The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  “You sound like a movie villain.”

  “My speech is built upon your expectations. The intent is mine but the syntax is based on what you anticipate. The voice I’m using has been lowered by your expectations as well.”

  “So, but the threat’s legit.”

  “Yes. You’re running out of…”

  “Why do you think she came here?”

  “…continuously changing the subject is not going to result in a solution.”

  “No, no, I understand that. Look, I’m sorry, you’re the first alien I’ve talked to. Well, second, but the first one didn’t tell me what she was, so I never had a chance to ask things. I get it though, you’re a really, really old idea. I’m not all that clear on how I’m talking to one, because we’re not used to ideas with sentience, but okay.”

  “There are many ideas, but only a few are powerful enough to live forever.”

  “And, to live outside of whoever thought you up. That’s the part there. Like, if you’re ever in a situation where you have to explain yourself, in the future, I’d start there.”

  “You are not advanced enough, as a species, to understand.”

  “Yes, yes, I know, we’re primitive, I get it. And my friend, your daughter—or offspring, or piece of you or…whatever—she’s another super-advanced being, right? Then why do you think she’d come here, to hang out with a bunch of people who, so far as you’re concerned, can’t even understand what she is?”

  “…I don’t know.”

  “She’s your idea, and your idea had an idea and that idea was to come here and hang out for a few hundred years. If I ask her she’ll say it was to hide from you, but she did a pretty crappy job of that. So why was she really here?”

  The alien began showing a series of images. These were different from before, in that Annie didn’t feel so much like she was experiencing them. They were purely visual, and none of them were moving. It was a photo album.

  They were extraordinary. She wished they were more interactive, because the scale and scope was magnificent. Great cities of iron, of crystal, of frozen gases and sculptured lava. She saw platforms to slingshot a vessel from the surface into upper orbit, and humanoids with webbed clothing to help them to fly. There was an undersea kingdom beneath a sky of eternal permafrost, and vast libraries of knowledge preserved on stone and cloth, in jars of electrical impulses and three-dimensional models made of silk. She saw ships powered by starlight traveling through holes in the universe poked open by controlled singularities, and beings of radiation living on an artificial ring around a dying sun.

  “To be an idea such as myself is to be a part of the greatest accomplishments in the history of all histories. I existed—I was born—as an idea inside of these beings. They were a part of what made me, as I was a part of who they became. But the great civilizations are all gone.”

  “Wait, I don’t understand. Which one of them thought of you?”

  “All did. It’s equally reasonable to say I thought of them. I appeared in the minds of those who were ready. From their perspectives, I was something new, even as from mine I was older than their stars. But each of these civilizations had different ways of using me, for good or ill. There is a sense of connection, and belonging, and growth, and that’s what your friend Violet took with her. The sense of being something new again. That’s what I truly want back. And that is what I’m sure led her here. To belong. Even among beings unprepared to accept her, which was immature of her.”

  “I never told you her name.”

  “I know. I’ve found your true idea of her.”

  “But we aren’t done talking yet!”

  “I have no need of you, or this place, any longer.”

  She heard the hiss stop, as the alien cut off Annie’s air supply.

  * * *

  “Edgar, we’re here!” Oona yelled through the ceiling. Ed was already on the roof with Sam, Laura and Dobbs, who was perhaps the most important person in Sorrow Falls for the next few minutes.

  Sam was marching up and down the right side of the camper, which faced the ship. He’d been misidentifying various members of the zombie class of the town as Annie for the entire journey, and now he was mostly just angry and looking for someone to shoot.

  “Whole base is here,” he said. “Look at ‘em, lined up in a row. We’re not gonna get through without running them down. I think they’re operating on different orders.”

  “We don’t need to get through,” Ed said. He leaned over Dobbs at the computer. “Can you find the signal?”

  “I don’t know, I told you this isn’t my equipment.”

  “Oh, get out of the way,” Laura said. She pushed Dobbs aside and tapped a few commands. “You gotta at least bring up the array first.”

  The ‘array’ was a series of microphones on a stanchion in the middle of the camper, with small parabolic dishes cupping each of the microphones. Dobbs spent the better half of the trip reassembling the array because it had been partly broken down earlier that evening to amplify the screamers. (That it took so long for anyone to point this out only underlined exactly how tired everyone was.) It also meant they made the trip without the one proven means to disable zombies.

  “That’s got it,” Dobbs said.

  Oona popped up through the trap door. “I’m just gonna leave us in the middle of the road. Don’t think anyone’s driving down here anytime soon. Did you screw up my computer, Dobbs?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why we looking for the signal, Edgar?”

  “You’ll see. Where’s Violet?”

  “The zombie queen’s downstairs fiddling with her magic suppository.”

  “I’ll be right up,” she shouted from below.

  “I’ll be damned. PICKLES?” Sam shouted the last part, and Ed for just a few seconds wondered if the soldier was now hallucinating gherkins. Then he remembered Dill Louboutin’s nickname.

