Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  Logan looked up at his wife. “Did you say something?”

  Clara looked back. She had a secretive smile — the one she used when he did something stupid and failed to realize it.

  “No,” she said.

  “I could’ve sworn you said something.”

  “Well, I didn’t.” Then she gave another smirk just as he turned his head.

  “What, Clara? I feel like I’m missing something here.”

  “Hmm. Like there’s something you’ve misplaced? Something that you might have forgotten.”

  Suspiciously, Logan said, “Maybe.”

  “Something you once knew, then forgot all about, huh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something you didn’t really need in your head, that you really don’t want to remember at all, and that’s really most relevant right now because I can torture you with it because you have this sneaking suspicion that I know something you don’t? Almost as if you used to have this power, but now forgot the trick of using it?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Clara smiled larger. Then she said, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

  Day Five

  But of course they didn’t talk about it tomorrow. The first reason was because Logan never asked. The idea — and probably the whole teasing conversation — seemed to have slipped his mind. Just like so many things seemed to do these days.

  But the second reason was that Clara no longer precisely remembered what she’d delighted in teasing her husband with.

  There was no matter. It was a beautiful day.

  She left the hut and looked up.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Or anything else.

  Day Four Hundred and Thirteen

  Meyer Dempsey was seventy years old when he died, if that was possible to believe. Seven full decades. Seven times ten full cycles of seasons, when the oldest most people could ever hope to reach was half that, maybe a bit more.

  Most people simply accepted Meyer’s incredible age. But on the day of his funeral, when the village gathered the pyre to send him on to his next life, Sarah Carpenter (daughter of Samuel and Mary, sister of Luke) found herself pondering it.

  She herself was twenty — over half the lifespan she might otherwise have expected. Recently she’d been feeling long in the tooth, but Meyer’s funeral inspired rather than frightened her. She’d been single until recently, childless even to half her expiration date. But perhaps now, she thought, running a hand across her still-small belly, she’d have a chance to see more of her unborn child’s life than a lone generation. If she could live to be seventy? Well, that would be something.

  It wasn’t going to happen, but as they set Meyer’s body on the pyre, her thoughts drifted to immortality — what seventy long years felt like to Sarah.

  As the pyre burned, Sarah’s mind drifted from inspiration to melancholy. Meyer had been center of this village forever. He was larger than life. And whatever he’d done to bargain with the devil, it seemed contagious. His wife was well past forty — maybe even fifty, or possibly sixty. They were doing something right. And Sarah — possibly now that she had a second life inside her — found herself more intrigued than most.

  She was on the village’s edge when she saw the ghost.

  A flash of light. Nothing. If anyone else had been with her, they would have laughed at the way she started. But Sarah knew the flash was worth paying attention to in the same way she knew Meyer’s advanced age was worth considering as more than coincidence. Without thinking — and surely against her parents’ and new husband’s wishes — she set off in the direction it seemed to have gone.

  She walked.

  And she walked.

  Hours later Sarah seemed to wake as if from a dream. She’d been ambulatory but not quite conscious, moving on as if in a fugue. Once she realized how far out she’d come, she gave a little cry. Sarah knew the general direction of home, but no more than that. How could she possibly find her village again? She didn’t even know where she was!

  Her worry died when she saw a small half moon of darkness ahead, visible in a crag of rock.

  She approached the thing and dug, stirred by a strange compulsion and the way the sand, when she’d approached, seemed to have been freshly disturbed. Someone had been here. Recently.

  Someone had gone into that hole.

  Without thinking — again in a fugue as complete as the one that had caused her to follow the ridiculous ghost — Sarah continued to dig.

  The sand wasn’t packed, and came away easily. She found herself looking down, realizing she’d had to hike up, as if the cave was at the top of a rock structure that had once risen above the desert floor. Something had covered it. But what? And why?

  Sarah slipped into the tunnel. There was no light inside, but she found herself able to easily see. As if something was over her shoulder, lighting the way. As if something wanted her presence.

  She went down one tunnel after another, terrified but moving despite her best intentions to turn around. She saw skeletons, wearing robes. Markings on the walls in strange languages, and a repeated word that seemed to be “Mullah.” She found room after room — a virtual warren within the rock.

  Sarah desperately wanted to leave. But something compelled her.

  Eventually she came to a room with a stone door at its head that had been partially rolled away, or perhaps knocked askew. She entered and found the room black. Two things happened.

  First, she saw a second flash of light, much like she’d seen leaving the site where Meyer’s body burned. It approached Sarah, then stabbed hard into her abdomen. She expected pain, but there was none. Instead, Sarah felt a stirring where her infant slept inside her. She was deeply aware of it, but then the feeling was gone.

