I CANT MAKE A WORMHOLE
She sat on her bed for a moment, waiting for the reply, chewing softly on her bottom lip. She hunched over the laptop, which she had pulled over and set on her bed. She stretched, feeling a stiffening in her neck. The tones came then, and she hunched back over quickly.
I CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO STRENGTHEN THIS ONE
Becca put her fingers to the keys of her laptop, planning on replying, but then the tones changed and a new message appeared on her screen.
I MUST GO I WILL CONTACT LATER
Becca’s eyes widened. She typed quickly, and her own words flashed across her screen.
NO DONT GO I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO
She waited, but there was no answer. Again she found herself waiting, as the minutes stretched on. She knew that, at least for now, Key was gone.
Becca was left with plenty of things to consider, as the night wore on and became morning. She didn’t sleep any more that night, and instead she thought about Key, and the conversation she had with the alien. Were they an alien? Was it a ‘he’? For some reason she felt sure that the answer to both of those questions was yes. She decided ‘he’ was a real alien.
The thing that she hadn’t realized, at the time, however, and which took up the majority of her thoughts after Key cut off their correspondence was that Key must have made a corresponding tone for every letter, because her software had translated every sentence either of them had written perfectly. He truly knew English. He truly knew Earth. Becca was still up, looking at her laptop, hoping against hope that Key would send another message when the alarm on her cell phone went off. She gripped her phone from her bedside table and silenced the alarm. She got up them, suddenly remembering Tom and her job, and wanting to rush in and tell him everything.
Becca hopped into the shower and was clean, dressed, and breakfasted before Gia even came out of her room.
“Rushing off, huh?” Gia asked.
“Yeah. I promise I’ll fill you in when I can. Really.”
“It’s big though?”
“It’s so fucking big,” Becca said, her sudden cursing making Gia laugh, and then she was out the door, hurrying to her car.
The office was almost empty when Becca arrived. She was an hour early, but Tom was in his office, and she hurried to it. She was only ten steps away when she glanced through the frosted glass and saw that Tom wasn’t alone. There was someone else there, sitting across the desk from her boss. The glass door was closed, and Becca considered barging in, but she resisted the urge and sat down at a nearby desk, not her own, to wait, although rather impatiently.
It took only five minutes for the door to open and Tom and the other man to appear, but it felt like much longer to Becca. The stranger glanced in her direction and then shook her boss’s hand. He was tall; a white man with a bald head, dressed in a black suit. He nodded to Becca and walked past, pulling a pair of sunglasses from inside his suit jacket and slipping them on. Becca stood and looked at Tom.
“Wow, it’s like I’m in a ‘Men in Black’ movie,” she said quietly, so the retreating man couldn’t hear her. Tom managed a small smile, but something in it made Becca take note. “Oh my gosh, is that what he is?”
Tom waved his hand away. “No, of course not,” he said, but when he didn’t go on to explain who the man was, Becca had to wonder if she was close to the truth. Tom seemed content with moving on, and so Becca did so, as her boss leaned against the doorway, folding his arms over his chest. “Did you ... get anywhere?” She asked him.
Tom sighed and shook his head, surprising Becca a bit. Really, the tone hadn’t been that tough to crack. She figured he would at least be on his way towards uncovering the same thing she had.
“No,” he said. “Did you?”
Becca didn’t even hesitate. The man in the suit had made her uncomfortable. Was he from the government? She didn’t want to play her hand just yet. She could feel as though there was something Tom wasn’t telling her.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“You’re here awfully early just to give me bad news,” Tom said with a laugh.
“I was hoping you had something,” Becca said.
“Yeah,” Tom said with a shrug. “Well, nothing to report. You think it’s time we get everyone on it?”
