The problem was, nobody could figure out what to do about it other than give Annie what she wanted. They could try and take control of the ship, except that would mean forcing their way into something that had been impossible to get inside back when the thing sat in an open field. Trying it now, when getting close required a rocket ship and a space suit, seemed like a pretty bad plan. Or, they could perhaps convince Annie to hand over control, but so far, she hadn’t been willing to do that.
Killing Annie was on the table for a long time. The problem with that plan—aside from the part where murder was widely considered to be wrong—was that Annie herself recognized this option almost immediately, and made absolutely sure everyone else knew she had.
There was a document. In the United States, every single government employee above a certain clearance was issued a copy of this document, and a similar process was followed in other countries. It detailed precisely what would happen should Annie Collins die suddenly, and it was basically the most terrifying last-will-and-testament in recorded history.
First, every secret government file for every country in the world would be shared with the Internet in the largest electronic push notification ever. Second, everyone involved in the decision to murder Annie would discover how difficult it is to hide from high-powered lasers fired from space.
Essentially, it established clearly and simply that the state-sanctioned murder of Annie Collins was a much worse idea than everybody leaving Annie Collins alone.
The document remained a secret to the general public, because there were a pretty decent number of people who would see value in exposing the world governments’ secrets with one well-placed bullet. Likewise, there were rogue governments, including one or two who had no secrets for Annie to expose. This was the reason for the secondary threat of actual physical violence in the form of lasers from space. Annie—who of course wrote the document—hated to include that part, but didn’t see a way around it.
The first question most people—on being shown the document for the first time— asked was: Is this for real? Aside from Annie’s e-signature on the bottom, how did they know?
This was where the message’s provenance came in, because that was also part of the message.
The document appeared simultaneously on computers all over the planet, some in utterly impossible-to-get-to places: isolated servers with no Internet access hidden behind impenetrable firewalls and lots of concrete; computers on orbital satellites; and laptops belonging to presidents and kings and prime ministers. Each version of the message was personalized when it was delivered, addressing the reader by their full name, in their native language, with their exact geo-coordinates at the time they happened to be reading it.
It was a remarkable, albeit understated, display of force.
The document led to a large number of back-channel summit meetings in the halls of the United Nations, convened with about the same tenor as a hostage negotiation. The question everyone had was, what does Annie Collins want, aside from to not be murdered?
The answer was so simple, at least half the world’s diplomats remained, more than two years later, concerned that they were missing something important. What she wanted was: to be left alone; to go to college tuition-free; for her mother to have the best medical care in the world.
She had no demands for vast wealth (notwithstanding the cost of tuition, which was indeed large) or fame or power. No gold-plated jets or mansions or dates with hot young celebrities. No weird requests, like making the entire House of Representatives dress in mascot costumes, or insisting that somebody apply lipstick on the Statue of Liberty, straighten the tower in Pisa, or fill in the Grand Canyon with licorice. Also, she made no political demands, like the passage of certain bills, or the freeing of political prisoners, or the ceding of Tibet.
Annie just wanted to be left alone to live her life as normally as was possible under her current circumstances.
To some, this was a huge waste of capital. But they didn’t see the world the way Annie did. She had some ideas for the future, certainly—there was one particularly loud one—but those ideas couldn’t be bought or negotiated. They had to be nurtured.
There was another implication to the message in Annie’s document. It more or less guaranteed that nobody acting at the behest of a government would attempt to kill or detain her, but that didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t try to do it. This was why, shortly after returning home to Sorrow Falls and just before her first television appearance, Annie ended up in a lengthy phone call with the president, to negotiate the terms of her security detail.
The terms were essentially that she was going to have to have a security detail for the remainder of her life, or until the spaceship went away. The president was negotiating from a position of weakness no modern head of state had ever experienced, so he was pretty glad Annie agreed to it. To that extent, he mostly just lucked out in catching her at the right moment. At the time, she was only sixteen, and had gone overnight from being decently-well-known exclusively to the residents of Sorrow Falls, to extremely famous world-wide. Annie was pretty confident in her ability to deal with most of the fame, but the world had a lot of crazy in it, so it was nice to have someone around who was prepared to take a bullet for her.
Having security was a little rough at first, because for about six months the secret service treated Annie like she had a live bomb strapped to her chest. Things improved, though, either because Annie was exactly as charming as she thought she was, or they got used to being next to a live bomb.
Annie thought it was probably the latter, even though she didn’t think of herself as about to explode, and she did think she was pretty charming.
The walk through lower campus ended at a long staircase that dropped Annie and Cora next to the library. From there, it was a short trip to the commons, and then the third floor of the Palmer building, where the calculus class she was sleepwalking through took place. Then came philosophy and a test on Hume that wasn’t as bad as Annie thought it was going to be. Then there was nothing but rainbows and kittens and cafeteria food.
And there was Ginger.
