Overture

by Mark Wandrey

  The laser team went back to work after they cleared the cigarette smoke from the working area. Then they replaced the targets, setting them on the far side of the dais, away from where the laser emitter rested on its tripod.

  Two days before, when they first started, they’d fired a laser over the dais, when the portal wasn’t active. This time, once they were ready, a technician in a protective suit stepped on the dais, reactivating the portal.

  The agent and the senior scientists watched the operation with mixed interest. As the techs prepared to fire the laser, Osgood slid his goggles back into place, and Volant followed suit.

  “What about the alien planet?” Volant asked. “Any idea where it is?”

  “We’ve taken a series of images of the sky, but none of the star patterns match,” Osgood said. “High resolution pictures of the trees show flora like Earth’s in the Cambrian period. The grass on the ground could have come from Earth.”

  The techs turned on their laser. The light went into the portal but didn’t hit the target behind it. Volant leaned around to see the other side. He had a view facing the opposite way, in the same field, on a planet who-knew-where.

  “That’s cool,” he said. Osgood’s main control computer sounded an alarm and he went to investigate. “What is it?” Volant asked.

  “There was an energy flux from the dais when they fired the laser.”

  “Dangerous?” Volant asked, watching the alien artifact with keen interest.

  “Not in the short term. Any effects on the other side?” Osgood asked the laser team.

  “Scott,” the team leader called, “see if you can spot the impact point.”

  “You bet,” the man in protective gear standing on the dais said. He stepped to the top and moved toward the portal. The gear was ill fitting, and he caught a foot on the same cable Osgood had earlier. With the cumbersome gear though, it wasn’t nearly as easy to recover. He did an almost comical spin/pirouette maneuver…and fell backwards. As he passed through the laser it splashed off his protective suit, sending shattered laser beams bouncing all over the room.

  Safeties detected the wild laser beams and shut off the emitter in a fraction of a second. Someone screamed. Scott backpedaled, trying to get his balance, and finally tripped on the edge of the portal. It had never displayed any sort of solidity before. Of course, no one had ever tried to go through before. He fell backwards through the portal, and it swallowed him.

  There was a deep bass ‘Thrumm!’ sound that shook the concrete dome slightly. The portal flashed from milky white to deep azure blue, then back to white. Everyone stared in shock at Scott now lying on his back in the alien field.

  “Holy shit!” someone yelled. Someone else screamed again. Scott sat up, yanked off his goggles, and said something, only no one could hear a sound except the screaming.

  “Who the fuck is screaming?” Volant asked and looked around. “Oh,” he said. One of the laser technicians was staggering around, bright red arterial blood spraying from a carotid artery neatly opened by a reflected one-kilowatt laser, bounced off one wildly gesticulating technician as he fell through the portal. “Someone call a medic,” Volant ordered.

  A pair of technicians were running toward the dais, obviously intent on mounting it to assist their fallen comrade on the other side.

  “Stop!” Osgood bellowed. They came to a skidding halt. “Is this being recorded?” Someone said it was.

  On the other side Scott crawled to the portal and reached toward Earth. His hand smacked into the portal on the other side as if it were covered in glass. The look of confusion on his face changed to one of horror. He stood up, hands unconsciously using the portal as support, and looked around at his surroundings.

  “Someone do something,” one of the techs said. Osgood snatched a clipboard, flipped over the papers on it and snatched a Sharpie from his pocket. He wrote in a shaking hand as he walked to the base of the portal and held the clipboard up for Scott to see.

  The man read his writing and gawked with unabashed disbelief.

  “Can’t someone help him?” Organized chaos ensued as everyone ran around and accomplished absolutely nothing.

  “Eggheads,” Volant said, reaching into his pocket, and lobbing his Victorinox Swiss Army knife through the portal. Scott caught it, and a second later the hovering portal snapped off. “One-way trip,” he said and walked over to Osgood. Volant took the clipboard from the scientist and looked at what he’d written. Can you breathe? Volant chuckled. Fucking eggheads.

