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by Cawdron, Peter

  “This stuff is gold!” Mitchell said, overacting, knowing he was goading Jason. “It's serious investigative journalism.”

  Jason shook his head, trying not to laugh.

  As Mitchell flicked through the pages, Jason spotted an image of a hairy man running through a child’s playground.

  “Hey, that’s a monkey suit,” Jason cried, but Mitchell kept running his finger back and forth over the glass display, turning pages.

  “Oh,” Mitchell replied. “You gotta separate the wheat from the chaff, but there’s some great stuff in here. Most of this stuff has been classified top secret for decades!”

  “Yeah,” Jason replied dryly, pretending to agree with him. “It's real Pulitzer Prize material.”

  Mitchell turned to a page near the back of the virtual newspaper and pointed at a grainy picture. He slapped his finger on the screen, exclaiming in triumph.

  “There!”

  From what Jason could make out, the image showed someone pulling a young child from the ocean into a rickety old fishing boat. There was something beneath the water directly below the boat, but it was impossible to make out what the object was. He reached over and touched the glass screen, pinching with his fingers and enlarging the image.

  Lights appeared to glow from beneath the waves, but he thought they looked like they’d been added to the photograph.

  Jason read the caption beneath the photo.

  “Two decades have passed since the Incheon Incident, when a UFO crashed into the sea off the coast of North Korea. The only known survivor of this extraterrestrial contact was a young girl of three or four, rescued from the ocean by North Korean fishermen as the UFO took on water and sank.”

  “I don’t see what this proves,” Jason said.

  Mitchell turned to another virtual page, crying, “Look at that!”

  He pointed at an image of a UFO flying past the Empire State building. Apart from the appalling lack of chromatic balance, Jason didn’t see anything noteworthy in the picture.

  “It’s the same UFO,” Mitchell announced.

  “It’s the same poor photoshop skills,” Jason conceded. He pretended to peer closely at the screen, taking the computer tablet from Mitchell and holding absurdly close to his face until the glass touched his nose. He squinted, adding, “Oh, yeah. That’s definitely been doctored by the same guy!”

  Mitchell laughed as Jason gently placed the tablet back on the table.

  Jason loved Mitchell like a brother, ever since they'd met during their first year at college, but his gullibility for the outlandishly absurd was astonishing to Jason's rational mind.

  Mitchell said, “Look at the facts: twenty years ago, a UFO crashes and a young girl survives. Today, you meet a roughly twenty year old woman from the same province. What are the odds that they are one and the same person?”

  Jason thought about it for a second and said, “Zero. One’s fictitious, the other’s real. There’s no chance they’re one and the same person.”

  “Come on,” Mitchell pleaded. “Think about it. All life on Earth follows circadian rhythms, with a day/night wake/rest cycle, but by your own admission little old Lily sat up all night. How do you explain that?”

  “Two words,” Jason said, watching as Helena and Lily walked over to join them. “Jet lag.”

  Lily smiled. She slid around into the booth and sat next to him. For someone who had dropped into his world barely a day ago, having her beside him felt both comforting and refreshing. Jason couldn’t express why, but it felt natural to be with her, as though they belonged together. He wasn’t one for the old cliché of love at first sight, but Lily was different from any other girl he’d ever met. She seemed almost disinterested in a physical relationship, and he found that strangely appealing. Perhaps it was the lack of expectation that disarmed him, the absence of any pressure was welcome. Rather than trying to make something happen between them, it felt like it had already happened years ago.

  Was this déjà vu, he wondered? Jason wasn’t one to buy into superstitions. He preferred to think of the two of them as somehow complimentary at a hormonal level. Yes, he thought, compatible chemistry, that was a better explanation.

  “Are you guys ready to order?” a waitress asked, standing there with her plastic stylus poised above a digital tablet ready to take their order.

  “Blueberry pancakes,” Jason said.

  “I’ll have the deluxe omelet,” Helena said.

