The Frequency of Aliens

by Gene Doucette

  Getting news about Annie at Wainwright did involve face-to-face meetings, which was why the shyness was going to be a thing. Lindsey ultimately got around it by pretending that when she did these interviews her name wasn’t Lindsey Drucker at all: It was Canny Ollins.

  It worked so well, she wondered why she’d never thought of it before. It helped a bit that nobody at the college knew who she was or what she was really like, so the adoption of the outspoken reporter-ish website persona was pretty seamless. (If she’d tried it at home, someone would have asked her why she was acting so weird, and that would have been the end of it.)

  The rest of the job required finding people to talk to about Annie—again, aside from Annie herself. Getting that done meant… well, it meant stalking Annie Collins, essentially. She ended up in the same dorm—more good luck—and that was just about all that was needed, because Annie’s Secret Service detail made Annie, quite ironically, incredibly easy to follow around.

  So, Lindsey got interviews. They were almost all anonymous, which was to say the people she spoke to went unnamed, and more than half the time didn’t even know they were providing information to a “reporter.” Since Lindsey always put air quotes around the word reporter when she mentally self-identified as one, she figured she wasn’t violating any kind of ethical standard by not revealing herself to a source.

  There was Wally, in the coffee shop. She swung by to talk to him a couple of times a week, about their ‘mutual friend.’ He was an excellent source for short bits on Annie’s mood that day. Annie’s lunchtime friends also didn’t have a problem chatting about her, but since they weren’t being paid to interact with customers from behind a counter like Wally was, they were more difficult to get regular information out of. Hua was really nice, but seemed baffled by Lindsey’s reticence regarding just going up and introducing herself to Annie.

  “It’s how I met her,” Hua said. “I recognized her, so I went up to the table and said hello. I think anybody can do that, it’s okay.”

  Steve’s reaction was pretty similar. He offered to make the introductions himself.

  Reza was probably the best source of information among them, at least at first. He didn’t have a problem relating what he’d learned about Annie’s day-to-day life, and never seemed to worry about how that information might be used. It didn’t appear to strike him as confidential. Unfortunately, after the first month or so, what he had to share became less useful, because he never seemed to learn anything new.

  And there was Ginger, who was just a horrifying person. Even from a distance, Lindsey could tell that interacting with Ginger would require some advanced social skills she had not yet mastered. Unfortunately, Ginger happened, whether you were ready for her or not.

  “Hey, Watergate, I know what you’re about,” Ginger said to her one day in March, in the cafeteria at the Corc.

  “Excuse me?” Lindsey asked.

  She had spent the second half of the first semester and most of February and March a safe viewing distance from Ginger, so having her show up and speak to Lindsey like that was disturbing for reasons that extended beyond the fact that Ginger was inherently intimidating. It felt like getting noticed by a zoo animal.

  Ginger sat. She had no food, because she’d already eaten, with Annie, at another table. (Annie had already left.)

  “I said I know what you’re about, Canny. That’s a cute name. What’s the real one again? Lindsey? Yeah, Canny Ollins is much better. Change it legal, straight-up. Nobody’d doubt it.”

  Lindsey’s face was getting hot. She imagined she must be turning bright red.

  “I’m just… I write a fan blog, it’s not a big deal.”

  “Oh, I know. The others know too.”

  “Does… does Annie?”

  “Naah. Truth, she wouldn’t care much, by my gauge. She got her own crazy, no point wasting time on someone else’s. Why’n’t you grow a pair and break bread with the girl?”

  “I… journalistic integrity… something?”

  “You’re afraid to.”

  “Please don’t tell her.”

  “Never meet your heroes, right. I got your back, Watergate. But tell me something, how come you only stick to the pretty crap on that website of yours?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do. Rocket Girl isn’t all clear skin and sunshine. She’s got some zits. Why don’t you want to know any of that?”

  “It isn’t that kind of blog.”

  “Why not? Look, here’s a scoop for you: sister Annie’s seeing dead kids.”

  “What?”

  She wasn’t sure how much of anything Ginger said was literal.

  “Dead kids. Happened last week, right here. I was there for it. She coughed a name, I looked him up, dude’s dead. She saw him here. You want to know his name?”

  Lindsey looked Ginger in the eyes, for essentially the first time.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to know his name. I’m not going to run a story like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It isn’t that kind of blog. And you’re her friend.”

  “You don’t think I’ve got a little Iscariot in me, Watergate?”

  “No. I think you want me to run something that isn’t true just to see what would happen.”

  Ginger nodded.

  “Respect,” she said. “Solid instinct. Wrong guess, but all the love for it anyway.”

  Ginger stood, and stepped around the table until she was right next to Lindsey.

  “His name was Rick Horton. You don’t care right now, but by tonight it’ll be all alien parasite up in your stomach. You’re good not to run it, though.”

  Ginger left before Lindsey could say anything else.

  The name turned out to belong to someone who died in Sorrow Falls on the night of The Incident, but that was all Lindsey learned about him, because she had no plans to run a story like that. She didn’t trust the source, and she had no appetite to corroborate it.

