The alien produced two long and thick silver cables, each segmented like a shower cord.
Dan looked across to Emma and saw that the alien on her side of the room was doing the same. “You okay?” he asked.
She nodded like she more or less meant it.
Dan’s focus returned to the alien as it removed a cap from the end of one of the cables, leaving the other dangling to the floor. A quick glance revealed its partner doing exactly the same beside Emma. Dan’s alien gently pulled two individual wires from the end of the open cable. With one of these inch-thick white wires in each hand, the alien walked behind Dan.
Dan caught a glimpse of the end of the wires, noting that each had a round tip roughly the size of a penny. He assumed these would function as suction pads or perhaps be removed to reveal a still smaller wire.
The alien touched Dan on the back of his neck. To his surprise, its hands were no colder than his own skin; if anything, they were slightly warmer. Dan then felt a shiver run down his spine as the alien gently placed the penny-sized pad on his neck.
“Are you okay?” Emma asked, standing uneasily as her alien — a few seconds behind Dan’s — removed the cap from one of the outer cables on its side of the room.
“Yeah. I just didn’t expect it to be as cold as—”
Dan gasped in sudden and intense pain as something shot out of the pad on his neck and pierced his skin. His hands shot to the pad, trying and failing to claw it away.
Emma froze in horror. The spell was broken moments later when her alien attempted to attach its pad to her neck, at which point she swatted its hand away and ran to save Dan.
Dan’s alien, either oblivious or indifferent to Emma’s movement, took the second wire from the cable and attached the pad to its own palm. Instantly, Dan stopped trying to claw the pad from his neck and looked directly into the aliens eyes.
“Dan!” Emma yelled. “We have to get out of here!”
He turned to her slowly. “Emma… it’s talking to me.”
The dread faded from Emma’s expression, replaced by a mirror of the serenity she saw in Dan’s. She walked back towards the alien waiting patiently on her side of the room and lifted her hair away from her neck. “Okay,” she said. “Do it.”
* * *
Dan stared into the alien’s eyes in quiet amazement as thoughts that weren’t his own echoed in his mind.
The alien didn’t speak to him in a voice of its own, or even by way of distinctly delivered thoughts; rather, Dan received semi-verbal thoughts in his own mental accent and syntax.
After an initially confusing few seconds of hearing his mind thinking thoughts that weren’t his, Dan made sense of one:
WE CAN COMMUNICATE.
“Where are you from?” Dan asked silently, concentrating his mind on this single thought as much as he could.
The answer came immediately but indistinctly. For Dan, it was almost overwhelming. There was no order to the components of the answer; it came all at once, more like a memory than an explanation.
Dan didn’t know whether the answer was deliberately vague or an approximation dumbed down for his puny human mind, but the key parts emerged: they were from the same time and the same dimension as Dan, but a different planet. They were bona fide extraterrestrials, not extratemporal time-travellers or extradimensional entities.
The upside of this, Dan knew, was that they came from a planet that was theoretically reachable. He focused his thoughts on two follow-up questions: “What planet? Have we found it?”
Dan’s inner voice, essentially conversing with itself under the alien’s direction, told him that earthly telescopes had discovered and named the aliens’ home star but not their planet.
“What’s our name for the star?”
This time, no answer came. There was no indication that this topic was off-limits, just a long radio silence until Dan tried again with a different question: “How far away?”
No answer.
Dan’s own thoughts were quieter than normal. He looked across to Emma, suddenly remembering that she was there, and saw her staring intently into the eyes of the alien in front of her, connected to it by the mysterious wires in the same neck-to-palm configuration as Dan was to the other. He started to wish that he and Emma’s makeshift contact team had included the linguists and psychologists he’d joked about before stepping into the craft’s cylindrical elevator; such experts certainly would have had a better chance of making sense of what was going on inside Dan’s head than he did.
“Are you going to tell me or not?” Dan asked, giving it one last shot before moving on.
NO.
Dan nodded slightly. This answer — “no” — had been by far the clearest so far. Hoping for more of the same, he opted to stick with yes/no questions.
“Did you destroy the Límíng module? DS-1’s core module?”
YES.
“Why?” Dan asked, instinctively abandoning his yes/no idea in the wake of the alien’s disturbingly cold admission of guilt.
The open-ended nature of Dan’s question resulted in another jumble of thoughts. The core of the answer became clear after several seconds, during which time Dan consciously tried to relax his body and calm his mind. As before, the answer came in Dan’s own mental accent. The clearest two-word phrase told him that any attempt to place weapons in orbit necessarily “provokes intervention.”
“Did you take Richard Walker?” Dan asked, almost certain of the answer. “Was that another intervention?”
YES.
“Where is he? Dead?”
HOME.
“No he’s not.”
YES.
“Since when?”
HOME.
Dan had no option but to believe the alien and no real reason not to. “But why did you take him in the first place?” he asked.
