The Frequency of Aliens

by Gene Doucette

  “So, I’m getting that I should stick with my original plans to stay in my dorm room and shout at the void all night,” Duke said. “Is that right?”

  “Oh, no, you have to come,” Annie said. “Otherwise I won’t know anybody and it will be awkward.”

  “In fairness, we just met.”

  “Yes, but I already know your real name, and I’ll need help with a good nickname so I don’t have to introduce myself as Clytemnestra all night.”

  “All right, then it’s a… well, no, it’s not a date. If I say it’s a date, will she shoot me?”

  “I might,” Cora said.

  “It’s an Occasion!” he said. “I’ll go get my sleeping bag.”

  There were times when Cora acted more like Annie’s mom than Annie’s actual mom ever did. It was amusing here and there, but mostly it was annoying, because Annie kind of already thought of herself as an adult.

  What followed, then, in the half hour it took for Annie to get Cora to leave the observatory, was a conversation that went well beyond the agent’s official role as protector of Annie’s physical health.

  “I just think you should be careful,” Cora was saying. This came at the end of a description of the predatory tendencies of the male portion of a species as a whole, delivered in the same way one might explain such a thing to someone who had just emerged from a cave at age eighteen.

  “You appreciate that you aren’t here to guard my chastity, right?”

  Cora turned pink. Annie made a note to make fun of her about this sometime.

  “Are you…? You aren’t planning…”

  “Jesus, Cora, will you relax? I just think he’s cool, and I would enjoy the opportunity to get to know him better, and that’s all, okay? I literally just met him, what do you think is gonna happen?”

  “Well I don’t know.”

  “Me neither! Isn’t that awesome?”

  Cora didn’t think it was awesome.

  “You just haven’t had a lot of experience.”

  Annie laughed.

  “You’re taking this way too seriously,” Annie said. “Look: I may get an hour into the evening before deciding he’s a jerk and I don’t want anything to do with him. I legitimately do not know that right now.”

  “And if you do, you’ll be stuck here for another eleven hours with him.”

  “Great! An awkward, uncomfortable evening. Isn’t that the kind of experience I’m supposedly missing?”

  Cora sighed.

  “Yes, I guess so. Just… I don’t know. Don’t let him get you alone unless you want him to get you alone, I suppose. I feel like I should be doing something more here.”

  “Cora Blankenship, you’ve seen me flirt before.”

  “Yes, but you never meant it before.”

  This wasn’t true, but Annie understood what she meant. Annie had been flirting—inexpertly—since she was fifteen or sixteen, but it was always in a safe situation, with someone she trusted not to take her seriously. What Cora meant was that nineteen-year old Annie Collins was old enough to do something more than just flirt, and the people she was around had every reason to think she wasn’t just play-acting or being otherwise precocious.

  The other side of this was that Annie was also old enough to not just be pretending any more. She still didn’t think she was very good at it, but it was possible that didn’t make a huge amount of difference.

  “It’s not like that,” Annie said. “Look, I just wanna hang out without it being a thing. Can’t I have that?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” Cora said.

  The sexualization of Annie Collins was simultaneously one of the most predictable and unfortunate outcomes of her fame. It happened almost immediately on the Internet—where a website with a countdown to her eighteenth birthday popped up less than a month after her first appearance on television—and gradually filtered into the mainstream media in all sorts of subtle ways.

  Annie was pretty busy most of that first year, between a full-on P.R. blitz that was almost entirely out of her control, regular visits to her mom in the hospital, and trips to Violet for a bunch of reasons she couldn’t explain to anybody.

  The public relations tour was specifically designed to overexpose Annie. When she first sat down with her publicist—Nita—what she said was, “I want people to be sick of me by this time next year.” That way, she could maybe go on and have a normal life as someone who used to be famous.

  It didn’t really work like that, which was probably not surprising given the plan had been hatched by a sixteen-year old who knew considerably less about the world media than she thought she did. What it would have taken for Annie to become someone people were sick of was for her to start being unlikeable.

  There were certainly a large number of people in the country (and perhaps the world) who disliked Annie, either for real reasons or for reasons they made up themselves. That was frankly inevitable. But for her to lose the majority, she was probably going to have to be awful in some way, and she couldn’t seem to bring herself to do that.

  Nita wasn’t any help, of course. Asking a publicist to help one destroy one’s own public image wasn’t a terrific idea.

  Between the interviews and the television appearances and the meetings with various representatives of the television, film and book industries, Annie didn’t realize that large parts of the country were treating her as if she were a lot older than she actually was.

  Then one day she was looking at a picture of herself on the cover of a magazine—she couldn’t remember any more if it was People or Us Weekly or EW or some other glossy national destined to be remaindered in a medical office waiting room forever—and realized it had been retouched. A lot. Someone had increased her cup size, lowered the neck of her blouse to make room for cleavage she was nearly positive she didn’t have, popped her cheekbones, added lipstick, and took at least an inch off her waist.

