Free Arisen : Genesis by Michael Stephen Fuchs Page B

up but had decided to skip. Even he knew that some lessons are better not delivered; some intel best not acquired. Lately he had been thinking a lot about the fact that as unconventional weapons – nuclear, bio, cyber, nano – got smaller, hugely more destructive, and, inevitably, more democratic… there would be no possible defense against them.
    And he said this as one of the guys responsible for the defense. Protecting us from those threats was the exact job of the intelligence community, as well as the enormous and unrivaled American military, and the sprawling research, development, and manufacturing apparatus that backed it all up.
    But deep down, Zack figured it was going to avail us nothing.
    Because remorseless technological progress meant that, one day, sooner or later, a single isolated asshole was going to have the power to kill everyone. Whether it was backpack nukes, or a bioengineered virus, or a self-replicating nanobot swarm, or a crippling cyber-attack… one day, and he thought it worth repeating, a single isolated asshole was going to have the power to kill us all.
    And so the only way anybody was going to be safe was if no one any longer wanted to fuck anybody else up. Unfortunately, that was probably going to require an overhaul of human nature, which itself was the product of six million years of hominid evolution. It was also going to require – and Zack thought this as an unreconstructed hawk and neo-con – that the U.S. stop pissing people off. Because, in the end, defenses, no matter how good, simply weren’t going to cut it.
    And that was the optimistic take.
    The other take was that there was always going to be a single isolated asshole . Someone who nursed a grudge against the world, or existence itself. Or just somebody whose neural wiring had shorted out. There would always be someone twisted or broken enough to want to flip the off switch for humanity.
    And if that were true, it would be enough to explain the Fermi Paradox. Often abbreviated to “Where is everyone?” this was the fact that, with the quadrillions of stars we see in the visible universe, statistically, the universe ought to be abuzz with the activity of untold millions of advanced civilizations.
    But we’ve never encountered a single one . Not a whisper.
    Maybe nobody made it more than a couple of centuries into technological development – before they killed themselves with it.
    Maybe nobody makes it.

Immediate Assistance
    BANG!
    Something made a sharp noise outside, just the one time. It was out behind the front door, or maybe up against it. Zack looked over to Baxter, but the younger man had nothing for him. He only shrugged. The two of them had been working quietly through the afternoon, speaking only to field phone and radio calls.
    The SEALs were still upstairs, manning their OP. Zack hesitated. He knew this kind of thing, investigating strange noises, was emphatically their job. But some terribly English part of him didn’t want to impose, didn’t want to make a scene. So instead he stood up, grabbed his gunbelt again, buckled it on, and wordlessly padded downstairs.
    Only when he got there did he remember the front door camera – and that he could have just as easily, more easily in fact, accessed its feed from his desk. But there was also a mini-LCD screwed into the wood frame of the door. As he reached out to press it on, he heard something else. Scratching.
    It was definitely scratching now, and pretty definitely right on the other side of the hunk of wood in front of his face. Which also, he remembered with gratitude, had a sixteen-gauge steel gate in front of it. The scratching went on. Zack looked over and realized his hand had stopped short of the LCD power button. He guessed that meant some part of him didn’t want to have this intel. But he mastered that part and mashed the button. The area on the other side of the door flickered to life in the dimness of the entryway.
    There was a human figure,