Becca did pause at that. If the whole office was in on it, someone would crack the tone, and would do it quickly. It had only taken Becca fifteen or so hours. There were a lot of smart people in her office, many smarter than she was, or at least she humbly thought so. However, if she didn’t agree, it would make her look suspicious. She didn’t know why she wanted to keep her correspondence from Tom. It was only since she had seen the mysterious man come out of his office, but she was sure of her course of action. She would keep Key to herself, for now.
The problem was now she needed to warn him. Luckily she had quickly downloaded an app which would forward her laptop correspondence to her phone, and as the office began to fill up with co-workers, she sent a tone message to her laptop, and from there, up to Key. Hopefully, he would get it before anyone else sent him something.
OTHERS WILL CONTACT SOON DO NOT REPLY NOT SURE IF SAFE ONLY ME BECCA
She hoped he would understand.
When everyone was there, Tom called a meeting, and the office filed into the conference room, sitting around a long rectangular table. Tom filled everyone in quickly, and played the tone for everyone. He didn’t mention that Becca already knew, and she didn’t offer up the information herself. The room was quiet as they listened to the tone; once, twice, and then three times.
“I’ll email you all copies,” Tom said, looking around the room. “That’s it. That’s what we’re working on. Go figure it out.”
Everyone left the room, leaving Becca and her boss. “Keep at it I guess,” he said, and she rose and nodded before leaving.
The office was a hubbub of excitement, and Becca found it hard to feign that same excitement. She had solved the problem; she knew that Key was up there, and she knew what he wanted her to do.
With nearly an hour to go before the end of the day, her phone buzzed.
I UNDERSTAND I HAVE PINPOINTED YOUR SYSTEM MY REPLIES WILL GO ONLY TO YOU
So; that helped matters. Becca glanced around from her desk, saw no one was paying any attention to her, and she texted.
GREAT I AM READY TO HELP YOU
She waited for a reply. It came shortly.
I WILL SEND YOU SCHEMATICS I REQUIRE A MACHINE TO STRENGTHEN THAT END OF THE WORMHOLE
Becca began to text, but she yelped and jumped when Tom spoke from beside her.
“What’s so interesting that you’re already moving on from a possible alien message?” He asked, glancing at her phone.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly, putting the phone away.”
“No, it’s fine,” Tom said. “I was just kidding. I wanted to come here and tell you I’m sorry for not including you this morning. I just thought ... I don’t know, I didn’t want to piss of anyone who’s been here a while. I brought this to you, and not them. I should have backed you up, or myself up I guess, and told them.”
“It’s fine,” Becca said truthfully. If anything, she was glad he had not told everyone that she had been working on the sound all weekend.
“Someone will get it,” Tom said, looking around the room. “Sometime soon.”
“I think so too,” Becca said with a forced smile, and Tom nodded and moved back towards his office. Becca pulled her cell out and typed.
PLEASE DO I WILL DO WHAT I CAN
A beat, and then Key’s response:
THANK YOU
Chapter Six
Becca didn’t receive another message from Key until after ten that night. She was sitting on the couch with Gia, debating on telling her roommate everything, when her phone buzzed. She snatched it up and saw that it was from the laptop, still running in her room.
“Alien stuff?” Gia asked, glancing at her from the corner of her ey
e.
“Gia,” Becca said, deciding to throw caution to the wind. She hadn’t told Tom, and so she needed to tell someone. “I made contact with it. An alien. He calls himself Key. He says we can’t pronounce his real name, so that will do. He’s the last one of his species; he says his planet is gone.”
Gia’s mouth fell open. Then she laughed. “You're pulling my leg.”
“I’m not,” Becca promised, and before Gia could say anything else she stood and pulled her from the couch. “Come here and see.”
Becca led her friend to her bedroom, and sat her on the bed, thrusting the laptop in her hands. Gia scrolled up through the whole conversation.
“So, what did your boss say?”
“I didn’t tell him,” Becca said. “When I got there this morning, he was talking to ... someone. Someone from the government I think. It felt ... wrong.”
“He didn’t figure it out?”
