Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  “Which is why there are UFO sightings, right?” Piper was still unsure where this might be going.

  “Some, I imagine,” said the monk. “Some of those are probably wackos, like everyone’s always assumed. But that’s not what I’m referring to.”

  “What then?”

  Gloria looked at Thelonius and said, “Go ahead. This is your stuff, not mine.”

  The monk turned back to Piper, wobbling a bit on his stool. “Look, I could go into a lot of stuff that would bore the hell out of you, but for now let’s just say that quantum physics tells us a few things about the universe that are as confusing as they are amazing. Just one of those crazy things is that our world is made up of more than the three spatial dimensions we know: length, width, and height.”

  “What else is there?” said Piper.

  “The math says there are probably seven more. Maybe twenty-three. It’s either ten or twenty-six dimensions total, but the point is there are more than we think. We can’t access those extra dimensions because they’re rolled up too tightly … but maybe the Astrals can. It would explain how they arrived at Jupiter without us ever having seen them out there before. Maybe they appeared from somewhere else after traveling through one of those higher dimensions. What might commonly be called a wormhole.”

  He waved his hand like a conversational eraser.

  “That’s not even my point. To what Gloria was saying, we think the Astrals can’t only travel through those compressed dimensions. We think they might be able to see through them as well.”

  “See through them?” The words made Piper’s skin crawl. She felt watched by an invisible voyeur.

  “We argue about this,” said Gloria, patting Thelonius companionably on the leg. “But at this point, our rational contingent hits a wall because the next step has to be a leap of faith.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Thelonius said.

  “It’s okay, Franklin,” Gloria replied, clearly enjoying the scientist’s predicament. “I do, and some day you will, too.”

  Piper looked from one to the other. “What are you talking about?”

  “Even their science holds many things that seem almost spiritual,” the abbess explained.

  “I wouldn’t say it’s—”

  Gloria cut him off. “His quantum physics basically says that energy responds to intention and thought. That sounds spiritual to me. The universe behaving like a giant hologram? Also spiritual to my ears.”

  “The math is more than—”

  “You go on, Franklin. Keep trying to calculate my soul.” She turned and took Piper’s hand in hers. “Honey, they’ve told me stories about supercolliders being used to smash things together to try and find the universe’s secrets — to open up that tight little ball of something they can’t understand. But there aren’t any of those machines around anymore — and still we know those holes in space are opening today.”

  “How?”

  The abbess tapped her head. “Thought.” She eyed Thelonius. “Prayer.”

  “Meditation,” the monk added, his word like a correction. “Altered states of consciousness.”

  “I hate to admit it,” Gloria said, “but it does seem like there’s a shortcut to spirit.”

  “What?”

  “Drugs,” said Thelonius.

  “Not drugs.”

  “Drugs,” the monk repeated. “Not just anything. Most drugs just fu—” He cut himself off, seeming to remember he was a monk in a church. “—just screw you up,” he finished. “But of the abductees who’ve returned, a surprising number report having felt their abductors before, in drug trips. The strongest connections seem to have come from a plant-based hallucinogen called—”

  “Ayahuasca,” Piper finished. Something she knew all about. Knew her husband’s fascination with. Knew how driven and purposeful he felt after those hallucinogenic sessions, and how the aftermath made him do strange things — like purchase unremarkable land in the Colorado mountains and build an end-of-the-world bunker beneath it.

  Thelonius nodded. “Precisely.”

  “They’ve been watching us,” said Gloria. “They’ve been peeking through the eyes of people like your husband. Maybe through people who are deeply connected without substances, too, like monks.” She looked over at the man beside her. “Real monks, I mean.”

  “They know everything then,” Piper said, thinking again of the information she’d taken from Meyer’s computer and what it might mean. What would the people in this room make of what was on the slip drive? What would Benjamin make of it, if they could, in fact, get it to him? The idea that the Astrals had been peeking over humanity’s shoulder filled her with a sinking sense of futility. Organizations like this church were playing rebellion. There was no way to evade an enemy who knew you as well as you knew yourself.

  “They don’t know everything.” Impossibly, there was a tiny smirk in the corner of the monk’s mouth. He looked at Gloria, who gave him an indecipherable look.

  Piper watched them both. “What?”

  “The Astrals have come to Earth many times before,” Gloria said. “From what we can figure — and from what people like Benjamin Bannister tell us — they’ve done so when instruments they left behind to guide us have nudged our social evolution forward to a point of critical mass. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Incas — all cultures who were highly spiritual, highly connected at the level of mind or soul. Cultures who Benjamin thinks were able to call to the Astrals through the combined force of their minds, albeit without realizing they were doing so. But this time, we’re different. For the first time, they seem to have arrived and been surprised by what they found.”

  “Surprised how?” Piper asked.

  “This time,” said Thelonius, “we’ve formed a rational society instead of a spiritual one. We’ve built our own magic devices and a highly advanced technological culture — contrary to past cycles, in which we’d developed more mental connection rather than gadgets, and had those tricks to show them when they appeared to check on us.”

