared into secret, deeply buried survival stations. Business executives bunkered in armoured, privately armied vacation homes. Billionaires and other Uber rich either had themselves flash frozen and buried in deep chambers on private islands or raced to private launch pads to board rockets they hoped would work but which had no where to go.
The internet died, phones went dark, TVs, tablets, and all other channels showed little spinning icons waiting for non-existent pages to load.
The sky-mountains floated like perfectly spherical clouds, each one’s surface a highly polished mirror reflecting the world beneath and the sky above. Few, once appearing, moved. Some appeared over forests, some over lakes, some over oceans, some over cities, some over farmlands, over iceflows, over deserts and rainforests and glaciers.
Satellites showed the spheres’ reflecting surfaces and nothing more. Overflights showed the same.
They stayed stationary and didn’t communicate.
Koss and Fisher stood in Senator Koral’s office. Most other offices were vacant. People in various military uniforms stepped with determined strides up and down corridors and hallways looking for something to do, someplace to be, someone to order, something to command.
Koral’s aide closed the door. Koss smiled at those in the room. “The President will not be joining us?”
Koral snorted. “How many years of space exploration and no contact? We’re contacted by the Thorines and now this?” She parted a curtain and stared out at the sky-mountain reflecting the DC cityscape below it. “Is this them? Is this the Thorines? We always knew somebody was out there, but tech like this? Ships that big appearing out of nowhere? Do the Thorines even have that level of technology? They only gave us what we needed to get us there and back, right?”
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