LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Jesus.
DR. SCRANTON: No oaths, please. We’re on the record.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Sorry.
COL. SMITH: Thank you. Luckily for us she made a good recovery, and after the train passed she distributed the sensor nodes exactly as instructed. Afterward she went for a ten-minute stroll to get her bearings, then came back. She stayed within the remit of her instructions at all times. I’m entirely satisfied with the way she conducted herself.
DR. SCRANTON: Okay. Findings?
COL. SMITH: This is where it gets disturbing. Firstly, they use intermodal freight containers just like ours. They’re too like ours: for one thing they’re labeled in English—
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: That doesn’t sound possible. You’re sure?
DR. SCRANTON: Yes, definitely. Rita didn’t get a close look at much, but her helmet cams picked up stuff she missed. All the text in the frame uses the Latin alphabet and conforms to anglophone spelling rules. There wasn’t much of it, mind you, and it was night. But there was enough evidence.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Could it be another version of our, our time line? A close cousin?
COL. SMITH: That’s what we thought at first. But Rita’s a smart kid. She thought there was something wrong with the tracks, so she knelt down and used her motion capture instrumentation to measure the gauge—the gap between the rails—exactly. We run on standard gauge—four feet, eight and a half inches. Rita measured their gauge at five feet, one inch, plus or minus an inch or so. Now, that might be Pennsylvania broad gauge—the Pittsburgh and West Penn Railways ran on a five-foot, two-and-a-half gauge—but we’ve never used those for container freight lines. Those railroads went bust in 1952 and 1964, respectively. So even if this is a kissing-cousin time line, it almost certainly diverged more than sixty years ago.
DR. SCRANTON: Good work. What else do we know?
COL. SMITH: They use overhead current and electric traction for freight shunters. So they electrified their heavy rail freight network, like in Europe or the new Chinese and Indian systems. But there’s more. Rita glimpsed what we presume to be signal lights, but they don’t follow the usual color convention—red, yellow, and green. These used blue. Nobody we know uses blue light signals.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Oh sh—sorry, gentlemen. This changes everything, doesn’t it?
COL. SMITH: I don’t see why. If they haven’t got world-walkers, they can’t touch us. And if they do have world-walkers, then as soon as they learn about us they’ll infer our ability to generate a second-strike retaliatory capability: a bomb wing of B-52s out of Thule should be enough keep them from getting frisky.
DR. SCRANTON: That’s above our pay grade, gentlemen. What else have we learned?
COL. SMITH: A lot of fine detail about the layout of a rail freight switchyard near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Nothing else, as yet. Unless you say otherwise, I’m sending her back over again tonight. Mission objective this time round will be to do an initial data retrieval from the sensor net she installed, then to plant optical imagers and audio pickups somewhere more useful. I want to target the station platform and offices. We want to confirm that they speak English, and if so what sort of accent they have. We want to get a good look at their clothing, demographics, and security protocols. It’s all essential legwork before we send Rita on an actual undercover mission: basic know-your-enemy stuff.
DR. SCRANTON: Do you have any recommendations you’d like to add, Colonel? Anything for me to pass up the chain?
COL. SMITH: Yes, I do. These people might be our long-lost cousins, but they’ve had at least sixty years of divergence, and they’ve got nukes, and they’ve shot down three of our drones. They’re dangerously competent, if not just plain dangerous. Imagine how we’d respond if parties unknown began probing us with drones, then sent world-walking HUMINT assets to check us out. We’d shit a brick, assume the worst, and reach for the big stick.
DR. SCRANTON: So you’re saying we should exercise extreme caution.
COL. SMITH: That’s exactly it, ma’am. Because if we don’t, someone’s going to get burned, and it might be us.
END TRANSCRIPT
NEAR PHOENIX, TIME LINE TWO, MAY 2020
The federal government took justifiable pride in the comprehensive scope of its communication traffic monitoring activities. It was, without doubt, a best-of-breed program. Every phone call’s end point was logged. Every e-mail was tracked. And quite possibly the NSA’s vast server farms were converting those phone calls into text and indexing them for future recovery. The Internet was totally surveilled, and the Internet of things—everything with an Internet connection, from toaster ovens to televisions—was also surveilled. Every fatphone’s or cell phone’s location was monitored as its owner moved around and it switched between cell towers for better reception. Every automobile and truck and bicycle notified the Federal Highway Administration of its location, the better to prevent interstate commerce crime. And every city block in every town with more than ten thousand souls boasted a high-definition webcam on every street corner, monitoring pedestrian and vehicle traffic.
Kurt Douglas, for his part, found it a never-ending source of wry amusement. The diminishing marginal utility of information had been a vexatious nuisance to the Stasi—the East German secret police—back in his youth. The more you knew, the more chaff you had to process with your wheat. The more true positives you had for dissent, the more false positives you had to eliminate. False positives who were good citizens falsely accused would, even if cleared, be ruined—their hearts dead to the cause. Subtle secret policemen walked softly and exercised a feather-light touch until they were certain of their prey; unfortunately by its nature the profession offered an attractive career to crude authoritarians.