Alien Collective

by Gini Koch

  Per the truce I’d brokered with Cleary, the campaign had actually been fairly civil. They’d left our many skeletons in our closets and we’d done the same for them.

  Oh, sure, the usual anti-alien muckraking and mudslinging had reared its ugly head, coming mostly from Club 51, the Church of Hate and Intolerance, and the various news channels that loved them. But the hysteria or accusations or whatever were always quelled from the top before they got too in-depth or too close to real facts. In fact, we’d ended up sort of covering for each other when the press asked awkward questions.

  The debates had been decent—if you ignored all the “why are you aliens really here” and “what are you hiding” questions, all of which were softballed and easy for Armstrong and Jeff to sidestep or answer safely—and kept to the issues. As well as any other debates over the past few decades had at any rate. Plus, no one had taken out contracts on the other side, and our various enemies had left us alone, so it was definitely the best option we could have hoped for.

  This was good for us in a lot of ways, but not necessarily in the polls. Sure, Cleary-Kramer was still the Hate Ticket, but Cleary had been correct—they had a lot of support. A lot of people still feared us because, well, aliens. Plus, Sandy’s “miracle” meant that many people expected us to perform daily miracles and when we didn’t, they turned against us, too.

  So much so that, despite what felt like nonstop campaigning for three straight months—or as most of us called it, Our Own Private Boot Camp In Hell—we had no idea which candidate was going to win. Pollsters, pundits, and every reporter we knew, including Jenkins and Oliver, felt that Cleary-Kramer were going to take the election, potentially in a landslide.

  Martini Manor was packed, though. We had people in the giant Guest House and the giant for normal people Servant’s Quarters. All of our people, all of Armstrong’s staffers, press, Secret Service, and more.

  A huge outdoor tent had been erected on the grounds, and this was where Armstrong and Jeff would either wave and thank everyone for electing them, or wave and thank those who voted for them but concede to the opposition.

  We’d voted in D.C., since that was where Jeff and I officially lived, as soon as the polls had opened in the morning. Then we’d gated it down to Florida and spent the rest of the day pretending we weren’t stressed out and worried.

  Despite the National Convention, or because of it, I was in an iced sky blue dress. Jeff was, of course, in the Armani Fatigues. Jamie was allowed to be all in pink, which was still her favorite color in the world. We all looked great, Pierre having done his magic and no one having dumped water all over us. The Armstrongs looked great, too. As did every other political ally who was here with us. All dressed up and potentially nowhere to go.

  The first few states came in. Cleary-Kramer had Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Pundits immediately started suggesting Armstrong-Martini start preparing those concession speeches.

  Then more results. Cleary-Kramer got West Virginia and South Carolina. And more. They had Tennessee. Armstrong-Martini concession speeches were being discussed, along with the Cleary-Kramer landslide.

  Until, all of a sudden, we got New York and Pennsylvania. Then Virginia and Maryland. And D.C. and North Carolina. And on it went, rolling across the country.

  I was sitting with Jenkins and Oliver when they both started laughing. “What is it? What’s so funny?”

  “We just got Texas,” Jenkins replied.

  “Yes?”

  Oliver smiled at me. “Get ready.”

  “For the concession speeches?”

  He shook his head. “No. To win. We have Ohio, thanks in no small part to the Maurers, Illinois, and Indiana, along with several others with double-digit electoral votes. We know we’ll get both New Mexico and Arizona because they’re your home states and were the only two polling Armstrong-Martini from the get-go. If we get California, it should seal the deal.”

  “Florida’s results are coming,” Jenkins said.

  This was a biggie, not only for the votes, but because both presidential candidates were from this state. Cleary was expected to take it; the state had polled Cleary-Kramer from day one.

  And yet, when the results were in, Armstrong-Martini had taken Florida. By a wide margin.

  The realization that we were suddenly winning a race we’d been told we were about to lose sank in, as the pundits started changing their tunes. The word landslide was still being bandied about, but the word “unexpected” was added to it, as were the words Armstrong-Martini.

  Time rolled on, and the party actually started. It was a cautious party, based on the fact that pretty much everyone had expected to not be partying at all, but it was a party nonetheless. Some of the younger staffers were dancing. Realized music had been playing but I’d been too nervous to hear it. Was still too nervous to focus on it.

  I rejoined Jeff, who had Jamie cradled on his shoulder. She’d fallen asleep. “You’re such a good daddy.”

  He smiled. “Doing my best.” We sat down a little apart from the rest and he put his arm around me and I snuggled next to him, put my hand on Jamie’s back, and closed my eyes.

  Heard a snapping sound and something bright went off. Opened my eyes. What looked like the nation’s entire press corps was standing there, taking pictures of us. “What the hell?”

  Jeff chuckled. “Sorry. You fell asleep, baby, and I didn’t want to wake you. But the press felt this was a good photo op, so I let them have it.”

  Yawned. “Good photo op for what?”

  “To show how confident and relaxed the Martini family was about the election,” Jenkins replied.

  Managed not to say we were tired and stressed. I’d learned to shut up faster these past three months. “So, how much longer until we know?”

  Someone screamed. Not out of fear, but excitement. Then more screams. Then cheers.

  Raj took the stage and the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen, they said it couldn’t be done, but hard work, perseverance, and fighting for what’s right pays off. It’s official—despite the polls, the voters have spoken and Vincent Armstrong and Jeffrey Martini have taken this election by a landslide. Please help me greet the next President and Vice President of the United States of America!”

  Lots of applause, cheering, and far too much flash photography. Jamie woke up a little fussy, but Jeff kissed and cuddled her as we walked to the stage and she cheered up and stood next to me, holding my hand.

  On stage with the Armstrongs. Hugs all around. While “Hail to the Chief” played, Armstrong took center stage, grabbed Jeff’s hand, and threw their hands up in the victory clench. The crowd went wilder than it had been.

  Elaine and their children and grandchildren joined Armstrong, and Jamie and I joined Jeff. Everyone waved, myself included. I kept on waiting to wake up.

  As we stepped back and Armstrong gave his acceptance speech, the reality of the situation hit me. “You’re really about to become the vice president. Wow. What does that make me, the Second-Best Lady?”

  Jeff grinned, swung Jamie up into his arms again, and put his free arm around me. “Baby, you’re second best to no one. And you can have whatever title you want.” He looked around. “We won. We really won.”

  “Yeah. And let me be the first to say how proud of you I am.” Saw all our friends and family clapping and cheering. “Nothing’s ever going to be the same, is it?”

  “No. But you know what we call that.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, I do. Routine.”

  Available December 2014,

  the tenth novel in the Alien series

  from Gini Koch:

  UNIVERSAL ALIEN

  Read on for a sneak preview

  THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF INDIA, Abdul Kalam, shared a lovely sentiment—Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.

  He’s totally right that we’re not alone, of course. But with all due respect, Former Pres
ident Kalam is dead wrong about the entire universe being friendly to us. There’s a lot of “others” out there, and while some are all for helping good ol’ Earth, there are plenty who think we should be avoided, enslaved, or destroyed.

  George Carlin said that if it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

  I know he’s right. I just know there’s more out there than we’ve seen. I look for it, sometimes, when I feel alone. I look for all the “others” out there. So far, unless they’re in a comic or a book or a movie, I haven’t found them.

  I’m not sure what’s actually more surreal—that the universe is teeming with life of all kinds, or that I’ve somehow gone from being a single marketing manager to the wife of the Vice President of the United States in just under five years.

  Oh sure, there was a lot in between “there” to “here”—much of it filled with having to fight many very bad things, both extraterrestrial and very terrestrial. Humans are really the worst, though. We’re devious and nasty on a scale that, thankfully so far, none of the aliens showing up to visit or move in seem able to manage. I’ll take a fugly space monster over most of the human megalomaniacs I’ve dealt with over the years.

  Being married to an alien, at least one from Alpha Four of the Alpha Centauri system, is the highlight. Well, our hybrid and scary-talented daughter is a highlight, too. Jeff and Jamie make all the change and general surreality that has become my daily life worthwhile.

  Sometimes, I wonder what it’s all about. I mean, we have a pretty great life, and I love my family. I’m a good wife, mother, and daughter, and I do things that matter. But there are days when I just can’t do anything right, and I wonder what’s wrong with me.

  Oh, of course, I have bad days. Sadly, since becoming the Second Lady, or whatever I’m really supposed to be called now, there’s a lot of pressure. Shockingly, with more public scrutiny comes more ways for me to screw up. And there are days when I wonder what’s wrong with me.

  Sometimes, I just want to see what it would be like, if things were just a little different. Maybe not a whole lot different, just enough so I could do something more, be something more . . . be something else.

  Sometimes, I just want to know what it would be like if I was me, but maybe a little less unwillingly famous and a whole lot more competent on the regular people things I sometimes seem incapable of managing with anything resembling smoothness or skill.

  Some days, I just want to be somewhere else. A place where I do everything right.

  Some days, I’d really like to be somewhere else. Where everything I do is right.

  Hey . . . is there an echo in here?

  • • •

  My brains oozed out of my ears.

  Not from being shot or something. From boredom. Massive, stultifying boredom. Boredom on a scale so epic I didn’t think anyone could really fathom it. I could barely fathom it and I was living it.

  Cheers went up from those around me. Well, not most of those immediately around me. I was surrounded by Americans. Sure, more than half of them were actually aliens either originally or first generation out from Alpha Four in the Alpha Centauri system, but still, living and raised as Americans. And this was not an American pastime.

  “You’re sure this is cricket? I mean, the game. The game that millions of people around the world supposedly love?”

  This earned me a dirty look from everyone near me, American or no. I’d tried to keep my voice low, but apparently cricket shared something in common with that most boring of Scottish games that had immigrated to the U.S., golf, in that the fans were hushed unless something “exciting” was happening on the field.

  I wasn’t actually sitting next to my husband. As the newly minted Vice President of these non-cricket-mad United States, Jeff was sitting a couple of rows below me, with now-President Armstrong, and the Australian Prime Minister. Technically, as his wife, I should have been sitting with them.

  Wiser heads had prevailed, however. Despite a great deal of effort and patience on the part of the Head of the C.I.A.’s Extra-Terrestrial Division and the American Centaurion Public Relations Minister—otherwise known as Charles Reynolds and Rajnish Singh—after a week’s worth of immersion, I still hadn’t been able to grasp or enjoy cricket.

  Since we’d been in our mid-twenties Chuckie had lived half the year in Australia, and Raj had been born and raised in New Delhi. Ergo, they both actually enjoyed cricket. In fact, Raj was quite a rabid fan, and Chuckie had an Aussie team he supported. Meaning if anyone was going to get this game through to me, it should have been them.

  Only, it took the complexity of baseball, the slowness of golf, and the bizarreness of croquet, and managed to turn them into something that, sports lover that I was or no, I just couldn’t manage to follow, let alone like.

  The hope had been that I’d have picked up enough to have the light bulb go off while watching a live match and suddenly become an expert. Hope might have sprung eternal, but it was definitely being dashed against the wicket today, because I still wasn’t sure where the wicket was, let alone what it was, or why it existed, other than to be the current bane of my existence.

  It didn’t help matters much that the entire point of this extravaganza was that the Australian government was visiting to show support for not only the new administration in particular but also aliens in general.

  Because of Operation Destruction, the entire world knew aliens lived here. The entire world also knew that there were a lot of different alien races out there, and some of them really hated humanity. Of course, some of them liked us just fine, in part because we’d given the exiled A-Cs a home.

  However, there were still a lot of people around the world who felt that aliens were the worst things to hit Earth, and they wanted us gone. Off planet, in work camps, or merely wiped off the face of the Earth, they weren’t picky. What with Jeff and then-Senator, now-President Armstrong having had a surprise landslide win, having a known alien a heartbeat away from the presidency had all these anti-alien groups in a tizzy of epic proportions.

  Australia had its share of alien haters. Club 51, our biggest, most coordinated anti-alien enemy, had made a lot of inroads into Australia, meaning one of America’s biggest allies had a huge anti-alien population.

  So it was vital for us to make the Australian Prime Minister and his retinue feel happy and comfortable. The PM was a huge cricket fan, hence this game. That I was supposed to feign excitement about.

  Wished I’d studied acting instead of business in college, because, despite my desire to be a good wife and representative of my constituents, I was failing to convince anyone that I liked this sport.

  The fact that we’d spent money to fix up the stadium where the Redskins played football to look like a cricket field didn’t help. They weren’t my team—we might live in D.C. now, but I remained true to my Arizona Cardinals and their tradition of usually losing—but I’d have committed many major felonies to have seen the Redskins trot onto the field and toss the pigskin around. I couldn’t pick a Redskins player out of a lineup, but still, football was a sport I understood and enjoyed.

  I loved baseball, too, but neither the Washington Nationals nor my beloved Diamondbacks were going to be showing up to save my day. There were lots of guys on the field who, from the program, were quite cute. Not that you could really see them. So I didn’t have that distraction going for me. And when I could see them they were standing around in a giant circle or running back and forth along a small strip of dirt in the middle of the field, so far, far away. For whatever reason, this didn’t make my Sports Gene go wild.

  My phone beeped and I dug it out of my purse. At a normal sporting event I’d never have heard it. At this one, not a problem. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to spend time on my phone when we were at public events such as this one, but our daughter wasn’t with us and the text could be about her.

  Sadly, it was from the
head of Alpha Team. Reader was none-too-gently suggesting I plaster a look of enjoyment onto my face. He wasn’t technically at this event—Alpha Team’s job was to protect, not to be the face of American Centaurion. Had no idea where in the stadium Reader and the others actually were, other than nowhere I could see them. However, they could see me, and I looked, if I took his text to be accurate, “like you’re about to die while passing gas.”

  Sent a reply text with one word—“charming”—in it. Wanted to say other words. But my Secret Service detail had clued me in—I had no such thing as privacy anymore.

  Dropped my phone back into my purse as people nearby gasped. Something was happening on the field. It appeared to be exciting, based on the crowd’s increased murmuring. Couldn’t tell what the heck it was. Looked around. Right now would be a great time for a parasitic superbeing to form, or for an intergalactic invasion to happen, or something else that would alleviate the boredom. Waited hopefully. Nothing. Apparently the Powers That Be liked cricket. Or had been bored into inactivity.

  “When is the halftime or intermission or whatever?” I asked Raj. Again, tried to keep my voice down, but apparently the acoustics in this stadium were great, because I got another host of dirty looks.

  “There isn’t really a break like that, as I’ve explained.” He managed not to add “over and over again” but I could see the thought written on his face. “We’re watching a T-twenty game, so there will be a short intermission in about an hour.”

  We’d already been watching this for an hour and had been here even longer. I wasn’t sure I could stay conscious for another hour without moving around. And there were at least two more hours to get through after the short 10-20 minute intermission. And this was a “short” game. “Real” cricket could go on for days. Had to figure this game had been created to use as torture for political prisoners and wondered if I could invoke the Geneva Convention as a way out of the boredom. Probably not. My luck never went that way.