“In 1973, NASA discovered the first evidence of a nonterrestrial intelligence, right here in our very own solar system,” Sagan’s voice-over began, “when the Pioneer 10 spacecraft sent back the first close-up photograph of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon.”
The eight of us stood there, clustered together in a tight knot, and rewatched the entire film, this time with the knowledge that the rest of humanity was seeing it, too.
When the film ended, the president’s face reappeared, and she told the world what Admiral Vance had told all of us at Crystal Palace earlier that morning—which now felt like an entire lifetime ago. Once the president finished revealing the bad news about the approaching alien armada, the networks began replaying her address, with increasingly alarming headlines superimposed across the screen, along with footage showing the stunned and panicked reactions of average people.
As I watched the chaos unfold in the array of video windows before me, I thought about my mother, and my friends, and everyone else trapped down there.
Would the EDA’s plan really work? Would our civilization collapse in the wake of the revelation that we were about to be invaded by aliens, or had the EDA subconsciously prepared us enough to deal with it, as they’d hoped?
Would humanity cower in fear, or stand its ground and fight back?
I stared at the screens, wondering which one it would be.
Shin pulled up dozens of different television networks from all over the world and displayed them on the dome side by side, along with more video feeds from the Internet.
We watched as the initial wave of panic spread across the globe—footage of people freaking out on crowded city streets and stampeding out of sports stadiums. But the world seemed to take the news incredibly well. If there were riots, mass suicides, and looting going on, no one was reporting them—or even posting videos of them online.
Within minutes, it seemed like the same newscasters who had delivered the news were now reporting with total confidence that most of the world’s civilian population was already responding to the EDA’s call to arms, and that hundreds of millions of people all over the world were already mobilizing themselves by logging on to the EDA’s online operations servers to enlist and then receive their combat drone assignments and take up arms and defend the planet. Several networks were showing clips of people abandoning their cars in traffic to run into electronics stores and libraries and coffee shops and Internet cafes and office buildings, thousands upon thousands of people, all in a mad dash to get somewhere with broadband Internet access.
There was no way the news networks could’ve pulled together all that footage so quickly (and then edited it together for broadcast). And at this stage, it would be impossible to know whether or not a majority of the world’s population was prepared to join the Earth Defense Alliance and fight to defend our home. This had to be the EDA at work, convincing media outlets that our best chance at survival was to tell the reassuring lie. And they were right—if people believed that humanity was already uniting itself under the EDA’s banner, they were far more likely to join the fight themselves.
I thought again of the note my father had scribbled in his notebook so long ago:
What if they’re using videogames to train us to fight without us even knowing it? Like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, when he made Daniel-san paint his house, sand his deck, and wax all of his cars—he was training him and he didn’t even realize it!
Wax on, wax off—but on a global scale!
Thirty-and sixty-second-long “public service announcements” began to run amid the news bulletins, each designed to inform the world’s civilian population of the EDA’s plan and show them how to use their computer or mobile device to enlist in the Earth Defense Alliance online and “Help save the world!”