He sighed heavily. “And I managed to access some of that classified data.”
“How?” I asked. “When you were stuck up here and he was back on Earth?”
“He linked his computer network to ours,” my father said. “So that he could share new builds of Terra Firma and Armada with us as soon as they were ready for testing. That allowed me to gain access to his research files on the Europans—which contained a lot of the top-secret data about our interactions with them over the years … and everything I learned from them confirmed the theory I’d already been forming for almost a decade.”
I nodded, trying to hide how nervous he was making me.
“Lay it on me,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Here goes.” He took a deep breath.
“Ever since we made first contact with them, the aliens have been intercepting our movies and television broadcasts. Then they edit clips from them together and transmit them back to us, once a year, just prior to the Jovian Opposition,” he told me. “But only a handful of people have ever been allowed to see the transmissions.” He motioned to the screen. “Now I need you to see them, too.”
A barrage of these alien-edited video clips began to appear on the screen—and every last one of them depicted some form of human conflict. I glimpsed a lot of World War II newsreel footage, intercut with photos and video of the dozens of other large-scale military conflicts that had occurred in the following decades. But these images of real-life war were intercut with scenes from a lot of old war movies and television series. It almost seemed as if the Europans were unable to differentiate between reality and fiction. Either that, or they were intercutting the two on purpose, in an effort to make some kind of point.
Even weirder—I also began to spot brief scenes taken from dozens of science fiction films—all of them featuring hostile alien invaders of some kind. In the space of just a few seconds, I spotted shots from various films in the Trek and Wars franchises, mixed with shots from the various versions of War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, V, and even—God help us—Battlefield Earth. Nothing from the friendly alien movie genre, though. Not so much a single glimpse of E.T., Starman, ECHO, or Alf.
“Look at these transmissions,” he said as the barrage of clips continued to flash on the screen, showing a grotesque menagerie of extraterrestrial invaders plucked from the entire history of science fiction films—Aliens, Predators, Triffids, Transformers—you name it.
“These images, and the way in which they’re arranged—I think it’s some kind of a message, Son,” he said. “An intentionally cryptic one. It’s like—like they’re holding up a mirror, so that we can see ourselves from their perspective.”
The rapid montage of unsettling imagery flashing on the screen suddenly segued into a series of two-and three-second-long clips from summer blockbusters like Independence Day, Armageddon, and Deep Impact, most of them from scenes that depicted all of humanity uniting as one species, to save itself and its home from a deadly comet, a rogue asteroid, or from a wide variety of hostile alien invaders.
“I think the Europans have been studying us and our popular culture since before we even made first contact with them,” my father said, raking his hands through his hair. “I think they watched all of the science fiction films and television shows we’ve made that depict an alien invasion of our planet, and they realized it was one of our species’ worst nightmares. So they set about making it happen. They proceeded to stage an alien invasion just like the ones we’d always imagined. The kind depicted in our fiction, complete with giant motherships, starship dogfights, killer robots—all of it!”
My father stared at me, waiting for me to say something, but I was momentarily speechless. I could only continue to stare at the screen, where the images kept coming. I spotted stills from the reboots of The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and War of the Worlds, and then a clip from an older film, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.
“I knew for certain these images were intended to be a message when I heard this,” he said, tapping his QComm. “Each of these bursts of images ends with a series of five tones.”
It was the opening of “Wild Signals” from John Williams’ score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The five tones the government has their keyboardist start off with when they play that epic game of Simon with the aliens at the end of the movie.
La-Luh-La-BAH-BAH!