The Frequency of Aliens

by Gene Doucette

  “Not yet, no.”

  Captain Braver re-entered the room, shaking her head.

  “What’s up?” Ed asked.

  “Couple things,” she said. To Sam, she asked, “Hey, what’s a ‘Roanoke thing’?”

  Ed looked confused, so she elaborated.

  “That’s what the sergeant said when he called Fort Irwin.”

  “Oh that,” Sam said. “I was trying to emphasize the point to the lughead on the other end of the line.”

  “That lughead was a general,” she said.

  “I’ve found that extra stars don’t cure lugheadedness, ma’am.”

  “I have to agree with him there,” Ed said.

  “Well anyway, I still don’t know what it means,” she said.

  “The lost Virginia colony, right?” Ed asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant. I figured everyone remembered that from history class, but I guess not. That’s not why I have an armed guard, is it? I made a general feel dumb?”

  “No, that’s not why. You’re something of an albatross, Sergeant Corning.”

  “How’s that?”

  “A bad luck charm. Everyone’s pretty sure you had nothing to do with this, but with your current track record regarding military assignments, nobody wants to take you. At the same time, they don’t want you to disappear in case they’re wrong and you’ve somehow gained the ability to evaporate humans in large numbers.”

  “Can I have him?” Ed asked.

  The captain looked amused.

  “You want him? I can probably arrange that.”

  “Only if I can get him without the MP escorts; they’ll just slow us down.”

  “Hang on,” Sam said. “Maybe I’m happy right where I am.”

  “Are you?”

  “It’s not bad. I can just go back to fishing. I think those boys on the porch might even enjoy it. What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, you know how I said nobody else had gone missing and you said it was a big world?”

  “I do. That was only a minute ago.”

  “You reminded me of something. Just a rumor I’m going to have to chase down. You ever been to Latvia?”

  “Never even left the states, Ed.”

  “Well, let’s fix that.”

  “Hold on,” Braver said. “It’s one thing to bring him around town, but clearing him for overseas is going to be rough.”

  “I’ll call General Perlmutter,” Ed said, referring to the man in charge of Team Babysitter. This sort of thing was beyond Cal Perlmutter’s immediate purview, but he was still a general, and he owed Ed about a hundred favors. “I’m sure we can get this done.”

  “See?” Sam said, with a laugh. “Ordering a general around.”

  5

  The Affairs of Dragons

  --Sheriff’s office responded to a report of theft

  Three unnamed individuals identified as local residents reported the theft of a deer. The men stated they were hunting in the woods on the western edge of Patience Road, when what was described as a “four-point buck” was felled by one of the men. All three stated that they witnessed the deceased animal from no less than five feet away, but when they turned to discuss arrangements for retrieving their truck in order to transport the carcass, ‘someone’ stole it. There was no evidence at the scene of another party’s arrival.

  The deputy on the scene suggests the deer was not mortally wounded at all, and simply got up and ran away when the men were otherwise occupied. All three individuals voluntarily submitted to sobriety tests, and passed.

  This case remains open.

  Sorrow Falls police blotter

  In a tiny corner of a small town that used to be extremely famous, there lived a girl who wasn’t a girl, in an area of the map that wasn’t on the map.

  The girl’s name was Violet Jones, most of the time. That was the name she gave for herself when she decided she wanted to make friends with a girl—who actually was a girl—named Annie.

  Violet lived in a small farmhouse with two people who were also not people, and also not really what anyone would call independent thinkers. They were husks, essentially, kept alive by the basic mechanisms of their animal brains, with some external technological assistance of the sort that might appear as magic to someone from a less developed species. Most of the time they just did chores to keep the house clean and to keep their bodies from rotting.

  In truth, just like with them, a lot of the day-to-day work Violet logged was to keep her own husk—the one that looked like a young girl—from deteriorating.

  This was probably one of the first things she had to learn to do. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand that beings such as this required energy to maintain their existence; this need was, in many ways, a defining characteristic. It was that she didn’t appreciate exactly how time-consuming that was.

  It was even more complicated than that. Technically, the girl who wasn’t a girl was an energetic collection of sentient information, and sentient information didn’t have any mass, so time was one of those things she knew about only abstractly. This made for some confusing conversations. For instance, Violet once told Annie that it took her a long time to understand time, which was an internally inconsistent statement that nonetheless was perfectly true. It was equally true that it took her a long time—as a cogent light-beam, sort of—to reach Earth, even though as far as she was concerned it took no time at all.

  When Violet took over her first human form—a local native who’d perished due to a combination of poor advance planning and extreme cold—she knew that food would be a requirement to keep the body alive, but she didn’t know when that food was needed or how often, because those were both ideas that made sense only if one was accustomed to the passage of time, as she was not.

  She was therefore very bad at maintaining her first adopted body. She was slightly better at the second and the third, but didn’t really get it right until the sixth, a young girl.

