There was also something going on with General Perlmutter. Cal had been on the move since the initial confirmation that Annie Collins was in Sorrow Falls. That was a little unusual, because the man never left D.C. for any reason, including his oldest daughter’s college graduation. What was a lot unusual was that the general was in the company of two civilian contractors nobody seemed to have a record of. All Devlin had been able to get out of Cal was that they were named Williams and Davis.
The Pentagon employed a whole bunch of contractors, and several of them had the surnames of Williams and Davis. But none were attached to Team Babysitter, and none were working together on the same project.
Marcus knew this because when he heard they were traveling with the general to Sorrow Falls, he decided to look into what kind of expertise they might be offering. He still didn’t know the answer to that question. Instead, he appeared to have learned that Cal Perlmuttter was lying to him.
Then the spaceship took off again. The team had an audio of a conversation between Edgar Somerville and Captain Braver indicating that Annie Collins was on the ship. In Marcus’s mind this meant, for better or worse, they had nothing to gain by continuing to press forward. Nobody was getting points for extra kills.
But the general was at the scene, with his two mysterious contractors, and they were talking about continuing the assault on the farmhouse, and nobody could explain to Marcus why. He pushed back against Perlmutter as much as he thought was safe, only to have Cal suggest that the lieutenant needed a nap.
“Things are getting out of hand,” Devlin said to himself. He was standing over one of the analysts—he was too tired to remember her name—having just listened to a panicked phone call from the Sorrow Falls sheriff, demanding emergency vehicles for wounded civilians, along with the national guard and the phone number for the President of the United States. (Asking for the president’s number was sort of a popular pastime for the Sorrow Falls sheriff.) The call was to the state police superintendent, not to Team Babysitter—they were intercepting all the calls coming out of the town, which was also entirely illegal, so far as he knew.
“Sir?” the technician asked.
“It’s out of hand, I said.”
“Yes sir. Hope she gives up soon.”
“She’s not even there anymore.”
“I mean I hope she gives up the ship soon, sir. Isn’t that what this is all about?”
No, he thought, it’s about protecting her. When did everyone forget that?
His personal cell phone rang. It was on vibrate, so he was the only one who noticed. He held it in his hand and stared at the blank call identifier and waited for it to stop being true that a call was coming in. He was standing in a room that had a lot of technology devoted to preventing cell phone signals from coming in or going out, so, essentially, his phone couldn’t really be ringing.
Maybe he did need that nap after all.
He stepped into one of the two private office areas in the room, and closed the door.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Is this Lieutenant Marcus Devlin?”
“It is. Who am I speaking to?”
“Formerly stationed in Sorrow Falls? That Devlin?”
“Yes.”
“Great. This is Annie Collins, and I’m about to do something really stupid. I may need your help.”
The meeting on the dirt road nobody was supposed to know about, on the way to the farmhouse that didn’t exist, initially played out like a hostage negotiation. Ed Somerville was standing in the middle of the road about a hundred yards from the farm’s front porch, with his hands in the air. He had a radio in one of the hands and nothing in the other.
Standing next to him was a young girl. She had her hands raised too. Her palms were out, but pointing to the left and the right, which was a little odd. It was like she was ordering the trees to stay put.
Melissa was in the passenger seat of one of the armored troop transports. She had a dozen soldiers in the rear, and orders from General Perlmutter to accept only unconditional surrender of all parties, immediately. Otherwise—and she couldn’t help but think this part came from Davis and/or Williams—she was supposed to shoot everyone.
She didn’t want to do that. Hopefully, Ed felt the same way.
The driver stopped the transport, and Captain Braver knocked twice on the wall behind her head. This was the signal. Eight soldiers jumped out of the back, and flanked the truck on both sides.
“Hi Melissa,” Ed said over the radio. “It’s me.”
Ed waved.
“This is Captain Braver, Mr. Somerville. Who’s standing beside you?”
“This is Violet,” he said. “It’s her house you’re attacking.”
“That looks like Annie Collins,” the driver said.
“Is that her?” one of the men outside Melissa’s window said.
“Violet who?” Melissa asked.
“Violet Jones. Like I said, this is her land you’re on. It’s a little complicated, but if you guys just calm down I can explain everything. Nobody else has to get hurt.”
“No, that’s definitely her,” the driver insisted.
“What’s she doing with her hands?” someone else asked.
“Hey, captain?”
Both of the cab’s windows were open. She didn’t know who was calling her out, but didn’t need to. She could hear all the chatter: “We’re seeing movement in the woods,” and, “look at her hands,” and, “what’s she doing?” and, “that’s definitely her.”
“Mr. Somerville,” Melissa said, “nobody named Violet Jones lives in Sorrow Falls. I’ve spent the morning checking on all the Violets. Tell me who that really is.”
