transcript, NBC Nightly News
In Northern Maine, less than 50 miles from the border with Canada, there was a small mobile home community largely made up of people who thought it would be a good idea to live that close to another sovereign nation, while having everything they own on top of a set of wheels.
This was not to say that the people living there were paranoid or conspiracy-minded or any other reductive typically used to describe people like them, by people who were not like them. They were practical. They were realists. Above all, they were right.
After three years in the ad hoc trailer park of Sorrow Falls, this was essentially the only place Laura and Oona could have possibly felt at home in. They needed to be around people who were convinced the world was ending, even though they themselves had been there when the world did end, for a little while.
Their need to live on the fringe of society became that much more acute once it was clear they were going to end up being minor celebrities if they weren’t careful. The inevitable churn of fame, fortune, and so on would—as Oona put it—make them “a part of the system”, and that was reportedly bad.
Laura knew what her girlfriend meant, even if she thought of it in less militant ways. In another life, in which Oona was slightly less abrasive, a touch more trusting, and a tiny bit more charismatic, she would be the figurehead of a separatist militia somewhere.
Laura just didn’t want lots of public attention, but had no need to phrase this preference in terms of The Great Struggle or whatever. Maybe it was true that big business and the government and the media were arms of a giant, soul-destroying monster keen on enslaving the population, and being a part of that would have made Laura and Oona pawns in their own enslavement.
Or maybe they just wanted to be left alone, because they were private people. This was just as true, and sounded better in polite conversation.
One thing their sudden fame did bring, was a slightly better life. Laura thought about this every time she woke up in their slightly-larger, much-more-modern camper, surrounded by a beautiful, completely zombie-free forest.
It was only a couple of days after The Incident that someone was in touch with them to buy their old camper, for a simply outrageous sum. That money got them a much nicer ride, with a better kitchen, more thoroughly reinforced sides, bulletproof glass, and so many new guns that they sort of did qualify as their own separatist militia.
It was, as Oona put it, a tank with a toilet.
The mobile home community in which they’d relocated was nice, too. It was legitimate, in the sense that unlike the last place they set down, there was electricity, and a community shuttle to get to and from the grocery store fifteen miles away. They had a mailing address.
Best of all, they had airtight aliases. Laura didn’t even know how this worked—Oona set it up—but it worked. Their multimillion dollar camper sale was done under those aliases, and so was the rental agreement with the owner of the land they were parked on.
Given that Oona Kozlowsky and Laura Lane were famous people (even after two years), all of their neighbors knew their real names, but that was the great thing about being surrounded by people who shared the same healthy distrust of the business/government/media hydra: nobody told. And if one of them did, they weren’t what anyone would call a trusted source.
Laura was actively appreciating how things had turned out for her and Oona—something she did a lot on the really nice weather days, of which this was one—when everything changed. Again.
“Laura!” Oona bellowed. “I mean… Rachel, whatever the hell your name is, get up here, it’s doing it again.”
Laura was occupying a lawn chair in front of the camper, enjoying the sun and a book. Oona was doing what she liked doing on sunny days: checking the guns, on the roof, and being annoyed that they were supposed to be using their aliases outdoors. Oona routinely forgot Laura’s name was now Rachel, and hers was Lucy. She especially hated the name Lucy.
“It’s doing what again?”
“The noise. The… the thing, the… just get up here.”
“All right, all right.”
As with the other camper, the ladder to the roof was indoors, so she took the chair in, stepped around a box of homemade grenades—this is what Oona did instead of arts and crafts—and up the ladder.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Over there. Something’s beeping.”
Oona was in a chair at the back of the roof, fiddling with one of the bigger guns. Laura could only identify about half of them, which was a little funny only because she was the better shot. Oona was pointing to the front, where there was an unsightly waterproof tarp covering a variety of electronics.
This section of the roof was essentially their junk pile. It was where they kept things they weren’t using but didn’t want to throw away. More than half of it came from the top of the Sorrow Falls trailer.
The electronics should have been a part of the deal to buy the old machine, but Oona didn’t feel comfortable about that, so they kept it all. Or something. Laura wasn’t involved, but Oona did say after the fact that she didn’t want anyone using the equipment to ‘do things’. What things in particular remained unspecified.
“Beeping?” Laura repeated.
“Yeah. I told you this before.”
“I didn’t hear it before.”
“Right, babe, and now it’s happening again, so listen again.”
Laura held her breath and listened.
“There, did you hear it?” Oona asked.
“I heard it. Have you been playing with this stuff?”
“I forgot it was even there.”
Laura lifted the tarp, and examined the equipment.
They basically took the table off the old rig and attached it to the new one. The electronics were bolted to the table.
She looked under the table, at the extension cord.
“Look at that, we plugged it in,” she said.
“Well good, ‘cuz it’s pinging. Be worse if it was doing that without any power.”