  “Trucker’s breakfast,” Mitchell said.

  Lily looked overwhelmed by the choices on the menu. Each meal had a glossy, color image associated with it, and Jason could see her eyes darting around the menu without settling on anything.

  “What do you normally have for breakfast in Korea?” he asked.

  “Rice.”

  “And lunch?” Mitchell asked.

  “Rice.”

  “And dinner?” Helena asked.

  “Fish ... With rice.”

  “Whatever you do,” Helena said, addressing the waitress, “do not give this girl any rice.”

  Lily laughed.

  Helena turned to her, saying, “You can have anything on here you want.”

  That didn’t help, Jason noted.

  Finally, Lily said, “I’ll have what he’s having,” pointing at Jason.

  The waitress wandered off.

  Mitchell leaned across the table, addressing Lily as he said, “So, what do you remember from your childhood? Say, when you were about three or four?”

  Jason kicked him beneath the table.

  Lily looked confused.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Helena said. “Mitch was born with his foot in his mouth. That’s what I love about him.”

  Lily blushed, and Jason wondered what was running through her mind. Here she was, thousands of miles from home, in a strange culture, surrounded by three Americans she didn’t know, unable to find her father. The poor girl must have been terrified, but she kept a brave face.

  “You are all very kind,” she said. “I am lucky to have found you.”

  Helena spoke in a serious tone, saying, “You need to be careful, Lily. New York is a dangerous place for a girl on her own.”

  “Yeah,” Mitchell added, kicking Jason's feet. “You never know what weirdos you’ll meet.”

  Jason smiled, shaking his head as Mitchell laughed.

  Lily picked up on their banter and rested her hand on Jason’s knee, saying, “Jason is a gentleman. I feel safe with him.”

  Jason turned his head slightly to one side and grinned at Mitchell. Mitch would know precisely the retort Jason wanted to utter to him at that point, something along the lines of, ‘Take that, Bitch!’ Mitchell smiled knowingly.

  Lily pointed at the computer tablet lying on the table and asked, “What's in the news?”

  “The news?” Mitchell replied, sounding innocent. “Oh, funny you should ask.”

  “Mitch, Honey,” Helena said, resting her hand on his forearm.

  Jason jumped in with, “Mitch thinks New York is about to be invaded by aliens.”

  “Really?” Lily asked, and Jason saw some of the naiveté he’d noted the night before. She seemed intelligent, but was easily led.

  The waitress arrived carrying all four plates. She set them down and left.

  “The odds are against it,” Jason said, pouring maple syrup over his pancakes. Lily copied him.

  “Space is absurdly large,” he added, picking up a tiny speck of dust between his fingers and holding it up, examining it in the morning light, somewhat lost in thought. “If this was the sun ... Well, actually, even this is a bit too big. If our sun was a single blood cell, visible only under a microscope, then our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of the Continental US.”

  “And the nearest star?” Lily asked.

  Jason looked out the window of the restaurant and across the street at Central Park. From their first floor booth, he could see over the tops of the trees. There were some kids throwing a frisbee i
n an open grassy patch by the lake.

  “About there,” he replied, pointing at them. “Roughly two hundred yards away, perhaps a little more. And it too would be no more than a microscopic speck of dust.”

  “What about Voyager?” Mitchell asked. “It's left the solar system and is headed toward the stars, right?”

  “Well, yes and no,” Jason replied. “It all depends on how you define the solar system.”

  Jason pulled a quarter out and put it on the table in front of him, with his finger resting in the middle of the coin.

  “If the sun was the size of a blood cell, most of the planets, including Earth, would orbit inside this quarter. Voyager would be just marginally beyond our quarter. Voyager is beyond the most distant, recognized planet, and well beyond the heliopause, where solar winds buffet against interstellar space, but it's not really the edge of our solar system, not if you consider the solar system as the system directly affected by the sun.”

  Jason pointed across the street at a man walking his dog through the park, just visible through the trees. He'd only just walked his beagle across the street.

