Thousands have died in the service of this belief, or call it a myth. Here we are twenty years later, with unemployment at record lows, student test scores at record highs, no reported racial or ethnic conflicts, and the Cubs finally winning a World Series.

Can anyone say “Utopia”?

Yes, there are still problems: The Free Nation coalition faces threats from without (though it appears we are on the verge of some kind of resolution) . . . and Keanu rises in our night sky, its purpose unknown.

But it seems to me that we all need to step back from our previous positions and ask ourselves if the Aggregates haven’t been a good thing rather than evil?

BLOGGER MINNESOTA SLIM, NEWSNIGHT&DAY.COM

Who wrote this? Some Aggregate? You are a traitor to the human race.

EXCHANGE POSTED 0811 EDT 17 APRIL 2040

EXCHANGE DELETED 0812 EDT 17 APRIL 2040

XAVIER

Fortunately, the small proteus printer did not require a large amount of energy. Working with the pilots, Pav and Chang had managed to scrounge up four batteries for electric vehicles.

It was up to Xavier to get the power from the batteries to the printer, which involved a bit of old-fashioned baring and bending of wires.

But before the plane was two hours out of Darwin, Xavier had managed to get the printer powered up. At which point the real work would begin.

Rachel and Pav had dedicated the entire aft half of the cabin to him.

Zeds helped, though not in a way Xavier would have predicted. The Sentry possessed above-average skill with the proteus and could, in an emergency, have taken over from Xavier in the fabrication of the transmitter.

For the first hours of the flight to Guam, however, the Sentry provided pure muscle, stabilizing the small, light basic printer on its work “bench,” which was actually a pair of hastily sawed boards stretched across a row of seats.

It turned out to be very helpful, because the climb out of Darwin and over the Arafura Sea, and especially crossing Papua New Guinea, was moderately bumpy . . . not enough to have bothered Xavier much had he been strapped in his seat, but vastly annoying when it came to creating connections for wires in order to power up the printer.

The bumpiness was even more destructive once Xavier and Zeds completed the wiring and fired up the printer, because then their job was to feed wads of Substance K into it, removing components for assembly after several minutes of fabrication.

“Fucking goo,” Xavier muttered more than once, each time earning a bizarre titter of some kind from Zeds. (Apparently the Sentry was amused by human profanity, or at least Xavier’s use of same.)

“How’s it going back here?” Xavier looked up, four hours into the flight, to find Rachel holding out a beverage in a bottle and a sandwich. Behind her Yahvi had refreshments for Zeds. As Xavier stood up and stretched—a painful maneuver that made him wonder just how long he had been frozen in that awkward praying position—Yahvi slid past him to sit next to the Sentry. Xavier envied her ease with the giant alien. Although Xavier was friendly with Zeds, he was still surprised and occasionally shocked by the Sentry’s actions.

Maybe you have to grow up with them, he thought. Like a dog raised with a cat. But animals didn’t always get along, no matter how you raised them. People were even worse; true, the HBs seemed to be a relatively peaceful bunch . . . mainly because they shared everything. “Everyone is equally poor,” as Harley Drake liked to say. Not so the citizens of New Orleans; Houston, Texas; and the formerly Free Nation U.S., in Xavier’s experience.

And since humans were always ripping on each other, trying to steal from or kill each other . . . how did anyone expect humans and aliens to get along?

“So,” Xavier said to Rachel, “Guam.”

“I know no more about it than you do.”

“The air force had a base there, as I recall,” Xavier said. “I wonder if the Free Nations still own it.”

“Good question,” Rachel said. Her voice betrayed her worry. “Mr. Chang?” The ancient agent worked his way back from the front of the cabin. “I know you and Mr. Edgely and your team have been very careful in arranging our trip, so just reassure me: We aren’t flying into an airport controlled by the Aggregates.”

Before Chang could answer, Edgely joined them. “Ah, that’s difficult to say.”

“Try,” Rachel said. Now Tea was turning toward them, listening from her seat. Pav, too.

“Guam is allied with Free Nation U.S.,” Chang said. “We are sure we can land, refuel, and take off without encountering their customs—”

“And our next stop is Hawaii, which is definitely part of Free Nation U.S.”

“Wait a minute, we’re being exposed to the Aggregates twice?”

“It’s geography,” Chang said. “We don’t have access to an aircraft that can fly the Pacific nonstop. Even if we did, we would have been tracked and detected. Going small, as we have, with the transponder turned off, there are only a few places you can refuel. All of them have some interaction with Free Nation U.S.” He blinked. “It would have been possible to take passage on a containership, but that would have required weeks. You wanted to get to Mexico as fast as possible; this is the optimum route.”

“It’s so risky!” Rachel said, sounding shrill—which was unusual for her. Which made Xavier even more uneasy . . . If Rachel was freaking out, what should the rest of the team be feeling?

“Yes,” Chang said. “We could all be arrested. We could all wind up in some Aggregate prison somewhere—”

“Or worse,” Edgely said, with a nervous giggle that made Xavier even more uncomfortable.

Chang stepped close to Rachel and put his hand on her arm. “This is what I always tell myself whenever I’m on a plane and the weather is bad or the flight is rough—”

“You mean, like this one?” Rachel said. There was no humor in her voice.

“Yes,” Chang said, persisting. “I tell myself that the pilot wants to live, too.”

Chang pointed at Edgely. “He’s in this, I’m in this, we’re all sharing the risk.”

Rachel took a step forward and gave Chang a brief hug. If she said something, Xavier couldn’t hear it. But it seemed to defuse things. Rachel went forward with Tea. Yahvi joined them, and even Zeds, his giant form forcing the Sentry to move down the aisle crabwise.

Xavier was alone with Chang. As he kept an eye on the proteus, still slowly sucking in Substance K through a tube, then excreting pieces of the transmitter, Xavier said, “So you guys have made this happen by throwing around a lot of money.”

“Every penny the rights earned,” Chang said.

“How many pennies are we talking? It can’t be a secret, right?”

Chang blinked; he seemed to be performing calculations. “For a package that included an hour exclusive live interview, personal stories both broadcast and print, pictures, a future book . . . twenty million Hong Kong dollars. I don’t know how many pennies that is; I’m a producer, not an accountant.”

“Is that a lot?” Xavier said. “Remember, I last dealt with U.S. dollars around 2019, when a new car cost, say, twenty thousand dollars. Not that I could ever afford one.”

“Currencies were seriously depressed by the Aggregate arrival and the collapse of the world’s economies. The fee the big companies paid to your group is the equivalent of fifty million U.S. dollars of your time, possibly more.”

Xavier couldn’t imagine a figure like that—hell, he had trouble picturing one thousand dollars. How big a wad would fifty million be? “I bet it was tricky to actually collect it—”

“You have no idea.”

“And then move it around in secret.”