A story about…

It's a two day journey from the East Coast to the protected location where Warren Tyler now resides, with frequent security checks along the way. Quite who he is at risk from is the great unspoken question – an observer given only the basic facts would expect it to be both the outraged masses of the general public, and the major multinational corporation which he so spectacularly betrayed. But it seems that no-one really cares about Tyler, and he has become something of a forgotten figure, the peoples of America and the world having sunk into a great apathy since the Departure took place.

Warren Tyler himself is an affable man of around thirty. He showed me around his home, not seeming at all ill-at-ease there, for all that he is effectively a prisoner. When I asked him why he had finally chosen to go on the record to NewsPost about what happened, he shrugged. 'Maybe I've got used to seeing my name in the papers,' he said.

I began our interview by asking him about his background.

Pretty standard, to be honest – I majored in Media Psychology at one of the Ivy League places – I'm sure my alma mater won't thank me for naming it! – interned with the corporation for three months, and made enough connections to get onto one of their grad recruitment programs. On these things you kind of get moved around between the different departments until they get an idea of where you'd be best suited.

And in your case that was...?

Well, my ideas were well-received in Marketing, less so in Development. The head guy there had some crazy scheme about new flavours, tropical fruit. Have you ever tasted carbonated papaya juice? (Grimaces.) It would've been a disaster, I tell you.

So I assumed, what with everything, I was headed for Marketing or maybe Sales. Except I was recruited into what they called Special Projects – the section that didn't appear on the corporate structure diagram. Very hush hush, and pretty prestigious for a new boy.

What kind of Special Projects were you involved in?

Man, you wouldn't believe some of it. I thought it was just going to be new ways of sabotaging the opposition – 'the only time when P means number two', that sort of thing – but some of those guys were complete whackos. Or so I thought, anyway. But it was never dull and the cash was great, so I kept my mouth shut and got on with it for the next year or so, until...

What are your personal memories of Arrival Day?

Same as everyone else's. Thought it was a hoax to begin with, that big glob in the sky over New Delhi. It just seemed weird. Why would aliens land in India, of all places? I mean, everyone knows – everyone knew – they'd touch down in Washington or New York. Or maybe LA. It's obvious, right?

Well, then they broke in on all the TV and radio broadcasts and suddenly we knew this wasn't a hoax. Everyone spent the day around a TV or monitor with the rolling news on. We were just like everyone else for two, three days. Couldn't believe it. It was like being in a movie.

What did you make of the aliens' initial message?

How'd you mean?

Well, did you have any thought at that time that –

Oh, no way. 'Fear not humanity, we come in peace. Your culture and laws will be sacrosanct to us. We bring only hope and gifts.' I mean, it just sounded so corny, you know. It took, ah, kind of an effort of will just to treat it seriously. Anyway, pretty soon the word came down – get back to work. Implement the contingency plans.

What contingency plans?

The ones that SP had drawn up in the event of something like this happening.

Excuse me. Can I just get this straight – a soft drinks manufacturer had contingency plans in place in case First Contact with an alien civilisation should occur?

Hell yeah. You don't stay world number one without keeping all the boxes ticked, you know? I gotta say the plans themselves had nothing to do with everything that came later. You should be clear about that.

So what was in the plans?

Oh, just stuff to make sure that people didn't forget that, whatever was going on around them, there was still only one drink that refreshed and stimulated and tasted great too, and that they should keep on buying it no matter what. You probably saw the commercials we put out with that kinda thrust. 'Some things always stay the same.'

I remember the one with the little girl offering the alien leader a bottle. That one was controversial even at the time.

(Shrugs.) Well, I thought that was kind of off-message myself. I was all for keeping the alien stuff firmly in the background. Continuity, that was the focus. Business as usual.

Isn't that rather a strange message in the wake of the most important event –

Listen, people were always going on about 'the dawn of a new era' even before Arrival Day. The cold war ends! It's a whole new era! Obama elected! Nothing will ever be the same! The CSI season finale! Everything will change forever! It was just spin, all of it.