This answer was the most clouded yet. As best Dan could have described, it was as though the answering side of his mind was trying to say too much at once. He picked out plenty of words here and there — Shield, manipulate, danger, fear, agitate — but he couldn’t really see the forest for the trees.
“Because he would have kept scheming and agitating people to keep going with The Shield?”, he asked, taking a shot at putting it together.
YES.
“But we are going on with it; Godfrey is just moving on to DS-2. What was the point of abducting Walker?”
No answer.
“What if he still has evidence of the hoax and shares it out of spite?”
PROVOKE INTERVENTION.
“You would stop him?”
YES.
“So why let him go?”
MINIMAL NECESSARY INTERVENTION.
The idea that the aliens wanted to interfere as little as possible in human affairs while protecting their interests made a measure of sense to Dan, well-read in the classics of science fiction as he was. But still, this didn’t explain why they had intervened so directly in his own life by first calling him to the cornfield and then to a forest a thousand miles from home.
“Why am I here?”
Amid a jumble of ideas that surrounded this response, Dan made out the words “new plan.” The rest of the thoughts seemed to centre around an admission from the alien that Earth’s leaders’ defiant reaction to the launch disaster had come as a surprise.
“And the new plan was me?”
YES.
Dan thought back to the night when he had first been called to the cornfield. “Do you need the plaques for the new plan?”
YES.
Dan took his backpack off, prompting assistance from the alien to make sure he didn’t disturb the wire which allowed them to interface pseudo-verbally. The alien watched as Dan removed the two blank plaques and left them on the floor.
“There.”
YES.
“Why did we have to come here?” Dan asked. “I brought these to the circle in the cornfield.”
The reply, much clearer than the previous non-binary resp
onses but still incomplete, told Dan that a smaller and less sophisticated craft — kept inside this mothership — had been the only one to land in the cornfield.
“Why didn’t you just leave it there until I brought the plaques? Can it not cloak itself?”
NO.
“So it can’t cloak itself and it leaves a circle? Is that what people have seen before? Has that craft landed on Earth before?”
YES.
Dan looked across to Emma, eager to tell her how much he was finding out. He saw the alien on her side of the room standing directly behind her with its hand on the pad on her neck, as though ready to remove it.
TIME.
“I’m not finished,” Dan protested as his alien began to move behind him. Dan turned his body to maintain eye contact. “Have you taken people before?”
TIME.
“Yes or no: have you taken people before Walker?”
NO.
“Have you left deliberate messages?”
NO.
“Elaborate circles?”
NO.
“Circles?”
YES. TIME.
Dan held his hand out at arms length to signal that he still wasn’t finished. He saw that Emma was looking straight ahead, calmly and obliviously waiting for the patch to come off her neck and for whatever had pierced her skin to come out.
But Dan wasn’t ready to go. He still had one more question that he wouldn’t leave without asking: “If you didn’t take people or leave messages when you landed in the past, then why did you land?”
The alien looked straight into Dan’s eyes. Dan liked to think it was grateful to him for bringing the plaques, and maybe even for believing in its race’s existence when so few others did. He knew it was too much to assume that the alien liked him, but it certainly didn’t seem to dislike him. As he had always predicted, it wasn’t hostile.
“For research?” Dan pressed, encouraged by the alien’s attempt to answer but frustrated by yet another tangled bundle of thoughts. “Science for the sake of science?”
YES.
Dan lowered his hand. He knew it hadn’t been holding the alien back in any real sense and was grateful that the alien had answered his last few questions after announcing time was up.
The alien walked behind Dan and placed its warm hand on his neck.
“Wait,” Dan said, speaking out loud as well as focusing his thoughts. “What powers your ships?”
LIGHT.
This thought — LIGHT — was the last thing in Dan’s mind as he stood in the room of unbroken white.
In tandem with its partner who stood behind Emma, the alien at Dan’s back briskly pulled the contact pad from his neck.
From Dan’s mind, light faded.
From Dan’s eyes, white vanished.
All around him… only black.
D plus 52
Lolo National Forest
Montana
Clark sprinted towards Emma and Dan, both lying crumpled on the ground in the inner circle. Rooster followed and quickly overtook him, going all the way in.
Rooster showed no fear of the barrier that had kept him away from the bread and sardines, and Clark realised halfway to the inner circle that the camera strapped to his chest hadn’t exploded. He took his hands away from his ears, allowing him to use his arms to run quicker. Nothing bad happened.
A bird previously nosing around the edge of the inner circle dashed in and fled with a beakful of sardines and breadcrumbs.
Thoughts ran through Clark’s mind at a million miles an hour as he hurried towards the inner circle. The mysterious barriers appeared to have been deactivated, but that didn’t change the fact that Emma and Dan were utterly lifeless.
When Clark reached them, he naturally checked Dan first. He found a pulse, breathed the deepest sigh of relief of his life, and moved on to Emma. Her face screwed up and she let out a pained murmur before he touched her.
“Emma?”