  * * *

  The weekend getaway to the cabin had been Jake’s idea. For weeks, both Jake and Mindy had noticed their relationship was beginning to cool off. They used to share a sense of direction, and now that wasn’t there. As the days went by Mindy began to wonder if she’d allowed her life to be derailed by events beyond her control. The weekend was Jake’s attempt to reverse the course.

  Mindy sat in one of the rockers on the cabin’s porch and watched the sunrise. It was beautiful. Jake was sleeping in while she sipped tea and watched the night give way to dawn. What Jake hadn’t realized when he’d booked the cabin was that the southern view was only a mile from the interstate route between their house and her job in downtown Portland. As the sky lightened, she had a distant, but clear, view of the same observatory she saw most nights.

  The tears came completely uninvited, and unexpected. A trickle became a stream, and that turned into torrents. She found herself kneeling on the edge of the deck, holding one of the support beams and sobbing. A swirl of spring fog enveloped the valley below, reminding her of a distant galaxy. She missed the stars so much, it felt like a piece of her soul had been torn out and never returned.

  “I miss it so much,” she confessed to the night. She dropped back onto her bottom and sat there as the sun finished reclaiming the day. Finally, the tears slowed and stopped. The pain was gone, replaced by a determination she hadn’t had in a very long time.

  Mindy grabbed her phone from her pocket. Even at the remote cabin site she had three bars. She sent a text message to an old friend.

  “Got a minute to talk?” This early in the morning, she wasn’t surprised to get a quick answer.

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “How’s the code breaking coming?” she asked.

  “Slow. We’d make more progress if we could land that funding.”

  “That’s why I’m texting. I hear you’re looking for someone to help with funding, fixing computers, and listening to the stars.”

  “Don’t tease me, Mindy. I thought you had a job and a fiancé?”

  Mindy took a breath and typed an answer. It was easier than she thought. An hour later, she walked down the dirt road to the cabin rental office. She’d asked the cab to pick her up there instead of at their cabin.

  She’d left a handwritten note on the kitchen counter in the cabin. It was her goodbye to Jake. She desperately hoped it wasn’t as lame as it sounded when she wrote it. She’d tried to apologize in many different ways, but eventually she just settled on ‘I’m so sorry, goodbye.’

  She glanced back as she walked down the hill, her weekend bag over her shoulder. The cabin slowly fell out of view, and she turned to the winding road leading to her future. In the shadows of the cabin’s window, Jake quietly watched her walk away and didn’t try to stop her.

  * * *

  The transformation of Victor’s life could not have been more profound. In the weeks since he witnessed the angels in Central Park, the course of his life had altered in ways he couldn’t have predicted. Anyone who had known him previously would have thought it impossible he’d find God, or that God would find him!

  He sat at the end of the table in the diner on 47th and Lexington. With him were his six inner circle aids, or disciples. Chief among them was his first follower, Duke, who’d saved him in the NYC lockup, and was now his right-hand man. Together they were the center of his church, believers and followers all. He had hundreds of followers.

  “We
have to get a place,” Duke was insisting. “Damn, Victor, we almost got arrested yesterday on Broadway for stopping traffic for two hours!”

  “I agree with you brother,” Victor said, “but even in this heaven-forsaken place, a church is going to cost serious Benjamins! We’re having a hard-enough time feeding our people and sleeping in the Brooklyn flophouse.”

  “We need to ask the faithful to turn out their pockets,” said Mary. She’d been the first to join after Duke and Victor were released. By the time he’d studied the Bible enough to realize Jesus hadn’t had any female disciples, Victor was way past the point of changing his mind.

  Mary wasn’t her real name. All the disciples in Victor’s inner circle chose new names. All except Duke, that is. Mary, the only white person in his inner circle, and the best educated, came to them as a drug-addicted prostitute. “I was a crack whore,” she freely admitted. Before plummeting from the heights of Wall Street, she’d been a stockbroker. “I’ve been chewing the numbers, and we need to start soliciting donations.”

