“That Jeep nearly got you shot,” Oona shouted from the roof of the camper.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Sam shouted back.
“They’re looking for me,” Annie said. “I mean, obviously. But if they already figured out we’re here… we’re sort of pinned down right now.”
“We’re safe,” Ed said. “Thanks to Violet.”
“Yeah. Yeah. We have a lot to talk about, Edgar. Come on inside, we’ll see what we can find for food. Maybe you can tell me why you were in Latvia, and why Sam shot somebody, and then we can work out where Violet actually is. Because she’s not here.”
“Soldier boy, I’m proud of you,” Oona said, clapping Sam on the back.
They were all in the kitchen, eating the available food and drinking the coffee that came from the stores on the camper, since Violet didn’t have any.
Calling what Violet had ‘food’ was a bit of a stretch. The freezer food that existed in the house—primarily to feed Annie when she came by—was still there, but almost none of it was what would be considered breakfast food to most people. Also, it was a menu tailored to the way Annie ate when she was sixteen: chicken nuggets and French fries, mostly. Some of it was three years old.
Everything else was dried grains that nobody knew how to make palatable.
Ed had just finished explaining why he and Sam were in Latvia, including the part where Sam shot a guy in the head.
Annie was a little less than enthusiastic.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked. “I don’t think I understand.”
“He was asking about you,” Sam said.
“Lots of people ask about me. We don’t usually execute people for that, do we? If we did, we’d run out of newscasters and talk show hosts, like, overnight.”
“I don’t think the person Sam shot was really a person anymore,” Ed said. “Well, no, he was, but something else was going on there.”
“Invasion, you said,” Laura said. This was the other half of the Latvia story. It had gotten somewhat overshadowed by the part about Sam murdering a guy, but was probably more relevant to the current situation.
“Yeah. I was looking at those log books for more than a week. I can’t read the notes, but the numbers are pretty clear. A Russian scientist found it first, but he was only interested in it because it was causing interference. His job was to intercept signals from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit over Sweden. You can see in the numbers that he became preoccupied by something happening only at particular times over the course of the year. I don’t know that he ever figured out what was causing that interference, but the next person who looked at his log books did figure it out: the interference was coming from an area of space behind the satellite. It’s pretty cool, actually. If these were different times, and we knew everyone’s names, the Russian would get posthumous co-credit for the discovery.”
“Invasion, Ed,” Annie said. “Come back to the plot.”
“Right. I think that signal might have been sentient.”
There was a silence for a few seconds as everyone thought about that.
“You might have skipped too far ahead,” Dobbs said. “We pick up things from deep space all the time. They’re just beeps and boops.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s what I thought too. That was why it wasn’t making any sense. But let’s say you hear a signal like this, and you become convinced it’s alien in nature. Okay, that’s pretty interesting: beeps and boops, but not random ones. Non-random means something is being communicated, right? The next question is, what’s being communicated? What are the aliens trying to say? I think what these guys did was, keep listening to the signal to see if it started making sense.”
“It drove them insane, then,” Sam said, “based on the rooms they left behind.”
“Or it started making sense to them.”
Ed pulled up a photo on his cell phone and slid it across the table to Annie.
“Tell me what you see,” he said.
She took one look and jumped out of her seat, like the phone was a grenade.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“It was written on the wall at both sites. It’s not nonsense, is it? That’s a real formula.”
Impossible, she thought, before remembering that this was her life, and impossible things happened all the time.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what it means?”
“No, I can’t do that. But it’s important.”
“How do you know what it is?” Dobbs asked.
“It was written on a board in her dorm room,” Ed said. “At the tail end of a proof.”
Everyone in the kitchen decided this was a good time to stare at Annie, who was not known by most to be any sort of mathematical savant.
“I’m not explaining it right now, guys,” she said. “We have other things to deal with. How did you know about the proof, Ed?”
“I get reports on you, you know that.”
“Sure, but I erased it, like, the next day.”
“Sorry,” Cora said. “That was me. Protocol. I was ordered to monitor you for things like that.”
“Seriously?” Annie said. “I didn’t know you were doing that.”
“I think that was the point.”
“If it makes you feel better, everyone we showed it to in the government thought you were screwing with us,” Ed said. “But I don’t need to know what it means. You’re just about the only human who’s had an alien idea in her head, and I’m guessing this equation was a consequence of that experience. Now it’s turned up in the two places where a signal from space was intercepted, so I’m thinking the minds in those locations were also touched by an alien idea.”
“That shouldn’t get out,” Annie said. “I shouldn’t have even written it down.”
“Nobody knows what it means.”
“I realize that.”
Annie sighed, and sat back down at the table, taking a sip of lukewarm, unsweetened, extremely mediocre coffee. It was awful, but she really had to wake up.
“You’re right,” Annie said. “That formula is… it’s not from this planet. Not yet. So if someone wrote that down it was because they were being influenced by someone who wasn’t born here.”