  “He's probably at about the right distance. Surrounding our sun almost a light year away is the Oort cloud containing billions, if not trillions of comets all held loosely in check by the sun's gravity, just waiting to start their long slow fall in toward the inner solar system and put on a show. That's the real edge of the solar system, at least from a gravitational perspective.”

  Lily had stopped eating. She sat there with her elbows on the table, her head resting on her hands, listening with rapt attention.

  “Space is mindbogglingly huge. There's a whole lot of nothing out there. Imagine New York City as an empty void. You'd have maybe a couple of hundred microscopic specks of dust scattered around as stars. Perhaps one of them would be on top of the Empire State Building, another might be on the Statue of Liberty, and so on. But there would only be a couple of hundred tiny specks broadly scattered around the place.

  “If the Milky Way were the size of the Continental US, there would be a massive black hole at the center, just outside of Lebanon, Kansas, up by the border with Nebraska. But it too would be no larger than a few grains of sand. As for us, the tiny speck we call the sun would probably be in St. Louis.”

  “I like St. Louis,” Helena said, grinning as she sipped some coffee.

  “Black holes in Kansas!” Mitchell cried. “Sounds like you've been reading News of the World.”

  Jason laughed, saying, “There’s just too much empty space out there. Interstellar travel is impractical. It will take Voyager 30,000 years just to reach the Oort cloud, let alone any of the stars. Thirty to forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens had just reached Europe and discovered Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man. Imagine where we will be in thirty thousand years time!

  “One day we’ll travel to the stars, and that will be the greatest act of exploration ever undertaken, but make no mistake about it, we’re traversing an arid desert, a desolate Arctic wilderness, an oxygen-starved mountain far more dangerous and inhospitable than Everest. The distances involved and the difficulty of maintaining life in outer space should not be underestimated.”

  Helena seemed more interested than Mitchell, saying, “But we’ve been traveling into space for decades. We’ve been to the Moon. We’ve got a space station.”

  “Honestly,” Jason replied. “That’s like playing in a duck pond, never being more than an arm's length from shore. If space travel was swimming, we’d be comfortable in a kiddie pool. Getting to the Moon would be like swimming a few lengths in an Olympic size pool, while traveling to Mars compares to swimming from Cuba to Florida. Going to another star, well, now you’re taking on a distance that makes crossing the Pacific look like your kiddie pool.”

  Mitchell disagreed, saying, “And just because we haven’t done it, you think no one can? That makes no sense. There’s no reason to think aliens would be at the same technological level as us. They could be millions of years more advanced.”

  “Or billions of years behind us,” Jason added.

  “So you don’t believe in aliens?” Lily asked.

  “Oh, it’s not that I don’t think there are aliens. I just don’t think they’re surreptitiously visiting Earth every couple of years to probe the rectums of a select few rednecks.

  “That life exists in outer space is undeniable. Just look at us. We’re in outer space and we're alive. Sounds strange to consider, I know, but our perspective is so narrow and prejudiced toward seeing Earth as unique. We naturally assume our Earth-centric view of the universe is reality, as though the Sun, Moon and stars really do revolve around us, but they don’t. Copernicus and Galileo proved that over five hundred years ago, but in practice it’s very hard not to think of sunrise and sunset. Try picturing Earth-turn instead. You'll give yourself a migraine!”

  “You’re such a geek,” Helena said. “Only you could take a perfectly romantic notion like a sunset and turn it into something weird.”

  Jason laughed, saying, “Well, reality is weird, and that’s the problem, it’s our notions that are distorted, not reality.”

  Helena just shook her head as she finished her breakfast. “Listen,” she said, checking the time on her phone. “I don’t know what you boys are up to today, but how about I take Lily with me. We can’t have her running around the city in your baggy clothes. I’ve got some spare clothes I can give her.”

  “I’ve got plenty of spare clothes,” Jason said, feeling a little affronted by Helena assuming she could lay claim to Lily.