  When the light and sensation had mostly abated, a circular vortex began to glow on the wall. And then Sarah saw a blonde-haired woman’s face appear, disembodied. The woman began to speak. But as Sarah considered responding, the words continued, and Sarah realized she was looking at some sort of black magic — a message left in light from someone in the past, meant to be received by someone at an unknown point in the future.

  “If you have found this,” the woman said, “It is because the observer has not returned to us and instead has found a new host. This was not our intention, but it was always a possibility.”

  Sarah watched the woman, fascinated.

  “We will not return, as agreed. But as we are changing, so might you change.”

  Sarah felt a strange feeling in her belly. Her hands went back to it, and after a moment of discomfort, she finally lifted her shirt to look at her skin — to see if she’d scraped herself on the way in, or otherwise caused injury.

  Instead she saw her glowing body. And it struck her clearly that the woman wasn’t talking to Sarah, from whatever time in the past she’d made this message.

  She was talking to Sarah’s baby.

  “When you are ready,” the woman said, “come and find us.”

  Authors’ Note

  So here’s the way these things go:

  Late in 2014, Sean and I decided to write something that would appeal to the rabid sci-fi fans we hadn’t quite hit with The Beam (which you should read now that you’re done with Invasion, by the way) or our other sci-fi properties. Because although we’d written compelling sci-fi in the past, we hadn’t written mainstream sci-fi. There’s a difference. Compelling means that the story is good — great, even. Mainstream means that a huge number of everyday folks can see the cover, hear the concept, and immediately know it’s something they want to read. Compelling and mainstream can overlap, of course, but they don’t always.

  As of late 2015, our shit was too rich and complex to be truly mainstream.

  (I practically needed a GPS, an accountant, and a 1700s-era mariner’s transit to get through all the plot twists in the third season of The Beam. It’s a great story, for sure. But holy crap.)


  And that sucked a little from an audience-growing point of view.

  So we set ourselves some rules. We decided to write a less twisty-and-turny plotline. We’d keep things simple because more straightforward stories excite readers and deliver thrills. We’d give readers what they were asking for, in maximal numbers. We’d tell a riveting story, then get out of the way.

  What was hot? Alien invasion stories.

  And hey, that was easy because we already had one in mind. Sean and his other writing partner, Dave, had actually pitched an alien invasion story to a publisher a while back, then never written it. And I’ve been known to pick up crumbs of other writing partners like a scavenger crow.

  We’d tell the story of aliens coming to earth in our way — but stick to the rules of such books as readers understood them.

  We’d start with A, and write through to Z.

  And because we wanted to give ourselves a good head start, we wrote all of the initial trilogy — Invasion, Contact, and Colonization — before publishing the first book. Before telling anyone the first book existed. Then all of a sudden, with no warning, we’d drop the first book on the world — with two more in the bank, ready to follow.

  (Internally, we referred to this whole project as “the Beyoncé,” because Beyoncé was badass enough once to just drop an album like we dropped these books. And also because we dance just like her.)

  That was how it began: one simple story, told right down the middle. And for a while, we stuck to that plan.

  Well. It didn’t stay that way.

  The way we had the full series figured, it’d unfold like this: humanity gets invaded; humanity gets judged on the big cosmic scale; humanity fails that judgment and gets wiped off the planet. We’d need some ray of hope so that people didn’t end on a downer, but that’s more or less how we saw things.

  Humanity fails.

  Humanity dies.

  Humanity is basically told to get it right next time, and the series ends.

  We stuck with that plan for the first few books, but then we started to realize that it wasn’t going to be so simple. For one, the idea of just killing off the humans and being done with it kind of blew ass. Who wants that ending? So we considered alternatives, knowing full well that we were considering said alternatives after several books were already out in the world and it was too late to change history. And that gave us some unique challenges.

  For one: If the aliens don’t win, does humanity? Because that’s a trope, too. There are stories that end in obliteration and stories that end with upheaval. Problem was, neither of us bought the notion that these all-powerful aliens could be defeated by garden-variety humans. What was this, Independence Day? Were we going to have Will Smith fly into the belly of the mothership and set off a bomb? The idea was ridiculous. So nope, the humans couldn’t win either. Not without a lot of help.

  I could go on and on, but if you’ve read the story to its end (and if you haven’t, why are you reading the Author’s Note?), then you know we were unable to keep the story simple. It got super convoluted. I pulled out my GPS and my mariner’s transit and I dialed up my accountant. And I said:

  “Wait. So the Astrals Founders were responsible for Meyer being a leap forward in evolution? No? Oooh … the Founders were responsible for the chaos of the first ‘human seeding’ that culminated in Meyer or someone like him being an eventual consequence of that chaos?”

  Because I don’t actually have an accountant, there was no easy answer.

