The Spaceship Next Door

²² ANNIE’S IDEA OF ALIENS

The best way to describe what happened—upon the discovery that Annie had run off—was coordinated panic.

Sam had to be restrained, which was a challenge as there was nobody there physically capable of really restraining him. Ed estimated a half an hour passed from when Annie left the kitchen to when he discovered her absence, which was easily enough time to collect her bike, loop around the camper, and pedal down the road to a point beyond where it was safe to be without an adequate zombie defense, such as a large RV. Sam wanted to chase her down on foot, if need be.

Meanwhile, Dobbs had a million questions for Violet, but he was asking them so rapidly she didn’t have time to answer, and didn’t appear to have much of an inclination to either. She was too busy blaming herself for Annie having run off, which in Ed’s opinion was probably a bit justified. Oona, who was struggling with the question of whether or not shooting Violet constituted an intelligent choice, may have also been a distraction.

They were a team of capable individuals, one of whom was an apparently immortal alien being wearing the body of a young girl. They needed to decide what the matter at hand was, and come up with a plan to fix it.

“Violet,” Ed said, “can the technology keeping this house invisible travel?”

She looked at him without speaking, as she ran through the implications of the question. In their conversation, he’d become used to the sense of wrongness she gave off when not actively trying to behave like a sixteen year old. There was maturity in there that was not unlike the sort of imitative adultness Annie exhibited, except in Violet it was more extreme, and decidedly unnatural. It was what Ed felt meeting a vampire would be like.

Provided vampires were real, of course.

“It can,” she said. “But it also can’t. The act of travel would make it visible, like a bubble in water. We would be detected by the absence we would create.”

“My GPS puts me in another spot,” Dobbs said, “so why wouldn’t that keep working if we move?”

“The reason it works is this place hasn’t existed in any physical or electronic survey of the land since the country was born. You’d have driven past if Ed wasn’t navigating, and Ed would never have found it if Annie hadn’t showed him. But everything south of us has existed for some time.” She looked at Ed. “He would notice.”

“He who?” Oona asked. She was going between helping Laura keep Sam from bolting down the road and fingering the handle of a revolver tucked into her waistband.

“We can explain later,” Ed said. “Violet, what happens if a zombie wanders down the road?”

“Nothing, because that’s impossible.”

“Fine, pretend it isn’t impossible, what would happen?”

“The commands from the host would stop making sense. It would be similar to receiving driving directions from a GPS that thought you were in a different place, only a zombie wouldn’t have the presence of mind to recognize incorrect instructions. But it would only be temporary. The host would recognize the anomaly and we’d be detected.”

“Good enough. Dobbs, if we get near the ship, can you pick the signal up again?”

“I dunno, probably. I think their equipment can. Oona would know… it’s her stuff.”

“We can do it, but why?” she asked.

“Later. Violet? If it’s mobile, we need it. Oona, Laura does this thing have enough gas left to get us across town?”

“Yeah, barely,” Oona said.

Laura pointed to Violet’s family car. “We can drain that tank, maybe. It’s not a diesel rig.”

“Good idea.”

“So we’re going to get Annie now?” Sam asked.

“We’re going to the ship,” Ed said. “That’s where she’s going.”

“Why they hell would she be going there?”

“There’s no place else to go.”

“And if she’s not there?”

“One thing at a time, Sam.”

THE LIGHT FADED to a soft blue that was just sufficient to allow Annie to differentiate between when her eyes were open and when they were closed. It came from no particular location and illuminated no details on the ship’s interior. There was something that could be construed as a video screen in front of her, except it wasn’t made of glass and had a depth to it that was absent in a standard television set. That she even thought of it as a screen suggested this information was coming from a font of experience that didn’t belong to her.

It felt a little like being on the inside of a chicken egg. And, like a chicken egg, it was fully enclosed.

“Hello?” Her voice came back with a metallic echo. “I’m going to need air.”

There was nothing in the way of a response… and then there was.