  “Many of our faithful can’t even feed themselves,” Paul said. He was the humblest of Victor’s followers, and had once been a Catholic priest. He didn’t talk about his fall from grace, though his fondness for pre-teens meant you didn’t have to think too hard about what might have happened.

  “Many would not wish us to succeed in building a permanent church on the street.” The speaker, Gabriel, could arguably be the one in Victor’s flock who’d fallen the furthest. He was once an NYPD detective. He’d had a wife with expensive tastes, children, and a townhouse in Greenwich. To fund it all, he’d gone dirty. When Internal Affairs caught up with him, reporters were all over it, and his family left overnight. He’d been out of prison for a year and living on the street when Victor found him.

  “You know the way of the street better than any of us,” Victor said to Gabriel. “I’m certain that among the various street ministries we’re considered less than legitimate.”

  “And the police are still looking for you,” Gabriel said and pointed a finger at Victor. He was a black man of average build, almost the same height as Victor, but with a presence that was naturally intimidating. Victor called it the ‘cop walk.’

  “We have to keep spreading the word,” their newest member said. “When we talk, they listen.” Kadru was the only one not born in the United States. She was a gorgeous Indian woman who had become part of the inner circle only two days before. Victor had invited her based entirely on the force of her personality and a fascinating connection with the angel of God. She preferred to call them Avatars. “People can’t listen to the words of the Avatars while standing in the streets and being watched by non-believers.” Everyone nodded in agreement.

  “She makes a good point,” Duke said, taking a sip of soda.

  “I can get us a place for only five hundred a month,” Gabriel said. “Over by the Cloisters.”

  “That’s expensive territory,” Mary said.

  “It’s an abandoned theater,” Gabriel said with a shrug. “They’re going to tear it down or renovate it; the authorities haven’t made up their minds yet. So, the owner will take our money.” Several nodded.

  “That’s almost all the money we have in our pockets,” Victor pointed out. “What happens next month when we ain’t got the Benjamins?” They were already hitting delis after closing for leftover chicken and day-old baguettes.

  Without drawing much attention to herself, Kadru got up and quietly walked out of the diner. Mary watched her leave the building and shrugged before returning to her coffee. It was moments like this when people were together, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, that her old desire for a hit was worst. She squeezed the edge of the table until it hurt and offered a silent prayer to the centaur angel Victor preached about.

  “On a subject we can afford,” she offered once her cravings had subsided, “I’ve made considerable progress on our website. I can only do so much using the free domain name, and my time at the public library terminal is limited. But, we’re online.”

  “What did you call it?” Victor asked.

  “A lot of stuff with angels and God were already taken. So, I was thinking about how Kadru keeps calling the angels Avatars, and I decided to call it Followers of the Avatar. I hope you don’t mind.”

  The disciples looked at each other and started nodding. It had a nice sound and avoided any claim of being an official church that might incur the wrath of the established faiths.

  “I think Kadru has named us,” Victor said, and everyone smiled. “Where is our newest member?”

  “She went outside a few minutes ago,” Mary told them. On cue, the tiny Indian girl reappeared through the doorway. Her delicate featured face scanned the room as she walked toward them. She moved like a graceful image from the Kama Sutra as she headed for the table with a smile on her face. “Victor has something to tell you,” Mary told her.

  “We’ve decided to call ourselves Followers of the Avatar,” Victor told Kadru.

  Kadru looked taken aback, then she smiled a tiny smile. She nodded slightly then took an envelope from her coat and placed it on the table among their empty lunch plates and the unpaid bill. She gestured for Victor to take the thick envelope.

  “Open it, Prophet,” she urged. Victor took it. The envelope was surprisingly heavy. He opened it and found a thick stack of $20 bills. He guessed there were about 100 of them. Two large!