  “Have you got any spare bras?” Helena asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Ah, no.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Jason couldn’t help but smile. Helena liked to be right. She got up, motioning for Lily to follow.

  Lily looked a little bewildered. She glanced at Jason so he said, “Have fun.”

  “But what about your phone?” Lily asked, holding it out in front of her. “What about my father?”

  “I'll call Helena if I hear anything,” Jason replied, taking the phone gently from her.

  “We’ll let you boys pick up the tab,” Helena said, taking Lily’s arm and winking at them as they left.

  “She’s a wild one,” Mitchell said, but it took Jason a moment to realize Mitchell was talking about Helena not Lily, and that surprised him, exposing how much he’d taken a shine to Lily.

  “Dude,” Mitchell continued, seemingly reading his mind, “you realize this can’t go on, right?”

  “Huh?” Jason said, lost in thought for a moment. Sitting there in the booth, he could see the girls outside waiting at the lights, getting ready to cross the street.

  “She’s going to find her dad, and then she’ll be out of here.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Jason was doodling, drawing equations and ratios on a napkin, barely aware his mind was running through a physics calculation. Dark strokes outlined various Greek letters and scientific notation. He’d written one equation several different ways, reversing and inverting portions of the equation but always arriving at the same result.

  “You are such a weirdo,” Mitchell said, pointing at his scribbled notation. “When most people are distracted, they bite their nails, they don’t reframe Schrodinger’s equations.”

  Jason laughed, “Yeah, funny one, that. Just the way my mind works, I guess. I find math soothing.”

  “Oh, it’s a cure for insomnia,” Mitchell added, pretending to agree. “So, Mr. Good Samaritan, what are you going to do when she leaves you?”

  “There’s nothing between us,” Jason confessed, “Just a passing fascination, I guess. But if she’s still around tonight, I thought we’d go to the fireworks in the park.”

  “You and a couple of hundred thousand other people,” Mitchell quipped. That was the thing about New York, even when it seemed empty over a long weekend, there were still millions of people around. Empty was a relative term in New York.


  Down at the intersection, Helena turned and pointed, directing Lily’s gaze up to the second floor window where the two young men were seated. Lily waved. She had one hand on her purse with the strap sitting comfortably over her shoulder. To anyone else, it would seem perfectly rational for a young woman to want to keep her purse secure, but Jason knew otherwise.

  “It’s empty, you know,” Jason said, his mind still dwelling on that fact.

  “What is?” Mitchell asked, sipping some coffee.

  “Her purse. There’s no money, no passport, no credit cards, no ID, no names and addresses, nothing.”

  “You looked?”

  “I looked,” Jason confessed.

  “Dawg,” Mitchell replied. “I’m telling you, she’s about the right age to have been plucked out of the water by those fisherman.”

  Jason shook his head. “You’re an idiot,” he said affectionately, unable to suppress the grin on his face.

  “You laugh, but I’m telling you, this shit is real. I saw lights over Manhattan last night.”

  “What would an alien be doing in my apartment?” Jason asked, humoring him. “Why would an alien come all this way to sneak around disguised as a young asian woman?”

  “I don’t know,” Mitchell replied. “Maybe it’s like those nature documentaries. You know, where they film animals in the wild. Yeah, that’s it, they’re doing a special on the mating habits of Homo sapiens and are looking for some live footage.”

  “You really are an idiot,” Jason repeated, finishing his coffee.

  Mitchell put on his best English accent, impersonating Sir David Attenborough as he said, “The mating call of the wild physics student can be heard for miles, echoing through the concrete jungle.”

  Jason punched him playfully on the shoulder, saying, “Let’s get out of here.”

  But Mitchell wasn’t finished. He kept his voice in a style that could only be described as BBC English, giving his words a crisp, clipped tone as he added, “The call of the Asian American is distinctly different from that of the African or European American, earning these fascinating creatures the title of the Great Warbling Bed Thrasher.”