You're comparing the arrival of an alien ship with the season finale of a TV show?

I'm just saying you don't lose money by being cautious. And, anyway, we had a pretty good thing going here on Earth, right? It wasn't like we were crying out for them to rescue us or fix the world.

The Petition of the Hundred was arguably just that –

Yeah, yeah, so a bunch of guys in the Third World started making a fuss about living conditions and stuff. You'll always get some of that.

So when the aliens offered their first Gift...

That was the water stuff, right?

Yes. (The 'water stuff' was actually a benign micro-organism which purified fresh water making it safe for human consumption no matter what its previous condition had been. The micro-organism bred and spread naturally and did not harm any naturally-occurring life except parasites and harmful bacteria. The implications for healthcare in the developing world were, of course, enormous. As a side effect, the water was left with a distinctive taste – those lucky enough to experience it have described it as being like 'frozen sunlight'.)

Well, we were fine with it until the pilot projects in Kenya and Bangladesh really got going. Then it was panic stations all round, because suddenly sales in those areas crashed. Like, almost to zero. People weren't going to buy soft drinks when they could get something that tasted better out of the tap.

Then we heard that people were starting to export tap water – tap water, for God's sake – to Europe and North America, even though the water there was safe to begin with. Word was getting around. We could maybe stand to lose the Third World as a market, but not our home territories. We screamed to Congress and the Hill about it as loud as we could, and they were really sympathetic, but no real use. It was actually a guy in our Legal department who came up with the answer.

Which was...?

We contacted the aliens through the open link they had and asked if they'd meant what they said about preserving our culture, because our corporation was pretty culturally vital and they seemed to be trying to shut us down.

'Culturally vital'?

Yeah, of course. We're part of the fabric of everyday life. That bottle's iconic, you know? Why do you think Santa Claus wears red and white? 'Cause we pay him to. (Grins.)

So anyway, we got the impression the aliens always erred on the side of caution in this kind of situation. After a tense day or so they got back to us, all apologies for any trouble they'd caused us. Then they announced globally that they were obliged to withdraw the water stuff from Earth. They didn't say why, of course – they were discreet. I liked that about them.

This of course provoked angry responses from across the developing world...

Look, we were back to the status quo. It wasn't like they'd actually lost anything. Things calmed down when the aliens came up with Gift number two.

(The second Gift was a symbiote living inside human beings which filtered and actively neutralised any harmful substances the host might ingest or become exposed to as soon as they entered the body.)

Now, what happened with that I blame the aliens for. They could've tweaked the thing so it didn't react to caffeine, I'm sure of it.

Apparently the levels of sugar in your product also –

It wasn't just us on that one, anyway. A whole raft of big name companies stood to take a massive hit or even shut down entirely. Us, the Golden Arches, big tobacco – we're talking massive brands here, gone forever.

People could still drink –

Yeah, but apparently it just tasted incredibly blah if you had the symbio-thing inside you. You wouldn't enjoy it at all. Same with having a burger or smoking a cigarette. The projections started looking shaky again.

Because of the business with the water thing, we had a head start on thinking of a way of tackling it, and we did. We got the aliens on the link and pointed out the great value we placed on freedom of choice, how central it was to stuff like the Constitution and the UN Charter. And the symbio-thing was screwing with people's right to choose.

It did also protect against 90% of poisons and infections, not to mention many viruses including HIV – -

Whatever. The aliens were pretty nice about it, again, though we kind of sensed they were getting a bit bemused by everything. It didn't matter because we were still in business. The aliens shut down all the symbio-things they'd already distributed and went back to the drawing board.

It was at this point that the hundred poorest countries who'd petitioned the aliens for help walked out of the UN, wasn't it?

