James Smythe: The Machine

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

I found myself in a McDonald’s, if you can believe that, the one down by the Dali museum (and I remember thinking how appropriate that was). It was fit to burst with children and their somehow even more high-pitched parents; but it also had the huge television screens across the back wall that showed the news all day. I watched the reporters discussing the static, sticking their microphones in everybody’s faces, trying to get opinions. They cut between them – some of them at the busier parts of W1, some of them in suburb areas, a very cold-looking man in Newcastle – and then they cut to one outside Westminster, talking about the close of session. It’s clear, the girl said, that even the government isn’t sure what to make of this curious state of affairs. No, they do not, I said to myself. (After that, the woman next to me moved her children along the bench slightly, putting her coat between myself and her daughter. She tutted. Tutted!) Then they cut to another reporter right outside where we were, microphone in the faces of the tourists, who seemed entirely confused by the whole thing. I put down my godawful coffee and went out there and watched the interviews. She kept looking over at me, as if she recognized me, but she didn’t ask me anything. Sir, I heard her say to a burly Yank in sandals and a luridly floral shirt that gaped across his gut. Do you think that the static could be the first contact we have with another race? I’ll be damned if I know, he said, but no; I would guess that it would be some sort of experiment by the government, that would be my guess. His whole family squeezed themselves into the shot to voice their opinions after him, and then all the other tourists who saw the cameras followed. Savages .

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

I was speaking to the National Security Agency when the alien stuff started coming through on the wire, and the journalists at the back began shouting questions about it. Half of me wanted to step in, tell them that of course there weren’t any fucking aliens, but the other half… I mean, look, there weren’t aliens, clearly, but the alternative was far less palatable. We’d spent twenty years worrying about terrorism, about attacks, and all of a sudden there was this, and it would have been so easy for the press to panic about it more than they should have. As I say, we didn’t have a fucking clue what it was, but it wasn’t aliens, and we were crossing our fingers it wasn’t anything worse. I told the press office to ignore all questions about that, just deny it, keep the cycle spinning for a while until we knew what it actually was. None of them believed it was aliens anyway; they just wanted something to fill column inches, same as we did.

I was heading down the corridor past the briefing room when a journalist from the Post stopped me, asked me how we would treat the static if it was a first contact situation with an alien race. You really want me to answer that? I asked, and he did, so I said, We would treat it like we’d treat any other sort of first contact: with extreme fucking caution.

Ed Meany, research and development scientist, Virginia

We ran so many tests. I mean, we were into tests up to our asses, you have no idea. Picture this: there were seven individual departments of governmental science, and they each had sub-departments, three or four apiece. Each sub-department was running its own tests, so there were tests on background noise levels, radiation levels, NASA stuff, security stuff, tests to do with animals, asking people what they thought it could be. I mean, anything you can imagine, we were testing for it somewhere. There were only a couple of divisions not working on it, because they worked on the stuff nobody knew about – plausible deniability and all that jazz. We were sending out single-sentence press releases through the White House press office when we eliminated something from the running, just to try and get everything under control. Everything else was standing still. Two minutes after POTUS told us to start running the tests (even though we had already started, clearly, because we weren’t the sort of assholes who waited for a go-order from somebody who had no idea what we were actually doing) there were statements put out to the press to calm the nation, urge the emergency services to keep going, to go to work as normal. We couldn’t risk a shutdown of them, all of us knew that. So he asked everybody to keep going as normal, and I think most people did, that day. We did; the TV stations did, and I’m betting that every 7-Eleven was still selling Slushies.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

I can’t remember how long I sat in that bar and watched the TV. Hours, probably. Max, the barman, kept putting drinks in my hand, and I kept drinking them. I didn’t say anything, that I didn’t hear it, and we all just watched the news as it rolled in. They went on about the aliens for an hour, maybe more, and then finally they started asking, well, what else could it be? One of the early theories was something to do with cell phones, like that beep you get when you leave it on top of a speaker? But it didn’t stick, and that became the news cycle. What is it, what is it, over and over. An hour later, every station was answering that question by sticking anybody with an even vaguely religious background on their shows.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

How to divide the world into three camps over a single hour: make them pick between science, fantasy and religion. Give them a situation, a hypothetical situation, then give them three possible reasons for it happening – could be aliens, could be God, could be something we made ourselves and just haven’t worked out what yet – and ask them to choose. You choose the wrong one, the worst that happens is you choose again. So, we all took a stance, and there was a part of it that day – I’m not ashamed to tell you – that felt a bit like choosing between the side of the sane, and the side of… well, the other .

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

There was a priest on the sofa with the BBC presenters saying that it was God speaking to us for the first time in two thousand years. (Since He first spoke to us through His son Jesus Christ, I think those were his exact words.) We can hear His voice, but of course we cannot comprehend it, he argued. The priest was old, set in his ways, you could tell. We can’t comprehend it because He’s speaking in tongues. Then he reeled off quotes from the Bible that seemed to back up his idea, if you squinted, and said that all good Christians should go to church and pray. If you believe, he said, you’ll go, because that is how you can tell God exactly how much you love Him. He’s made contact, the priest said; now it’s your turn to answer back. That just killed it. Half the office had gone by that point, trying to beat the traffic and make it home for the day; that took most of the rest. Ten minutes later, people everywhere were flooding to their nearest church. And I mean that, it’s not me being over-emphatic; the streets were clogged.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

Leonard wasn’t a fickle man. He was a man of conviction; that’s one of the things that I most liked about him, that most attracted me to him. He knew who he was. We saw the news reports about people flocking to their churches and synagogues or what have you, and he didn’t even blink. And our closest synagogue was only minutes away, so it would have been all too easy for him to fall back on old habits.

We watched them on TV as they divided it up – and gosh, it seems like all we did that morning was watch things happening, when you really break it down. CNN had figureheads from all major religions on within an hour, and they fought over what the static was. They didn’t say it, because I suppose they couldn’t, but it actually felt as if they were fighting about whose God it was. The Greek Orthodox priest kept nearly saying something, you could tell, then holding it back; he finally spat it out as the segment was coming to a close. What if it’s Allah, he said, or somebody else, Ganesh, Buddha; just not whoever it is that you already worship? What if you’ve got it wrong? There was this look that went across them all, then, because I don’t think that they had even considered that possibility. Typical, Leonard said. An hour spent in the presence of the maker, and already they’re starting to wonder if they picked the right team.