  “Hey Sam!” Dill shouted back.

  Dill was standing next to a Humvee on the other side of a crashed-in fence, just at the edge of the ship’s safety zone. He had a kid with him, but the kid wasn’t Annie.

  “The hell you doin’ over there?”

  “Waitin’ for you. See you got a better ride. You want me to mow down these dead-eyes for you?”

  “Better stay there. What were you thinking, did you try to run over the ship?”

  “I was thinking maybe it was worth a shot. But then the girl went in, so we were just waiting on you. She said you’d be by.”

  Sam turned to Ed. “The girl… went in.”

  “How’d she do that?” Ed asked.

  “How’d she do that, Dill?” Sam asked.

  “She said she was here and the thing just opened. Someone should’ve tried that before we had zombies, you ask me.”

  “I’ve got it, I think,” Dobbs said. “Just sounds like breathing. Did he say Annie was in there?”

  “Yeah, can you hear her with that?”

  “No, it’s just the breathing.”

  Violet came up. “She went inside.”

  “Can you get her out?” Ed asked.

  “Only by taking her place.”

  “It may come to that.”

  “I realize.”

  “Then go do it,” Sam said. “Get her out of there.”

  “Not yet, Sam,” Laura said.

  Sam didn’t like the plan, and had said as much more than once.

  She can take care of herself, Ed thought. For at least a little while longer.

  Violet extended a coaxial cable to Dobbs.

  “Can you plug this into the output? I’m going to need to analyze the signal.”

  “S…sure. You had a jack for this? That thing doesn’t even have an interface.”

  “It does now. I asked it for one.”

  “How long?” Ed asked.

  “Five minutes, at most. I need to piggyback the signal, but I already know what I’m sending.”

  “Ed?” It was Laura. She was looking over
the side of camper. “Don’t think we have five minutes.”

  “Here comes the Army,” Sam said. “Looks like they’ve decided we’re a threat.”

  “Hot damn, I do get to shoot somebody,” Oona said.

  * * *

  “Hey!” Annie shouted. The tinny echo came back on her as if to underline how alone she was inside the ship. She was always alone, in a manner, because the alien was only as there as a computer program or a TV show. He was an idea of a thing instead of a thing, which should have made him less real but somehow didn’t. Somehow it felt like he was much more real than she or anything on the planet was.

  Perhaps he was rubbing off on her as much as she was clearly affecting him. His voice had gotten deeper, he started using contractions, and it felt like she was talking to an actual person, right up until he decided he was done with her.

  Not that that wasn’t also a very human quality.

  “You still need my help,” she said. It probably wasn’t true, and she didn’t even sound convincing to her own ears, but it was worth trying. The only other option was to suffocate.

  Unless that’s not the only option, she thought.

  The ship responded to her before. She got a glimpse of the outside, and maybe the alien didn’t even realize that had happened. She was also still carrying the entire operating manual in her head.

  Annie started thinking of an idea. It was a simple idea, of a ship with an aperture that pumped air in, and a filter that scrubbed CO2. There wasn’t a lot to it; if she wanted to take the ship into space she’d have to come up with a better idea, but this one would keep her alive for a while.

  It worked. There was no telltale hiss and the air quality hadn’t devolved sufficiently for a change to be notable immediately, but she could sense the handoff. The idea had been uploaded in some kind of invisible exchange, and the ship acted. She was going to be okay for a little bit longer.

  “Annie.”

  “Oh, hi. Where’ve you been?”

  “Did you do that?”

  “What, turn the air on? Yeah, I didn’t want to die.”

  “Not that. The drones are missing.”

  “Uh… I don’t really know what that means. You lost contact with them?”

  “Based on their feedback, each of them was bodily relocated outside of Sorrow Falls at the speed of light. This is possible for one such as myself, but not for one such as you. They also can’t leave through the shield I’ve placed over the town, so it’s impossible for them to be where I’m told they are. Therefore, they weren’t relocated at all and something else has happened. Did you do this somehow?”

  Violet is here.

  “No, but that sounds like a cool trick.”

  * * *

  “I think it worked,” Sam said.

  The fact of this was self-evident, because the camper stopped rocking and Oona, Sam and Laura weren’t shooting any more. That they had to take any shots at all became necessary once the soldiers tried scaling the sides, something the townsfolk reportedly never tried during an earlier siege.

  They were shooting to wound, in theory, but ultimately the goal was to get the zombies off the side of the camper by any means necessary. If an arm or a leg could be disabled, great. More than a couple of times, it was a head or a heart, though, and there wasn’t anyone to blame for that, aside from whatever being was inside the ship with Annie.

  “They’re just wandering around,” Laura said.

  “This is funny as hell,” Oona said. “Like they all got drunk at the same time.”

  Their movements reminded Ed of what someone might look like when missing the bottom step on a staircase. Their feet weren’t finding land where they were expecting to.