  It was, besides, the kind of Annie Collins story she just found distasteful, regardless of whether it was true. Over the past couple of years, she’d had dozens of stories just like it sent to her website tip line: Annie caused the zombies; Annie was a zombie; Annie was an alien; Annie turned all the zombies into aliens; Annie was pregnant with an alien; Annie was a witch; and on and on. Some of them were actually pretty well-sourced, if such a thing could be said about that sort of rumor-mongering. Most ended up being run by other Annie-centric websites, collected lots of page hits, and occasionally became a part of the national conversation for a few days.

  Lindsey didn’t believe any of them. The story Ginger had was, admittedly, a lot more startling, coming as it did from a person Lindsey was pretty positive Annie called a friend. But all that meant was that now Lindsey was more concerned about who Annie was putting her trust in.

  By the second week of April, Lindsey was becoming concerned about Annie for different reasons, only sort-of related to the Ginger thing.

  The part of Lindsey’s job that took up the most time—and most threatened her ability to get her classwork done—was the news aggregation. There were a few dozen sites she mined regularly for useful news, a couple of search engine keyword notifications when something new came up in the regular channels, and the mail drop for hot tips that was essentially open to anyone. Those different areas of focus tended to get hot at different times of year. Regular news stories name-checked Annie in August, for instance, and the dependable sites tended to heat up around holidays. Her mailbox was always busy, but it got busiest whenever there were natural disasters, or when some famous cryptid (like Bigfoot) ended up in the news.

  The pattern in the mailbox was interesting in its own right, but it became more than just interesting when it increased five-fold starting in early April.

  At first, Lindsey thought it was something specific to her website, and her mail. Perhaps she’d been targeted by some online group for a non-specific thing that only made sens
e to them. If so, they were spending an awful lot of effort on it. Lindsey was getting multipage poorly spelled screeds from all over the country, from people who were singularly convinced that whatever they believed was happening—whatever they’d seen or heard about—was Annie’s fault somehow, and only they understood it, and CollinsWorthy had to tell the world. No two were the same.

  It was crazy in its own right, but when Lindsey took a step back she realized that the mail she was getting hadn’t gone up entirely in a vacuum. Nationwide, the number of (Internet) reports of weird phenomena had risen hugely in a really short span of time. There were ghosts everywhere, and packs of vampires roaming the streets, and of course werewolves, because you couldn’t have just vampires. There were new zombie sightings too, but those had been high ever since The Incident, so it was hard to say that this was unusual.

  What it added up to was a lot of terrified people seeing impossible things, and then deciding Annie Collins was to blame for it. Everyone’s logic was a little different, but they ended in the same place.

  It was just strange enough that Lindsey wondered if she should tell someone about it, only she couldn’t figure out who, aside from maybe Annie herself, and that wasn’t going to happen.

  Then, in mid-April, she ran into Ginger again.

  Something Lindsey had noticed, aside from the weirdness on the Internet, was that her sources for Annie info at Wainwright College were slowly disappearing. Annie continued to appear at the cafeteria at around the same time as always, but the number of people joining her kept getting smaller. Reza stopped showing up entirely, and Ginger only once or twice a week. Some of the others rotated in now and again, but there were days when Annie sat “alone,” which was to say she was unaccompanied by anybody except for the scary-looking woman who guarded her. Interestingly, if Annie noticed, she didn’t appear to care.

  “Hey again, Watergate.”

  Ginger had come up to her in the hallway outside Lindsey’s econ class, having apparently been waiting there until the bell.

  “Hi,” Lindsey greeted, somewhat flatly. “Ginger, right?”

  “Cocky move, pretend like you don’t know. C’mon, let’s talk.”

  Not apparently having any say in the matter, Lindsey let Ginger lead her to an empty stairwell.

  “Look,” Ginger said, “I’ve been keeping track. I know you didn’t run that story, and I get it, but you really should.”

  “I don’t understand. You guys are…”

  “We’re not friends, okay? We just know each other.”

  It wasn’t until then that Lindsey noticed Ginger looking a little worn around the edges, like she hadn’t been sleeping. She had none of the swagger, and she didn’t appear to have a taste for her usually colorful word choices.

  “Are you okay?” Lindsey asked.

  “No, man, I don’t think I am. Look, I’ve been seeing… Never mind. It’s her, okay? It’s Annie. She’s doing it. She should’ve never kept the spaceship.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She should give it back.”

  “To who? The owner went away. You know the story.”

  The story, as everyone knew it, was that Annie convinced the alien not to destroy the planet and to go visit somewhere else instead. The way she put it was that the alien being had lost his joie de vivre or whatever, and she suggested he go find it.

  There were a thousand reasons to think this was a ridiculous story, but it was the one Annie told, and everyone more or less agreed that it was at least a version of the truth.

  It was not, anyway, the sort of story that could later result in her handing the ship back to that alien.

  “Give it to the government, I mean,” Ginger said. “Or someone else, or let them destroy it maybe. She’s being selfish, keeping it for herself.”

  “And you think this because…?”

