The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  “They can’t find me here,” Violet said. “They won’t come to the house. It’s safe.”

  “But it isn’t you they’re looking for.”

  Violet looked at Annie, and back at Ed again. “No.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You should all come inside. We have a lot to discuss.”

  “Ed,” Annie muttered, as Violet and her family turned around and headed back into the house, “what the hell is going on?”

  “I’m pretty sure your friend is an alien and her parents are zombies,” he said. “Sorry to break it to you like this.”

  “Right. Well, I’m pretty sure now the day can’t get any weirder.”

  * * *

  The first indication Ed had that something was amiss with Violet and her family probably should have been when he met Susan for the first time, but it wasn’t. He was able to look back on that conversation and see the signs, but she didn’t sound off any alarms in his head during the conversation itself. Instead, it came from the most mundane of tasks: property research.

  After he dropped off Annie, he went back to the base to continue his research, when it occurred to him he should probably record the name and address of the people she was staying with in the documents he’d been given by the court. He was her legal guardian, after all; he didn’t want anyone asking where is she and have to cough up such an incomplete answer as she’s staying with her friend Violet up the road. He didn’t know their address, and Jones was a pretty common surname.

  He thought about calling Annie and asking—he’d also neglected to ask Susan for her phone number—but decided not to bother her with something he could just look up.

  That was when it started to get strange. An Internet search gave no indication that there was an address associated with the dirt road leading to the house, and the road itself wasn’t even identified on the maps. When he pulled up a satellite image of the area, the house wasn’t visible from above.

  On Monday, after meting with Pete he went to city hall and pulled up property records to match the approximate GPS location of Violet’s home with historical ownership of the land in that area, and hit two problems. First, every electronic search for the coordinates he was inputting—a guess in the first place—ended up with a point on the map that was either too far north or too far west. Second, nobody claimed property ownership of those points either, for the past seventy years.

  Records older than seventy years were archived in the library, so he went there next. The property archives of Sorrow Falls were perhaps more thorough and extensive than any he’d ever seen, but there was no private ownership of the land, and no maps which even recognized the space as existing, even though it clearly had to exist.

  All it meant was the town owned it, and that was fine, except when he approached it from that angle, he also came up empty. There were no forestry records, hunting licenses, reports of fires, gypsy moth infestation summaries, soil sample surveys, leaf-peeping expeditions, bobcat spottings, wildlife conservation projects, or any other kind of indication, official or unofficial, that this part of town existed.

  It was even possible to chart the missing territory mathematically. The total acreage of Sorrow Falls could be calculated as a whole, from border-to-border, or it could be calculated by adding up the total of the privately owned property with the total of the town-owned and state-owned property. The two sets of numbers should have been roughly equal. Instead, nearly twenty acres were missing from the second set.

  It was deeply weird. He was still trying to put it together when he stopped by the diner for a late lunch. Beth waited on him, so he took the opportunity to ask her—in the most casual way he could—what she thought of Annie’s friend Violet.

  Beth never heard of Violet. Ed thought that was a little surprising given how often Annie described them as best of friends, and how Beth was like a big sister. It made him want to ask more of Annie’s peers about Violet, but he didn’t know any of Annie’s peers.

  Only then did he start to rethink his conversation with Susan, which was strange yet at the same time strangely familiar.

  Susan answered questions with questions, offered generic sympathy, and repeated things said to her, and this went on right up until her daughter left the room. Ed had experienced that kind of interaction before, on a computer, with a computer.

  Violet’s mother was a living, breathing, Turing test. She wasn’t a person; she was someone pretending to be a person.

  * * *

  There were no versions of the conversation that needed to happen next that played out well in Ed’s mind if it also involved notifying anyone from the camper about the aliens in their midst. Oona was angry and paranoid, Laura mostly followed her lead, Dobbs was terrified and paranoid, and Sam… Sam might have been okay, but he was over-protective of Annie, and Annie was going to be having a difficult time.

  He explained to the others that they were safe for the moment and they were welcome to relax and stay in the camper or on the porch. Susan (or, whatever she should have been called) offered to bring out coffee, and apologized for being unprepared for guests at one in the morning.

  It was in their nature to assume Ed was wrong, and they were not safe at all, which was fine. It would keep them busy with their gadgets, looking for ways in which they were still in danger. It would keep them looking toward the woods at the zombies that were surely on their way instead of toward the house and the alien inside of it.

  It freed up Ed and Annie for perhaps the most important conversation in human history. As was perhaps true for most important conversations, this one took place at the kitchen table.

  “I don’t know exactly where to begin,” Violet said.

  “You can begin by telling Ed he’s crazy,” Annie said, “and you’re not some kind of freaky alien zombie lord.”

  Violet laughed.

  “Zombie lord is a stretch. But I can’t do that, because he’s right. I’m sorry, I… I wanted to tell you so many times, especially after the ship landed.”

  “Tell me what? Come on, this is crazy.”

  Ed put his hand on Annie’s arm to try and calm her.

