superradiated samples with three hundred thousand grays. This material does not absorb radiation.” As he became nervous again, the scientist’s stuttering returned.
“Are you saying they can’t be nuked?” an Army general asked. This time I saw the man asking the question—a pudgy little man with a flattop of white hair. I didn’t recognize him.
“N-no, sir. The trauma caused by the explosion might destroy the avatar, but the radiation would not bother it.”
“Avatar?” the general asked. “What the speck is an avatar?”
“Um …ah, it’s a representation.”
“A representation?” the general asked. “Somebody help me out here.”
“Avatar? You mean like the characters in computer games?” somebody asked from the Air Force section of the room.
“Computer games?” the Army general asked. “Games!”
“I understand you use computerized combat simulations to train your men,” the scientist said.
“Oh …battle simulations,” the general said, sounding somewhat appeased. “What do the Mudders have to do with combat sims?”
“These are not living creatures,” the scientist said. “These are physical representations of creatures that are controlled by the creatures they represent.
“The samples we received contain no semblance of living tissue. As you can see,” he said, pointing with a foot-long metal stick, “the material is uniform. There is no muscle or bone. It’s almost as if this creature w-were a living statue.”
“What about their guns?” This time it was one of the staff members Glade brought. “Those are real.”
“Oh, the weapons, now that was fascinating,” the scientist said. “The weapons degraded even faster than the aliens themselves.”
“Degraded?” The Army general clearly wanted to turn the briefing into an interrogation. “You said that before. What do you mean by degraded?”
“Th-this creature and his weapon are …are …are made out of the exact same material. They are made out of the element we refer to as MBC. Also, um, the illumination shield that has enveloped New Copenhagen appears to be made out of that same element.”
Spontaneous arguments broke out. The soft-spoken scientist tried several times to restart his briefing, but his bullheaded audience paid him no mind. He watched nervously, slicking back his cotton-fluff hair.
Finally, the chubby Army general took control of the meeting. “Just to make sure I have got this straight.” He waited for the auditorium to become quiet and started again. “Just to be sure I have this straight, you claim that the Mudders and their guns are nothing more than computer characters made out of light? Is that what you are saying, because if it is, we may need to find some better scientists. Those Mudder bastards were alive enough to kill eighty thousand Marines today. Those were flesh-and-blood clones they killed out there. This was not some bullshit computer simulation.”
The general stood and took a step toward the stage. Now that he was out of his seat, I saw that the general was short as well as chubby and old. But compared to the scientist, he looked like a green beret.
“No one is calling this a computer game,” Ray Freeman said as he stepped in from the wings. Ray stood nearly two feet taller than the general and weighed more than the general and the scientist combined. He had been hiding somewhere, and he now came downstairs along the front of the stage.
The general spun around to look at Freeman, then paused. I don’t know if he recognized Freeman or was simply put off by the sheer size of the man. “I see,” was all the general managed to squeak out. “I, uh, just wanted to clarify the point,” the general said as he returned to his seat.
“Thank you, Raymond,” the scientist said, turning and smiling up at Freeman. Freeman walked to the edge of the stage and sat, watching over the scientist like a bodyguard.
With Freeman watching over him, the scientist gained confidence. For a moment, he and his audience looked at each other in silence, no one quite knowing where to pick up. Finally, a general from the Air Force asked, “What did you mean by degrading?”
“Oh …oh yes,” the scientist said. He surprised me by lifting the specimen of an alien arm with one hand. “When we received this limb, it weighed 133 pounds. Compared to a human arm, that would be about—”
“Can you please get on with this?” the Army general asked. Some of the other officers in the room sounded a note of agreement.
“This limb was too heavy for me to lift,” the scientist said. “Within an hour of our receiving it, we realized it had begun to degrade.”
The scientist carefully replaced the arm on the table, then took hold of the forearm with both his hands like a man breaking a stick. He snapped the forearm in two and held up the wrist and hand. “Three days ago I could not lift this limb, let alone break it in two. Over the last 72 hours, the weight of this arm has dropped from 133 pounds to 27 pounds. The limb has become hollow and brittle. It is as if the MBC particles are evaporating.”
“Can you explain how that could happen?” an Air Force officer asked.
“I cannot explain it at this juncture. Dr. Sweetwater has a hypothesis, but we need to put it to the test before we discuss it,” the scientist said.
“And you said that their guns are made out of the same stuff?” the Air Force general asked. By this time, the briefing had reached a low level of pandemonium.
The scientist bent over and picked up a box that sat beside the table. He looked into the box, shaking his head as if trying to steel himself for a difficult task, then brought out something that looked like a two-foot-long mud clod.
“This is one of their guns,” the scientist said.
“What happened to it?” someone asked.
“It is degrading to its tachyonic form.” The scientist turned the box over and poured out a small pile of dust.
“It all turns into dust?” somebody asked in a voice loud enough to be heard above the chaotic chatter.
“This is all that we have left from the scientific instrument that was captured three days ago. As you can see, the instrument has nearly completed the entropic cycle.” The rectangular stone he held up looked like an oversized brick. “Everything the aliens create ultimately reverts back to tachyons and evaporates.”
“And what are tachyons?” the Army general asked.
“Tachyons? Why, tachyons are one of the great mysteries of science. They are a class of particle that is too small and fast for us to detect. We have no way of proving tachyons exist, but all of the data we have collected from the aliens are consistent with our understanding about the properties of tachyons.”
“Wait. Wait a moment, Doctor,” the little Army general shouted, once again leaping to his feet. “So you do not know if anything you have told us is accurate? It’s all your opinion? Is that right?”
“The …the data support our theory,” the scientist said.
“Subatomic particles?” the Air Force general asked. “Tachyons are subatomic particles?”
“Yes, sir. Tachyons are particles that move at a speed greater than the speed of light. Theoretically, it takes a great deal of energy to bond these particles in place. We have been able to measure enormous amounts of energy released by these body parts and this weapon as they degrade.
“I can try to explain the mechanics of this, but—”
“I’ll take your word for it,” the general said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We defeated them. Killed them, broke them …it really doesn’t matter.” Taking a moment to look back at the officers around him, the Army general smirked and said, “My colleagues in the Marine Corps degraded a lot of tachyons this afternoon.”
The audience laughed.
“If our theory is correct, General, over the next seventy-two hours the avatars will simply reassemble,” the scientist said.
The laughter stopped.