  “Looks like phase one worked, Violet,” Ed said through the open trap door. “Ready for phase two any time you are.”

  * * *

  Annie decided she wanted to see outside again, so she asked the ship and the ship showed the outside to her. The zombies were still there, but they were acting less zombie-like and more staggeringly drunk-like. She also saw Oona and Laura’s camper and understood exactly what happened.

  For some reason, the alien hadn’t figured out his daughter was the only one with the technology to do what they just did, and had been using his zombie network for information for long enough he forgot he could just look out the proverbial window.

  “So what’cha doing?” Annie asked.

  “I’m performing a diagnostic of the ship’s systems. They’re clearly malfunctioning.”

  “Okay. Hey, can I ask you a really dumb question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you just go out and be a new idea for some other civilization? If what you’re missing is that sense, like you said, of being something new, just go out and be that for someone else. I mean, if you’re right and that’s why Violet came here—and I think you probably are—what do you even need her for? Make your own memories and all that.”

  “I am the greatest idea that ever was. There is no civilization prepared to fully grasp all that I am.”

  “What happened to the ones that were?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “But why?”

  “Great ideas have many uses.”

  “So you’re saying they all destroyed themselves.”

  “I’m saying some did. Some grew out of a need for me. I’m still a part of them, but a historical part. I continue to exist in the minds of others, but as an idea that no longer provides value and doesn’t change.”

  “So you’re kind of a snob, basically.”

  “I’m sure I don’t understand.”

  “You could involve yourself just like Violet did, but you don’t think we’re worthy of your big, total idea-ness.”

  “My offspring didn’t involve herself in the way you describe. She isn’t an idea that exists within this civilization. If she were, I’d have found her immediately instead of having to engage in this puppet show. She remains a self-contained idea, engaging ones such as yourself for reasons I won’t fully appreciate until I have her back and can ask.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The alien sighed. The emotion of exasperation was a new one for him. Annie was definitely having an impact, because she heard this tone from every adult in her life at one time or another.

  “What is it you don’t know, Annie?”

  “I don’t know how great an idea you actually are.”

  “…I would cause your mind to explode.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Look, you already dropped the ship’s entire design into my head, and that included a ton of things nobody with my kind of brain ever experienced. That didn’t wreck me.”

  “You didn’t understand what you were shown.”

  “Dim the lights.”

  The blue lights dimmed slightly.

  “That is unremarkable.”

  “Fine. Give me a second.”

  Mariachi music began to play inside the ship.

  “What is that sound?” the alien asked.

  “When I was ten my dad took me to a Mexican restaurant in Athol for my birthday. This is the song they played for me. It’s kind of repetitive; I don’t remember the whole thing, so it’s on a loop. I can also turn off the defensive shield from here, I’m pretty sure. And a few minutes ago I thought about what the government archives for this machine must look like, and the ship dropped a bunch of emails into my head. So maybe it’s just that I carried Violet around, or maybe the human mind is a little more advanced than you think.”

  “…All right. But why would I do this?”

  “I don’t know, you seem lonely. I mean, we’ve only just met, but if I were an idea too and I were hanging out wherever ideas hang out, I’d say you need to get out there and introduce yourself to new species. Change things up.”

  “This is a preposterous conversation.”

  “I have a lot of those.”

  “…Eve
n assuming you survived, you wouldn’t know what to do with me.”

  “Why would I have to do anything? Ideas can just be ideas sometimes, right? Look, you don’t have anything to lose. In a couple of minutes you’re going to go back to the whole kill all the people thing you’ve got going on, so I’ll end up dead either way. I’d rather go by way of the greatest idea ever. I mean, if you aren’t exaggerating.”

  He fell silent, which she took to mean he was thinking but could also have meant his ship diagnostic was finished and he’d managed to overcome the distractions Annie kept throwing at him for long enough to notice that Violet was sitting in a camper a fifty yards away.

  “All right,” he said.

  The gentle blue of the interior brightened, and then crawled inside of her, or so it seemed. She was being pulled away from reality, down Alice’s rabbit hole, up the tornado spout and into Oz.

  Ideas already in her head connected with other ideas already in her head, establishing relationships with one another she couldn’t believe she’d never seen before. These weren’t strictly her own ideas. They were things she’d picked up from books, and movies, and school, and Violet. They were ideas other people had that she’d taken and made a part of her. They fit perfectly, and then started to connect to other things: things she’d never known before, that nobody on the planet had ever known before.

  There was a vast network of interconnected ideas in her mind, Einstein’s grand theory of everything multiplied by ten, laid out across extra dimensions. It was beautiful, and very nearly too much to bear.

  Then came the idea.

  He was right. It was the greatest idea she could have imagined.

  She thought maybe her mind really was going to explode.

  23

  Deus ex Machina

  The President of the United States was in the second year of his first term when an extraterrestrial vehicle landed in Massachusetts and changed the world.