“No, but he will. Someone will. The whole office is working on it now.”
“And you don’t want them to?”
“No,” Becca said. She knew Gia was wondering why, but she didn’t know what to say to her. She said, “I feel like I should be the only one to know.”
“Well, now I know,” Gia said.
Becca smiled. She could tell that her friend didn’t know what to think. Was this a trick? A joke? Was an alien really sending Becca messages? Which option would be more preferable?
Gia handed the laptop back over, but didn’t get up from Becca’s bed. She made room, and Becca sat down, scrolling back down to the most recent messages. There was a new message there, but it wasn’t words, there were dishes and curved lines and numbers.
“What is that?” Gia asked, looking at the screen.
“I don’t know. It looks like …” Becca trailed off, remembering that Key had said he would send blueprints for whatever machine she had to make, to strengthen the wormhole. “This software isn’t going to be able to cover this,” she went on, talking more to herself than to Gia.
“Nerd stuff?” Gia asked.
“Yep,” Becca said, expecting her friend to leave, but Gia stayed planted on the bed. It wasn’t every day that you saw a conversation from an alien. Becca thought for a moment, and Gia was mercifully quiet. Suddenly Becca snapped her fingers and went to work.
“Geometry is universal,” Becca said. “It’s not like language. All maths is universal.”
“What do you mean?” Gia asked.
“Well; two plus two equals four, everywhere. In language, some might put nouns before verbs, some might do it opposite; you know all of that kind of stuff. Maths is universal. Shapes are universal.”
“Two plus two is four, even out there?” Gia asked, motioning to the ceiling.
“Yup,” Becca said. She was typing on her laptop, and she didn’t look up. “Key knows our language which is nice, but with geometry, he doesn’t need to know anything we do here, because it’s the same there.”
“So what does that mean?” Gia asked, thoroughly confused.
“It means -” Becca said, with a final tap of her keyboard. She turned the laptop so that her friend could see the screen, and see the blueprint perfectly reconstructed on it. “- that I just needed to run that message through a 3D mapping software. Now I know what to build.”
“Can you build it?” Gia asked.
Becca took a moment to look the blueprint over.
“Yes,” she said with a nod. “I can.”
Chapter Seven
Becca had been working on the machine for over a week. Someone at work had managed to break the hidden message within thirty-six hours of the whole office working on it. Tom had been excited, and Becca had been careful to appear just as excited. The office gathered in the satellite room as Tom bounced a message back, but a reply had never come back. After a week, the mood in the office had soured.
Meanwhile, Becca had been making headway on the device she needed to build. If she was being honest with herself, she didn’t quite understand how it would work. It was very advanced. It seemed as if it would broadcast some sort of signal, and she supposed that would create a stronger wormhole, but the nitty gritty of the whole thing was lost on her. Wherever Key had come from, they were advanced.
Still, she could follow the schematics, and it just became a process of getting the materials that she needed. She had to take some from work, tense each time she shoved something into her purse, and thankful that the device was going to be rather small; about the size of a watermelon. That meant she could fit most of the components into a handbag. She kept Key up to date as she worked, and the days went on.
She was sitting in her room, working on the device one evening when her cell rang. Without looking at who was calling she grabbed the phone, slid her finger across the screen, and held it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Honey. My love. It’s me.”
Chad. Ugh! She hadn’t even thought of him, lately. Certainly not in the couple of weeks since she had made contact with Key.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’ve given you time; space. I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“It was,” she said. “But way more, like all of the time and space. All of it. I have nothing to say to you.”
“You aren’t coming back to me?”
“No,” she said, and she hung up. He called again, and texted, keeping it up all night, but Becca ignored him. She couldn’t even think about a relationship right now, even with a man better than Chad. Her feelings for her boss were long gone too. She was focused on Key and the machine, and nothing else.
