dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  She connected the tablet to SpeediShare, downloaded the .wav file to the home screen, gestured for Joe to cover his ears, turned up the volume as high as it would go, opened the file, and stuck her fingers in her ears.

  000

  Joe watched Ani deal with Klein and knew that she was going to make a great addition to the YETI ranks. Hacker skills notwithstanding, there was a calm, focused quality to her that reminded him a lot of Andy. That reminded him of himself. It was a quality that he and Andy had been taught, that had come only after months and months of training and simulations. Ani, with only natural talent and raw instincts, had cut through to the heart of things with a couple of questions and, Joe was sure, had managed to show Klein up as the liar he was. He was hiding something, that much was obvious. And it was all tied up with the .wav file that Jack had found.

  Joe was pretty certain that the sound that Klein had played them was not the sound Ani had been expecting, which meant it wasn’t the sound that lay at the dark heart of X-Core. Which also meant that either they were wrong about the .wav file being the same as the one that Imogen Bell had recorded from space, or that Klein had somehow switched out the file transmitted to other observatories around the world for analysis.

  But why?

  Why would Klein send out the wrong file?

  Unless …

  Unless …

  Ani gestured for Joe to cover his ears and he realized that she was about to play the real sound file. He nodded his approval—Klein’s reaction might tell them all they needed to know—but he didn’t think Ani saw. She was too busy.

  Joe covered his ears, Ani covered hers, and the .wav file played.

  Ani had thought that Klein’s face would tell her the truth—that his expression would show that he recognized the sound. In that instant, she reasoned, he would give himself away.

  And yes, Klein gave himself away all right.

  It just wasn’t in the way she’d thought.

  But then it was like nothing she could have imagined.

  When the .wav started, Klein’s body seemed to seize up. He was turning his head toward the source of the sound and then suddenly stopped dead, jerked back to how he had been positioned a couple of seconds before, moved again, stopped dead, and jerked back again. He was stuck in a kind of physical loop, repeating and re-repeating the same tiny action. The sight was so strange, so unexpected, that Ani could do little more than stare at him. It was as if Klein were an automaton and the clockwork mechanism that powered him had slipped a cog and become stuck.

  He didn’t so much as blink, nor did he seem to realize that he was stuck. The expression on his face did not change.

  The .wav played on and Ani realized that she could hear it, although this time it sounded like the first time at Uncle Alex’s; there was less electricity threading through the experience, and the “OBEY!” command was missing. She jammed her fingers into her ears and opened her jaw to increase her ear canal pressure, like she’d done on the only plane trip she’d ever taken—to Spain a couple of years ago—and it shut out most of the sound. She was relieved to find that she couldn’t hear enough of it for the soundforms to try, once again, to invade her mind.

  She continued, fascinated and chilled, to watch Klein, all the time wondering what was actually happening to him. She leaned in a little for a closer look and that was the precise moment that Klein broke out of the loop and suddenly lifted his head, causing her to recoil. His eyes rolled back, showing all whites. His hands twitched into rigid claws at his sides.

  And.

  Then.

  Suddenly.

  It.

  Happened.

  At first she thought that it was because she was tired, and maybe her brain was trying to tell her so. Then she thought maybe it was a trick of the light, or a trick that her eyes were playing on her brain. Because, right in front of her, Klein suddenly went fuzzy, like he’d been encircled in the kind of heat haze you saw on roads on really hot days. His edges seemed to blur, to lose definition, and Ani made herself blink to try to clear the effect. It didn’t work. It only seemed to make the man’s edges blurrier.

  She dragged her eyes away and looked at Joe, who was staring at Klein with what looked like disbelief. It made her feel a tiny bit better that he could see it, too, but then she thought, He’s a trained government spy and even he doesn’t know what’s happening, and she felt even more scared. When she turned her eyes back to Klein, she thought that she’d lost her mind.

  Professor Klein was no longer human.

  Or, at least, he was no longer just human.

  Over the entire length of his body, Ani could see an unearthly, hazy disturbance; a pattern of interference that made him look like he was covered with a dark, grainy texture—almost as if another layer had been superimposed over him in an image-editing program. The “layer” looked like it was made up of a grayish sandlike substance, and it was in constant, flowing motion, as if the particles were shifting across Klein’s body. He was completely enveloped in the stuff—or made of it? Ani thought grimly—and it made her think of the sculptures she’d seen on beaches, where people built incredibly detailed models out of sand.

  As she watched, another layer was added to Klein and it nearly made her throw up. Neon splashes wormed their way across the gray sand, looking too much like those awful soundforms for Ani to bear. Her instinctual horror of the wormlike shapes was calmed only slightly by the wonder of seeing them in the real world instead of inside her own head. They writhed and swirled across Klein, sinking through the sand texture, only to emerge again fatter and more defined.

  Neon worms, she thought. He’s covered in neon worms.

  That was almost exactly what they looked like, but she didn’t know if that was just her mind’s desperate need to make sense of the shapes.