“Mel, I’m telling you the truth. Let’s just talk this over like adults.”
The girl really did look like Annie from this distance. They needed to get closer.
“Roll up,” she said. “Real slow. And next time, let’s remember to bring binoculars.”
They moved five feet closer, which didn’t clarify the issue at all, except for one detail: now Melissa was seeing the movement in the trees too. The animals surged when the truck did, and only fell back… when the girl moved her hands again.
“She’s controlling them,” Melissa muttered.
It was hard to follow the order of events after that, because it seemed to all take place at the same time. What was definitely true was that one of the soldiers outside Melissa’s window declared, “it’s her,” and another one said, “take the shot.”
All Captain Braver knew for certain was that this order didn’t come from her, and she was the only one there with that authority.
Somebody took the shot anyway. It was impossible to say who. It was clean, though; it dropped the girl.
According to a certain confidential document, if they had really just shot Annie Collins, the next thing that was supposed to happen was that the shooter would get vaporized by a weapon fired from outer space. Presumably, this would also take out everyone standing near the shooter.
That didn’t happen, but what did, was that their position was overrun by approximately every wild animal in Western Massachusetts. It happened so fast, Melissa didn’t have time to wonder if this meant the girl was someone other than Collins, or if it was her, and the lasers from space was a bluff. There weren’t any good answers.
“Floor it,” she ordered the driver. He did, running over a wolf, two deer, and a raccoon, and clipping one of the soldiers.
“We’ll drive this right through the front door if we have to, is that clear?” she barked.
“Yes ma’am!”
His enthusiasm—and the truck—only lasted another twenty feet before the ground erupted beneath them.
The explosion blew out the tires and flipped the truck onto the driver’s side.
Melissa was belted in, or it would have been worse.
We hit an IED, she thought, as the truck slid to an ugly stop.
She undid her belt. The driver was on
the side of the truck that took the worst of it, at least as far as landing on the ground and skidding to a halt was concerned. He was unconscious, but breathing.
Through the hole where the windshield used to be, she could still see the farmhouse. Someone fitting the description of Oona Kozlowsky had joined Ed, and together they were helping the get the girl’s body back to the house.
No. No, that wasn’t right.
The girl sat up on her own. Then they started to help her.
Ed turned back to look at the truck he and his friends destroyed. He was looking right at Melissa, when his jaw unhinged, and his mouth opened wide, and he shrieked.
23
The Briar Patch
Hello. Are you there?
The first time Annie engaged the entity—she didn’t know what to call him yet, but ‘entity’ seemed fair—it was by accident. She was searching for Violet, and generally, when tasking the ship to do something, you have to specify what not to do.
She could have developed an idea that incorporated the historical satellite data for the land around Vi’s house that included only information stored in computers, but if she didn’t also say that the data should not include people’s memories of that data, she was going to end up getting some of that as well.
Part of the problem was that the ship didn’t really know what a computer was. As far as it was concerned, it was all information, and a mechanical storage device wasn’t so different from a biological one. It was just that for certain bits of data, the biological version was less reliable, and the expectation of data loss over time far more drastic.
Annie forgot to tell it not to look inside minds, essentially, and when it did as she asked, whatever was lurking in some of those minds out there woke up and interacted.
This time, she was ready. She hoped.
It’s Annie, are you there?
Hello.
To say it ‘sounded like a man’s voice’ was somewhat inaccurate, because it didn’t sound like anything. Her ears weren’t picking it up. What was happening was that her brain chose to interpret it as male, just like the last disembodied alien she came across.
Probably there was a therapist somewhere nodding slowly about this revelation.
“Hi,” she said aloud. Both ways worked, but this was easier. “I’m ready to talk now. Who is this?”
Give it to us.
“You suck at conversation, did you know that? Who are you?”
We will destroy you and your world and your—
“Yeah, yeah, cut it out.”
The entity tried to shove another exciting image of world destruction at Annie’s hands into her mind, but it was like watching a horror film after you already know where all the scares are.
“Cute,” she said. “Let’s try this again. My name’s Annie Collins. I had an advanced alien being in my head a few years back, so most times I don’t scare all that easy. What can I call you?”
We are a multitude.
“Terrible name. Okay supervillain name, I guess.”
Give it to us.
“All right, maybe you’re just an idiot. I’m not giving you the ship, but if you tell me what the problem is, it’s possible we can work out some other solution. I saw the formula you guys were writing on the wall. Do you know what it’s for?”
They didn’t respond for a few minutes. Annie got the sense that there were several of them—a multitude, as he said—speaking with one voice, and during the quiet moments they were arguing with each other. This was sort of funny.
We know what it’s for. This planet is not ready for it.
“No kidding.”
But you know of it.
“Yeah, and I’m keeping it to myself. Just like the ship.”
