Be My Enemy Read Online Free PDF Page A

deep and hard and long—long for a machine intelligence. In human terms, it was something in the region of three minutes. The Thryn Sentiency spoke.
    The world of 1963 was nervous, paranoid, bad tempered—adolescent. It would have broken at the revelation that alien intelligence had arrived. The USSR, the USA, and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council made a deal with the Thryn Sentiency. Six years later, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the Moon, what the camera did not show was the figure waiting there to meet them, the figure of a little lady with kind eyes and grey skin. She wore no heavy space suit, her skin was bare to vacuum. Madam Moon, a construct of the Thryn Sentiency. She watched them plant the stars and stripes and salute it, but the Moon was not theirs. In the six years since the agreement, the Thryn coffee can had unfolded into replicators and fabricators and constructors and had dug deep into the dark side of the Moon, sending tendrils of Thryn technology down through the rock like a fungus. Solar collectors opened like mushrooms on an autumn morning all across the South Pole-Aitken Basin. By 1983, the agreed date for the conspiracy to end, the Thryn Sentiency had converted the entire far half of the moon into a terrifying warren of spires and pits and webs and fans that looked a little bit like a science fiction movie city and a little bit like a dead, white coral reef, but most of all like nothing anyone had ever seen or even imagined before. All the way down to the Moon's cold, dead core.
    Laura and Tejendra had not been born when the Thryn star-seed arrived. In 1983 Laura had been in Year 9 at Rectory Road Comprehensive, writing Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet on her pencil case in felt marker. Tejendra had been choosing his A-Levels for Oxford while his mum and dad begged him to go to Imperial because it meant he wouldn't have to live away from home. August 27, 1983, twenty years to the minute after the Thryn seed-ship sensors almost touched off a nuclear war, that was the “What Were You Doing When?” moment. The great deception was exposed. There were protests and riots and outcries, but they died down, as they always do, and people realized that the alien was on the dark side of the Moon and quickly forgot about it. Out of sight was out of mind. And the occasional piece of Thryn tech that made it down and onto the streets made up for looking up at a huge harvest moon and never quite seeing it the same way. History stopped. There were no more “What Were You Doing When?” moments.
    No , Everett M thought. There are no more big moments like that, when everyone shares history. But there are small ones, private ones. What were you doing when your dad was killed in a stupid, needless traffic accident?
    “It's always been like this for me, sir,” Everett M said.
    “You don't need to call me sir,” the prime minister said. He paused. He seemed to chew over the words he was about to speak, as if they had an unpleasant taste. “Is there any pain at all?”
    “I just feel cold all the time.”
    “They—Madam Moon—has done an extraordinary job.”
    “She told me I should be dead. She rebuilt almost every part of me.” Everett M turned his face up into the Earthshine. There was no warmth in it. “Mr. Portillo, why couldn't they save my dad?”
    “I know what happened, Everett. I don't know why Madam Moon couldn't save him. The Thryn Sentiency can work wonders, but it can't work miracles. It can't bring back the dead.” Again, hechewed bitter words. “Everett, the man who came with me is very powerful. You know what a Plenipotentiary is?”
    “It's an ambassador of our entire planet to the Plenitude of Known Worlds.”
    “That's right. He's much more powerful than I am—but don't let him think that. He'll be talking to you soon. He will ask you to do a thing for him. It's a big thing, but only you can do it. Everett, I need you to do what he