Images: vibrant, colorful, frightening images of collapsing stars and nebulae and black hole event horizons. There was light viewed from the perspective of a point in space, and a point in space from the perspective of a beam of light; a thing that looked like an amoeba pulsing in a sea of heavy gas; a hailstorm of aluminum riddling a carbon-dense planet; a civilization of squat humanoids developing tools on a huge planet with tremendous gravitational force; another civilization of light-limbed hermaphrodites dying in a conflagration on a planet that had previously never known fire.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Annie said.

A centipede-like creature the size of a commuter train roared expletives from a circular mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, at an airborne slug with gossamer wings. Annie could smell the ammonia-rich air and feel the rage of the giant centipede, and understand its anger. But she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with this understanding.

“Air. I’m going to suffocate.”

She was already running out, but whoever was operating this picture show couldn’t understand what she was saying. So instead, she started thinking about suffocation.

The centipede and the airborne slug began to choke, and then the picture changed to the humanoids on the gravitationally intense planet grabbing their throat areas and gasping. Then a human man appeared. He was a white human with light brown hair and a shiny white smile, in a blue polo shirt. The most generic rendition of the species imaginable—provided television was the source—this man appeared to have emerged directly from a toothpaste commercial, as perhaps he had.

Annie hoped he was a construct and not a real person who existed out in the world somewhere, because as she focused on him, he began to choke as well. He gasped and pawed at the generic room he stood inside of, clutching the back of the generic chair and stumbling over a generic cat to the generic floor. He twitched and screamed silently, and continued to do so until he stopped breathing.

“This shell… requires.”

The voice came from all around her, in the same way the faint blue light did. It wasn’t so much that there was no specific source; it was that whatever the source was, she was on the inside of it.

“Air,” she said.

“This shell requires atmosphere.”

“Yes.”

A new hiss sounded, an indication of a valve or pipe opening or unlatching or releasing, and then she could breathe again.

“Intake atmosphere exhaust waste.”

“Thank you, yes.”

Annie realized she’d arrived at this point with a certain number of preset expectations about this experience. The first was that there would be a presence in the spaceship, and the second was that this presence was Violet’s father. (Or, more exactly, “father”.) Given all she’d been told regarding how terrifying he was supposed to be, that she was not at that moment afraid meant either she had become very brave recently, or she was just too exhausted to be frightened.

Another assumption was that the alien she would be speaking to would have a deep, ominous-sounding voice. That expectation was colored by the movies, which were no doubt themselves influenced by humankind’s historic depiction of both authority figures in general and deities more specifically. Zeus on high, making sonorous declarations to cowering mortals at the foot of Mount Olympus, was always expected to speak in a voice as deep as thunder, and so on.

The voice she heard inside the ship was a man’s voice, certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of voice that commanded awe. It was the kind that was trying to sell her something. It was what she would expect the suffocated white man from the toothpaste commercial to sound like if he’d managed to get a word out.

At least he has a voice now, she thought.

The picture show was interesting, except that it wasn’t really a picture show so much as an immersive experience. The longer it went on the more her other senses kicked in and she began experiencing what was happening instead of looking at it through a camera lens. These were memories, and they were being added to her mind. It was a peculiar way to communicate. It was faster, perhaps, than words, but had none of the nuance.

“You are not her,” the alien said, in his peppy sales voice. If it weren’t quite so life-or-death, she might find it funny. But if you buy this detergent you can be her.

“I am her,” she said. “I am the one you were looking for.”

“You are the one and you are not her. She is of you, you are not her.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You have… her smell.”

“Her smell? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Your words are so small. Her scent is in your mind.”

“You can read my mind?”

“I can taste your… yes. Your ideas. I can taste your ideas.”

“I understand. She is not me, but the idea of her is a part of me.”

“Yes.”

She was trying to pinpoint a source of the voice, so she knew which direction to face when talking.

“How are you speaking? Like, do you have a mouth?”

“I do not eat.”

“Mouths in humans are also for speaking. If you have a visual… I mean if you can see me, look, my mouth is moving.”

There was a terrible moment, just after she said this, when the thought came that perhaps her mouth wasn’t moving at all. She could feel it moving, but this was uncharted experiential territory, and she couldn’t discount the notion that everything happening to her was internal. She could be projecting a version of herself in her own mind that was speaking and looking, just like the way she thought she could smell the atmospheric ammonia of an alien landscape. Her senses weren’t necessarily trustworthy.