“Boom,” Ginger said, as she introduced herself to the table currently only occupied by Annie and Cora. The sound effect accompanied the cafeteria tray-drop, said tray holding food of questionable origin. “What’s up, space baby? Hey G-girl. I just murdered an entire econ midterm. Did you slay the great white Scot?”
Talking to Ginger required a guidebook, most times. She seemed to think it was her goal in life to create nicknames and invent ridiculous colloquialisms, so nearly half of what came out of her mouth was non-literal. Annie knew at least three English-as-second-language students who were literally terrified of getting caught in a conversation with Ginger.
On this day, Annie was space-baby and Cora was G-girl. These were default nicknames, and Cora didn’t like hers. The first time it was used, she spent a good portion of the lunch hour trying to get Ginger to understand that the title ‘G-man’ was specific to the FBI, that the term was non-gender-specific anyway, and also nobody was supposed to know Cora was a Secret Service agent, so could Ginger please stop announcing it.
Ginger kept using it anyway, because being aggressively impolite was kind of her thing.
“I did indeed slay the great white Scot,” Annie said. This was the nickname for Hume, and he had no opinion on it. It was a compound nickname based on the usual collegiate disparagement of old white men that surfaced most often in English classes, combined with Hume’s Scottish origin. The “great” that turned this into a shark reference was all Ginger.
“Groovy. Reset the hard drive. Who’s next?”
“Kant, I think. But let me enjoy this first, will you?”
“Kant sucks whale meat. You’ll miss Scottie in no time.”
“Like I said, let me enjoy this. I’m not ready for a final boss battle with the next guy just yet.”
“Yeah cool. But you aced?”
“Pretty sure.�
�
“No cheating?”
Annie threw a roll at Ginger’s head. It bounced off harmlessly and landed on the floor, with the target completely ignoring the impact had even happened. Given the potential damage implicit in a collision with a cafeteria roll, this was unquestionably a conscious effort.
It was widely rumored, among Annie’s fellow students, that Annie could access any fact she wanted any time she wanted it, because she had a computer in her brain, or was an alien/human hybrid, or was getting the answers in advance for some reason.
Annie hated the rumor, a lot. It made no real sense in the first place, because why would she bother to go to college if she already knew all the answers? Because of her unique circumstances, a college degree really didn’t do anything for her, so cheating to get one wasn’t at all worth her time. Obviously, she was in college to actually learn. That perhaps made her a minority.
Also, the ship didn’t really work like that. Certainly, the spaceship’s archives were terrifyingly vast. Comparing them to something like the Library of Congress, or the Internet, or even to the combined knowledge of all human history, was unfair, because the ship had more information than any of those things. Annie understood this, but she understood it in the same way a squirrel in a tree at the base of a mountain might have a dim comprehension of how large the mountain is. She would never have a full grasp of all of it.
That said, while she could get answers, they weren’t necessarily fast answers, and they usually came with a lot of things she didn’t really need to know that badly.
There was one time, when she was about to go on live television, she had decided it would go better if she knew a little more about the host. She asked the ship, and it more or less worked, in that she got to know a lot more about the host, but the information included that he was a closeted homosexual who was having an affair with a married man.
Annie knew enough to keep that to herself on television, but she couldn’t look him in the eye, and she blushed noticeably on-camera. Then, for about a month after, she had to field questions about whether she had a crush on the host.
That was just one of the reasons Annie didn’t spend as much time communicating with the ship as everyone probably thought she did. It was complicated, and there were usually unexpected consequences. It was a little like dealing with an over-literal genie.
“You know better, Ginger,” Reza said, as he sat down with them. “Keep teasing her, she will shoot you with a death ray.”
“Hey, come on, I don’t have anything else to throw,” Annie said.
“Try the fork,” Ginger said.
“I still need the fork. Cora?”
“You have to stop asking me to shoot people.”
“Fine. Reza, next time I’m getting extra dinner rolls and then you’re done. Whole governments fear me, hombre.”
“More for the death rays than the dinner rolls,” he said. “But the rolls are quite fearsome.”
If Annie were still in high school, she’d probably use the word motley to define her circle of friends. At Wainwright College, that was pretty much the whole campus.
This said more about Annie’s upbringing than it did about Wainwright. In many, many ways, there was no town on the planet quite like Sorrow Falls, especially for certain three-year stretch. But in other ways, it was pretty typical for Western Massachusetts. There was a certain homogeneity, if not of race—or, not entirely of race—then of attitude and general worldview. Having their own spaceship for a little while meant regular visits from a wide range of people, but those people didn’t stay, and didn’t contribute their perspective to the existing New England groupthink in any meaningful sense. The town never got a restaurant that served Indian food, or a yoga studio, or a family of refugees from a war-torn country. Everyone listened to more or less the same kind of classic-rock-heavy diet of music, with occasional forays into country, but nothing so radical it couldn’t be played over the speakers in Joanne’s Diner.
