Look, Up in the Sky
Neil told me recently that I had to write more. I believe him, so here's a treatment of an idea that's been following me around for the past few months. A very rough treatment. Be nice.
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Let’s get one thing out of the way real quick.
Every single movie you’ve ever seen about an alien invasion of Earth lied to you. We couldn’t fight them.
This should have been pretty obvious once the pods started dropping from the sky-heck, you lived through it, same as me-but I keep running into people who insist we had a chance. It’s tough to eradicate the belief in human innovation as a universal curative.
You’ve heard of the expression “glassed”? This is where it originated: in one of the first actions of that short, terrible war, an entire battalion of tanks in the Mojave Desert was burned to nothingness. I still don’t know the technical name of the heat-ray device the aliens used, but it fused a ten-foot deep square mile of sand into pure, clear glass. This took them perhaps a second. The energy required to send a kilometer-long spacecraft (let alone several hundred) on a faster-than-light journey spanning tens of light-years can also be used to power nightmare weapons, or to protect against them.
Remember the few nukes we were able to set off? They did nothing but fizzle against the Xenos’ defenses. Weapons meant to destroy the world, failing to protect it. The Xenos had harnessed the power of an entire sun and brought it down like a hammer. How could we compare?
And that’s why those movies lied to you. There was no computer virus to upload, no swarm of brave fighter pilots, no strain of the common cold that would ravage the invaders. None of that rot. We never had a chance.
Despite all this, we did inherit one last bit of luck. Heat rays can’t build anything. Those that were left alive after the initial harrowing were herded into camps, given tools, and commanded to make our Earth more habitable for the Xenos. We were set to dismantle our history and prepare our own graves.
Some refused, and were killed. The rest of us complied. Not much of a choice.
You can still see the remnants of some of the work camps. Some of them we kept intact as living memorials, like the old Europeans did with Auschwitz. Security at these things was non-standard. We were allowed to move around at will when we weren’t working. We could talk. We could copulate. We could quarrel, and fight, and kill. So long as we worked when we were called and stayed within a certain perimeter (enforced by auto-turrets that saw everything), we could do whatever we wanted. The Xenos knew we couldn’t truly fight back.
Do you know what a culture does when it’s about to die? It dreams its problems away.
The Righteous Harmony Society believed that martial arts would make them immune to western weapons. Lakota and Paiute Ghost Dancers hoped ancient rituals would cause their ancestors to rise from the grave and drive the white man away. Spirit men in the Maji Maji rebellion gave brave warriors talismans that would reduce German bullets to water.
There’s an old colonial rhyme that sums up this state of affairs succinctly:
Whatever happens
We have got
The Maxim Gun
And they have not
Dreams have no purchase against technology. It’s a lesson learned hard by humanity, but this time the Maxim gun was a devastating heat ray, or a city killing mass driver, or a super-energized shield. We dreamed every night of salvation, and awoke to labor and our creeping extinction.
We should have known better, some of us said. The Ghost Dancers were wrong.
But one night, in a corner of France, the Big Idea took its first form.
Laborers working in a mountain pass connecting France and Spain had gone to bed one night after a former professor of French Literature had read them a particularly stirring recollection of the Song of Roland. That night, each of them, in their own way, dreamt of the paladin Roland and his Twelve Peers, fighting and dying against a horde of invaders. One of the great stories of history, made alive in their heads.
When they awoke, thirteen armored men on horseback stood between them and the Xeno overseers sent to give them that day’s marching orders.
The reports are varied as to what happened next. Some of the laborers insist nearly all horsemen were cut down immediately, pierced by a thousand searing rays, reduced to dust. Others recall at least a few reaching the overseers and piercing them with lance and sword. What is generally agreed upon was that immediately before their leader, an impossibly tall man with an impossibly large sword, was cut down, he raised a horn to his lips and blew a note that knocked thousands of laborers to the ground.
Every alien in southern France and northern Spain fell dead. Their turrets malfunctioned, their war-walkers collapsed, and two of their cruisers fell from the sky. A little part of humanity was free.
More importantly, the horn call reverberated across the entirety of the Earth. With it came a message.
Dream your legends into being.
And we did.
In Israel, we dreamed of inanimate warriors, exacting vengeance on those who would threaten their creators. Xeno captains awoke to stone hands choking their lives away.
In the Baltic, we dreamed of elegant monsters, night-empowered abominations of death. Xeno soldiers began to turn up drained entirely of blood.
A great dragon appeared in the sky over China, winding itself around a grounded cruiser, ripping it apart with five claws.
Near-forgotten gods walked the Earth. Norway’s invaders were split asunder by a roaring titan with a hammer made of thunder. A spider-king shot his webs into the skies over Africa, dragging down Xeno fighters by the hundred. A mighty Aztec warrior, three hundred feet tall and radiant as the Sun, took the worst beams of heat from the mightiest dreadnought in the Xeno fleet and threw it back, bathing the kilometer-long warship in killing light.
The entire city of Tokyo came to life in the form of ten thousand giant robots.
And yet, despite all this, we still nearly lost. The ships over America were able to escape-the old ways were too weak in the States at the time-powering themselves free of Earth’s gravity and into orbit. We could see their intentions clearly. They were going to scourge this world, envelop it in heat and fire. They could not kill our dreams, but they were content to kill us.
A thunderclap.
A blue blur.
The cruisers began to fall from the sky, nearly all at once.
Never again will I question a monoculture. There may have been a McDonald’s next to every great Italian restaurant, every beautiful Arabic temple, every Mayan ruin. An American pop star may have had more global facial recognition than the President. We may have been in danger of subsuming all our legends.
This much is true.
But on one night, when the world needed him most, the collective minds of humanity dreamed of a man who could move faster than a thought. Who could see to the farthest edges of the universe. Who could move stars.