“I see, yes,” the alien said. “The sound of my voice is rendered from the archives collected in this… outpost. Mouth is an inefficient speech requirement. I would not mimic an inefficiency.”

“But so, you can’t read my mind. I’m really here, in the ship, talking out loud right now, and this isn’t just happening in my head.”

“Your ideas leak into this ship, but thoughts are… thoughts are… The words are crude. Thoughts are pieces. Fragments of unconnected… What is this?”

The picture show kicked in again. The alien had plucked an image of a cloth hanging from Annie’s own memory.

“That’s a tapestry. It’s from a medieval castle. I saw it when I was eight, when we went on a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.”

She remembered liking the tapestry for reasons she still couldn’t explain. She spent a half an hour looking closely at it, until Mrs. Parris dragged her away.

The image zoomed in on a corner of the tapestry that was eye-level to an eight year old. It was a frayed edge. The indirect lighting of the room reflected off the glass case protecting the ancient cloth.

“These parts.”

“Threads. Those are threads.”

“Thoughts are this.”

The image jumped back to the full picture. It showed men on horseback in a tournament in the foreground with a castle in the background. Annie remembered liking the horses in particular.

“Ideas are this. Ideas are full things, contained. Endless but bounded, as a sphere. Ideas can be. Thoughts cannot. Even simple thoughts in a crude mind are threads.”

“So, no, then.”

“I cannot read your mind. I can exist in your mind but not read it. Only you can know your own mind.”

“But you can exist in my mind,” she repeated. “As an idea. I don’t like how that sounds.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Maybe to you.”

“I can exist as an idea in your mind, but not in my entirety, no more than this device in which you sit holds my entirety. I can be shared, and I can exist independently elsewhere. I am endless but bounded. Now you will tell me now where the one I seek is.”

“I don’t know. Who are you looking for?”

“You are attempting evasion. You have her scent.”

He began pulling images from her mind and displaying them, as if to show exactly how easy it was.

“She travels,” he observed. “Tell me where.”

“Please stop pulling those images out of my head.”

“You are a crude life form, you should accept your limitations.”

“Well it’s rude.”

The images continued to play, possibly more so Annie could understand how much the alien was extracting of her idea of Violet. He wasn’t showing her anything she didn’t already know, certainly.

“I have examined the records and cannot find this place,” he said. “It is on no maps.”

Annie laughed.

“Yes, it’s a funny little place.”

“She travels with strange beings… I do not understand. You.”

“Annie. People call me Annie.”

“Annie, I will call you. You will help me find her.”

“I don’t really think I have any incentive to do that.”

“I do not understand.”

“Sure you do. She’s my friend, and I don’t think she wants to go anywhere with you, so I don’t know why I would lead you to her.”

“This warship can eliminate the planet if I choose.”

“Well, that’s a good incentive. Can it really?”

A series of images flooded her mind. It was a much more aggressive sharing of information than before, possibly because she was seeing into the idea of another idea. It was something like a schematic of the spacecraft, but despite using scientific principles nobody on the planet had ever been exposed to, she felt like she understood. This either meant the alien was getting better at communicating with her, or she was getting better at receiving this style of communication. When it was finished, she understood the ship’s workings alarmingly well, as if the schematics had been saved off in her head. It made her want to ask the alien if he could also put Spanish in there so she didn’t have to take it next year.

“Well, you definitely can destroy the planet with this,” she said.

“You understand.”

“Sure. But if you do that… I mean, wouldn’t she die with it?”

“Ideas can never die.”

“Fine. Weird, but fine.”

“You will tell me how to find her.”

“Okay, but I have some questions for you first.”

There was a long pause. She imagined him in another part of the spaceship (although it had no other parts) pacing furiously and cursing her in some alien language.

“I will answer questions.”

“Great!”

“And when I am done answering questions, you will tell me where the place called Oz is located, and why my daughter wishes to see this man named wizard.”

“I promise.”