  “I’m saying, her whole town turned into a bunch of zombies, and we’re supposed to believe she wasn’t partway responsible for that, and now… look, I’m saying I’ve seen stuff.”

  “More zombies?”

  “Other stuff. Crazy stuff. And all I know is, it’s her fault. I’m not going near her again, and you better stay away from her too, Lindsey. Being afraid to talk to her is the smartest thing you’ve done here. Now use that website of yours and get the word out, before we all go down.”

  Ginger exited the stairwell before Lindsey could say anything else.

  Lindsey didn’t run the story. She also didn’t try reaching out to Annie to let her know at least one of the people she considered a friend appeared to be losing her mind, and could be dangerous.

  What she did do, was start paying a lot more attention to what was arriving in her mailbox.

  Ginger was right about one thing: something was going on.

  7

  More Human Than Human

  According to two sources, there was evidence of at least one military uniform among the remains. A spokesman for the United States army at Fort Irwin declined comment at this time.

  “Human Remains Found in Woods”, the LA Times

  The name on the door read George Juszkiewicz. It was a name nearly as alien to Mr. Juszkiewicz as it was to everyone who knew him, because George was not famous under his legal name. Everybody on the planet knew him, but they knew him as Dobbs.

  The door was in a building belonging to a high-end technology consulting firm/ think-tank, and that building was in San Diego. And the continued employment of George Juszkiewicz at the firm was a large reason for the firm’s current success.

  This, unfortunately, had nothing to do with Dobbs in any real direct sense.

  In the weeks that followed the Sorrow Falls incident, it became increasingly clear that the media narrative was going to require a lot of heroes—one, it seemed, for every demographic—so it wasn’t long at all before Dobbs discovered that he’d become the pudgy nerd hero for every pudgy nerd in the country.

  Frankly, some of it was deserved. Dobbs had been the one to isolate the signal the ship was using to communicate with the zombie army, and that was no small thing. He had issues, though, when other technological accomplishments were attributed to him, especially when he didn’t recall having anything to do with them. The mass healing of the town, for example. He was pretty positive he had nothing to do with that part of the evening, which had to mean the spaceship did. But when Annie was interviewed on this point, she deflected.

  Dobbs kind of knew Annie pretty well, certainly well enough to understand that if she wasn’t taking credit for that particular thing, she had a reason for it. And, since he wasn’t the only one to notice her refusal to take credit, it became something of a mystery as to how that little trick was accomplished. Arguing that there were only two possible contenders for this feat, a lot of people decided it had to be Dobbs, and Dobbs was—for reasons unknown—just not explaining how he did it.

  Another area where Dobbs got credit he didn’t deserve was whenever anyone tried to account for the actions of Edgar Somerville, without knowing Edgar Somerville was there. Ed made it clear within an hour of the sunrise, that he would prefer it if they agreed he was never there. Dobbs, Laura, Oona and Sam all agreed to this, not realizing that it meant they’d also be lying about what they themselves did that night.

  For the most part, Dobbs didn’t mind. He was willing to allow the general public to create a much cooler version of himself, because it was nice to be seen in such a flattering light. For starters, it made him important enough to get hired by a big-deal consulting company.

  What he did all day—when he decided to even go into the office—was listen to other people’s ideas for new inventions and then offer his opinion. It was a ridiculous way to make a lot of money because, basically, his opinion was no better than anyone else’s. Yes, he had a degree in electrical engineering, but other than that he was essentially leaning on an average geek-level understanding of comic books and science fiction movies. The counter-argument might well be that a tech co
mpany looking to brainstorm should probably get feedback from a high-functioning geek anyway, but that didn’t make it any less bizarre.

  Meeting after meeting, he would be the least knowledgeable person at a given table, yet as soon as he started speaking, everyone would act like his opinion was hugely important.

  And maybe it was. Maybe he was some kind of savant. But probably not.

  Dobbs felt like a fraudulent genius, who was eventually going to get called out for his fraudulence. He was Chance the Gardener, or Tom Hanks’s character in Big, or a naked emperor. Somebody would figure that what he said wasn’t special.

  That was why the door still read George Juszkiewicz instead of Dobbs. The name was put there without consultation, by someone connected to personnel, who didn’t know George and Dobbs were the same person. The managing partner responsible for recruiting Dobbs told him he was welcome to get it changed, but Dobbs decided to keep it there. He hadn’t gone by George since high school, and it continued to be the case that nobody called him that, but maybe it was appropriate for his first real grown-up job.

  More to the point, maybe Dobbs didn’t have anything to do with all the zombies going to sleep at the same time, or with all of them waking up the next day without any broken bones. But George? He probably knew all about it.

  Dobbs made it into the office at 10:30, on a lovely April morning—which was all San Diego appeared to experience—to discover he was fifteen minutes late for a meeting he was unaware he had.

  There were a lot of things to get used to pretty quickly, once he agreed to take the consulting job. First, there was the idea of having money. It meant getting clothes that fit, and spending a lot on a gym membership in order to learn that he didn’t want to put in the work necessary to look like a less-pudgy nerd, never mind a svelte one. (He still tried going to the gym a couple of times a month.)