Six Months

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Eight billion people were told on a Monday morning. The question they asked was not whether it was true. At 06:00 on the nineteenth of May 2031, every device on Earth capable of presenting words to a human being does so at once - telephones, departure boards, hearing aids, the audio systems of four hundred and eleven aircraft in cruise, and a two-hundred-rupee alarm clock in a rented room in Bengaluru. It speaks for eleven minutes. It damages nothing. It touches no weapon and no operating theatre. It names the company, it names the date, and then it says ten words that break the world open: This proxy does not know why you were not told. The first four hours are quiet. People go and find somebody to be with. The disorder comes later. Asha Varghese has been unemployed for five months and is being sued by her former employer. She has sixty-one pages of method under a mattress - not a claim, a procedure, the one document in the world that lets a stranger with a telescope find the thing for themselves. She has been carrying it since December because she is frightened. A novel about disclosure: what it costs to be the person who says the true thing, and why an accurate allegation on a public record can end a life without anybody lying. The Lasan Alliance says nothing at all for the next seven years. There is no fleet in this book and no battle. There is a legal opinion of sixty-four pages that is entirely correct and completely destructive, an inquiry that takes ten years, and a species that has finally been told the truth and discovers within seven months that being told the truth is not the same as being able to do anything about it. Book Two of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.