“Is Dan okay?” she groaned, wincing again and putting one hand on her stomach while blowing air slowly and deliberately from her cheeks.
“He’s here,” Clark said as he helped Emma onto her front in case she vomited, which was looking like a distinct possibility. “He’s safe.”
Emma pushed herself onto her knees. “Did you see it?”
“See what?”
Before Emma could answer, she was sick on the grass.
Clark pushed Dan onto his side as quickly as he could without being rough then returned to Emma and held her hair out of the way. “It’s okay,” he said. “Tell me later. Do you want some water?”
She nodded.
When Clark turned to see how far away he’d dropped his bag, he saw Dan stirring. “Dan,” he said.
Dan rolled onto his knees and vomited violently, putting Emma’s purge to shame in terms of both volume and stench. He held his hand up to tell Clark to stay back when he heard him coming; Clark didn’t need an excuse to keep away. Even Rooster, who looked like he might have made a move for Emma’s before Clark told him to stop being so disgusting, shied away from Dan’s vomit.
Dan wiped his mouth with his hand then wiped his hand on the grass. He jumped up to his feet like he was fresh out of bed and turned frantically to look for Emma. A huge smile crossed his face when he saw that she was okay. He turned back to Clark, still smiling madly. “You saw it, right?”
“Saw what?” Clark asked, repeating his earlier question to Emma.
“We were inside,” Dan said.
“Inside what?”
“The craft.”
Clark’s eyes narrowed. “What craft?”
“It was right here,” Dan insisted, turning to Emma.
“Clark,” she said, “seriously. It was.”
“But you were only gone for a second. You were standing at the edge, there was a flash, and then you were on the ground.”
Dan shook his head. “Listen to me: we didn’t imagine it, okay? They were right in front of us. I spoke to one.”
“Look,” Emma said excitedly.
Dan and Clark turned to face her, watching as she held her hair to one side and felt the back of her neck with her finger.
“There’s a mark,” she said.
While Clark went for a closer look, Dan felt the back of his own neck. “There’s a mark!” he yelled, giddily running his index finger back and forth across the painless puncture. “See? It was real!”
Clark inspected Dan’s mark after Emma’s then stared dumbly at the ever-diminishing circle of breadcrumbs. A broad smile spread across his face. He looked up to the sky and shook his head slowly, smiling all the while.
“They took Walker and blew up Límíng,” Dan told him.
“Is that what they said?”
“They didn’t exactly say it, but they put the answers in my head. There was a wire going from my neck to one of its hands — same with Emma — and whenever I thought of a question I got the answer right back. Everything sounded like it was in my voice, but the thoughts were its thoughts. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“So they didn’t actually say anything?” Clark asked, no longer smiling.
“They did,” Emma said. “Just not out loud. I heard their thoughts in my voice just like Dan heard them in his.”
“What did they tell you, then?” Clark asked her. After taking a few more photographs of the area — including the small but pronounced hole in the centre of the inner circle which Dan would later explain had been left by the core support below the cylinder — he started walking away, leading the way back towards the car.
“They didn’t tell me much,” Emma said. “It was more like the alien was asking me stuff. There were loads of questions but most of them weren’t so much questions as, I dunno… prompts.” She rubbed both sides of her head as though it hurt from overexertion. It did. “It was like a game show when they have a rapid-fire round and the host is reading the questions as fast as he can, and by the time you finish answering one he’s already ha
lf way through the next. But like Dan said… it was my voice on both sides, like I was asking myself. But my thoughts were so quick and clear and… free. It’s like my brain was amplified.”
Dan didn’t know where to start asking Emma what she meant; he could hardly relate to any of this. “My alien didn’t ask me anything,” he eventually said. “I was asking the questions and it was answering them. Some of them, at least. What did yours ask?”
“Mainly how they could stop people from putting weapons in space without having to reveal themselves. You know, how to clean up this whole mess.”
Dan started laughing. “Shut up,” he said.
“What?”
“It was asking you for advice?”
“What’s funny about that?”
Clark jumped in: “They wanted PR advice.”
Emma grinned as the irony dawned on her. “What can I say? My reputation precedes me.”
“So what did you tell it?” Dan asked, his laughter slowly dying down.
“It kept talking about “minimal necessary intervention” and being low-key.”
“Mine said that,” Dan said. “The thing about minimal necessary intervention.”
“Right. I mean, we already knew they wanted the plaques, but it was asking what they could do with them to calm everything down. It’s so hard to explain, because none of the questions were clear cut. Sometimes I didn’t know which thoughts were mine. One second it was like I was brainstorming ideas to myself, and then it was like “What? Where? When?”… you know?”
Dan didn’t know; he still couldn’t relate to Emma’s experience of being questioned by her alien. He didn’t envy it, either, much preferring to have been free to ask his own questions and to get answers to most of them. “But what did you actually tell it?” he asked. “Because your alien was standing behind you ready to take the pad off before I was finished talking to mine, so you must have given it what it wanted.”
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