Distant Atmospheres Daily 1000

The Briefing Room Lights Dimmed and the Screen, which...

One Hundred Days of 1000 Words-a-Day: Day 2 of 100

The briefing room lights dimmed and the screen, which had already been on but which had been largely too dim to be seen now was more clearly, more vividly visible. At the top, the words ‘Cognitive Perception and the Now-Moment Width” ran across the screen. Below that was a photograph of a Kleesi in its tank, the sensing tip of its main tentacle sticking out of the fluid and pointed toward the camera.

“Good afternoon,” the captain standing behind the podium started. “I’m Captain Telez from R5. This briefing is classified Yankee Blue, no recording permitted.” The no-recording reminder was superfluous; all of the briefing room’s occupants had surrendered their cellphone in the foyer upon entry into the building, but regulations were regulations—the script called for the Yankee Blue warning, and Telez delivered it. There were officials in the room which would not have allowed themselves to be out of communication, even for a short briefing, but those for whom such a thing might actually have been an issue had assistants who would enter the briefing room and personally inform them of a real-world event of some kind. General Peterson’s aide was presently standing in the foyer with the general’s classified cellphone, personal cellphone, and White House pager, and General Livingston’s case, a similarly equipped aide stood on the building’s first floor ready to respond. On the flightline, there were two fully fueled and crewed C-141s with ‘silver bullet’ trailers loaded ready to respond if a need suddenly developed for the presence of either general anywhere in the world.

Captain Telez flipped a page in his script and the screen transitioned to the first content slide, another static photograph of a Kleesi. This one was a top-down view of a Kleesi laid out on a table, its tentacles stretched out and its gas bag deflated. “As you all know, our initial contact with the Kleesi occurred last year when the ship from Klee 51 arrived, assumed orbit, and began broadcasting. In the intervening eight months, we established contact and, with considerable help from the Kleesi, worked out a method of communication. The Kleesi are much better at English than we are at Kleesian, but the initial Kleesi who deployed to work with our language experts have made it possible for us to have a good reliability in communication exchanges.”

“Ah, one moment, Captain,” General Livingston held up her finger and then leaned over to Peterson, who was seated to her left. “Sir, I have my doubts about the reliability. We might be fooling ourselves, at least a little bit.”

Peterson frowned and nodded. “Alright. Go ahead, Captain.”

The slide changed again, this time to a line drawing of the parts of the Kleesi sensing tip. “With a good deal of help from the Kleesi, we are informed that their sensing tip, which you see here, is able to perceive the world visually with the structure identified as A, by molecular sampling using the structure identified as B, and are able to monitor vibrations with the structure identified in the drawing as C.”

“So that’s its eye, its nose, and its ear, then,” Livingston said.

“Ah, yes, Ma’am, roughly,” Telez said. “The structure identified as D here does not have an analog in humans. We are told that this structure is used to perceive what the Kleesi call the now-moment.”

“Now-moment,” Livingston responded. “What’s that?”

“The now-moment is the segment of time that one is able to perceive directly,” Telez responded. “A person is aware of what is going on from moment to moment, but when one of the moments is gone, it becomes the past and remains only as a memory. Our ability to perceive the future appears to be completely nonexistent until that future becomes the present.”

One of the lieutenant colonels sitting in one of the chairs around the table raised his hand. “Captain, if I may?” The captain nodded and the colonel turned toward the head of the table, where Patterson and Livingston sat next to each other. “There’s been some research done on insects, especially house flies, that suggests that the house fly’s perception of time is much faster than ours. Thus, events around the house fly occur much more slowly. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to slap one—they have a lot more time to see the hand coming and respond to it than it seems to us.”

General Peterson waved his hand. “Hmm. Continue, Captain.”

The slide changed again. “If we are understanding the Kleesi correctly, and as I say, our reliability is high on the exchange, the Kleesi have a longer now-moment than we do.” He turned pages on his script. “The Kleesi report that their now-moment is about seven-tenths of a second.”

“Seven-tenths of a second,” General Livingston repeated. “So what does that mean?”

“Ma’am, it appears that the Kleesi are aware of events as far as about three-tenths of a second into the past and about three-tenths of a second into the future in a direct way, as we are directly aware of events occurring around us from moment to moment.”

“So they can see the future?” Livingston’s tone was incredulous, but already Peterson and others around the table were calculating the consequences of having a direct awareness of the immediate past and, more interestingly, the immediate future. “How do they do that?”

“We’re not sure, Ma’am,” the captain responded. “The Kleesi have an explanation, but we’re still working on converting it to something we can understand. It has something to do with entangled quantum pairs involving fast-decaying particles.”

“Of course it does,” Livingston said sarcastically. Then she turned to Peterson. “Isn’t this exactly how you would go about roping a tribal leader into cooperating with you and giving you their trinkets? Convince them that you have some sort of superpower?”
Peterson didn’t respond to her but his gaze was focused on the slide. “I don’t know, Tom,” he said, using the captain’s first name. “It seems to me that all you need to remember the past is a good memory. When it comes to the future, since it hasn’t happened yet, I don’t see how you can really know what it is going to be.”

“We don’t really know either, sir, but the Kleesi have demonstrated. I have a video clip.”

“Are you people down there in R5 convinced?” Livingston asked sharply.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Telez responded. “It’s not unanimous, but the evidence seems to be convincing.”

“How did you test this?” Peterson asked.

“We set up a device to generate a random number between 1 and 6. The Kleesi identified as T14 sat before it and predicted the number. We were able to set up a mechanism whereby T14 was able to indicate his choice of number 15-hundredths of a second before the number was revealed.”

“And how did old T14 do?” Livingston interrupted.

“Well, Ma’am, he was 100% reliable after 30 trials.”

There was a moment of silence in the room, and then General Peterson seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. He stood up. “Alright, Captain, that’ll be all.” The lights in the room came on. The general gestured to Livingston. “Come along with me, won’t you?”

General Livingston stood and followed Peterson out of the door.

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