IT WAS another hour after the failed bombing of Sorrow Falls before someone developed sufficient nerve to raise the nuclear question.

This followed a great deal of analysis of the kind that only happens in emergencies: quick, contingent, back-of-envelope calculations made by very smart people in many rooms around the world. These were the same scientists charged by their governments and the science community at large with understanding the spaceship as well as they could with whatever tools they had. There were solid reasons to think these men and women would have, if not complete answers, some agreement on approximate answers.

What was apparent to anyone who listened to them argue for more than a few minutes was that this wasn’t the case, and likely never would be. In three years, this team had measured everything they could, but the ship was so good at keeping its secrets they were as surprised as anyone by its capabilities.

As an example, everyone knew perfectly well what happened if one attempted an open assault of the ship. Small objects like rocks were repelled gently. Small rapid objects, like bullets, were vaporized, and their kinetic energy absorbed via some unexplained physics.

(Vaporized was not a truly accurate observation, as the bullets weren’t turned into vapor. Nor did they cease to exist, nor were they converted into energy—this would release a truly enormous amount of energy if they had been—or any of the other descriptions readily available to anyone with Internet access and about thirty seconds. What happened was that the protective barrier around the ship absorbed the impact of the bullet and then turned the small projectile into several million extremely small projectiles. The metallic dust remnants of the first bullets fired at the ship remained in the field three years after the Sorrow Falls sheriff fired them.)

Larger objects were dealt with in a range of ways that were similar only in that they each seemed to represent the least complicated solution. Flying drones had their altimeters confused and ground-based robots lost their understanding of left-right and back-forth. People lost the will to continue.

What had not been tried was a more overt assault.

Eighteen months after the ship landed there was a plan in place to hit it with a surface-to-air missile from forty yards away. The idea had a lot of supporters, but most of those supporters were people who were convinced it would have no effect and only wanted to take the measurements that would come out of such an experiment. Well, that and they wanted to be proven right about it. The detractors argued that deliberately and actively antagonizing an advanced race with advanced technology just to see what would happen was a really dumb idea. This counterargument was also used when someone suggested they just drive a Jeep straight ahead really fast, and when someone else suggested crashing a jet into it.

The counterarguments carried the day, which meant the upper limits of the protective shield around the spaceship had never been tested but it was assumed—unreasonably, as it turned out—that a sufficiently large non-nuclear weapon would be adequate.

But that was only part of the problem. Not one of the men and women with multiple degrees and Nobel prizes and so on ever advanced the notion that this shield might be expandable.

There was no reason whatsoever to entertain this thought. Yes, they all knew about the munitions explosion, and the truck breakdowns, but half were convinced this was a case of the government giving up after coincidental setbacks and not actions initiated by the ship. Also, it was already assumed that the ship was using a tremendous amount of energy just doing what it did in a five-foot radius. The energy needed to turn the same shield into a dome covering the entire town?

Staggering.

When asked for a more precise calculation by none other than the President of the United States, the scientists offered other words that also meant “staggering”, which was unhelpful.

After the shield—clearly not weakened by the expansion—dealt with the two thermobaric bombs they dropped on it in a manner similar to the way a windshield dealt with two mayflies, the first question was not what do we have which is bigger that we can deploy instead? It was what do we do if the shield keeps expanding?

This was a very good question, because while nobody was going to say it—certainly none of the scientists with advanced degrees were going to—but there was a thing going on inside that Sorrow Falls bubble, and that thing involved zombies.

This seemed like a really good reason to try and prevent the ship from doing anything else.

At a little after two in the morning, a three-star general in the Pentagon cracked open a top secret action plan for the nuclear destruction of Sorrow Falls. Enclosed was a list of U.S. and world leaders who were expecting calls. Those leaders had been briefed on this outcome, and were expected to provide the kind of assent a sitting president needed to cover his butt when nuking his own people.

The missile would be fired by a nuclear sub that was patrolling the waters between Long Island and southern Connecticut, specifically for this contingency.

