by Elle Simpson
I didn’t know in what world a coma and a swollen brain could be considered ‘relatively optimistic,’ but I also didn’t want to ask in case that was all the incentive Agent Schwarz needed to, like, lock me up in a warehouse in the middle of a Nevada desert, shoot rayguns at my brain, and—
“Miss Stanton?”
“Sorry. Just, uh…uh…rayguns.” I shook my head. “What were you saying?”
The granite-cleaving smile did some more quarrying. “I was asking if I could draw your attention back to the conversation you had with the pilot drone.”
“Oh yeah, sure. Let’s do that.”
So we had another nice little chit-chat about the nice little chit-chat I’d had with what was apparently just a drone, except who was totally not just a drone, and I made sure to tell Agent Schwarz that very much totally.
“So like, all the ‘stop them, please’ stuff? Is that, I mean, should we be worried about that? Like, is something going on that we should be worried about? With the Little Big Green Men? The Aka-whatsits? The hay fever medicine people?”
Agent Schwarz put down his pen. When he looked up again and met my eyes, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the state of my reflection staring back at me from his sunglasses.
(Legit don’t want to tell you what my hair was doing right then. I don’t think even it knew.)
“The Akanarin are a peaceful race,” Agent Schwarz said, sounding so bland and unconcerned that no lie, totally wanted to punch him a little. “The ship suffered a catastrophic malfunction and the pilot drone, attached to the ship’s systems as it was, suffered the same fate. There’s no need to be concerned, Miss Stanton. No need at all.”
“Oh…”
It was weird: when a secret agent from some shadowy government agency tells you not to be concerned about something, you’re going to be concerned about it, right? Because that’s just pink elephant stuff.
But somehow, for some reason, I wasn’t concerned.
Don’t get me wrong, I felt – distantly – like I should be. But I wasn’t, not properly, because there was something bizarrely reassuring suddenly about Agent Schwarz, with his monotone American accent and his weirdly expressionless face.
“So like, nothing to worry about then, basically, is what you’re saying? Is the gist of, you know, all this? The underlying theme of the moment?”
“Nothing to worry about in the slightest.”
And that made sense. It really did. And my brain agreed that it made sense. But…
“I mean, I get what you’re saying. I do. So don’t get me wrong, I just think…I just think…I think…” And then I said, “Why are your sunglasses changing colour?”
Because they were. The mirrored surface of the lenses was swirling, splitting apart into blobs of drifting colour, like in Art when your teacher’s feeling brave and/or hungover and she lets the whole class do ink marbling instead of still lifes. “Why are your sunglasses doing that? Wait, what’s going on? What are—”
“You don’t need to concern yourself with the whys and the wherefores, Hannah,” Agent Schwarz said. “You need only carry on looking at my reflective ocular protection device until the relevant memories in your cerebral cortex have been identified, stored within a temporary repressional module, and replaced with more suitable artificial recollections.”
Uh…
“Okay,” I said faintly, “sounds legit.”
And it so totally did. Honestly, it sounded like the most legit thing I’d heard all day. So I just stared at the swirly ink-blot colours and let the gentle, fuzzy feeling in my head take over.
I wasn’t worried. I didn’t need to be worried. And Agent Schwarz was right, I didn’t need those memories either.
Just as quickly as they’d started, the colours stopped swirling.
Agent Schwarz said, “Now, Miss Stanton, you were telling me about the alien speaking with you?”
“Whu…what?” I said, still blinking. My eyes were kaleidoscoping a little for some reason. “No, I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t?”
“Cheekbones didn’t talk to me,” I said, valiantly repressing the duh. “I’ve already told you that.”
“Oh.” Agent Schwarz flipped back in his notes. “I see. But just to be absolutely clear – at no point did the pilot of the ship speak with you?”
“At no point whatsoever.” I made sure to talk really slowly and clearly, because it was becoming increasingly obvious that poor old Agent Schwarz had lost both his socks in the tumble dryer. Messed about with too many rayguns, probably. “Cheekbones groaned a lot, because he was dying a painful death, but he didn’t groan any words.”
