The Floating Cradle

Sixteen

You know that thought experiment some smug old philosopher probably made up, where there's a train going down a track, and if the conductor does nothing he'll hit three people, but if he pulls a lever to switch tracks he'll hit just one?

I dunno if I've written it right, but that's the gist of it. If you're the conductor, do you let the train run its course, killing three people, or do you make the decision to change direction and kill that one guy instead? It's the kind of bullshit question your eighth grade social studies teacher poses to the class when there's fifteen minutes left on a Friday afternoon. I won't get into all the different arguments, because that's not my point. My point is, the tanta have no such thought experiment.

To them, it's simple math.

The Whelk is called such because it looks like some kind of seashell, apparently, one with a big, bulbous chamber that tapers to a long skinny tail. It is just over five miles long and circles the Earth once every eighteen days or so. The tanta only completed it seven years ago, but probably would have finished sooner had they not had to wait for humanity to build its own in orbit of Cognata. Mutually assured something—not destruction, friends can't say that. It's taken me a while to figure out, but it's just one long game we play, shuffling cards, rearranging pieces, keeping to tedious rules. Because the second it stops being a game, it becomes a war.

The Whelk is the last stop leaving Earth and the first one coming from Cognata on the two-year journey between our planets (it used to take four, but things only get faster). It is an auxiliary hub for major tantic corporations that conduct business on both worlds. It is a research station, tracking weather patterns across the planet, and an embassy, providing representation for Earth-bound tanta charged with anything greater than a misdemeanor. The Whelk stands for peace, shelter, and unity; no one makes mention that its most senior official is a general.

I have never been on the Whelk. I am not there this Christmas, when midnight strikes on the Ka-Boomsday clock (I'll admit, not my best pun). But that's okay. I can still tell you what happens up there. As above, so below, right?

Indonesia passes like a fractured femur under the Whelk's tall, curved windows. Somewhere, at a tactical monitoring station in one of its spines, a few bored lieutenants count down the minutes until their shift is over. They're probably "real" tanta—well muscled from growing up under Cognata's oppressive atmosphere, moving in that staccato, jerky, bird of prey way they do—as opposed to the effete, Earth-raised variety like Jack. You can always tell a free-range cow from one that's been tied up in a stall its whole life.

Sirens blare. There wouldn't be any flashing red and yellow lights—meaningless to the colorblind tanta—but maybe the ventilators release a synthetic stress hormone, ramping up their adrenaline production. Data cascade down the windows-turned-screens like hieroglyphic rain; graphics pop up displaying trajectories for not one, not two, but twenty-eight missiles soaring from one side of the planet to the other. The general and her cadre of higher-ups burst into the room as the lieutenants hasten to orient the Whelk's anti-ballistic missile system.

On Earth, humans flee downward, toward subterranean salvation. A thousand miles overhead, the tanta are hunting.

Twenty-eight missiles, twenty-eight targets. The first threat the Whelk eliminates is en route to the Whelk itself. Its cavernous body releases a swarm of interceptors, which collide with the incoming projectile as it breaches the Earth's exosphere. Debris from the explosion washes over the Whelk, but the damage is negligible; from southeast Asia, it appears as a distant firework, washed out by the bright morning sun.

The Earth is a tilting rock in dark space. It circles a fiery sun, so, in some ways, I guess it has always coveted immolation. In orbit—which is, essentially, the act of falling so fast toward something massive that you cannot stop—the Whelk desperately orchestrates a counter to every act of doom the sphere threatens to perpetrate against itself. But suddenly there are more than twenty-seven threats—more than fifty.

Retaliation.

"Prioritize by population, warhead, and proximity to target," the general commands, and simultaneous with that order: "There are no living; all we do here is resurrection."

It is a ballet of actions and equal, opposite reactions. I imagine the general scanning the data, counting the seconds, doing the math. She spares Tokyo and Seattle. She saves Shanghai and Moscow. She cannot foil all the missiles, so she makes choices. A base in Alaska is sacrificed, three hundred feet of permafrost subliming in an instant. Several artificial islands in the South China Sea get blown to the depths, and for miles around them the ocean spits up flotillas of grey fish, boiled alive. The biggest cities receive the highest protections. There can be no humanity now, except for in the numbers.

I wonder if at any point the general, gazing down upon the Earth a-bloom with spores of fire, wants to look away, thinks: This doesn't belong to me.

I wonder if she considers retreating into her house, into her floating shell, and letting the Homo sapiens blow themselves up however they please. Part of me wishes she would.

But she doesn't. Having expended her resources to destroy the missiles—not counting reserves, of course, safeguarded should the Whelk need to defend itself again—she assumes a strategy of deflection. A threat headed for Delhi is repelled northward to explode in the sparse, snow-capped ranges of Tibet. Caracas lives, and the Amazon Basin burns. Western Europe is an exercise in triage, as are the Bay of Bengal, the Gulf of Guinea, the coastal United States—too many people, too little space, not enough time. One is smaller than two; one million is smaller than two million.

She's not counting deaths. She's just counting.

She is counting when she locks on three missiles boring toward targets in the belly of America and looks for a patch of relative nowhere to redirect them. She lacks the time to send them west—the far side of Kansas would be ideal, she thinks, or Nebraska—and so she settles on the center of a funny little triangle, not as empty as she'd like, but preferable to doing nothing. She gives the order; the three missiles converge in eastern Oklahoma, but the general has moved on to the next equation.

I have never known such thunder.