The thing that was making the noise was their homemade sonic detector, which was plugged into a parabolic array. The array was pointed in the last direction it had been when the entire thing was on a different vehicle, and that vehicle was parked across from the spaceship. If it could be said that it was aimed at anything now, that thing would be their neighbors. None of them had a spaceship, and as far as either of them knew, there weren’t any aliens.
Laura flipped on the screen to see what it thought it was picking up.
“That’s really strange,” she said.
“What do you got?” Oona asked.
“Last time we used this, it was set up to at the zombie channel. Remember?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that’s why it’s pinging now. It’s picking up something on the same frequency.”
Oona got up and walked around the rooftop.
“Don’t see any zombies,” she said.
“Yeah… Weird, though.”
“It’s a little weird, I guess.”
Laura entered a few commands to reorient the dish. After a minute of fiddling, she managed to get a much louder beep from the device.
“Hello,” Oona said. “You find the source?”
“I found where it’s strongest.”
“Is it Chuck? I always thought he was an alien.”
“No.”
Oona took a look.
“Oh,” she said.
The dish was pointed up. Whatever they were intercepting, it was coming from something above the horizon.
“A satellite, then,” Oona said.
“Maybe.”
Oona decided to secure the big gun in her hand, and take her seat again, because this was turning into a non-casual kind of conversation pretty quickly.
“The spaceship,” she said.
“Maybe,” Laura said. “Assuming the ship’s even in that direction. All we know about this particular frequency is that w
ith the right kind of technology, you can use it to control people. I’m not saying Annie is using the ship to send something along that signal, but at the same time…”
“…she’s the only one with access to the tech. Yeah, I’m seeing what you are, honey. What do you think the signal’s doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could just go ask her. She’s not that far.”
“We’re going to have to get more data,” Laura said. “God, what if it’s her? For real, Oona, what if she’s doing something? That’s like worst-case-scenario, right?”
“Oh, we went through worst-case-scenario already. I think Annie Collins going all evil on us wouldn’t be as bad.”
Laura laughed.
“I was assuming it was something she was doing accidentally.”
“Sure, that’s much nicer.”
It was another week before things got any stranger. In that time, Laura analyzed the signal as carefully as she could, and managed to identify three different places where it could be said that it was transmitting from. It also appeared to be true that at certain times of day—variably—the signal was also strong locally, from their neighbor.
It was enough to establish the initial parameters of their paranoia, which they didn’t really think was paranoia at all even when they called it that. This was real, and it was really happening, and they didn’t know what it meant.
Then Dobbs showed up at the door.
He took a cab, and had the chutzpah to send it on its way rather than wait to make sure he was welcome. In Oona’s reckoning, he was not.
“The hell are you doing here,” she asked, from the roof, with a gun in her hand.
“Hello to you too,” he said.
Laura, who had been staring at the signal, peeked over.
“Oh, geez, Dobbs, get inside before someone sees you,” she said. “We’re supposed to be secret out here.”
“Hang on,” Oona said. “How’d you find us?”
“That’s a pretty cool story,” he said. “Let’s say I got it from the person who bought your old rig.”
Laura looked at Oona.
“Is that possible?” she asked.
“I dunno, girl, you did all that, not me.”
“What are you talking about, I didn’t arrange that.”
“Babe, I never met the buyer,” Oona said. “You did all that. The aliases too. Impressed the hell out of me, gotta say.”
“Guys,” Dobbs said.
“Shut up, Dobbs, we’re having a thing up here right now,” Oona barked.
“Yeah, but I can explain. I was there when the whole thing was done. So were both of you.”
“That’s impossible,” Laura said.
“No, just improbable. Look, her name is Violet, okay? Now let me in and I’ll tell you what I know.”
Part III
May
10
Strangeness in a Strange Land
…It is true that the cost/benefit ratio currently points in favor of maintaining the current status quo, but there may come a time in the future—perhaps the near-future—in which it may be more to the State’s advantage to remove A.C. from the dynamic and accept whatever the consequences of that act may be.
Both outcomes may be devastating, but if one of those outcomes is the extinction of the human race, it is in our interests to take the other option seriously…
excerpted from top secret position paper, The Annie Collins Problem #5
Sam had never been overseas.
On three occasions, he’s been to US territories which required that one travel ‘over seas’—oceans, more accurately—but that didn’t count, in his opinion, because he never ended up in a place where the United States military didn’t hold some sort of jurisdictional power.
Latvia, then, was quite the thing.
It took Ed a month to arrange the trip. There was the matter of making sure nobody decided Sam was AWOL by going with him—this was the detail that most directly concerned Sam, and so it was what he paid the most attention to—and also ensuring Sam had the necessary paperwork to travel abroad. That was complicated, but not as much as it might have been if anyone other than Edgar Somerville was arranging it.