“Great,” Agent Schwarz said, snapping his notebook shut.
“Uh. Is it?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Oh…kay,” I said, thinking it’s not just the socks, it’s his undershirt and his y-fronts too. “Like, are we finished then?”
“With your statement, yes.”
“So I can go home?” I sat up straighter in bed. “Because Dr Vlad says I’m good to go, and I’d really like to take a shower that doesn’t involve flip-flops and people in hazmat suits with scrubbing brushes, and I’d also really like to wear some clothes where my bum isn’t just, like, saying ’hi!’ to everyone it meets, so y’know, actual clothes and not a hospital gown, and I’d just – I’d really like to go home,” I finished, finally, aware how small and pathetic I sounded and not caring even slightly at all.
The granite cliff face didn’t shift, but there was maybe the tiniest hint of sympathy in Agent Schwarz’s robotic voice when he said, “And you can go home, Hannah. Very shortly—”
I groaned. “God, that’s a sentence with such big hanging but.”
“—but,” Agent Schwarz agreed, “first, there’s someone outside who’d like to meet you.”
7
You’ll probably have seen this bit on TV. I think everyone has by now. But if you haven’t – and, I mean, really? – you should go and youtube it or something. Search for ‘evil aliens hospital landing.’
I’ll wait…
…
…ready?
So this is what you saw, but instead of being shot from miles away on a ridiculously shaky camera phone zoom, this is it in full on, spot-the-blackhead closeup: me in a wheelchair in the middle of Buckford Infirmary’s hastily emptied car park, Mum and Toni standing behind me, Major Doctor Vampire, a bunch of men in black – all of us looking up at the orbiter as it dropped out of the sky like one of those huge black blood clots you get the months Auntie Flow’s feeling totes vindictive.
“Well, knock me over with a feather,” Mum muttered, craning her neck for a better view.
The rest of the adult contingent wasn’t faring any better: Toni swore quietly, one of the dicey ones about communion wafers that I’m supposed to pretend I don’t understand; Dr Vlad looked so pale I guessed she’d have to feed on the blood of innocents soon; and the men in black were shuffling about like a flock of nervy goth flamingos.
I was doing okay, though. At least this spaceship wasn’t crashing. That seemed like a bonus.
Plus, my head…it felt kinda spacey. Like, I’ve never been drunk – because I am far too young to drink, just for the information of any relevant authorities who might be reading – but let’s imagine I might’ve gotten a little tipsy on some wedding prosecco once. Y’know, entirely hypothetically.
So my head felt a little hypothetical wedding prosecco tipsy. I was mellow. I was chilled. I was good.
(Spoilers? I wasn’t good. My brain was about to start bleeding in a tiny yet very bad way. But I didn’t know that at the time, though. Had to wait for a cockroach to tell me.)
The Akanarin ship landed a few metres away from us.
“Oh, my giddy aunt,” Toni whispered.
I say landed…
Hovered, with most of the ship’s huge, bulky bum still hanging in midair above the car park. A hatch twisted open. No dramatic backlighting this ti
me. Just aliens. Lots of aliens. More aliens than I’d ever seen before, and considering I’d only seen one in-real-life, seeing more than one wasn’t hard to achieve but it was still freaky, and mind-bending, and not gonna lie, really fricking scary.
Only two aliens stepped out of the ship, though. One was Akanarin, ridiculously tall and completely mouthless, and one wasn’t. He was shorter, with more human proportions. Both his gloved hands were propped against the butt of the gun-like thing strapped across his chest, and his big silver eyes stared out blankly at—
“Oh my god,” I whispered. “Oh my freaking god.”
Cheekbones. It was Cheekbones. Cheekbones was alive.
It went like this in the poor old noggin: I saw Cheekbones, I registered seeing him in a fuzzy sort of way, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t call out to him or try to speak to him. Partly because I didn’t remember that I could, but mostly because there was this tiny little voice – still my own voice, just for the record – deep down in my head chanting, Don’t. Don’t, Hannah. Don’t.