  “Why don’t you start with explaining what you are,” Ed said. “As long as we’ve dispensed with the idea that you’re a sixteen-year old girl.”

  “The body I’m wearing is biologically indistinguishable from that of a sixteen-year old. I think she was seven when she died, about eighty years back. A respiratory ailment of some kind. The lungs are still imperfect.”

  “You’ve gotten older with me,” Annie said. “We’ve been friends for six years, don’t you think I would have noticed?”

  “That’s true. But before you and I met, she—I—was a ten-year old girl for a very long time. Figuring out how to stop and restart the aging process was one of the first things I had to learn if I wanted to stay here.”

  “Here like on this planet? I’m losing my mind. Ed, help me, I’m losing my mind.”

  “Before this I was Susan for a long while,” Violet continued. “She started out much younger. So did Todd. I’m sorry, Annie.”

  “How long have you been here?” Annie asked. “You’ve only been in Sorrow Falls for six years, but how long have you been on the planet?”

  “That isn’t really correct. The first memory I allowed you to have of me was six years ago, but I’ve been here for much longer.”

  “Allowed? Wait. Wait. How long? You were here before Sorrow, weren’t you? You were there when Oliver Hollis banged the drum.”

  “…Yes. I was.”

  “Ed, I saw that happen, in my mind, when we were looking at the drum. I was there. Violet, what did you do to me?”

  “I’ll explain.”

  “Is this why they’re after me?”

  “Annie, calm down,” Ed said. “C’mon, we’re finally in the right place to get answers, so let’s get them, huh?”

  “Right,” she nodded. “Right, sorry, it’s just my best friend the undying alien set me
up as zombie bait and I’m a little freaked out about that, my bad.”

  “It wasn’t intentional!” Violet said. She reached across the table to take Annie’s hand. Annie pulled back like there was a cobra at the end of the arm.

  “I mean it,” Violet said. “Until this minute it never occurred to me that I was putting you at risk. The ship should have gone away by now, I don’t know why it didn’t. It couldn’t sense me. I don’t know why this is happening at all.”

  “Let’s go back to the first question,” Ed said. “Tell us what you are.”

  “All right.”

  Violet leaned back in her chair and spoke only to Ed. Looking at Annie upset her, which Ed thought was interesting.

  “I don’t think there’s an easy way to explain it, though, not to… not to a human.”

  “Do you have a body of your own?”

  “Not in any sense you would recognize. I would say we’re energy-based, but that’s also reductive. More like… an idea. A self-aware idea.”

  “We. There are more?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you the only one of your kind here?”

  “Not any more, no. But for a long time, yes.”

  “The meteor in the painting,” Annie said. “The one distracting Josiah. That was when you came here.”

  “That’s not historically accurate. I put that there as a gag, although I was the only one who ever appreciated it properly.”

  “You did the painting?”

  “Yes, as Susan. I was going through an artistic phase. It didn’t last. I never met Josiah, so I made up the details of that day on the river. But you’re right, I did meet Oliver. I also bore him children. That was in a different body, of course.”

  “You’re saying the Hollis family is a half-alien race,” Annie said levelly, as if with everything else she’d already heard, this one particular detail was straight-up ridiculous.

  “Maybe in temperament. Biologically, no. I have no genetic material to pass along. But the entire drum ceremony has been depicted incorrectly. The land the Sorrowers found wasn’t considered cursed. It was holy. The natives kept away out of respect, and yes, fear. When they came to the tree stump and used the drum, it was to call the other tribes together, but it was also to summon my attention. I resolved many of their disputes by fiat. By the time Oliver came upon the drum, I’d already grown weary of the arrangement, and was interested in a more immersive experience with humankind. But to answer the rest of the question, the ship that fell to earth in this region many centuries ago came down before Josiah Sorrow was even born. And I wasn’t aboard that ship.”

  “Who was?” Ed asked.

  “Nobody. It was an unmanned pod. It’s beneath the house, if you’d like to examine it. I suspect we don’t have a great deal of free time, though.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that.”

  “It’s really simple. As an intelligence without a physical form I can travel the universe at the speed of light—faster, if you’d like to discuss extra-dimensional travel, although I imagine we have no time for that either. But I need a place to go. If you think of me as a piece of information, I need to be transmitted and received, just like any other piece of information. Likewise, I can only interact with the physical world through physical things. If I want to see something, I need to find eyes, or reside in something with an optical interface.”

  “So the ship beneath us is a giant antenna array and memory bank.”

  “Essentially.”

  “Is it the same as the one up the road?”

  “No. Same technology, different model. I have the equivalent of a roadside motel. Shippie is more like a tank or a battleship.”

  “Don’t call it Shippie,” Annie said.

  “Why not?”

  “That’s something Violet and I called it, and I don’t know who you are.”

  “Annie, I’m still Violet.”

  “Whatever, go on. Ed, go on, ask her something.”

  “Where did the technology come from?” Ed asked.