The plan included a token evacuation plan for Sorrow Falls and the surrounding towns, but that was mainly for show because there was no reasonable expectation that anyone would make it outside of the blast radius in the time allotted, and the radioactive fallout could potentially reach New York and Washington anyway. It was going to be the most devastating and horrific event in the history of the country, and the only reason it was under serious consideration was that the president and his advisors had reason to believe they were preventing something that would have global consequences.

One thing the author of the nuclear option hadn’t considered was what to do if there was reason to believe the ship could weather an attack from a thermonuclear weapon. As the men and women tasked with executing the plan took the necessary steps to hand the president all he needed to sign the order, someone decided to try and reach the plan’s architect.

His name was Edgar Somerville, and he was unavailable.

“WHY DO YOU WANT HER?” Annie asked.

“She is mine.”

“That’s a terrible answer.”

“I do not see any reason for… elaboration. Are these all your questions?”

“What makes her yours?”

“I thought of her. She was my idea.”

“Ideas can have ideas of their own?”

“It is not something that can be explained easily to someone so limited.”

“How am I limited?”

“You are trapped in that body. That is a limitation. There are places you cannot go because your body cannot make the journey. I have no such limitations. I am an unbounded idea.”

“…that can have ideas of its own.”

“Ideas can be simple, and ideas can be complex. Simple ideas do not often obtain sentience. They are too… inflexible. They cannot adapt. Ideas never die, but ideas can become useless, or irrational. Something over-specific would not thrive independent of where it was born. An aquatic creature riven from liquid media.”

Annie laughed. It echoed through the ship. She wondered if anyone outside could hear them.

“A fish out of water, you mean.”

“Your metaphors are new to this one. But such is a simple idea. There are many ideas in every civilization in every world, everywhere. She is not a simple idea, which is why although she is in you, she is not of you. Your idea of her is a shadow of her entire conception. It is the version of her which casts that shadow I would like back.”

“All right, so you’re an idea and you had an idea, and that’s who my friend is. What was the idea that became her?”

“This is difficult to explain.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It is… it’s true. I didn’t intend to create a new idea.”

He hesitated.

“I was once a new idea. I remembered what it was like, and that remembrance became something other than myself. Then that something left me. I can remember what I lost, but I can no longer feel it. This is why I say she is mine. She took something from me and she is something from me.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re starting to sound kind of human.”

“You’ve developed an idea of me. It’s been a long time since that has been true.”

“Apparently my idea of you uses contractions when he talks.”

“This is humor.”

“Hey, don’t go nuts.”

He went silent.

She tried to gauge how long she’d been in the ship, and wondered what was happening outside, and as soon as she wondered that, the images in front of her coalesced to show the field.

“Whoa, did I do that?”

The alien didn’t answer. It was clearly a current image, though. The soldiers remained frozen in place, and Dougie and Dill were still at the car. They were arguing about what to do, pointing frequently right at Annie, which was to say right at the ship.

They were discussing whether to leave her, go in after her—if the ship would let them in—or stay where they were.

Higher, she thought. The view became a bird’s-eye view of the field and the surrounding area, and it was quite literally a bird’s-eye view. The ship was borrowing the eyes of a bird.

Zombie birds.

“Yep, I’m definitely doing this,” she decided.

“Annie.”

“Oh, there you are.”

“I have located Oz.”

“Oh? Okay?” She crossed her fingers and hoped the next sentence would have to do with Australia. It didn’t.

“You have lied to me.”

“That’s totally unfair. I may have misled you, but only a little.”

“This Dorothy, this place called Oz, they are fictions. There is no wizard. These are lies.”

“It’s a movie, and a movie is an idea, and ideas are real.”

“You no longer amuse me. Reveal where I can find her, or I will cease the atmospheric intake of all the drones in this place you call Sorrow Falls.”

ED HAD this notion that the spaceship hidden in the root cellar was going to be at least the size of the more familiar one on the other side of town. It was considerably smaller: roughly the size of a coffin for a child, and shaped like a vitamin capsule.

“Did that come from the ship?” he asked Dobbs, who had gone down with Violet, Todd and Susan. (Ed didn’t know what to call Todd and Susan. He knew they weren’t people and he knew they weren’t aliens, and they didn’t behave like zombies. Faced with such a quandary, he continued to refer to them as Todd and Susan.)