  She looked amazing. She also didn’t look like Annie, and she didn’t look seventeen, which was her age at the time. It made the headline of the piece—The Sweetheart of Sorrow Falls—sound like it was a very different kind of story than it actually was.

  (The actual article was one of her favorites, and not at all concerned with how Annie looked.)

  She showed the cover to Nita, who didn’t share her outrage. Her Service detail—not Cora at the time, but an older woman named Agent Moulton—also didn’t look surprised.

  “You should check your media more carefully,” Moulton suggested. “There’s a lot out there.”

  This probably wasn’t the best thing to say, but Agent Moulton wasn’t known for her tact, which was (probably) why she no longer worked Annie’s detail.

  Annie did check, though, and that was when she decided she hated everyone. There were thousands of web pages treating Annie like a sex object. It was horrifying. And the fact that she could—and did—task Shippie with finding every single one of those pages just made it worse.

  She asked the spaceship to find all the pages, in part because Annie was in a unique position: she could actually delete every one of those pages.

  Annie almost did just that. She discussed it with a number of people ahead of time—Ed, but also Beth, Violet, and Sam—before deciding it wouldn’t help.

  “You can delete as much of the Internet as you want to,” Ed said. “You can’t delete the idea that created those pages.”

  “I actually think I can do that too, Ed,” she told him.

  “It terrifies me when you talk like that, you know.”

  “I’m aware.”

  Sam wanted her to delete the pages. Violet had no opinion, but told her deleting the idea of sexualized Annie from the public consciousness was, while not impossible, very difficult. Beth didn’t know what the problem was.

  “You look hot,” Beth said, then offered a list of Hollywood actors Annie should be trying to meet. All of them were twenty years older than Annie. But that was Beth.

  Not purging the Internet of every mention
Annie found objectionable had a downstream impact on her social existence. Essentially, she found it nearly impossible to go on a proper date.

  There wasn’t even really such a thing as a date any more, anyway, at least not yet. It was something that existed for adult professionals, perhaps, or for characters on television. In the real world, so far as Annie had been able to discern, for kids her age, “going on a date” and “hanging out” were the same thing, except for a couple of minor details relating to physical contact.

  For the two years following her emergence from the spaceship, it was effectively impossible to “hang out” with Annie Collins either. That was two prime years of social development she wasn’t going to be getting back. Things had improved a little since she’d gotten to Wainwright, and she got the idea that feeling like a normal person again was going to be happening shortly, but in a way Cora’s reaction was perfectly appropriate: Annie sort of had just emerged from a cave.

  Cora left before Duke returned, which was just as well. It would have felt like a handoff of some kind otherwise, and Annie didn’t really have the patience for that. She wandered into the main observatory room.

  The space was an interesting mixture of modern and classic. In the dead-center was a raised platform which led to a chair, which was not actually at-rest on the platform itself. It was attached to a metal railing, and a set of wheels, and to the base of the telescope. As near as Annie could tell, if someone sat in the chair they could lean forward and look into the telescope’s eyepiece, and this would be true regardless of where the telescope was pointed. The chair would move with the telescope.

  For all the things this central design could have reminded her of, what she thought of first was Marvin the Martian from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

  Attached to the sides of the platform, and therefore partly obscuring it, were six flat screen televisions. Beyond that was a round walking space that was almost the full extent of the floor area on which the evening’s participants would be expected to sleep. After that was the auditorium seating: rows of chairs four deep, raked upward toward the back wall like in a movie theater.

  There were twelve people in the room already. They’d taken up seats in different parts of the auditorium, separately and in twos. Either nobody was talking, or the conversations were hushed and sound carried poorly.

  Annie took a seat in an unoccupied back row and looked up.

  The tubular part of the telescope looked like it jutted out through a wide slit in the ceiling (it actually stopped short of extending outside), which was open to the elements on this evening, something she assumed was particular to the season. It snowed in the winter, and all that.

  It had been many years since the Wainwright observatory telescope was considered anything like state-of-the-art. It had a good run, but that run ended sometime in the late 1940’s. It had been updated since, clearly—if nothing else demonstrated that, the flat screens did—but modern telescopes didn’t look like this anymore, not really.

  Annie had seen more of them than most. For reasons that only really made sense to Nita the publicist, a decent number of Annie’s public appearances were staged at or near large-array telescopes. None of them looked a thing like the one she now shared a room with, which perhaps just made the Wainwright observatory that much more charming, in contrast.

  She kind of wanted to climb onto the platform and have a look through that eyepiece. She probably wouldn’t see anything, because it wasn’t dark enough outside yet, but that didn’t make the idea of doing so any less enticing. There was, however, a velvet rope barring entry. Everyone else in the room was respecting the rope, so she thought she probably should too. Getting kicked out before the night had even begun would probably reflect poorly on her. It would make Cora pretty happy, though.

  Another ten students trickled in, each looking around the room for a familiar face that wasn’t Annie’s, before either finding one or picking an isolated spot the same way she had. Duke turned up a few minutes later.

  “There you are,” she greeted, as he climbed to the back row.