  The girl would have been called an ‘Indian’ for most of the latter history of this region, but recently had been renamed ‘Native American.’ Violet had trouble with this only because she legitimately couldn’t tell what difference it made. Neither of them was in any appreciable way correct, because both were names given to the locals by people who showed up later. She could as easily have been called an Algonquian, or a Nipmuck.

  The native girl got to grow up, marry, have a family, and die of old age, after which the being that had animated her body returned to the interstellar device hidden in the hillside, right in the middle of the area of the map that didn’t exist.

  Violet thought seeing a human being through very nearly an entire lifetime was a pretty remarkable accomplishment, but she didn’t have anyone to share this satisfaction with, although she did try to explain it to Annie one time.

  (Annie was under-impressed, pointing out that everyone else in the world did this sort of thing all the time.)

  The best Violet could do was relive it occasionally. That was one of the more interesting things about being a non-corporeal thought-creature who didn’t experience time in her natural form. She could revisit the past whenever she wanted, because it was all there and all happening at the same time. She tried explaining this to Annie too, failing almost entirely. Words like “‘past”’ and “‘same time”’ only made sense in a specific context, and the English language was too inflexible to get around the temporal nature of the words being used.

  It was perhaps more accurate to say she didn’t relive it at all: she was experiencing it continuously. Or maybe it was best described in tenses. She had no past tense, only present- and future-tense.

  No, that wasn’t any better.

  Every new day, Violet ‘got up’ and went about doing things to fill the passage of time in a constructive way. This could mean repairing parts of the house, or tending to the garden, or just walking around the forest. In the winter, she couldn’t do most of these things—the body was surprisingly bad at deali
ng with cold temperatures despite being native to a climate that experienced cold temperatures routinely—so she read books instead, or jumped out of the body of the young girl named Violet and into the older man named Todd, to take care of some of the snow.

  Todd was one of the two people who lived in the house who was also not exactly a person. He was possibly even less of one than Violet was, because when the being that called herself Violet wasn’t in Todd’s body, he was either manipulated by an algorithm in a signal sent from the interstellar device that used to be buried in the hillside (and was now under the house) or running an internal default program that was largely defensive.

  She used Todd when she needed heavy things lifted, snow shoveled, or when there was someone out in the world who didn’t deal as well with females as with males, as this was evidently an aspect of the human condition just as much as dealing poorly with the cold was.

  The other adult was named Susan. Todd and Susan occasionally played the part of Violet’s parents, because some people out in the world didn’t always cope well with children who didn’t have adults on-hand to care for them. (This was slightly more understandable than the issues with females.)

  It was all an awful lot of work to maintain the illusion that she was just an ordinary human person—or three—especially given the house she lived in, and the spot in town it sat on, didn’t exist as far as the vast majority of the world was concerned. Violet only ate because it was the easiest way to add energy to the body, and only slept in the sense that she lay still for a few hours because it helped the body recover more quickly from physical exertion. (She did not, in any real sense, sleep or dream. This remained one of the few human things Violet had not been able to experience.)

  Nobody was going to stumble on them, whether they acted normal or not. The only risk of discovery happened when she left the house for one reason or another, but even then, if she or Susan or Todd acted in a non-normal way, there was little expectation that anybody would jump right to ‘dead girl being manipulated by a sentient energy being’. Even though this was Sorrow Falls, where a lot of frankly ridiculous—by the standards of this world—things happened, that explanation was probably not in anybody’s mental toolkit.

  On this particular day, the girl who wasn’t a girl at all decided to leave the relative safety of the place that wasn’t a place, for the morning, to interact with various humans.

  This was a decision reached suddenly. Violet was working in the garden, on a new project relating to the problem with the energy resupply her body needed to survive. Historically, she’d fed the body the same way humans fed themselves—i.e., by eating food—but this was incredibly inefficient, and it always bothered her. She couldn’t figure out how to survive as a human using photosynthesis (or, not directly; she survived indirectly by eating plants) but there were other energy sources worth exploring.

  To that end, she’d been experimenting on a variety of dead things. Not human ones. There was a large supply of recently-dead humans in a cemetery not far from her, but she was pretty sure animating a few of those would have negative consequences. Fortunately, there were a lot of non-human creatures from which to choose.

  She’d been conducting the experiment for nearly two years, and was almost ready to try it on Todd or Susan.

  That was what had her in the garden on this morning. She was reviewing the body of a dead squirrel. It was buried next to her tomatoes, which were currently just seeds, when she sensed something amiss in the world.

  The feeling was exactly as nebulous as that: something amiss. It was substantive enough to get her attention, yet vague enough to defy explanation. She wasn’t sure it was even real, but decided the only way to find out was to explore it.

  To do this, she took the family car, a hatchback that was slowly losing a battle with oxidation. She could walk, but there was a lot of walking between her and any decent gathering of people, and she didn’t think the body she was in could handle that kind of stress without ending up damaged.

  (There were many, many occasions in which Violet broke arms, or legs, or in one instance, a spine. The arms and legs she could repair, and did, but the spine was too much work, so when that happened she just abandoned that body.)