“That’s it,” Dobbs said. “That’s the whole thing.”

“Is it at least heavy?” The aforementioned non-human Todd and Susan were carrying it in a blanket.

“It’s heavy,” Violet said. “But not so heavy as to represent a risk to the camper.”

Ed hadn’t actually thought of that, but was glad someone had.

They slid it into the back of the camper on the floor next to the toilet and under a rack of leather clothing. The device was the same matte black as the ship, and when Ed put his hand on it he found the kind of friction-free material Annie described. This explained the blanket, as surely it would slip right out of anyone’s hands, even the undead kind.

While that was happening, Laura and Sam siphoned gas from the car. There wasn’t a whole lot to add, but it was better than nothing.

Oona took the time to change out of her pajamas and into something more futuristic dystopian warlord. He imagined she’d been waiting for a long time for the opportunity to dress in a way she considered appropriate for the circumstance.

“What’s the plan, Edgar?” she barked, while verifying that she had a full cartridge in one of her handguns. This was probably for Violet’s benefit.

“Start driving, head for the ship, try not to kill anybody.”

“Should I start the screamer?” Dobbs asked.

“May not be needed,” Ed said. “Assuming it still works.”

“We’ll man the roof,” Laura said, pulling Sam along, “and keep an eye out for Annie.”

The camper got moving. Ed knelt down next to the alien device.

“I guess it doesn’t make sense to call this a ship,” he said.

“It’s closer to a probe, or as you said before, an antenna array.”

“Does it open?”

“Put your hand back on it.”

He did, and after a second or two of nothing, his mind was flooded with images. It looked like a travelogue for a beam of light, only one that took detours outside of regular space.

“Wow,” Ed said. “I’m not really sure what any of this means, am I supposed to?”

“The visuals are a form of communication, yes. It’s going to figure out you’re not an advanced being. The next step would be to activate its defenses, but I’ve disabled that feature.”

“Oh good, thanks.” The images stopped, and he removed his hand. “What defenses are we talking about?”

“Just a sonic alarm. Dobbs, would you like to try?”

Dobbs did want to try. He put his hand on and acted suitably impressed by the show going on in his mind.

“But it didn’t open,” Ed said.

“Oh, right. Wait until he’s finished.”

“Was that eighth dimensional space?” Dobbs asked.

“Yes, very good. It’s a short cut. The universe is incredibly large if you’re stuck inside of it, but very reasonable otherwise. Dobbs, think about the capsule opening.”

“Okay.”

A horizontal line creased the center of the tablet, and then it popped open like an old-fashioned lunchbox. The interior was bathed in a baby blue light.

The device was full of stacks of circular discs or coils. It appeared almost solid-state.

“This looks like a large radiator,” Dobbs said. “Probably isn’t, though, huh?”

“No, it’s much more than that. You’re familiar with quantum computing technology?”

“Oh, wow, really?”

“You’re only seeing the portion of the machine that exists in this dimension. It’s actually much larger, if size even means anything in this instance.”

“What’s the power source?” Ed asked. “Is that here, or is it hanging out in the extra dimension?”

“It’s both. It uses a combination of zero-point energy resources and… there’s no word for the secondary technology. Imagine a way to collect and store chaotic energies. Discharges from the corona of the sun, kinetic energy from a gravitational slingshot, and so on.”

“That would violate the third law,” Dobbs said.

Violet smiled. “Yes, it would, in a closed system. The waste product of this energy storage would be entropic, and it is, but the entropy isn’t manifest in this dimension.”

“Okay,” Ed said. “But nothing nuclear?”

“Oh, yes, there’s a nuclear core too. It’s only a backup, though. Like a battery in an alarm clock if the house loses power. The core isn’t active right now.”

Ed stepped back instinctively, and nearly fell over. Dobbs decided he didn’t want to touch the probe any more.

“It’s shielded,” Violet said. “Don’t worry. Radiation would do the same to me as to you.”

“Sure, but you can go find another body,” Ed said, “we’re sort of stuck with these.”

“Comin’ up on zombie world, everyone,” Oona announced from the driver’s seat.