  “Where did this come from?” Gabriel asked, his natural police instinct coming forward.

  “The Avatars have provided it,” she said with a shrug and a sly smile.

  “Okay,” Victor said, giving her an appraising look. “Thanks to the Avatars, we have a start.” He turned to Gabriel. “Tell your contact we’ll take the building.” He counted out 50 of the bills and handed them to Gabriel without a second thought.

  “You know this is completely under the table,” Gabriel warned him. “The law could come down on us at any point.”

  “We need some documentation to make it at least nominally legal,” Mary said. Gabriel considered and shrugged before nodding.

  “I can probably get at least that much. Besides, I have a contact in the housing authority. We’ll be good for a few months.”

  “That should be enough. We don’t need all that long.”

  “Why not?” Paul asked. Victor considered for a moment.

  “I think it will all be over by then.”

  Victor ordered a round of milkshakes in celebration of their new name and, soon, their church building. Everyone was talking excitedly about how they could accelerate their outreach program and help the new faithful with the facility. As they celebrated, Victor looked down at the envelope in his hand. It was the same kind of envelope some ATMs dispensed with large withdrawals. Without a word he slipped it into his coat pocket and sipped his milkshake.

  * * *

  Alicia Benjamin pushed the #7 on her phone’s keypad, deleting the last message. She tossed it onto the couch beside her, made a note in the tablet, then the pencil and paper followed the phone, and a sigh followed that. She got up and went to the kitchen where the teapot was whistling.

  She’d received two crank calls, eight requests for interviews by the typically confrontational British tabloid media, a notification of a cancelled field trip, and an offer of a bus trip for tourists. In the weeks since going public with her LM-245 sighting, the tourist traffic had exploded. Then as the WAA weighed in, accusing her of fraud, it had all but died.

  Her tiny observatory had long depended on the miniscule donations she got from such visitors. A few pounds here and there paid the bills she couldn’t pay on her modest pension. The ridicule of the press had chased away almost all her tourist business. Now, even the schools were staying away. Her frustration with the World Astronomy Association, of which she’d been a lifelong member, was unbelievable.

  “Local Astronomer is a Charlatan,” read the Southampton Daily Echo. She angrily poured boiling water into a c
hipped cup and added a teabag.

  “Bloody bastards,” she growled.

  Taking the tea outside, she began opening the observatory for the night. The forecast was for clear skies, and she was eager to find an old friend. The trouble was, it should have returned days ago.

  Once she was ready, the telescope began sweeping the distant horizon. Due to the time of year, only a couple hours of observation were possible. The edge of the view was hazy from light pollution, but it was the best she could do. During the day, she used the American’s SOHO observatory. Located in deep space, it watched the sun 24 hours a day, looking for solar phenomenon. But it was also useful in spotting celestial bodies, particularly those close to the sun. The telescope’s high-resolution images were available to anyone with an internet connection.

  Alicia punched data into her telescope’s computer controls, and the motors whined as the scope moved. An area only two degrees from the now set sun came into view.

  “April 10, 8:49 pm,” she spoke into her digital recorder. “Observation for LM-245 at expected coordinates continues. Its transition from behind the sun should have occurred 3 days ago. The asteroid should transition Earth orbit in perihelion on July 9.”

  Alicia opened her old laptop and activated the instant messaging program. “Are you there, Ms. Patoy?”

  “Mindy is fine,” the reply came from almost half way around the world. “Any sign yet?”

  “Not yet,” Alicia typed. “I’m going to run the coordinates you suggested now.”

  “Understood, standing by.”

  Alicia entered the coordinates suggested by the American astronomer. She was familiar with Mindy Patoy’s story. She’d watched it unfold from afar, then listened to the alien signal and hoped it was genuine. When the WAA discredited her, Alicia got her first taste of betrayal from that organization. It wasn’t as if they proved Mindy wrong, she just wasn’t able to provide enough evidence to back up her assertion.