  She felt the air in the room changing, becoming charged. There was a harsh electrical smell and she could taste it in her mouth, like she was licking a battery. Her scalp prickled and the hair on her arms started to stand up. Her mouth felt dry. Her eyes started to hurt.

  The soundforms continued to crawl across Klein’s body, more and more of them every passing second. She saw a fat worm of light enter Klein’s mouth and exit through one of his eyes and it was so horrible and unexpected that she forced her right hand to move, slowly, away from her ear and toward the tablet in her lap. The sound of the .wav file was louder, not just because she had taken a finger out of her ear, but as if the tones had been picked up by Klein’s body and were resonating through it, amplified and purified into a wall of noise—high-pitched, low-pitched, and every pitch in between—and when she saw the soundforms in her mind’s eye, she knew that she was running out of time.

  She willed her hand to travel faster, but it was like moving through molasses. Soundforms danced inside her, hungry for her sanity.

  With a supreme effort she reached the tablet screen and closed the file, just as the soundforms began to change the structure of Klein’s body entirely. As the sound died, Ani had a momentary glimpse of what the .wav file had been trying to do to Klein’s physical form.

  She saw his arms start to elongate, stretching and curling until they were like the whip tentacles of a giant squid, but made of a gaseous, foggy substance that was partially transparent. Through the clear surface she could see the soundforms passing back and forth like a new circulatory system that was pumping sound around his body instead of blood. His head seemed to bloat, also transparent, and the soundforms were gathering in the area of his skull that should surely contain his brain, wrapping themselves around each other, dissolving into a throbbing mass.

  Klein’s eyes stretched, grew longer, then divided like cells reproducing, then divided again and again and again until the front of his now-ovoid head was covered in them. But they were not like eyes she was used to seeing. These were perfect spheres barely connected to the face itself, and they pushed against each other like soap bubbles, so many … so many …

  She got the
feeling again that her mind was just trying so hard to understand the visual information it was receiving, it was simply picking things that were close enough for her to interpret what they were, rather than showing them exactly as they were. Klein’s body seemed to suddenly flip inward, feeding back into itself like water flowing through a plug hole, or a black hole dragging matter inside it, and then …

  … and then it was over.

  Klein was just Klein.

  No sand, no worms, no soap bubble eyes. Just a man.

  The worms inside her own head disappeared.

  The static charge in the air was dispelled.

  Klein snapped back to his previous position and his head turned to face the source that the .wav had come from.

  “She didn’t follow protocol,” he said, continuing on from his last statement, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.

  Ani looked down at the .wav file on the tablet screen and felt a tremendous sense of unreality wash over her.

  What she had just seen had no place on this planet, she was sure of that.

  Whatever was contained within that sound file was not from Earth.

  It was something that Imogen Bell had found in outer space and—completely unknowingly—had dragged down to this planet by recording it as a sound file. Ani didn’t know what it was, or where it was from. She didn’t know what it wanted, or how many other people—like Klein—were carrying it around inside of them.

  But she did know something.

  It was alien—utterly, unbelievably alien—and Ani was certain that it was no longer content to remain trapped as a sound file on a computer hard drive.

  Joe and Ani managed to hold things together just long enough to say their good-byes, thank Klein for his time, and get out of the observatory and into the night air. All the way to the door Joe was expecting Klein to change form again and prevent them from leaving, but the professor had just led them to the exit and shut the door behind them.

  They tried to make it to the SUV before what had just happened hit them full force.

  They failed.

  They took about three strides and then looked at each other in a mixture of terror and awe.

  Joe tried to speak, but it all came out in a torrent, muddled up and disjointed. “Did you see …? I never … it was horrib … his head … I mean, what was that? … You did see it, right?”

  He watched Ani as she tried to speak, but words failed her.

  For a few moments back there, Joe had thought that he had been hallucinating, that his chip was malfunctioning, and that what he had thought he had seen Klein suddenly turn into was not really what had happened. Then he’d seen Ani’s terrified face.

  They had just witnessed the effects that the sound file from space could have on the human body; they had seen Klein change, before their very eyes, into something that had no place outside of a nightmare. Klein not realizing they’d seen the change, Joe was certain, was all that had saved them. If he had known, then maybe he would have had no choice but to prevent them from leaving so they couldn’t tell anyone else.

  A lucky break.

  And thank heavens for it.

  Finally Ani managed to get out the rush of words that had been twisted inside her mouth. “His … he was … he’s not … what just happened? Did we just see an alien? I mean, Joe, seriously, tell me that we did not just see an alien back there!”

  Joe shook his head.

  “I don’t know what we just saw. Abernathy?”

  There was a moment when Joe was sure that his handler wasn’t there, that he and Ani were on their own, but then the voice appeared in his head.

  “What just happened, Joe?” Abernathy asked.

  “You need to get a team down here stat, and you need to secure this facility. We need an armed team, we need scientists…. Abernathy, the guy in charge of Pabody/Reich is a bloody alien!”

  “An alien, Joe?” Abernathy couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice.

  Joe understood Abernathy’s doubts, but really didn’t have time for them. Joe could hardly believe it himself, but the evidence of his senses was going to have to be enough if they were going to prevent what suddenly looked like it could be an alien invasion.