Everyone was still sort of staring at her, which wasn’t going to get her to elaborate on the math in any way.
She understood why it was happening, though. For the most part, everyone assumed that the Annie Collins who got off the spaceship was the same one who’d crawled into it in the first place. That was almost always true, but not 100% of the time.
“Right,” Dobbs said. “Okay, but does that get us all the way to invasion?”
“That’s the part I was stuck on,” Sam said.
“If we posit that the signal contained an alien idea,” Ed said, “the evidence seems to indicate that the idea propagated. It wasn’t one guy who disappeared from each facility, it was all of them, in both places.”
“Some died,” Sam reminded Ed.
“Oh my God, the bodies,” Lindsey muttered.
“In California, yes,” Ed said. “Only five people have turned up, but twenty-three went missing. Maybe whatever this is didn’t take, or something, for everyone. But two of them turned up in a room with Dobbs. We know that.”
“And then I remembered Violet,” Dobbs added.
“I get you,” Sam said. “I remembered her too, after meeting that general.”
“You said he was in your head somehow,” Ed said. “I think he was trying to share the idea with you.”
“That would make them something like Violet,” Annie said. “I would say it’s impossible, because these guys are still human beings working with human brains, and it’s not like there’s latent psychic powers just waiting to kick in.”
Ed laughed.
“You mean, you haven’t been able to do what Violet does,” he said.
“Let’s just say it’s possible I tried and it didn’t work. But maybe these guys c
an do it, and we should think of these ideas as viruses that can be passed on. Let’s table it until we can ask Violet.”
Nobody said anything for a few seconds, because Annie was the only one there who thought Violet was actually going to show up.
“All right,” Ed said. “It sounds like we have another problem. I’m told everybody hates Annie now.”
He looked at Lindsey.
“And you have data to back that up, I hear,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Hey, can I ask you something? You’re Mr. X, aren’t you?”
“Pardon?”
Lindsey looked around the room, like she expected someone else to know what she was talking about.
“It’s an Internet conspiracy theory,” she explained, when it was clear she was the only one who was down with this. “There was supposedly a government spook involved, but nobody was able to put together a name and a face. Lots of shadowy images and… sorry, I guess that isn’t important.”
Ed smiled.
“I’m not a spook,” he said. “But I guess the answer’s yes.”
“Right. So, yes, everyone hates Annie, and I have data to back it up.”
“It’s the zombie frequency,” Dobbs said. “Someone’s broadcasting it.”
“Hey, Ed,” Sam said, “could you use a great big dish telescope to broadcast a signal?”
“Maybe,” Ed said. “With a little work.”
“If we’re talking about this stuff being viral,” Annie said, “it wouldn’t take much. People would accept it without fully knowing why. You could embed it in anything.”
“Like bad techno?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, like that,” Annie said.
Annie thought back to the college radio that was played in Corcoran, and the loud music at the party. Sam probably wasn’t referencing either of those situations, but bad techno was certainly an apt description for what was going on there.
“All right,” Ed said. He stood, and started pacing while rubbing his face. This was either to wake up or because he was exasperated about something. It was, admittedly, a lot to take in on very little rest.
“Let’s boil this down,” he said. “There’s at least one alien entity inhabiting the minds of people on two continents that we know of. Those aliens are broadcasting a signal that appears to have infected a significant enough portion of the population to actually manipulate public opinion about Annie. The army, so far as we can tell, thinks Annie is responsible for the signal, and they’ve shown themselves willing to shoot her to make it stop. Also, they’re in Sorrow Falls already, and since this farmhouse isn’t hidden from view any longer, it’s only a matter of hours before they discover us here. Other than maybe trying to convince Annie to give the spaceship to the government, we don’t have anything like a demand from this alien species, because they haven’t tried to communicate directly. Violet’s missing, and we have almost no coffee. Did I forget anything?”
“No, I think that’s pretty thorough,” Annie said.
Laura raised her hand.
“Hey,” she said. “Something’s been bothering me since we got here. How do we have power?”
Everyone took turns at looking at everyone else.
“This cabin is completely off the grid, right?” Laura added. “I don’t see any power lines to it. If this Violet girl is an alien, like you said, she may have powered it some other way, but she isn’t here now, and Annie you said she took her… ship, or capsule with her. Where’s the power coming from?”
“I don’t know,” Annie said. “It always just had power. Violet will tell us when we find her. I think we have to focus on that first.”
“Did you ask your ghost?” Oona asked. “Maybe he knows where she is.”
“Your ghost?” Ed repeated.
“Oh, yeah,” Annie said. “Funny story.”
20
Crossed Signals
Caller: Hi, hello? You have to help us!
Operator: Please state your emergency.
Caller: It’s the army, they’re shooting everybody! I…
Operator: …Hello?
call to 911 emergency line
Sorrow Falls woke up surrounded.