Well, look, it's a tough world, isn't it? You've got to look after your interests as best you can. The aliens were kind of reluctant about the last Gift, weren't they? They took their time deciding to hand it over.

Yes, I believe they said the technology would normally have been considered too advanced for us. They thought we might lack the maturity to make appropriate use of Mass Universal Synthesis.

Fancy name for what was basically a 3D-photocopier machine. The aliens made another big speech about 'breaking the chains of scarcity' , didn't they? It was when people figured out just what the MUS units could do that people got excited. And it wasn't long after that that our big brains really started panicking.

Those MUS machines could analyse and copy anything, even each other. They had internal power and would run forever, so the aliens said. They could churn out anything you wanted them to, day after day. Everyone could've had their own one soon enough and made their own food, clothes, cars, whatever, for free.

Your corporation realised the significance of this?

We realised it was a catastrophe in the making. Look, if you had a MUS unit in your house, all you'd ever need to buy would be one bottle of our stuff – you could just get the machine to scan it, store the analysis, and generate a new copy for free every time you got thirsty. You didn't even need to buy a bottle – you could just borrow your neighbour's. The machines were going to put us out of business – put everyone out of business. The economy would be utterly devastated.

But if everyone had a MUS unit of their own, then surely the need for a conventional economic system –

Look, this is gonna sound strange, but I kinda like the world we live in. I like its values, you know, hard work, competition, entrepreneurialism. None of us in SP relished the thought of all of that getting swept away. So we got to it.

And this time it was me who cracked the problem. The reason we've been number one for a century is our great taste, right? And that was down to our secret recipe, which we had a legal right to protect. Anyone sticking our stuff in a MUS would be able to figure out the recipe for themselves using the analyser. So we told the aliens that we wanted our products to be exempt from MUS copying, to protect our intellectual property. That was all. We didn't know how they were going to react...

And when they did react...?

I thought they were taking it a bit personally. That last message – 'we see you are a proud race, with no need of our aid. We apologise for intruding on your world' – it seemed a bit snippy to me. Then the ship left and all the MUS units shut down. We were back where we'd been a few months earlier. Big sighs of relief in my department, I can tell you.

And the skies have been silent ever since. You don't feel personally responsible for anything that's happened?

Look, it's a big universe. Sooner or later some other aliens are gonna arrive, and hopefully next time they'll be ones who understand the principles of a market economy.

I take full responsibility for blowing the whistle on the corporation's role in the refusal of the Gifts, of course. I can hardly duck out of that. (Grins.) But seeing all the recriminations, and the rise in international tensions... I felt we had to hold our hands up.

How do you answer those who claim your main motive was actually resentment at not being rewarded more extravagantly for your part in preventing the spread of the third Gift?

You're going to make enemies if you succeed inside any big organisation. That's all I have to say about that.

Your former employer is, now, number two in the world market, sales throughout the world having collapsed in the wake of your revelations. Factories were burned in Latin America and Asia. What are your feelings about this?

It'll bounce back. We have good people in marketing and a taste you just can't beat. And, you know, people have short memories about this kind of thing. Outrage lives in a different part of the brain to the one the taste buds connect to. The public's sensible – they'll come back to us when they feel we've paid our dues. It's just a question of time.

As a journalist I try to be objective, but I can't help leaving Tyler's residence with a vague feeling of repugnance – for what, I can't quite place – and also almost of pity, for the man's isolation from society has clearly begun to affect him. The idea of the events he was involved in being forgiven or even forgotten, as he believes will ultimately happen, is surely an absurd fantasy.

It's a hot day and I have foolishly turned down an offer from Tyler's protectors to drive me to my motel, and after walking for a while in the sun I am very grateful for the liquid refreshment Tyler gifted me before I left.

It takes me a full five minutes to remember just what it is I'm drinking and to connect that to the thoughts still circling in my head. And then I think that Tyler may have a point after all, and I feel a chill entirely unconnected to the cold drink in my hand.

Awix

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