So I didn’t. I very much didn’t.
Instead, I just waved my hand a little pathetically at the huge, skinny, greeny-grey alien in front of me, and said, “Um…hi?”
“Hannah Stanton,” the Akanarin said, taking the slightest of bows. “I am so very glad to meet you.”
Behind me Toni squeaked. Seemed a sensible reaction, to be honest, and I’ll tell you why – even though the Akanarin didn’t have a mouth, it had just spoken to me.
In my head.
Without me using my ears.
My own mouth fell open. “What in the actual fu—”
“I must apologise,” the Akanarin cut in, the skin and bones of its face shifting like a hidden mouth was moving, the weird tonelessness of its voice pinging about in my head. “Please, do excuse the intrusion. My kind have no way of communicating as is the human wont. I apologise if you find the telepathic transference involved discomfiting.”
“I…” I said. “I…” Then I shook myself and managed a really intelligent, “Whu…?”
“I can see that apologies do nothing to alter the strangeness of the experience. Perhaps if we were to begin with some pleasantries, you may find a degree of equilibrium within the moment. Perhaps a reciprocal exchange of names, as is the human tradition? And though my kind claim no names of which the human mind can comprehend, I wonder…” The Akanarin cocked its massive head to the side, like a really freaky intergalactic nodding dog. “Perhaps you might wish to suggest a human moniker I could utilise instead.”
“Uh…” My brain was in no fit sate to deal with Intergalactic Thesaurus and its little silver-eyed buddy, Alien Zombie Jesus. “…what?”
“The gentleman wants you to give him a name,” Toni told me in a vaguely hysterical, vaguely mind-blown whisper.
“Give him a name? Me?” Which was so much more responsibility than I’d signed up for when I threw myself into a steaming crater twelve hours ago. “Uh…just, like, any name? Or? I mean? Uh?”
“A name you think would be suitable,” the Akanarin replied politely – and completely unhelpfully.
Oh my god. “I mean, you’re kinda putting me on the spot here.” Understatement of the century. “But you also kinda look like my Uncle Bob. Just, just around the eyes and stuff. So, um…Bob?”
“Bob,” Bob repeated, making Bob not seem like a name at all, with the freaky, empty accentlessness of his voice. “Baw-buh. Yes. A fine name. From henceforth, to the Humans of Earth, I shall be Bob.”
“Okay,” I said faintly, fairly sure I was still high. “Okay, Bob. Cool beans.”
Bob pressed the tips of his weird fingers together. He looked thoughtful, maybe, but it was hard to tell. “Now, having exchanged the appropriate local pleasantries, I feel I should address the point I think has discombobulated you most. I have seen you cast a number of startled glances towards my security drone.”
I managed to clear my throat. “Well, you know, that kinda happens when you see someone die and then come back to life the next day.”
Bob’s huge forehead crumpled in a way that seemed to suggest sympathy – or maybe constipation. It was a fifty-fifty chance. “I’m most sorry to tell you that this is not the same creature as the one you attempted to rescue from the wreckage of our scout ship. Or rather, it is the same creature, in that they are clones of one another. But the first is dead, I am truly sorry to say.”
I had to let that process for a second. I probably should have let it process for longer, though, because what came out was, “Creature? No offence, but that’s like a sieve calling a colander leaky.”
“Miss Stanton!” said one of the men in black.
But Bob waved a four-knuckled, three-fingered hand. “No, please do not scold her. Hannah’s reaction is understandable. To learn that life exists beyond the confines of this world, and then to discover so soon afterwards that such life is multitude – I can only imagine how disconcerting that must be.”
Mum took a step forward. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You speak of multitudes of life, sir,” she said, her voice completely steady, because my mum is awesome, “and yet you call this young man a ‘creature.’ Has he not intelligence?”
“Of a much limited kind,” Bob allowed. “It is a primitive being, and when left to its own devices, it is also a creature of mindless destruction. Perhaps the best comparison I can draw is that of an insect – the cockroach of this biosphere, for example.”