At first, this wasn’t seen as an enormously big deal, even if it constituted a not-minor inconvenience for a majority of the population. The army had been in town before, after all, and that had gone pretty well. Nobody shot anyone, or even behaved imprudently. It had been such a peaceful occupation that there now existed an entire generation of local children who strove to join the armed services when they grew up.
But what was almost immediately clear with the new occupation was that this set of soldiers seemed a whole lot more hostile. For starters, their guns were out, which nobody could remember seeing before, outside of the immediate perimeter of the spaceship. They were also just plain rude, which didn’t go well with the thing about the guns.
In all fairness, the soldiers had a different mandate this time around. The spaceship was the enemy before, and everybody knew where it was. Now, for reasons the army was unwilling to explain, Annie Collins was the enemy, and nobody knew where to find her.
What the army personnel did share with the townspeople was that this had to do with what had happened the night before, at the college. It wasn’t as if nobody in Sorrow Falls was aware of this peculiar event, but it didn’t take a close follow of the news to appreciate that nobody had died. Beyond that, the people of Sorrow Falls were largely content to assume Annie knew what she was doing, and everyone should just calm down and give her time to figure things out.
She’s a good kid, you boys just leave her alone, was the running theme of the morning.
This only made the soldiers angrier, and more rude. Everyone, they would counter, agrees that Annie is a risk. Even the president.
This was technically an overreach. The sitting President of the United States had not been consulted directly in this matter, but that was because he didn’t need to be. The power to act, either in support of or in opposition to Annie Collins and her spaceship, had been signed over to the command center at the Pentagon. This included the nuclear option, provided nothing on the surface was targeted.
In other words, Team Babysitter had the authority to fire nuclear weapons at extra-planetary objects, and the missiles to do so. They also had an authority that trumped the normal military chain of command.
It was an exaggeration, then, to say that the president had weighed in specifically on the imminent danger of Annie Collins and the need to locate and neutralize her immediately, but his signature on the document gave the Pentagon authority to worry for him, which was thought of as the same thing.
Also, he was in Europe all week for a trade summit.
It was barely seven-thirty by the time Melissa Braver could state with any degree of confidence that the town was buttoned up. That would have been a remarkable feat of military legerdemain in just about any other part of the country, but in this case the army knew exactly where all the egress points were, and already had tactical plans in place for sealing them up. The plans were nearly five years old and originally included support from a base within the town, but aside from that base ceasing to exist, nothing was really any different. No new roads had been built in the time since.
By nine-thirty, Braver had a list of the people Annie was most likely to be found in the company of. This was—of course—well after Annie’s own house was searched thoroughly. Other than nearly losing a cadet to a hole in the kitchen floor, it wasn’t a notable excursion.
If it had been any other person, the list Melissa was working from would have been Annie’s closest friends. (That was actually what she asked for.) A problem with that request appeared to be that Annie was friends with almost everyone, to the extent that it would have been easier—and faster—to check a list of anyone in Sorrow Falls who didn’t know Annie personally.
This was something that really puzzled Melissa. Collins was more than a little to blame for some two hund
red local dead people, and the place was small enough that it was impossible to find someone not related to at least one or two of the dead. Melissa could appreciate a town that had learned to forgive and moved on and all that, but some of these folks were ready to die for her. Literally. She already had to defuse three situations in which private citizens stood in front of army men who were pointing guns at them.
Someone was going to end up getting shot; it was just a matter of time. Braver would use that as an argument to convince the locals to help—the sheriff, in just about any other town, would like this angle—but it probably wouldn’t work. Individually, without discussing matters amongst themselves ahead of time, Sorrow Falls had reached the conclusion that Annie Collins was right, and the government was wrong.
So, there was the list of likely hideouts. At 10:00, she met with the person most capable of hiding a large RV: Desmond Hollis, whose family owned the paper mill that employed much of the town. The mill had plenty of truck docks, and he had two houses in town, so it was an obvious first guess.
Hollis was unhelpful to the point of belligerence. The army had men with bullhorns going up and down the streets telling people to stay in their homes due to the (unofficial) state of emergency, so even the mill workers who lived within walking distance of their jobs couldn’t show up, which meant Hollis was facing a real economic impact the longer the occupation lasted. Melissa thought this would convince him to help or, if not help, at least not actively inhibit their search.
Not so. They still searched the mill, of course, only without his consent or his keys. He was already calling the governor before she even made it off his front lawn.
The Welds, who owned the diner, and whose daughter Beth was one of the early victims on the night of The Incident, were only a little more polite, and only because they appeared to be constitutionally incapable of being impolite.
Beth Weld was another story.
“Don’t say anything to her,” Beth shouted from the top of the stairs. There was already a cadet up there, checking the rooms for any trace of Annie Collins, so it wasn’t like Beth could impede their progress.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 29