A man who could save us.
Look, some of us said. Up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane…
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Let’s get one thing out of the way real quick.
Every single movie you’ve ever seen about an alien invasion of Earth lied to you. We couldn’t fight them.
This should have been pretty obvious once the pods started dropping from the sky-heck, you lived through it, same as me-but I keep running into people who insist we had a chance. It’s tough to eradicate the belief in human innovation as a universal curative.
You’ve heard of the expression “glassed”? This is where it originated: in one of the first actions of that short, terrible war, an entire battalion of tanks in the Mojave Desert was burned to nothingness. I still don’t know the technical name of the heat-ray device the aliens used, but it fused a ten-foot deep square mile of sand into pure, clear glass. This took them perhaps a second. The energy required to send a kilometer-long spacecraft (let alone several hundred) on a faster-than-light journey spanning tens of light-years can also be used to power nightmare weapons, or to protect against them.
Remember the few nukes we were able to set off? They did nothing but fizzle against the Xenos’ defenses. Weapons meant to destroy the world, failing to protect it. The Xenos had harnessed the power of an entire sun and brought it down like a hammer. How could we compare?
And that’s why those movies lied to you. There was no computer virus to upload, no swarm of brave fighter pilots, no strain of the common cold that would ravage the invaders. None of that rot. We never had a chance.
Despite all this, we did inherit one last bit of luck. Heat rays can’t build anything. Those that were left alive after the initial harrowing were herded into camps, given tools, and commanded to make our Earth more habitable for the Xenos. We were set to dismantle our history and prepare our own graves.
Some refused, and were killed. The rest of us complied. Not much of a choice.
You can still see the remnants of some of the work camps. Some of them we kept intact as living memorials, like the old Europeans did with Auschwitz. Security at these things was non-standard. We were allowed to move around at will when we weren’t working. We could talk. We could copulate. We could quarrel, and fight, and kill. So long as we worked when we were called and stayed within a certain perimeter (enforced by auto-turrets that saw everything), we could do whatever we wanted. The Xenos knew we couldn’t truly fight back.
Do you know what a culture does when it’s about to die? It dreams its problems away.
The Righteous Harmony Society believed that martial arts would make them immune to western weapons. Lakota and Paiute Ghost Dancers hoped ancient rituals would cause their ancestors to rise from the grave and drive the white man away. Spirit men in the Maji Maji rebellion gave brave warriors talismans that would reduce German bullets to water.
There’s an old colonial rhyme that sums up this state of affairs succinctly:
Whatever happens
We have got
The Maxim Gun
And they have not
Dreams have no purchase against technology. It’s a lesson learned hard by humanity, but this time the Maxim gun was a devastating heat ray, or a city killing mass driver, or a super-energized shield. We dreamed every night of salvation, and awoke to labor and our creeping extinction.
We should have known better, some of us said. The Ghost Dancers were wrong.
But one night, in a corner of France, the Big Idea took its first form.
Laborers working in a mountain pass connecting France and Spain had gone to bed one night after a former professor of French Literature had read them a particularly stirring recollection of the Song of Roland. That night, each of them, in their own way, dreamt of the paladin Roland and his Twelve Peers, fighting and dying against a horde of invaders. One of the great stories of history, made alive in their heads.
When they awoke, thirteen armored men on horseback stood between them and the Xeno overseers sent to give them that day’s marching orders.
The reports are varied as to what happened next. Some of the laborers insist nearly all horsemen were cut down immediately, pierced by a thousand searing rays, reduced to dust. Others recall at least a few reaching the overseers and piercing them with lance and sword. What is generally agreed upon was that immediately before their leader, an impossibly tall man with an impossibly large sword, was cut down, he raised a horn to his lips and blew a note that knocked thousands of laborers to the ground.
Every alien in southern France and northern Spain fell dead. Their turrets malfunctioned, their war-walkers collapsed, and two of their cruisers fell from the sky. A little part of humanity was free.
More importantly, the horn call reverberated across the entirety of the Earth. With it came a message.
Dream your legends into being.
And we did.
In Israel, we dreamed of inanimate warriors, exacting vengeance on those who would threaten their creators. Xeno captains awoke to stone hands choking their lives away.
In the Baltic, we dreamed of elegant monsters, night-empowered abominations of death. Xeno soldiers began to turn up drained entirely of blood.
A great dragon appeared in the sky over China, winding itself around a grounded cruiser, ripping it apart with five claws.
Near-forgotten gods walked the Earth. Norway’s invaders were split asunder by a roaring titan with a hammer made of thunder. A spider-king shot his webs into the skies over Africa, dragging down Xeno fighters by the hundred. A mighty Aztec warrior, three hundred feet tall and radiant as the Sun, took the worst beams of heat from the mightiest dreadnought in the Xeno fleet and threw it back, bathing the kilometer-long warship in killing light.
The entire city of Tokyo came to life in the form of ten thousand giant robots.
And yet, despite all this, we still nearly lost. The ships over America were able to escape-the old ways were too weak in the States at the time-powering themselves free of Earth’s gravity and into orbit. We could see their intentions clearly. They were going to scourge this world, envelop it in heat and fire. They could not kill our dreams, but they were content to kill us.
A thunderclap.
A blue blur.
The cruisers began to fall from the sky, nearly all at once.
Never again will I question a monoculture. There may have been a McDonald’s next to every great Italian restaurant, every beautiful Arabic temple, every Mayan ruin. An American pop star may have had more global facial recognition than the President. We may have been in danger of subsuming all our legends.
This much is true.
But on one night, when the world needed him most, the collective minds of humanity dreamed of a man who could move faster than a thought. Who could see to the farthest edges of the universe. Who could move stars.
A man who could save us.
Look, some of us said. Up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane…