by TM Catron
The voice of the journalist hushed as she said, “Didn’t faze it? What’s that chatter?” A translator spoke close to the mike. “They’re saying it didn’t work. Well we can see that.” The fighter jets circled the tower again. “We’re just waiting on the official report . . .”
No one spoke for some minutes. The smoke around the tower dissipated, blown away by the wind. The tower remained unchanged.
The journalist stepped back in front of the camera. “We have just witnessed an attack on the tower by the IAF. The report’s just in that the missiles failed to damage it in any way. What are these things?”
Looting continued throughout the day in London, New York, Moscow, Beijing, and three hundred other cities. In addition, rioters broke through police barricades to gawk at the towers, while demonstrators interfered with the riot police, gang rivalries broke out into shooting wars, and suicide rates spiked. As civil unrest grew, military reserves descended on affected cities to help the overwhelmed local law enforcements.
The city of London waited, holding its breath. Groups of impatient travelers crammed around airport TV screens. Minutes ticked by as the lines grew longer.
The towers loomed over their respective cities. A mass of thunderstorms was predicted for the next day, and travelers could expect more delays. All of Heathrow airport sighed out a collective groan.
When she could no longer hold her bladder, Mina gave up her chair in search of a restroom and supper. She had been unable to get in touch with Lincoln again before both her cell phone and laptop batteries died. And she had yet to find an opportunity to charge them. Entire families had camped out near charging stations, guarding them aggressively.
Mina’s first time in an airport had been with her family—Dad and Lincoln. They were flying from their home in Indiana to see Dad’s sister, Aunt Julie, who lived in Minnesota. Mina was eight and Lincoln had just turned fourteen.
Freckles dotted Mina’s pale young face. Her hair had been wilder back then. Dad had not known what to do with his daughter’s curly mane. Mina’s mother had left them only six months before.
The eight-year-old Mina knotted her fingers in her lap as they sat in the terminal. She had only met Aunt Julie once when she was four, and Mina’s faded memory was of a plump woman with dyed red hair, bright red lipstick, and heavy eye shadow.
“Daddy, why do we have to go see Aunt Julie?” Mina’s brown eyes found her father’s blue ones. His face was already lined, his hair too grey for a man of thirty-eight. He wore his customary faded jeans and brown boots with a light blue button-up work shirt. Today his clothes were washed and neatly pressed.
Dad’s face twisted oddly, his eyes screwing up as he looked at Mina. “Because that’s what family does, Addy. We take care of each other when the time comes.” Dad had always called her Addy, short for Adamina. His name was Adam, and Mina’s mother had liked the name Adamina. But Dad always called her Addy.
Even at eight, Mina had known what her father meant when he said Aunt Julie was out of time. Aunt Julie had cancer. And people with cancer usually ran out of time. Had her mom been out of time? If so, why hadn’t she let her family take care of her instead of that new man? Why had she left them? Young Mina wanted to ask these questions, looking first at her dad and then at Lincoln.
Lincoln scowled and jammed his thumb down on his portable cassette player. His earphones blared out “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains. Mina hated that song. Lincoln had played it for her the week before, and she was pretty sure Dad wouldn’t approve of the lyrics if he knew what they were saying. Dad didn’t approve of cursing or anything that could be interpreted as disrespectful.
But Dad wasn’t paying attention. He was picking a thread from a metal button on his shirt. He tugged at the blue string, watching it unravel.
“It’s going to fall off, Daddy,” she said. He wouldn’t be able to sew the button back on in the airport.
“Do you have any fingernail clippers?” Dad asked.
“No.” Mom would have had clippers, Mina thought. But she said, “Want to see a trick?”
“Sure.”
Mina took the end of the thread from her father and carefully wound it clockwise underneath the metal button, first once, then twice, and again and again until she could hide the end of the it under the button. “See?” she said. “Now you don’t have to worry about losing it while we’re gone from home!”
“Good thinking. Thanks, princess.”
Mina glanced again at Lincoln. His shaggy auburn hair fell down over his closed eyes—he had refused several haircuts. Mom had always cut his hair. He stretched out his long legs, which already at fifteen made him taller than Dad and a favorite on the school basketball team. Mina dug her book out of her small purple backpack and nestled as close to Lincoln as she could get with the armrest between them. She wrapped one arm under his and propped up her book. Her other hand rested on Lincoln’s arm. He didn’t open his eyes, but his scowl softened as he found her hand, giving it a quick squeeze before turning the volume down on his cassette player.
We’re going to be okay, right? She wanted to ask him again, as she had countless times in the last few months. But maybe now wasn’t the time. Because Aunt Julie’s time was running out.
She would ask the question again when Dad’s time ran out six years later.
The adult Mina ate a soggy sandwich from the airport cafe, brushed her teeth in the bathroom, and huddled between two large plastic ficus trees for another long night. Here and there, she watched passengers pass through security on their way to their gates, envying them. Already Mina had lived her entire life at check-in, waiting for permission to continue her journey. Airport security walked by with a dog, and the animal paused to sniff Mina’s carry-on. She smiled sleepily at the official. The dogs had sniffed her bag five times already.
Mina curled up with her arm resting on the lip of the giant concrete planter to her right, coat pulled over her like a blanket. She wouldn’t sleep, but she wouldn’t spend another night wandering under the harsh airport lights, either.
Maybe Lincoln wanted to drive with her out to Dad’s place, which they had never been willing to sell. She would ask him next time they talked.
Somewhere the outside doors slid open, and a cold breeze swept through the facility. Mina shivered and closed her eyes.
Lincoln Surrey sat at his desk in Boston, the glowing screen in front of him the only sign of life inside the dark open office. He absentmindedly picked up a pencil and tapped it on his desk as he read the web page in front of him. According to news reports, the situation in London was the same as in Boston. But he hadn’t heard from Mina in eighteen hours. And he hadn’t showered or changed in thirty. He glanced down at his button-down shirt and khakis, then rubbed a hand over his whiskers. Perhaps a shave would freshen him up. His auburn hair also needed a good combing. Lincoln ran a hand through it. A patrol car eased down the street under the third-floor office window, its lights slowly flashing.
Lincoln pushed back from his desk and stood, stretching his six-foot-six frame and tossing the pencil on the desk. He looked around the office, at its computers, worktables, and servers. His team had left hours ago. He should have, too. Hopefully he wouldn’t be mistaken for a looter on his short walk home.
The office phone rang. Lincoln glanced at his cell phone—8:00 p.m. A little late for a client to be calling, but not entirely unusual. Still, it would be the first client call all day. Maybe Mina had only been able to get through using a landline? Breathing a sigh of relief, he walked to the phone sitting on an adjacent table and answered.
“Surrey.”
“Lincoln. Glad I caught you. Paul Cummings.”
“Oh. Yes, hello, Paul.”
“Expecting someone else?”
“Matter of fact, I was.”
“I’ll be brief. Is your team around?”
“No.”
“Too bad. I was hoping to catch all of you, but you can relay the message quickly, I trust. We’
re implementing ARCHIE.”
Lincoln groped around for the nearest chair and rolled it toward him, but he didn’t sit yet. “You’re . . . as in . . .? But just as a precaution, right?”
“No, I’m afraid not. The towers aren’t man-made.”
Lincoln sat down. “So aliens, then.” The words sounded strange as they left his mouth. Lincoln experienced a rush of excitement—wait until Nelson finds out—followed swiftly by a surge of panic. There are towers in all major cities around the world.
Cummings continued, “How quickly can your team write a program to interact with the aliens and determine if they’re hostile?”
“You’re joking. How much time do we have?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do the lifeforms communicate?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“What do you know?”
“We’ll share everything we have. Are you in?”
Lincoln laughed. “Like I’d pass up an opportunity to communicate with the first intelligent beings from outer space?”
“Good. One other thing,” Cummings said. “There’s a facility we’re sending you to.”
“A facility? What kind of facility? Where? We have everything we need here at the lab.”
“Can’t tell you anything else over the phone. Has to do with ARCHIE. I’m sending a chopper to your building. Get your team ready.”
“Surely there are other people more qualified than us.”
“There are, and we’re sending some of them to you. But they can’t handle the coding like you.”
Lincoln did some quick thinking. “Paul,” he said.
“Yes?”
“My sister is in London, trying to get a flight back stateside, but it’s chaos at the airports. I haven’t been able to reach her all day. She may get through to the lab office, and I can’t miss her call.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m afraid . . .”
“I don’t think you understand. Either she gets on a plane headed to the States, or I’m not leaving the lab.”
Cummings was quiet for so long Lincoln worried they’d been disconnected. Finally he said, “I’ll see what I can do. Chopper’ll be there in an hour. See you soon.”
DAY 3
“MINA SURREY. PAGING MINA SURREY. Please report to the customer relations desk.”
Mina almost ran to the desk, luggage in tow. She passed several television screens, now reporting lines of cars in the London streets, honking and swerving, headed out of the city in a mass exodus. The towers had not moved.
“Ms. Surrey?” asked a tense-looking man behind the counter.
“Yes?” she said, slightly out of breath.
“We have a cancellation, and you have been bumped to the top of the list.”
His thick Scottish accent threw Mina for a moment, and she paused to process what he had just said. “I have?”
“Yes. By someone named Paul Cummings from Washington, DC.”
“Who is that?”
The man shrugged. A line was forming behind Mina. He handed her a ticket and a note. “He left this message for you. Your flight leaves this evening.”
His eyes were already fixed on the next customer, so Mina moved out of the way to examine the hand-scribbled note.
Lincoln Surrey flying to meet you in Atlanta.
Lincoln must have pulled some strings, she thought. But how? He didn’t know anybody that important. Mina looked at the ticket. Her flight left at 8:00 p.m. She silently thanked Paul Cummings, whoever he was. Eight hours. Eight hours and she would be headed home. She smiled as she entered the airport security line.
“Lincoln.”
Lincoln stirred in the small office chair where he had been dozing and blinked watery eyes at one of his associates, computer engineer Lindsay Alvarez.
“Fresh coffee in the break room,” she said, sipping from her own styrofoam cup, the plastic stirrer pressing into her tan cheek. She nodded toward an open doorway at the back of the conference room, causing a piece of straight dark hair to fall into her oval face. She brushed it behind her ear. She’d taken out her contacts and put on dark-rimmed glasses.
She sat in a chair across from Lincoln at the large meeting table, next to Robert Carter, their roboticist, a greying man with a receding hairline and a gut that hung over his khaki cargo pants. He pushed his round glasses up on his nose and twiddled a cigarette between his fingers, already anticipating his next smoke break.
Chris Nelson, computer-engineer-hacker-genius, sat at the end of the table to Lincoln’s left, facing the door, completely awake and oblivious to the people around him as his fingers hummed over the keys of his laptop. The youngest of the group at twenty-eight, Nelson had a soft waistline and a bowl haircut. He wore a black Space Invaders t-shirt with a blue pixelated 8-bit alien on the front.
“Did you put on that shirt after I called you, Nelson?” Lincoln asked, smirking.
Nelson shot Lincoln an amused glance. “Heck yeah,” he said, his voice breaking slightly.
The four of them sat in the small conference room where they had been deposited after their helicopter ride to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Nothing had been hung on the plain white walls. The rolling seats were stiff and unforgiving, the grey carpet barely worn. They had dropped their overnight bags haphazardly about the room, obstructing the small paths between the chairs and walls.
