If you think you know somebody who resembles any of the characters here, congratulations, but you're wrong - any similarity between the characters in this story and any real person is purely coincidental, since all of these characters are figments of my imagination.

This is my story, not yours. Don't sell it or put it on a pay site. You can keep it and/or give it away with all of this information intact, but if you make money off of it without my permission, you're breaking the law and pissing me off.

Prototype Ten: Chapter 2 (no-sex)
(C)Copyright 2005 - Shakes Peer2B
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"What are we looking at, Mr. Secretary?" The President asked as he took his seat in the situation room of the White House.

"I wish I knew, sir." The Secretary of Defense shook his head. "The people on meteor watch were first to notice them. At first they thought it might be an uncharted meteor shower, but then they noticed that they were decelerating, matching orbits with Earth. We got these pictures from some of our satellites before the ships took them out."

The screens showed various views of a number of oddly shaped craft. No two bore the same shape, though each seemed to be approximately the same mass as the others.

"How big are those things?" The President asked the first thing that came to mind.

"Our best guess is that each one could swallow several supertankers and have room left over for dessert." The Defense Secretary answered.

"Are they hostile?" The President stared in wonder at what appeared to be living proof that the creationist ideology that had regained popularity of late was, if not wrong, at least incomplete.

"We can't say for sure, sir." The Secretary replied. "Clearly, they have weapons and know how to use them, since every military satellite in orbit, not just ours, was destroyed within seconds of their arrival, but they haven't touched communication or weather satellites. That could signal either hostile intent or self protection. They might have decided to combine a self-protective strike with a show of force for our benefit."

"Naturally, we've tried to contact them..." The president looked around the room.

A man wearing a rumpled sportcoat and horn-rimmed glasses cleared his throat. He looked as if he felt completely out of place, and indeed, amongst the sharply tailored business suits, crisp military uniforms, and hundred dollar haircuts, his clothing and disheveled, thinning hair set him well apart from the others.

"Uh, Dr. Sobieski, Mr. President." He mumbled. Fortunately, the microphone in front of him amplified his voice enough for the others to hear, despite his mumbling. "Current head of SETI. That stands for, uh 'Search...'"

"'...for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, yes, I know Doctor." The President finished for him. "I've always hoped you guys would come up with something exciting for us one day, but I never imagined it being quite like this. What have you got?"

"Well, nothing, sir." The scientist scratched nervously at his bald spot. "We've tried communicating with them on every wavelength we can produce, and listened on every wavelength we can detect, and frankly, we're stumped. Not only have we not gotten any response from them, but we can't detect any sort of emission from their ships, not even anything that could be construed as ship-to-ship communication."

"When you say you've tried everything, what does that encompass?" The President probed.

"Every electromagnetic wavelength we know about from extreme low frequencies to extreme high frequencies, on into infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, and beyond. We've started with basics - counting pulses and so forth, all the way to complex math and physics, but to no avail." The scientist shook his head. "We've even experimented with modulated gravity waves, x-rays and gamma radiation at low levels, but nothing has elicited a response."

"Maybe we should be good neighbors and pay them a visit," The President joked, "welcome them to the neighborhood, so to speak. While we're at it, we might ask them if they're going to pay up for the destroyed satellites." His voice turned serious once more. "Are we absolutely certain that this isn't one of our present neighbors exhibiting unexpected capabilities?"

The President's National Security Advisor spoke up. "The Russians shut down their space program decades ago, and frankly, their economy couldn't sustain a program even a tenth this ambitious. The European Union has the bucks, but there's so much infighting, and security's so lax in their space program that they'd never manage something like this without us knowing about it. The chinese program is still in its infancy. No sir, I can't say with 100% certainty, but it is highly unlikely that any of them are responsible for this."

"If someone else on earth owns these toys, I want to know about it yesterday!" The President said, "Meanwhile, on the assumption that these ships {i}are{/i} from outer space, let's find out how to communicate with them. They haven't attacked, so maybe they {i}are{/i} friendly. Let's find out."

The Security Advisor followed the President as he left the situation room. "Mr. President, I didn't want to speculate in there, because I have no way to resolve the issue one way or another, but our study of the photographs taken by our satellites before they were destroyed gives us reason to believe that these ships, while probably not of Earth origin, nonetheless exhibit some of the characteristics one might expect of ships built by Humans."

He drew a sheaf of 8x10 photos from a folder labeled 'Top Secret' and handed them to the President.

"What am I looking at here, Bill?" The President asked.

"This is apparently a service hatch on one of the ships." William Schultz, the National Security Advisor answered. "Each of the ships have a number of them, though they're difficult to pick up, given the vastness of these hulls. They seem to be the only openings in any of the vessels."

The President's brow furrowed in a frown. "But those ships could hold thousands of people, beings, whatever crews them. How big are these hatches?"

"As near as we can determine without nearby size referents," Bill answered, "they seem to be about two feet square."

"Okay, if we assume that the occupants of these ships entered through these hatches, they can't be that large. Certainly not much bigger than us, so there could be tens or hundreds of thousands of them in those ships, but it doesn't seem to make any sense to try to board that many beings through such restrictive openings." The President stared at the pictures as if an answer would pop out at him.

"As I said, Mr. President," Bill replied, "they appear to be service hatches. From the fact that they're more or less uniformly distributed around the hull, we believe they were used in building the ships, and that the ships were built in space, then the hatches were sealed. It's puzzling that there don't seem to be any cargo or passenger portals, but what I wanted you to notice, if you'll look at the next photo, is the pattern of rivets around the hatches."

"Okay, so what?"

"Sir, there are no rivets anywhere on these hulls that we can determine," the Advisor continued, "except around these hatches. That suggests that the hulls were grown, molded, extruded or somehow created as a single, seamless piece, and the hatches added later. The intriguing thing, however, is that this is exactly the same sort of rivet pattern we use in building warplanes. There is no particular reason for that pattern other than it was the first pattern we hit upon that worked, and rather than mess with success, we've continued using it. Even the Russians use the same pattern, having copied it from stolen plans and downed aircraft. Many other patterns have been discovered since that work equally well, but this is the one we use."

"So what are the chances that some alien race stumbled on the same pattern by accident?" The President asked.

"Small, but not impossible." Bill replied "The evidence is not conclusive, by any means, but it suggests that these hatches, at least, were added by Humans from Earth with experience in building Earth warplanes."

"All right," The President asked, "what else?"

"Nothing at the moment. Our people are going over the photos with a fine toothed comb, and we're working to launch a stealth satellite that will be able to get us more data, but that's several weeks away." Bill replied.

"Don't launch without my say-so, Bill." The President admonished. "Expedite those preparations, but I want to try to be damned sure we don't provoke these beings, who- or what-ever they are, if we can help it."

"That may not be our call, Sir." Bill said. "We have indications that the Chinese are pushing up their next launch and there's been a lot of encrypted traffic between Moscow and their space-station. Word is that the EU is readying another probe, as well."

"All right, stay on top of it. I'll try to get on the horn with the leaders of those countries and see if we can reach a consensus on how to proceed."