  “So what?”

  “Diverting toward technology — and away from mental or spiritual development — has thrown our visitors for a loop,” said the monk. “We don’t have the group mind they expected — and might need in order to fully understand us. That’s why they spent so much time building a network of stones: to fill in the blanks. But it’s only partially working. So far, they can’t quite comprehend the way modern humans have chosen to store and utilize their collective consciousness. Our current group consciousness is too new — too totally foreign to them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Piper asked.

  The monk smiled. “The Internet,” he said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Trevor stood at the door to his father’s study, wondering if he should dare to follow his instincts.

  The computer was right there. Right friggin’ there, not ten feet away. Trevor had been in this room plenty of times, to grab books from the shelves or look something up in the home’s digital library, which was clunky to access anywhere other than at the main console.

  He had no business on the computer now. But that could, if he was discovered, be explained. There were no Titans in this part of the house; they were all closer to the dining room, helping to prepare for the evening banquet. Reptars didn’t enter the house. The human kiss-asses who did his father’s bidding had mostly gone home for the day. Only members of his family might find him tinkering. Trevor could make up excuses for them — maybe say the catalog interface was acting funny. He’d just hopped over for a second. And so on.

  Trevor stared at the thin screen, still leaning rather conspicuously in the doorway. Whatever made Piper run had come from inside. It might still be there. He’d passed his father earlier and seen him agitated, mumbling about folks sticking their noses into things that didn’t concern them. Surely, he’d have known what she’d taken. And it’s not like computers were filing cabinets. You copied files, then only deleted t
hem if you had a good reason and knew how to do it without alerting anyone. Piper would have had neither.

  Trevor could go to the computer now, poke around, and maybe discover what Piper had found. Maybe. It felt worth a stupid, foolish, futile shot, given his current inner turmoil over his missing stepmother. If Trevor got caught? Well, he could play dumb. Nobody would assume he’d intentionally done anything wrong.

  Except maybe for Raj.

  Trevor’s palms were sweating. Not good for secret agents trying to get in and out undetected. He was about to leave, thinking himself a coward, when his father brushed by him to enter the study.

  “Hey, Dad,” he said, his voice almost breaking with nerves.

  “Hey, kid.” Meyer opened one of his desk drawers and began rifling, glancing up just once.

  Those two simple words felt like a sigh. Only after he’d felt himself relax did Trevor realize how strange his father had seemed lately. He’d tried getting used to the new Meyer Dempsey and convincing himself that nothing had changed. Yes, he seemed to be mentally connected to Earth’s invaders, but what father didn’t have his eccentricities? Meyer had been powerful and arrogant before, same as today. No biggie.

  But hearing him greet Trevor so casually now made Trevor realize how odd that simple greeting sounded. Meyer sounded like Trevor’s dad … which made Trevor think of how he hadn’t seemed like his father for much of the past two years.

  It doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s becoming his old self again.

  A second voice inside Trevor contradicted the first: Or maybe you’re finally getting used to his new self.

  “I was going to grab a book,” Trevor said, realizing he should probably explain his presence.

  Meyer looked around at the study’s dusty old volumes. “One of these? Why don’t you download one on your Vellum?”

  “I don’t feel like running down to the public library.”

  “The download sites are back up. You didn’t know?”

  Oh. Right. Trevor did know. The net had been coming up little by little — progress always being made in the land of the viceroy.

  “Oh. Yeah, I forgot.”

  His father opened another drawer and searched anew.

  “So,” Trevor said, “that dinner thing tonight.”

  “Yes?” Meyer closed one drawer and opened another. His tone was short, sliding downhill from where it had been when he’d entered.

  “Do I have to go?”

  “I told you. Yes. Everyone needs to go. There will be press for at least an hour at the start. You can go when they go.”

  “Do I have to dress up?”

  Meyer slammed the last drawer, his face frustrated.

  “What?” Trevor asked.

  “I can’t find my signet cufflinks.”

  “Do you need them?”

  “For an official dinner, yes, I should wear the seal. Goddammit.” He said the last syllable to his desk, as if it had wronged him.

  “Maybe they’re in your bedroom.”

  “They’re not in the bedroom.”

  “Did you check in Piper’s—”

  Trevor stopped when his father vented a frustrated grunt and kicked a cardboard box beside the desk hard enough to impale it with his wingtip shoe. A tiny rain of leaflets fluttered out — probably more useless pro-Astral propaganda.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, fighting for control.

  Trevor blinked. “No problem.” But it was strange, all right. His father prided himself on unfettered calm, and Trevor could count on one hand the times he’d seen him lose emotional control.

  “It’s this banquet. This fucking banquet. Why do we have to have it tonight? You know about this thing with your stepmother?”

  Trevor nodded slowly.

  “It’s all a big misunderstanding. She’s always using my connection to grab shows for her juke because the net is … well, you know how it’s been. Problems with the wires or something. Which is why I’ve been on Raj to find a way around the issues with the city net, at least for connections in the house.”