The spaceship belongs to us. We will show you.
The flood of memories that followed was charged with emotion, which was a new experience for Annie. She had dealt okay with Violet’s dad, the prior owner of the spaceship, because the memories he communicated were sense memories. She could feel what it was like to fly, and to breathe ammonia, and to eat something with a mouth that had a thousand teeth, and there were some emotions that came with all that, but it was a range.
What the multitude had to offer was rage.
Annie wasn’t really surprised by that, once she realized what she was experiencing. She’s heard part of this story before.
They brought her to a magnificent city, full of beings both strange and familiar. This was what it was like sharing the memories of an alien. She was at once Annie Collins— human, with two arms, two legs and a head and so on—and also an elephant-like thing with a prehensile tail and a canine mouth. Both felt perfectly normal.
The aliens with the elephant heads had built a magnificent city-state on a planet with twin suns. The technology was far beyond anything on Earth already, and this was just the start of the story.
Someone got an idea. A huge idea. Like most huge ideas, it was simultaneously great and terrible. Annie knew it already, because a consequence of that idea was the equation the aliens were so preoccupied with.
The equation came at the end of a proof, and that proof was in itself revelatory for a number of reasons. It wasn’t the kind of thing any single being arrived at on its own. The proof was the product of generations of thinkers, each reaching for the stars (as it were) and getting a little closer. This was how progress usually worked.
Fully grasping the entire thing meant coming to grips with how the universe worked, which led to a better understanding of how to find, and use, energy in entirely new ways. Unfortunately, where there were new uses for energy, there were also new weapons.
That was the downfall of the civilization. They came to the idea too quickly, before they were sufficiently mature to handle the consequences of their ingenuity.
As for how this could happen—how one brilliant, beautiful idea ended up being so destructive—Annie already knew the answer to that.
The idea brought new technology and a new concept for how to explore the universe, by crossing vast distances at speeds impossible to attain in a physical body.
She was sitting in the product of that technology.
“You built something you couldn’t use,” Annie said.
We can use. Now. You must give it to us.
They didn’t build the ships for the benefit of Violet’s species, but for their own. They meant to become beings capable of riding the same idea-streams, to explore the universe at light speed. And so they did. The finest minds on the planet were digitized. But then their world was destroyed beneath them before they could figure out the next step. They could touch Violet’s membrane of ideas, just like human beings, but they couldn’t travel on it.
So, they did the only thing they could: ride the radio waves instead.
Bitter and confused, they never slept and they never stopped. It was like Vi said. They were trapped in the signal.
You understand now. This device is ours. You will give it to us.
“I can see how you might think that way. I’m still gonna say no.”
It wasn’t that she had no sympathy for their plight. It was weird to think of it this way, but the idea that caused this whole problem for their otherwise-ingenious species wasn’t actually their fault. They were preyed upon.
But, setting aside the actions of a certain amoral sentient idea, the entity to which she was now speaking had nothing to offer but anger. There was no way to persuade them to get past eons of sleepless rage.
She couldn’t think of anybody more dangerous to hand over the ship to.
Then we will convince you.
“Sorry, but I’m not gonna be convinced.”
We cannot hurt you where you are. But you are not the only one capable of being hurt.
The best thing Ed could say about the assault that followed was that Oona seemed happier than he’d ever seen her before.
First, she relocated the camper so that it was next to the house, sideways, providing Laura with a
sniper position and also blocking access to the back of the house. This enabled everyone to move freely between the camper and the farmhouse without being in the line of fire.
Then she started spreading guns around the house. The idea was that anybody could walk into a room with a window, pick up a gun, and shoot at what they saw. It wasn’t a terrible idea, but other than Laura, only Sam and Cora had any experience firing a gun, and Cora didn’t look at all pleased about having to do it.
Ed was still trying to work out what happened on the road.
He was pretty sure he knew Melissa Braver about as well as anybody, and for the most part he considered her a friend. Sure, she was a little rigid at times—this was true for a lot of military officers, he’d found—but she had her head about her.
Whether or not Melissa ordered Violet to be shot because she thought she was Annie, targeting and killing nineteen-year olds just didn’t seem like something she’d do.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
He was in Violet’s bedroom. A minute earlier, Sam had come by with a couple of assault rifles and instructions on their use. The bedroom had a good angle on one side of the property.
Violet was lying almost motionless on her bed, trying to resolve a gaping chest wound.
“I was already weak,” she said quietly. “Keeping this body intact is becoming a struggle. Do you think Annie would still call me a friend if I found a new one?”
“I wouldn’t pick someone she knows, if you’re going to do that,” he said. “You should also probably stop creating zombies. I don’t know if that’s a family habit or not, but I think we’d all be happier if that stopped happening.”
Violet laughed.
“They saved your life a few minutes ago,” she said.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 35