  The place to go to surround herself with a decent population of humans was the diner on Main Street, inaccurately called Joanne’s. It continued to be the case that nobody knew why it was called Joanne’s, and yet everyone called it that, which as far as Violet was concerned wasn’t all that unusual for this species. It only took enough people to start calling something by a name for the name to become standard. Indians weren’t from India, after all.

  Whatever was wrong in the world, it was something subtle, something she could get a hint of with the equipment inside the pod in her cellar, but not quite understand. If forced to define the thing using only the senses available to her as Violet, she would say it was like a vague odor of something she was too far away to identify clearly.

  She had to get closer to the smell, and the smell was coming from the collective mind-space of humankind.

  The car hated to move. This was true of all things with mass, but seemed doubly so for the hatchback. It groaned when it got going, and cried when the wheel was turned. The tires screamed, the fan belt sang atonally, and the exhaust coughed and choked. Every time she drove it she wished people used horses again. Horses didn’t go faster than cars, and they smelled worse, but they were also a part of the planet in a way cars would never be. Cars—really, all human-built machines—felt like obscene contraventions of the physical world.

  There was a current and flow to life. Man and animal rode that current, whether aware it existed or not. Man’s machines fought it, angrily, and broke down quickly as a consequence.

  Violet—and once she left the protective bubble of her home she was officially Violet—negotiated the turn off her private dirt road and headed down the street toward Main. The smell was louder already.

  “Hi, honey, just you?”

  The name of the woman asking the question was Beth, and she had been one of Annie Collins’s best friends for much of Annie’s life. Beth had met Violet several dozen times previously, most recently three weeks earlier, and yet she had no idea who Violet was.

  “Yes, just me,” Violet said.

  “Grab a booth, I’ll send someone over in a sec.”

  “That’s great, thanks.”

  With that exchange, Beth was allowed to keep a temporary idea of Violet in her short-term memory. This was necessary, or nobody would be coming by to take Violet’s order. She would grant the waitress the same allowance. No additional manipulation would be needed, because the cook would only know about her food, for instance.

  A living idea was how she explained herself to Annie and Edgar, which was close to being right. More exactly, she was a sentient branch of the core idea that was her, and now Beth had an offshoot of that core idea in her mind. Beth’s version wasn’t anything like the true idea—her version was not sentient, and also not substantial enough to even take root in the long-term memory. Violet was, by design, extremely unmemorable.

  She sat down in the last booth in the back of the diner, and started listening.

  Violet couldn’t read minds, but she could hear ideas. Thoughts were a messy collection of incoherent impressions mingled with electrical stimuli from other parts of the body. Even for the finest thinkers on the planet, what was going on in their heads was rarely more than a patchwork stew of concepts that would make sense only to the mind’s owner, and then only occasionally. It wasn’t fair to say humans weren’t advanced enough to have less cluttered mind-spaces, because Violet had been an idea among much more sophisticated creatures, and there wasn’t a substantive distinction. If there was something bad to say about mankind, it was that they were still too close to their animal selves, and so their thoughts were cluttered by outdated instincts. Thus, they had less control over what they did and less understanding of why they did it. But it didn’t m
ean their minds weren’t advanced.

  What separated humans from most animals was that they could also hold ideas. (This wasn’t an exclusively human trait: some higher primates held onto crude ones, and the ideas of dolphins were wonderful.) Ideas were ordered collections of thoughts that could be packaged and transmitted with only a little deterioration. This made ideas less like thoughts and more like viruses.

  At first, all Violet could hear was the same fundamental set of ideas from the people around her, which was to be expected in a largely homogenous town like Sorrow Falls. And since commonly shared ideas tended to be the loudest—mutual understandings of things like God and country—they drowned out the interesting little ideas.

  The new ideas, belonging to perhaps only one or two people, tended to be the quietest and most difficult to notice. They were also usually very wrong.

  Violet’s entire library at home was full of her favorite wrong ideas. She loved that the owners of those ideas thought so much of them that they wrote them down in an effort to convince other people to take ownership. Some succeeded, to horrible effect, such as the books she had on eugenics. Most were so outlandish that they ended up being interesting but not otherwise threatening.

  Some were works of fiction, which was a little funny since the entire concept of fiction was one person taking an idea that was all their own and attempting to share it with a lot of people. But Violet wasn’t interested in just any kind of fiction; she liked the ones that came out of a deeply original worldview. Whether that worldview was fantastic or terrible, or—using a word humans liked, but that didn’t really have a cognate outside of this planet—evil, didn’t much matter, as long as it was new.

  The privately owned, quiet ideas of the diners were pretty pedestrian. They were mostly egocentric ideas: the paranoid thoughts of the low self-esteemed, or the self-aggrandizement of the ones with too much self-esteem. There was a range of ideas Violet classified as generically sexual, save perhaps for the one gentleman at the counter harboring an incredibly complicated fantasy that involved Beth and a tractor. It was an original enough perversion—all humans had an intimate, and very private, fondness for perversity, she’d found—but that was all. So, in that sense, it wasn’t all too interesting. Creative, certainly.