  “I had to borrow a sleeping bag,” he said, “which ended up being a complicated quest involving barter and trade that’s not at all exciting in its non-fiction form.”

  “Where’s the sword?”

  “Alas, it was one of the things I had to trade.”

  “You traded your sword for a sleeping bag?”

  “No, the sword was bartered for a Chem textbook. I told you, it’s complicated. There was a wizard involved. Oh, and we’re going to have to throw a ring into a volcano later, so I hope you’re ready for a hike.”

  “Wrong kind of shoes, sorry.”

  “That’s all right, I was thinking I might keep the ring anyway.”

  He took a seat one spot removed from where Annie sat, and put his sleeping bag on the empty spot. Given the chairs were uncomfortably narrow, anything closer would have been something like a violation of her personal space that only would have made sense if the entire auditorium were filled or if they were actually a couple. So, she understood. It brought to mind that thing teachers used to say to kids at high school dances, according to at least a half-dozen movies: don’t dance so close—make room for Jesus.

  “So,” he said.

  “So. For real, is your name actually Duke Clementine?”

  “It actually is, yes. And it actually was inspired by the name Dukakis. As in, the Democratic presidential candidate.”

  “Does your birth certificate say Dukakis on it?”

  “It does not, thankfully. Nonetheless, I didn’t get this name thanks to John Wayne, or a Genesis album, or an English royal. I got it from a short Greek politician my parents were a good deal more enamored of than essentially the rest of the country. Probably including Mrs. Dukakis, although that’s just speculation. It was likewise not well-considered that someone might connect the name Duke with John Wayne and a last name of Clementine with the film My Darling Clementine.”

  “Or the song. But John Wayne wasn’t in My Darling Clementine.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “No, that was a Henry Fonda flick.”

  He laughed.

  “You didn’t even look that up on the Internet first or anything, did you?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of old movies.”

  “I guess.”

  He fell silent, and they had the kind of pause that’s especially uncomfortable when the people involved are strangers. She tried to pretend it wasn’t awkward by looking up at the view of the sky. It had gotten a lot darker in just the last few minutes. The stars were already beginning to pop.

  “So what’s it like?” Duke asked.

  “What’s what like? Being an expert in old movies?”

  “No, not that.”

  “The list of things about which I have direct experience and you don’t is practically endless. What did you mean?”

  “I dunno. I figured I’d let you assume what I meant and just start talking.”

  “All right, I guess I’ll start by describing the ladies room.”

  He threw his hands up.

  “Sorry, bad conversational gambit. How about, what’s it like to be famous?”

  “Oh that. It sucks.”

  “No perks at all?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “I’m nearly positive you’re lying to me right now,” he said. “I hear you’re going to college for free.”

  “I am, but not because I’m famous. I’m going to college for free out of the kindness of the federal government.”

  “You’re definitely lying to me right now.”

  “I asked them to pay for it, and they kindly agreed.”

  A couple more people entered, and found seats, and then Tammy walked in and closed the door to the room behind her. This had the effect of quieting all the conversations midstream, something Tammy looked a little self-conscious about.

  She walked to the platform, lowered the velvet rope, and stood in the center. A wearable
microphone was waiting for her.

  “Can everyone hear me?” she asked, after adjusting the mic and turning it on. They could hear her just fine, with or without the amplification. After several shouts of affirmation, she continued.

  “I’ve closed up the outer door,” Tammy said, looking at Annie when she said it, “which means we can officially begin!”

  Applause. Nobody knew exactly what they were applauding, but they all applauded anyway.

  “Wait, we’re locked in here?” Annie said, quietly.

  “We can get out, nobody can get in,” Duke said. “It just means we need to put someone at the door when the pizza arrives, no biggie.”

  “Oh good, because this is basically the set up for a murder mystery here. Let’s not add us being prisoners to the equation.”

  Tammy continued.

  “How this works is, everyone’s going to have a chance to come up here and use the telescope. It’s a little complicated, so one of us…” this she said while looking at Duke, “…will be here to help. What you’re looking at will show up on the TV screens down here, so if you happen to spot the eye of God—or anything else—we’ll all get to see.”

  Duke raised his hand.

  “Everyone,” Tammy said, “this is Duke, he’s here to help tonight. Go ahead.”

  “Maybe you should tell everyone what the eye of God looks like,” Duke said.

  “That’s an excellent idea! We don’t actually know, because as you might have guessed we’re still looking, but! There are a few exciting candidates.”

  The screens kicked to life and began showing a collection of color stills. They were nebulae, and they all looked kinda-sorta like eyeballs.

  “That’s the Helix Nebula,” Duke said, after one particular one flicked across the screens. “My favorite.”

  Annie knew which part of the sky the Helix Nebula could be found in, which was a little troublesome because she was pretty sure that information didn’t belong in her head. She also knew that there had been an advanced civilization in an arm of a spiral galaxy in orbit around the star that used to live at the center of the Helix Nebula. That definitely didn’t belong in her head.