Wainwright College was also in Massachusetts, but almost none of the students were from the state originally, which was more or less typical for a Massachusetts institution of higher learning. It was kind of what the state was known for. Well, that and spaceships. And maybe baked beans, although Annie considered that more of a tourist thing.
Annie’s college choice got a lot of attention, which was sort of amazing considering she didn’t even finish out her senior year at Sorrow Falls high school. (Technically, she also did not start that year.) Eighteen-year-olds with GEDs don’t typically field calls from Harvard, or issue press releases about it.
She nearly did go to Harvard. It was on the short list, especially once she ruled out the tech schools—MIT and CalTech were very interested—in favor of a more liberal arts education.
She picked Wainwright because it was the closest thing to the isolation she very much missed from her hometown, combined with an education not all that different from the one she might have gotten attending a more cosmopolitan university. Wainwright also had one of the better astrophysics departments, thanks in part to the convenience of a campus on a hill that was topped by what was once considered a state-of-the-art telescope.
The suburbs suited everyone. It took less than a semester for her professors and classmates to get accustomed to Annie being in their presence, and then they kind-of/sort-of treated her like anybody else. And since they weren’t surrounded by a major city—Wainwright was located in the hills of Turnbull, in a small exurb of Boston—the likelihood of encountering some rando off the street was reduced to approximately the occupation capacity of the coffee shop that was just off campus.
The Secret Service was pretty happy about it too. Annie was a lot easier to protect in this environment.
The cafeteria was located on the second floor of the Corcorcan Student Center, right at the edge of middle campus. It was a five-story building, with largely unused classrooms on the top three floors, and entirely too many things on the bottom two. It had the bookstore, the radio station—which played a rotation of alt-rock and a heavy techno that did not fit in with Joanne’s Diner or any other part of Sorrow Falls—and a laughably outdated computer lab. There was talk of a new student center breaking ground in the next one or two years, because these were the sorts of public spaces colleges used to attract new students and the Corc, not having been built originally to serve its current purpose, mostly attracted rats.
There was a campus joke Annie was probably not supposed to hear, which was that the new center was going to be called the Collins center, on the assumption the college was rolling in government money thanks to her attendance there.
She thought that probably wasn’t true, but since she wasn’t supposed to hear the joke, she didn’t say so. Her opinion wouldn’t change the narrative all that much anyway.
It had been a pretty messed up couple of years, she reflected, from her uncomfortable wooden chair in the terribly-in-need-of-renovation cafeteria.
Annie was used to the idea of being known. Certainly, in Sorrow Falls, everyone knew her, and since for the first sixteen years of her existence, the town constituted her entire world, it was reasonable to argue back then that the whole world knew her. And that was fine because, as it happened, she knew everybody back.
Now, the actual whole world knew her, and she couldn’t say the same. Even in a smaller pond, like Wainwright, she only knew a tiny sliver of the populace and had to rely otherwise on the generic “hey… you” greeting to cover the rest.
The talk at the table reached a banal phase, which was what happened with people who saw one another essentially every day. They had been joined by Hua—who increasingly preferred the name Helen—and Frank who, aside from Annie, was the most conspicuously American-looking at the table. Provided one adhered to the appropriate stereotypes. Hua was Chinese, and Reza was Iranian, but Ginger—who had Filipino heritage—was an American citizen. Frank, meanwhile, was Canadian.
It was all very confusing.
Annie drift
ed out of the conversation, which was about a party on Thursday night she doubted she’d be attending. Her gaze ended up fixed on a point at the far end of the room, near the doors.
There were two sets of public-entry doors to the cafeteria. One was straight ahead of her: five double-doors propped open, on the other side of which was a staircase that led to the downstairs lobby. The second set was on the left: two double-doors to a hallway where the bathrooms were located.
She couldn’t have said why her gaze ended up in that particular area, although Annie did have a habit of looking toward exits. It was a thing she’d picked up over the past couple of years because most of the time the exits had a Secret Service agent nearby. Today, it was Agent Yount. He was dressed in a nice windbreaker and jeans and was pretty tough to miss because Yount was stupidly handsome, no less so for being forty years old.
He had an earpiece and an active mic attached to his sleeve, so he and Cora could talk with one another as well as with ‘command’—a team coordinator in a van that was currently parked on the road behind Corcoran. Annie hardly ever spoke directly with anybody in the command center, so she had no idea who was in the van or how many there were.
It wasn’t Agent Yount that caught her attention, although he certainly could do that. It was someone else. Specifically, the back of someone’s head looked extremely familiar.
“What is it?” Cora asked, quietly.
“Hmm?”
“You’re holding your breath, Annie, what’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing, but she couldn’t say what it was yet because she didn’t know. She sort of wanted Cora to ask Yount to grab the guy that was standing ten feet to his left, but she had no reason to make this request, and the Secret Service was supposed to be ‘invisible.’ Otherwise, the Wainwright board of directors got nervous.
Cora looked in the same approximate direction Annie was looking, but if she saw something unusual, she didn’t show it.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 2
