Today would be a big one....
Bruce, the Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth, has spent centuries trying to protect, develop and unite humanity.
When a distinctly non-human arrival seems to offer a way to do this, once and for all, he wi...
At the head of the Space Spire, the elevator chimed perkily as it disgorged the Northern Hemisphere personnel of the United Nations of Earth in the pressurised section of Spaceport Longyearbyen. The elevator had been a miracle of novomodern engineering, and the Secretary General remembered vividly coming here as a child, projecting to the platform in the early days of projection, itself a rare and expensive treat, enthralled with the broadening potential of the future after a past marked by collapse, conflict and failure (not knowing, at the time, that far worse times were coming), watching as the first few astronauts to make the journey stepped out onto this very platform, while his symbionts filled in all kinds of details about who they were and how they had come to be walking there. Maybe he'd call up the memory recordings from his archives when they boarded, while they were still in range of the servers that he kept his childhood on.
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They slowly assembled, yawning, dishevelled, jet lagged and notably suffering the effects of more human mobility that they had experienced in decades, maybe even a century.
"I still don't see why it has to be so.... Physical" sniffed the Ambassador for NWEU, notably uncomfortable and seemingly disgusted by the presence of the bodies of his colleagues. "We can... bear witness... perfectly well through projections. Unless there is some mysterious extra sense we believe we'll be using that is hitherto undiscovered? Perhaps something the 1000 AIQ sentience which built the projectors may have missed? After it was done analysing almost all known data on human senses and literally billions of brain scans? Hmmm?" His sarcasm dripped with snobbish condescension for the human intelligences (augmented or not) around him.
"Bandwidth and the Doppler effect" said the Secretary General. "NUNS may be compromised, and it has the only projector in near-earth orbit designed to carry multiple human intelligences in real-time. We need to respond in real-time, because we don't know what's going to happen. Also, the ship is fast. The faster it moves the more difficult it is to maintain a connection, if one of us drops out while we're in transit it would be impossible to reestablish contact until we were stationary. That's time we don't have spare. Not to mention the fact that we don't know what an abrupt connection termination might do to your psyche. And I do so value your psyche."
"Still," he pouted, sulkily, "you're the de facto ruler of planet Earth - I don't see why we had to come too."
"Democracy, Kenneth." The Secretary General snarled, caustically. "Also," he continued, more gently, "we can't afford a single point of failure." He recalled with a shiver the conviction of some of his symbionts of their collective impending demise. The more people, the greater the probability of at least one survivor. He knew Kenneth's symbionts would already have run similar projections when he said it.
Kenneth cocked an eyebrow. "Well, indeed. Not too thrilled to be your.... Spare part... though."
"Humanity appreciates your sacrifice."
"No, they don't, they don't even know what we're doing." Which was true. They had used a complex blend of hallucinogenics, augmented reality and hypnosis to construct a long debate about, inter alia, trade with Mars, the maintenance of the Arthur C Clarke Array, the need to accept the presence of the anomalies and entities without exhibiting potentially harmful levels of curiosity, and potential future upgrades to the 3T network. These had been stored on a sentient server, and right now the thoughts of each delegate during the meeting were being live streamed on the 3T as though that was what was happening in the United Nations of Earth that day. Conversely, if all went well, fabricated risk assessments were ready to roll and the current mission be relayed at a later date as if it was happening then, not now, so that (hopefully) nobody would know there had ever been a fake. It was the first time politicians had deceived the public in centuries and that grated with all of them bitterly, but they couldn't risk hysteria.