“Is this still extending the… I don’t know what to call it… invisibility cloak?” Ed asked.

“It is.”

Ed walked to the front to look out the windshield. “Stop at the turn, I want to see what we’re facing.”

“A lot of confused marionettes, Edgar,” Oona said.

The zombies in the street looked like their equilibrium had been severely compromised: a hundred instant inner-ear infections and extreme vertigo.

“Perfect,” Ed said. “Violet, can you shut it off?”

“Why would you do that?” Oona asked.

“I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“It’s done,” Violet called.

The zombies righted themselves.

“So now they’re all in my way and you don’t want me to kill anybody, so how do you plan to get there from here?” Oona asked.

“They’re not moving.”

“Yeah, I know they’re not moving, that’s my problem.”

“No, I mean they’re not moving toward us or away from us. Honk.”

Oona honked. The zombies immediately in front of her got out of her way. Slowly, but successfully.

“What the hell.”

“Annie made it to the ship,” Ed said.

“How do you know?”

“They’re not looking for her any more. They’re on standby, in some sort of basic self-defense mode.”

“It’s gonna take us a while to get to the ship, just honking and rolling.”

“Do the best you can.” Ed turned the back of the camper. “Dobbs, maybe try the screamer again to get some of them moving. It might help.”

“Okay.”

“When we’re close, I’m going to need you focused on finding that signal again.”

Ed sat back down next to Violet, with her alien capsule at his feet. The zombie parents were standing across from them, holding their balance pretty well in the rocking trailer.

“Do you want to tell me what you’re doing, now?” Violet asked.

“Not sure yet. But I have a few questions. First, how big can you make that invisibility cloak extend?”

“I’ve never tested its range, how far did you want it to go?”

“How about the same size as Sorrow Falls?”

She studied him carefully.

“Perhaps. But why?”

“Maybe question two will answer question one for you. What did Susan and Todd die of?”

“Susan perished from tuberculosis. Todd was crushed by a carriage wheel.”

“Todd looks pretty good.”

“Yes…” And then she understood. She smiled.

“How long would it take?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But if it works, everyone is going to be extremely hungry afterwards.”

ANNIE HAD no particular strategy in mind when climbing into the ship, or at any subsequent point in the conversation—possibly except for the part where she mingled Dorothy Gale of Kansas with Violet Jones of Sorrow Falls. She didn’t expect that to actually work, but thought it would be funny if it did. It was funny, up until the part where she pissed off the super-powerful alien in the planet-ending spacecraft.

She’d been rolling with the just keep him talking rule that really only made sense in different contexts, like talking a jumper off a building, giving law enforcement time to trace a phone call, or keeping someone with a concussion awake. She was pretty sure it didn’t make as much sense here, because if she was stalling, she didn’t herself know what she was stalling for. There wasn’t anyone coming to the rescue.

Except of course there was. Ed would come running. So would Sam. Dobbs, Oona, Laura… they probably would too. Maybe even Violet.

Violet was the only one who could actually rescue anybody, and only by surrendering. Likewise, Annie could rescue herself just fine by telling the alien where to look. But as angry as Annie was at Violet, it was the kind of angry she expected to get over eventually. When she did, she wanted Violet to still be around.

Besides, Violet’s dad was turning out to be a scary combination of innocent and amoral.

“Drones, you mean all the zombies?”

“That word doesn’t correspond to their function. I have heard it said many times tonight and reviewed the meaning.”

Annie thought about mentioning the whole undead thing, which was definitely a zombie standard, but it seemed beside the point. He recognized that a lot of his drones were living people and was threatening to change that, so he understood alive versus dead.

“So you’re an evil idea,” she decided.

“No. Ideas are neither good nor evil. It’s only in their application that they can be one or the other, and even then they can only be judged one or the other from a subjective viewpoint. If I tear apart this planet looking for my daughter, you would no doubt see these as evil actions, but I have seen a million such worlds and consider her of far greater value. I would call it a good thing. Now tell me where to find her or I’ll begin with the drones and stop only after I’ve set the world on fire and picked her out of the remains.”

“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.”

“…Even 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.