  “Who built it, since we are beings without hands?”

  “That’s a good way to put it, yes.”

  “A very, very long time ago, one of my kind infected an advanced species of interstellar travelers with a new idea. That idea was the basis of a technology used to build a large number of probes and send them all over the galaxy, looking for planets that could support life. So far as the species was concerned, the probes were a long-term exploration plan employing inventive new ideas and bending space-time in ways nobody had ever thought of before. In truth, it was to create landing spots for us, so we could visit places that didn’t have sufficient technology to suit our existential needs.”

  “Infect?”

  “It’s the best word choice out of a number of bad word choices. It would be just as fair to say that one of our sentient ideas took seed in the minds of technologically advanced beings in order to advance them further, so as to accommodate the goals of the sentient idea. They thought of the idea as theirs, when it was the other way around.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” Ed said, “but what happened to that species?”

  “They destroyed themselves. Technology was introduced to them at a time when they were unprepared for it. An equivalent would be handing a nuclear weapon to a caveman.”

  “You destroyed a whole species to get those ships?” Annie asked.

  “The death of a species was a consequence of the actions of one of my kind, yes. But entire species die all the time, often because of the poorly executed use of an idea. I find it hard to blame this entirely on the idea itself.” She turned back to Ed. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why do you think they’re after Annie?”

  “Honestly, we were really hoping you could answer that for us,” Annie said.

  “She touched the ship,” he said.

  “She… Annie, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Annie laughed. “Vi, in the game of things we should have told each other, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna lose. I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “The night it landed. The same night… oh, of course. I understand.”

  “Cool, explain it to us.”

  “The probes are designed to land on alien worlds and collect data, but the designers understood that some of those places may contain hostile lower life forms, so there are security countermeasures that have, what you would call an AI package.”

  “Something that learns,” Ed said.

  “Exactly. That package will analyze anything it considers a threat and look for ways to repel it with minimum environmental impact. The reason for this should be obvious: it can’t get a clean understanding of a place if its existence manifestly alters that place.”

  “Well that didn’t work well, did it?” Annie said.

  “Not in this instance, but in a world where the most advanced life form was a squirrel or a stegosaurus it would have been sufficient. You know this defensive program exists because you’ve seen it in use.”

  “It convinced me to call my mother,” Ed said. “It was very persuasive.”

  “Exactly. But a few hours after landing it would have only begun to calibrate to the environment. It would have defaulted to a generic blast of negative ideas. I’m surprised it didn’t destroy your mind completely, Annie.”

  “Maybe it lowered the volume after wrecking Rick Horton.”

  “He was there?”

  “Yes. I was the only one to touch the ship, though.”

  “That was the night your mother… that was the same night, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  “I think the reason you made it past the countermeasures was that the thoughts it gave you were ones you’d already had independently, that same evening. It was showing you the worst thing you could imagine, but you were already coping with that actually happening. If you’d been there a day later, you would never have made it that far.”

  “Yay me.”<
br />
  “What happened when you touched the ship?”

  “It put a bunch of pictures in my head? I didn’t understand what I was… well, seeing isn’t the right word, but…”

  “I understand. You reached the hull. The next logical conclusion would have been that you were a member of a higher life form, so it tried to communicate.”

  “Then it shrieked at me.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, both of you, there’s no polite way to put this. Humans aren’t nearly advanced enough. It recognized this and concluded you’d breached the defense due to a programming error. Once again, I’m surprised you were able to walk away.”

  “More like run, but okay. So we’re the squirrel and the stegosaurus in your eyes.”

  “Not in my eyes, no. To the ship, yes.”

  “Now it thinks she’s you,” Ed said. “Isn’t that right?”

  “That isn’t exactly right. It’s confused.”

  “Hold it, you need to back waaaay up, both of you,” Annie said. “Why is it looking for you, why does it think I’m you, and what is up with the zombies? Also, the ship has been here for three years. Why is this happening now?”

  Violet sighed. “A lot of things went wrong here. I thought I planned for all of it, but…”

  “Start with why it’s looking for you,” Ed suggested.

  “I’m sort of a runaway. In the parlance of the times.”

  “Oh my god, you’re hiding from your dad,” Annie said. “The abusive crazy one you told me about.”

  “Yes. We don’t really have genders, and don’t require two parents. He’s the one who thought of me originally.”

  Ed laughed. “That’s your reproductive cycle?”

  “It is. If one of us has an idea of a new version of ourselves, we can think that new idea into being. There’s a complexity to it that I’m failing to account for, but that’s the essence of the process. He thought of me, but as I matured I came into my own, as a fully formed being or, if we’re sticking with this wording, I became my own idea. He responded poorly, so I ran. I used the probe outpost network to explore the universe until I found this place. I sent a pulse through the network to disable all the probes in this star cluster to cover my tracks. I knew that wouldn’t dissuade him forever, because unlike humans when we say forever we mean forever. He’s a stubborn idea as old as eternity with no reason to stop looking.