“A cockroach?” I echoed, disbelieving. Cheekbones hadn’t looked anything like a cockroach. He was far too pretty for one thing.
“Indeed. Though when taken in hand,” Bob said, “when brought under control, even insects can be useful – and as you have seen, so can this creature.”
My memories of Cheekbones hadn’t come back yet.
No hand-holding, no talking, no pleading with me to help him. So I shouldn’t really, technically, have been suspicious. But, you know, women’s intuition – and something was pinging mine hardcore.
“That just sounds really…like, really…not right.”
“But it is the truth,” Bob said.
“Yeah, but—”
“But it is the truth, Hannah, and you can believe it.”
Mum’s hand dropped from my shoulder at the same time as Bob’s voice washed through me. The words were already in my head but they seemed to go deeper. I thought, I can believe that, and it felt nice to think it, so I thought it again, and again, until I did believe it.
Cheekbones was a drone. Nothing more. Just an insect.
“And now, Hannah,” Bob said, “I require you to answer a vitally important question. You will do that for me, won’t you? You will answer?”
“Yes.” It didn’t even cross my mind to disagree, because my mind was so totally full of this wash, this you will do that for me.
You will answer.
You will.
“I will,” I said, and I wanted to rub my eyes, to shake myself, to try and clear the sudden feeling of pulsing pressure in my head. I wanted to.
But I couldn’t.
Because something…something wasn’t right. I couldn’t – think. Had to. Answer.
Answer Bob.
“I will answer,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Bob said, somehow managing to sound amused. “I imagine you will.” He motioned Cheekbones over to stand in front of me. “Heed my words, Hannah, and answer when asked. You will hide nothing, and you will not lie. When you pulled this creature from the wreckage, did it speak with you?”
“No,” I said. And that was the truth, as far as I could remember right then. I wasn’t lying.
Bob cocked his head. “No?” he asked, voice light. “But I do wonder…” He shouldered Cheekbones out of the way and crouched down to meet my eyes. His own eyes weren’t so black anymore – they looked like ink swirling on dirty water. “Hannah, did the creature speak with you?”
I opened my mouth to answer – and that was when a vo
ice in my head, faint and far off, shouted, “Lie, Hannah! You must lie!”
(This is why I wanted you to remember – the current voice in my head? Wasn’t my voice. Wasn’t Bob’s voice. It was another voice. In my head. In as many minutes. And it sounded like a nervy old-school newsreader.)
Lie? I thought fuzzily, painfully. Why would I…?
And all at once, as I stood there staring up into Bob’s weird, swirly eyes, I remembered. Like a lock bursting in my brain, the memories came flooding back.
Help me. You have to stop them. Please.
And I thought: the creature did speak with me. He spoke with me. Cheekbones spoke to me.
The words hovered on my tongue. I wanted to say them as much as I didn’t. But either way I couldn’t make them come out.
No, but I could. I had to tell Bob.
But I didn’t want to.
No, I did.
“He sp—” I began, but the newsreader voice interrupted, louder this time, closer, deeper in my head.
“Hannah, you must listen! The Akanarin cannot know that the young man you call Cheekbones spoke with you. It is imperative to your safety, and moreover, to the safety of Planet Earth.”
“Answer me,” Bob said. “Now.”
“Lie, Hannah! You must—”
“Hannah Stanton!” Bob roared, thunder in my head. “You will answer!”
“It didn’t speak to me. The creature didn’t say a word.”
The lie came out easy as anything. The pressure in my head was still there, but something was pushing back against it now – and it gave me space to think. To lie.
“Is that the truth?” Bob asked. He took a four-knuckled finger and tipped my chin up until all I could see was the absolute, total, sudden blackness of his eyes. “Answer me. And. Do. Not. Lie.”
Pain flared, horrible and sudden, a cramp deep down in my brain. I wanted to reach up and clutch at my head. The pressure was almost too much. And I knew if I told Bob the truth, it would go away. But I couldn’t tell him. I knew that too.
Had to – had to—