  “Look, I know how it sounds,” he barked. “Ani and I just saw Professor Klein turn into something that cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be classified as human. He responded to the .wav file. It changed him. You need to get down here and find out what he is, because from where we’re standing ‘alien’ is the only word that fits.”

  “Team’s on its way. Are you both all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Joe said. “I think we should stay in case that … thing decides to leave.”

  “Negative on that,” Abernathy responded. “We need you back at HQ. Both of you. I thought I heard Klein saying he practically lives at the telescope. If that’s true, he’ll be there when we get a squad to your location.”

  “Any other news?” Joe asked.

  “You told us to pick up some test subjects from the Warhouse, so we did. It was nothing like you reported in, just some kids at a concert, but we invented probable cause and scooped some off the street outside, brought ’em back here, and are currently experimenting. Should have preliminary reports waiting for you when you get back. I’ve also got the Shuttleworths throwing every test they can think of at Ani’s .wav file. Again, I should have more for you when you return.”

  “Okay, boss,” Joe said. “Might be worth blasting the .wav file at the kids you scooped up, just so you can see what we’re dealing with here. Anyway, we’re heading home.”

  There was a pause and then Abernathy came back, concern and resignation in his voice. “I don’t know, Joe. This might have just gotten to be a little too big for us now. There’s no shame in admitting that things have grown out of our remit. It might be time to hand the investigation over …”

  “Call in whoever you need to, but we’re not backing away from this. No way.”

  “As soon as I call the people I have to call, this will probably get taken out of my hands, anyway. They’ll tell me that this was not why YETI was formed, and remind me that my operatives are all children who are hardly prepared to start defending the Earth from extraterrestrial threats.”

  “And you will inform them, politely but firmly, that an organization of kids is exactly what is needed. We fight aliens every day on our laptops and PS4s, and if anyone is more knowledgeable about extraterrestrial threats than a bunch of kids raised on a diet of science fiction movies, comic books, and cartoons, then I’d like to meet them. You’ve got government favors owed to you. It might be time to cash ’em in.”

  Abernathy laughed, a dry chuckle, but a laugh all the same.

  “I’ll see what I can do. I suspect it might be wise to wait a little while before I make any calls, and give us a chance to have something more substantial to tell them than ‘the aliens are here!’”

  They got in the SUV, and Joe spent a couple of minutes organizing his thoughts before he started it up, gunned the engine, and headed back toward London.

  They shared almost hysterical re-creations of what they had seen at the observatory. The conversation had flowed along through disbelief, terror, awe, more terror, and then right on back to disbelief again. The human mind hadn’t evolved to deal with stuff like that. It had evolved to process a hairless ape’s progress through a complex, textured world, at medium speed, and to instill hunter/gatherer skills.

  When faced with the truly terrifying, it tended to shrivel and hide.

  Eventually, they fell silent while Joe concentrated on getting them back to London in the right number of pieces. He used the time to try to put what they had experienced into some logical, comprehensible order. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle with an unknown number of missing pieces, no picture on the box, some of the pieces three-dimensional, and others that kept hiding.

  In the end, he gave up and just tried to make his mind stop racing. Ani played
with the tablet computer, occasionally getting excited over some new feature—the battery life of the device initiated a ten minute mini-lecture on comparative battery studies—and Joe felt glad just to have her beside him.

  Suddenly, Ani slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand.

  “Are you okay there?” Joe asked.

  “Apart from being an idiot, fine I guess. Back before Klein turned into whatever that was, I’d just gotten an email from a hacker friend. The one who went missing after sending me the .wav file.”

  “It’s not really surprising it slipped your mind. What’s it say?”

  Ani stabbed and prodded at the tablet’s screen and then said. “The subject line is Help; I can’t imagine it’s going to be good news.”

  “Read it out loud.”

  “‘Ani. Gone dark because they’re after me. Keep that file safe. Meet me tomorrow, outside Benedict’s Place. Two p.m. Urgent. JM.’”

  “Sounds like we caught a break. We’ll have to make that meet tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know London. And I definitely don’t know where Benedict’s Place is.”

  “Search it.”

  Ani did.

  “Nothing comes up. And Jack McVitie is as paranoid as they come. He believes that there’s an internationally-run project, ECHELON, that monitors all emails, phone calls, and other forms of communication, scanning for keywords. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM, Jack’s fears that the NSA and GCHQ listened in on just about everything only grew. Jack wouldn’t put an address in an email.”

  “You do know that PRISM and ECHELON are just the distracting tips of the real iceberg? Information leaked out to cover the real systems that are analyzing every piece of information transferred across the globe, with thinking software that makes commercial AI seem like 10 print ‘I’m thinking’; 20 goto 10.”

  “Abernathy did inform me, yes.”

  “So, where are you supposed to meet him?” Joe asked, baffled.

  “It must be a code. Maybe if I wasn’t so tired, I’d even see it. Hang on, that’s weird …”

  “What?”

  “He signed the email ‘JM.’ He always just signs ‘J.’”