Lincoln had seen little else of the vast complex, but the sense of urgency they had experienced in the helicopter pervaded the air here as well. When they arrived, he’d barely registered the offices teeming with people rushing up and down, phones ringing, and televisions blaring. A large screen in the ground floor lobby of the building cycled through three-dimensional renderings of all of the towers with lists of data displayed beside them. Lincoln would have liked to stop and look at them, but the group strode quickly past to the bank of elevators that took them to this third floor room. The muffled sounds of people scrambling to make sense of chaos occasionally echoed down the hall.
Someone in uniform stood outside the door, checking on the group from time to time. Helicopters whined in the distance. Lincoln wondered what the military was planning to do about the towers. Despite the fact that his team was supposed to help, they had yet to be given any information on the situation or their role in it. Lincoln assumed they were waiting on Cummings, who had always been their point of contact for ARCHIE in the past.
No one slept. The team had begun working right away, taking advantage of the lull to pull up existing programs and refresh their memories on scenarios they had not seen in over a year.
Lincoln checked the time—7:00 a.m. He’d only dozed for twenty minutes. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at his screen. Nelson was already digging into code, updating algorithms. Alvarez and Carter were discussing possible methods of contact.
“I don’t see how our programs are going to determine anything just by looking at the towers,” she said. “The aliens will need to do something.”
“Let’s hope they don’t do too much,” said Carter, “except open up and spit out E.T.”
“Then we’ll at least be useful,” said Alvarez.
“What will also be useful,” said Lincoln, standing up, “is if they hold up a big sign saying, We come in peace. Here’s the cure for cancer.”
“When was Cummings supposed to arrive?” Carter asked.
“He didn’t say,” said Lincoln.
“What I want to know,” said Nelson, never taking his eyes away from his screen, “is how this facility is in any way better than our lab.”
“I was wondering the same thing,” said Alvarez. “Why bring us here in a hurry only to dump us in an empty conference room?”
Lincoln shrugged. “Security?”
“But you’d think they’d have a better place to put us,” said Nelson. “I’ve heard about this place. They have whole buildings for R&D, counterterrorism, you name it.” His fingers whizzed over the keys.
“Maybe this is just a stopping place.”
“I hope so.”
Lincoln went to get a cup of coffee and returned to his seat. They worked in ignorance for several more hours, gradually dropping questions, taking turns dozing at the table, making fresh coffee, checking cell phones for messages from family or news about the towers. Carter took several smoke breaks, returning each time cloaked in the strong odor of tobacco.
The screen in front of Lincoln blurred. After three days without solid sleep, even the copious amounts of caffeine he was forcing into his body were doing nothing to remove the fog from his brain. He checked his phone occasionally, not expecting much with the spotty cell phone signal inside the room.
His irritation grew with his weariness. He scrolled through the numbers in his phone, looking for Paul Cummings. The number was still there. Lincoln toyed with calling the number and telling Cummings they were waiting for him. But then, Cummings would know that.
Footsteps echoed outside, voices at the door. It opened. Their escort stepped aside for two other men in Army fatigues. The first man was at least six inches shorter than Lincoln, but strongly built, with dark hair buzzed short and a presence that took up the entire doorframe.
“Lieutenant John Halston,” he said, extending a hand to Carter, who was closest to the door. “This is Corporal Schmidt.” Halston gestured to the much younger man behind him. Schmidt nodded. He was about twenty, with a fresh boyish face and peach fuzz on his chin. The others all stood and shook hands, except Nelson, who glanced up from his computer to nod in Halston’s direction.
“The colonel’s on his way,” said Halston.
“Colonel who? Is Cummings here?” asked Lincoln, closing his laptop.
Halston glanced at Lincoln. “You’ll have to speak to Colonel Nash about it, but there’s no one named Cummings here.”
“What?” said Alvarez. Lincoln imagined his own expression must have mirrored hers—a mixture of surprise and irritation.
“Look, Lieutenant,” began Lincoln.