  But Sean and I talked it out over and over, and eventually decided it worked. Because that solution didn’t mean the humans or the Astrals won. It was more like a stalemate. The Astrals couldn’t destroy humanity because they were intertwined with us thanks to Meyer and Clara. The only solution — once the Ark was opened and Divinity’s plan was out of the way — was for the Astrals to evolve as well.

  Now, let’s go back in time. Set the way-back machine for early 2015, when we Beyoncé’d the first book in the series.

  Believe it or not, there were people who didn’t like that our alien invasion story didn’t actually have an alien invasion in it. We were shocked. (Not really.)

  But it’s true. In that first book, the Astrals don’t show up until the very end. And some of those same annoyed readers felt that the ending of Book 1 was “tacked on.” They said that we added the scene where Meyer was abducted by the shuttle because we wanted to force a sequel.

  And that part? It wasn’t true.

  That, Faithful Reader, was why we wrote the first Author’s Note in this series, which you’ll find in the back of Invasion: to explain to readers that we hadn’t started with Meyer just for the hell of it, and we hadn’t decided only at the last minute that he should be abducted. That Author’s Note was our way of asking our readers to have faith in us and hang in there because we had plans in mind.

  Here’s some of what we said:

  It’d be easy to enjoy this novel’s ride, taking a quasi-apocalyptic adventure ending in a confrontation and a twist ending. You can do that if you’d like. Plenty of readers certainly seem to enjoy this book on that level.

  But we hope, when this series is done, that you’ll look back and see Invasion for what it is in the larger story’s context.

  Because the story doesn’t start with the aliens.

  The story begins with Meyer Dempsey.

  The story begins with an itch that Meyer can’t quite scratch — an urge not to flee the city or escape the crowds or even to get his family away from danger … but rather from an overwhelming urge to reach his “Axis Mundi” — a place he was told was special through his dreams and journeying in an otherworldly haze.

  In Contact, you’ll learn where Meyer vanished to, and why.

  In Colonization, you’ll see what role Meyer has yet to play, and you’ll see how he was always handpicked by his captors, always selected in advance for a purpose, always dragged toward his axis as if by an invisible hand.

  And in the following books, you’ll learn what the aliens want from us. From the planet. And from Meyer himself.

  Meyer Dempsey — whom many readers hated and found grating — mattered. To the entire human race.

  And Lila, who started as a selfish brat, mattered. Because she was Meyer’s daughter.

  And second-to-most of all — or maybe even most of all we could argue — Clara mattered. Because although Meyer was the hybrid whose dual nature allowed human changes to “pollute” the Astrals (thus forcing their hand and evolution), it was Clara’s unique position that ultimately broke the system where the Founders had meant for it to break.

  Meyer’s next-level hybrid mind …

  Plus the changes to our “external collective intelligence,” altered forever by the Internet …

  Equalled Clara.

  We went back and forth a lot over this ending, starting in Book 5. Because by then we knew Clara mattered more than we’d thought and that Meyer mattered differently than we’d believed. We wanted to give our readers a satisfying, thrilling conclusion that answered all the questions and tied up all the loose ends, and needed a way for humans to be victorious without getting away scot-free. We knew pretty early that there’d be a near extinction, but that we’d survive it. We wanted a reset, but a wise reset.

  And given all of that, this book you’ve just read was how it all seemed to work out.

  We hope you enjoyed it.

  Now, one parting word, about that ending.

  You might be wondering if the story is truly over, if Meyer’s observer found a new home in Sarah’s baby. Because that means there’s still a hybrid left on Earth, and that the Astrals know it’s there.

  The answer, as it always is with us, is maybe.

  We do know for sure that Invasion, as the arc we imagined from the start, is over.

  But we won’t know — not until the collective intelligence tickles us — whether or not a new story might one day begin.

  One day, maybe we’ll find out together.
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br />   Thank you so much for being a reader.

  — Johnny (and Sean)

  July 2016

  Austin, Texas

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  About the Authors

  Sean Platt is an entrepreneur and founder of Sterling & Stone, where he makes stories with his partners, Johnny B. Truant, and David W. Wright, and a family of storytellers.

  Sean is the bestselling author of over 10 million words' worth of books, including the Yesterday’s Gone and Invasion series. Sean is also co-author of the indie publishing cornerstone, Write. Publish. Repeat. and co-host of the Story Studio Podcast.

  Originally from Long Beach, California, Sean now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two children. He has more than his share of nose.

  Johnny B. Truant is co-owner of the Sterling & Stone Story Studio, an IP powerhouse focusing on books and adaptations for film and television. It’s the best job in the world, and he spends his days creating cool stuff with partners Sean Platt and David W. Wright, as well as more than 20 gifted storytellers.