  Trevor said nothing. That seemed wrong, too. After two years, you’d think that intergalactic travelers who’d built the pyramids could do some basic electrical repair. Or for that matter, properly secure data on a computer.

  “She tripped an alarm or something — some bullshit security they have on this thing. But then she chooses right now to go off somewhere, and it looks bad because they think she did it on purpose and is running away.”

  “Did what?”

  “Something was accessed that shouldn’t have been. Nothing terribly important. I keep telling them it’s a mistake; that’s not like Piper to do something underhanded. But they …” He trailed off then touched his temple. “Well, it’s hard to explain, but since I’m tuned in to their groupthink or whatever you want to call it, I don’t just get answers like talking to a normal person. I can feel their disbelief, as if I didn’t believe her myself.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I do believe her, Trevor. Or I mean, I would if she were here to tell me what I already know.”

  “Sure.” Again, Trevor felt a new sense of familiarity in his father, reminding him that it had been missing before.

  Meyer’s perfectly combed hair had come slightly askew after kicking the box. His tie had flapped out of his coat. But it was more than those simple bits of disorder that caused Trevor to wonder. His father looked momentarily lost.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. But the last damned thing I want to do tonight is have dinner with a bunch of ambassadors.”

  “The other viceroys?”

  Meyer shook his head. “Just ambassadors.”

  “Couldn’t it be handled over Skype or something?”

  “Banquets like this are never to talk business, Trevor. It’s a PR thing.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re still a human society. New power structures don’t change that. People have to believe in all of this. Believe in the system.”

  Trevor resisted the urge to ask if he meant “believe it” instead of “believe in it.” So much of his father’s job as viceroy seemed like acting rather than politics. The new government and social infrastructure was all human, with the Astrals supposedly acting only as supervisors. But the visitors weren’t merely observers, and everyone knew it. Too many humans had been killed, and the old governments had been forcefully rebuked when they’d attempted nuclear mutiny. But the public image machine kept churning, spitting out colonization-is-good-for-all-of-us propaganda, broadcasting fancy dinners like tonight’s as the new and elegant norm. Trevor would have rolled his eyes if he hadn’t seen his father’s mastery of the public eye in the past, and his fervent belief that reality was simply whatever someone declared and repeated. Enough dinners with smiling human dignitaries broadcast to the population, and people would eventually believe all the lies.

  “Sure,” Trevor said.

  Meyer looked at the kicked box. He seemed baffled by his actions, as if unable to fathom why missing cufflinks had roiled his stress into a momentary loss of control.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, Trevor.” He smoothed his hair, retucking his tie.

  “You said the Astrals were digging below the Apex. And that’s why the rebels tried to blow up the city with that plane.”

  “Not exactly in that way, but yes, that’s what we think.”

  “Why are they digging?”

  Meyer looked into Trevor’s eyes from across the room. He seemed to be warring with a decision. “I guess there’s no reason I can’t say,” he finally said. “There’s a structure underground here. Something that got buried by time.”

  “And they have to dig to reach it?”

  “That’s how you get below dirt, Trevor. You dig.”

  “But they’re aliens.”

  “There’s still dirt between them and the structure. And the Apex is on top of it anyway.”

  “Why did they plant a giant glass pyramid on
top of something if they meant to dig it up?”

  “I don’t know. They’re building at all the capitals.”

  “But right on top of a dig site?”

  “I don’t know. Why does it matter?”

  “What’s the structure underground?”

  Meyer’s eyes had narrowed slightly, but he answered without hesitation. “A temple, I think.”

  “But they’re being so slow.”

  “They’re trying to find its door then search it carefully.”

  Trevor felt less than satisfied. Each answer birthed ten more questions. What exactly was down there? What were the new monoliths for? Were the Astrals just digging to get at an old structure or digging around it for artifacts? The compulsion to keep asking was a horrible itch, but Trevor knew he had to pull back. His father could sense prying, and so far he was still in the realm of curiosity. If he connected the rest of the dots for his father, asking how a discovery at the dig site could possibly have attracted Piper’s attention and launched a citywide manhunt, Meyer’s demeanor might change from paternal to guarded — maybe suspicious. He’d been betrayed by one member of his family already, and his denial would only stretch so far if a second joined the first.

  “Oh,” Trevor said. “Okay.”

  His father’s eyes had hardened, his momentary weakness now gone. “Have you heard anything from Piper?”

  Trevor fought the urge to swallow, knowing it might be misinterpreted. “No.”

  “You’re sure? Not just from her, but about her? No idea where she might be?”

  Trevor saw a Reptar’s vision of Terrence in his mind. He saw the police captain, talking about bad camera feeds near one of the churches. He saw Terrence in the flesh, revealing things he shouldn’t have known.

  “No.”

  Meyer met Trevor’s eyes. His fingers trailed along the desk as if in search. “Was there anything else then?”

  Trevor swallowed. “No. I guess I’m good.”

  “You came in for a book. Aren’t you going to look around for one?”