Sam had been joking for some time that Ed—someone whom he considered a friend—was secretly one of the most important and powerful people in the country, but the more time he spent with the man, the less that seemed like a joke.
At one particularly annoying impasse in the efforts to obtain the necessary clearance for Sam, Ed got annoyed enough with whoever he was dealing with to call the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (on the Chairman’s private cell) and have him fix things.
Getting into Latvia proved to be a far more intractable problem. Ed’s pull with other governments wasn’t nearly as substantial, and it turned out the reason they were going there in the first place was to investigate something the Latvian government hadn’t officially acknowledged.
Whatever that was.
A point of minor annoyance when it came to Edgar Somerville was that he always seemed to know about ten times more than he let on. He and Sam had only spent a few hours in the same company prior to Ed’s arrival on Sam’s California doorstep, but they were a significant few hours. That said, one had to spend a lot more time around another person to fully appreciate their various annoying tendencies. Ed’s was secrets: He had all of them, and he didn’t dole out details until he thought it was necessary.
A lot of the time that was unavoidable, because Sam didn’t have anything like the necessary clearance. (He did have higher clearance than any other sergeant in the military, due to what he already knew.) But the Latvian whatever they were following up on couldn’t possibly be a US-classified event. Yet Edgar wouldn’t say a damn thing.
Sam flew into Riga International Airport alone, so he didn’t even get the opportunity to question Ed over the course of the eight-hour flight.
Ed met him at the gate.
“Welcome to sunny Latvia,” he said.
“Is that sarcasm?” Sam asked, as he hoisted his duffel over his shoulder. He was dressed in civilian clothes, but the army-green canvas carry-on bag that was the extent of his luggage gave him away.
“Maybe. It’s a crap day today, but it can nice in the summer, I hear. Hope you’re ready for a long drive.”
“Ed, I just got off eight hours in second-class. If I don’t sit down again for the rest of my life, I’ll be okay with that.”
“Then I have bad news. The car’s pretty roomy though, and I have some burgers if you’re hungry.”
It was another two hours before they were out of the city proper and on the road toward… something. They were sharing the back of an SUV being piloted by members of the Latvian army, to whom Sam hadn’t been introduced. All he could tell about them was that they didn’t speak very much, and they had awful taste in music.
“All right, now do you want to tell me why we’re here?” Sam said. This was after some incidental small talk about the history of Riga, the climate of Europe, and the trouble Annie Collins had apparently been causing lately. According to Ed, Annie put the spaceship through a couple of unnecessary evasive maneuvers when having a nightmare, and the Pentagon folks on Team Babysitter (Sam had to ask twice if this was their real name) were really unhappy about this.
“I keep you in the dark on purpose, you know that,” Ed said.
“I know that but it’s annoying. Maybe you like being annoying.”
“You sound like my ex.”
“You mean, Captain Braver?”
“I meant all of them, but her too. I believe strongly in first impressions.”
“And my first impression is important to you.”
Ed smiled, “You’re working from a singular perspective. For a lot of reasons.”
“Well, give me something. I mean, if you can. Do those guys speak English?”
“They do, yes. You’ll find a lot of Europe speaks at least some English, which is helpful becau
se I don’t speak any Latvian, or Estonian, or Russian. I know a little French. You?”
“Some Spanish, that’s about all. What can you tell me in front of them, assuming they can hear us over… whatever the hell that is.”
“Yeah, sorry. I think techno is really popular here. At least it is with these boys. I’ve been listening to it the whole day.”
Sam liked country music, and whatever was coming out of the radio was pretty far from it. He wasn’t even sure he’d call it music. There was a rhythm to it, and something like a recurring melody, but nobody involved in its creation appeared to know about the invention of the guitar.
“But they’ve been briefed already,” Ed continued. “You’re the only one in the car who doesn’t know what we’re heading toward.”
“That doesn’t sound ominous at all.”
“Yeah, sorry. All right, I’ll tell you a little. It’s a ghost town.”
“A ghost town.”
“Yeah.”
“Remind me to regret having ever met you, Ed. What do you mean, a ghost town?”
“We’re heading for the westernmost part of the country, to a hillside overlooking the Baltic. If the day clears up a little, I’m told we might be able to see clear across to Sweden, but that’s probably an exaggeration.”
“I hear Sweden’s nice. We could just go to Sweden.”
“Well there’s something else in those hills that used to be very interested in Sweden, back when the Soviet Union built it.”
Sam sighed mightily.
“A telescope.”
“Yep. A big one.”
“Was this one abandoned too? How come you didn’t mention this at Algie?”
“I’m still putting it together, because I’m not sure yet if they’re related. What I knew a month ago was that there were rumors floating around the intelligence community about a telescope going dark. Separately, a few of the people connected with that telescope were added to some important lists at Interpol.”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 14