That night, she was done. The chrome machine sat heavily on her bed. It had a battery pack, which Key said would keep it charged for only three or so minutes. That was long enough to get him to her, but only if he was prepared.
“That’s it?” Gia asked, after Becca had called her in.
“Yes,” Becca said with a nod.
“He’s coming tonight?”
“I ... think so,” Becca said. She had almost said hope, and changed it to think, after a short pause. “I have to send him a message.”
She went to her laptop and did so, typing quickly.
I AM READY
She waited, sitting on the edge of her bed, with Gia beside her. They leaned towards the screen, neither young woman speaking. Soon, letters began to appear as the alien replied.
I AM AS WELL TURN IT ON NOW
Becca set the laptop aside and stood. She took the machinery in her hands and moved it to her nightstand. Gia got up and went to the doorway. She was biting her lip.
“Is this safe?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Becca said truthfully. “I hope so.”
Gia took a deep breath. “Do it,” she said. Becca nodded and pressed a button on the machine.
For a moment, nothing happened, and then a loud whine filled the air, causing both women to slap their hands over their ears. Becca backed up to stand with Gia, as the machine continued to scream. A light appeared, not on the machine but in the center of the room, where the triangular end of the machine pointed. The light pulsed for several minutes; the whine grew more high-pitched and louder.
“Something’s coming!” Gia screamed so she could be heard over the whine. She pointed, and Becca looked. She could see a dark shape in the center of the light.
Without warning the whine ended, and the light pulsed once more and then vanished. The machine on the table began to smoke, but neither girl noticed. They were too busy looking at what stood in the center of the room: Key.
He was tall, at least six-foot-two, and his skin was a soft-blue color. His hair was as black as tar and his eyes yellow. Not just his pupils, but all of his eye. He looked more or less like a man, strong and broad-shouldered, standing on two legs, and with two muscular arms, but there were some differences. The most noticeable were the ridges on his head, just above each eye, and the pointed ends of his ears, sticking out through his shoulder leng
th hair.
The alien being wore a silver suit; it looked something like a flight jumpsuit, not a separate shirt and pants but all in one piece. The color of the suit seemed to shimmer, always silvery but with a different secondary color every few seconds, blue, pink, green and then back to blue. His large feet wore heavy boots made of the same silver material. Key looked at the girls, raised his hand in greeting, and then pitched forward. Becca rushed forward to help the alien, but Gia stayed back.
“Are you okay?” Becca asked, falling to her knees next to the alien and hesitantly placing her hands on his back.
“My stomach,” the alien said, speaking perfect English, without a hint of an accent. Becca helped him roll over, and she found a zipper at the neck of his flight suit. She pulled it slowly down.
“What are you doing?” Gia asked from the doorway.
“He’s hurt,” Becca said, and then she gasped, for as the zipper went down to his waist she could see a wound in the flesh of his stomach. He had tried to bandage it himself. The material was similar to gauze but somehow different, made up of smaller strands of material which had bonded together. Dried dark-blue liquid caked the bandage, and Becca took this to be blood.
“I can clean this,” she said, looking to the alien’s face, sure that he was looking directly at her even though he had no irises or pupils. He nodded softly, and Becca turned to look at Gia.
“Can you grab the basket under the bathroom sink? It should have alcohol in there, and bandages.”
“Uh, yeah,” Gia said, and she turned and rushed for the bathroom. Becca was lucky, her mother was a nurse and had imposed the importance of keeping a fully-stocked med kit at home (and in the car, and at the office), so Becca was sure she would have what she needed to clean and redress the alien’s wound.
It hadn’t hit her yet, that she was touching a being from space. The idea was there, somewhere in her mind, of course, his blue skin and all yellow eyes were hard to overlook, but she felt as though she was in a crisis. The alien may have reached her just in time. His wound was severe and he hardly had the energy to sit up, or so it seemed. While she knew he was an alien, she didn’t focus on that. She just focused on keeping him alive.
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