The Spaceship Next Door

²⁴ A GOOD IDEA IS HARD TO FIND

Annie had never been to Washington D.C. before.

The only other time the opportunity presented itself was a class trip to the capitol that was canceled last-minute because half the grade came down with the flu at the same time. It was the same year the ship landed anyway, so there was a lot less interest locally in going to see the White House and the Smithsonian when a much more interesting thing was happening on the town’s front lawn.

She remembered that year pretty well, not just because of the ship. That was the year everyone on the planet—it seemed—passed through town, and when she learned that being famous didn’t preclude anybody from being a total nutbar. The cancellation of the annual D.C. class trip seemed like a formality.

So far, she hadn’t had a chance to see anything up close. It was easy enough to spot important landmarks from the back of the SUV—the Washington Monument, Congress’s gold dome, the Lincoln Memorial—but it was all in passing, and largely ignored by everyone else in the car. She wondered what it must be like to live around things other people considered extraordinary. Then she remembered she was from Sorrow Falls.

She could see the tip of the Monument from the window. She was in a corner room on the top floor of an unassuming, square building that looked a lot like several other such buildings in the district. She had no idea what the name of the building was—if it even had one—or which government agency it belonged to.

It was a little alarming. Nobody would tell her precisely where she was going from day to day, only that they would like it very much if she came with them. It had been like this since the morning after. That was four days prior, but felt like it was months ago.

Incredibly, since her initial interview, conducted in the field in front of the ship by an army officer and consisting of only five questions—are you all right, are you sure, can you step over here please, can we ask you a few questions, and are you Annie Collins—nobody questioned her. Once she answered the fifth question with an affirmation she was politely escorted to the back of a Jeep and had been on the move ever since. She guessed this was standard protocol for sixteen-year olds who call the president in the war room.

Only one other question was asked since. That was, can you write down everything that happened to you on the night of the ship, in your own words? She’d done that. Nothing was sent back with notes or feedback, or even a smiley face sticker like the one Mrs. Winston in English put on the essays she liked.

It probably should have been a little intimidating. She didn’t feel intimidated, though. She’d had no contact with anyone from the media, but they hadn’t taken television away from her—that would probably, at some point, require that they decide to call her a prisoner instead of a guest—so she was well aware that her name came up quite a lot in the national discussion. Her friends from the trailer, plus Dill and Dougie, had clearly already been spoken to and released back into the wild, as they were all over the news. All except for two of them.

The door on the other end of the room opened.

“Ed!” Annie shouted. She stepped around the table and gave him a long hug. Then she punched him in the shoulder. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry, I’m sorry, it’s been crazy.” He released her, stepped back and took a good look. “They’re treating you all right? Looks like they took you shopping.”

“Yes! I can’t go to the Smithsonian, but the mall? That they can do for me. I think the girls in the Gap thought I was some head-of-state’s daughter. It was awesome. The hotel, too. But look at you, you look as tired than the last time I saw you.”

“Fewer bruises, though, I hope.”

“Yes.”

“Like I said, it’s been crazy. Look, has anyone talked to you about…”

He stopped himself when the door reopened, admitting an army officer in full dress.

“Ms. Collins? Hello, I’m Major Corcoran.” His introduction came with a firm handshake. He had a cold hand and a dry grip.

He dropped a shoulder bag onto the table and took a seat on one side of it, then extracted a tape recorder and a stack of folders. These he arranged on the table in a way that implied there was an exactly correct place for them. Then he took out a new pad of paper—white, standard size, lined—and a pen. They had places as well. Finally, he looked up at the two other people in the room, as if they only just arrived and he’d been there the whole time.

“Please, sit.”

He turned the tape recorder on as they took his suggestion.

“This is Major Donald Corcoran, in an interview with Ms. Annette Collins. Also in attendance is Mr. Edgar Somerville, who has already provided independent testimony.”

Ed looked at her. “Annette?”

“Literally my first words were, ‘never call me Annette.’ They must have looked at the first draft of my birth certificate.”

“Mr. Somerville, for the record, I have an objection to your presence in this interview.”

“I’m aware of that, major. I’m also Annie’s legal guardian, and she’s a minor. I believe we had this argument already.”

“So we did; I wanted it on record.”

“You guys have been fighting over me?” Annie asked.

“Ms. Collins, in the past four days you have been the subject of very nearly every conversation Mr. Somerville and I have been a part of, as have a significant number of other people.”

Major Corcoran spoke as if his words were as starched and ironed as his shirt.

“Well that’s cool. Every girl’s dream.”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. She noted a lack of comfort on his part with informality. “I’m going to walk through the events as we understand them, and ask that you fill in details whenever you can.”

“All right.”

He opened the first folder, and examined the top page for several seconds before speaking, as if what was on there was a prepared speech.

“According to statements made by Corporal Louboutin and a Mr. Douglas Kozinsky… private citizen… at some time around two in the morning on the night in question, you approached the anomaly, asked to be admitted, and went inside.”

“Can’t you just call it the spaceship?”

“The spaceship, then. Is that right?”

“Yeah but, you knew that. The major on the scene, in the Jeep…”

“We’ll get to that.”

“Okay.” She rolled her eyes at Ed, who smiled.

“You asked to be admitted,” Corcoran repeated. “Is that accurate?”

“More or less.”

“What did you say?”

“Open sesame. I’m surprised you guys never tried that.”

“Ms. Collins, these are important questions. What exactly did you say?”

“I said, ‘I am her’.”

Corcoran leaned forward and made a lengthy note on one of his clean pads of paper.

“That was in my statement too,” Annie said.

He held up a finger to indicate he was still writing, and evidently couldn’t do more than one thing at a time.

“Yes it was,” he agreed, putting his pen down. “All right. You went inside. According to your own statement it was…” he searched for the right folder, opened it, and read, “…blue.”

“Yep. Very blue.”

“Could you provide any more detail?”

“Um… baby blue, I guess. Not quite a cerulean. Almost a pastel.”

Ed put his hand on her arm.

“One second, major,” he said. He nodded his head, and they turned their chairs around, away from the recorder. A good one would still pick up most of their conversation, but Ed didn’t appear to have the kind of authority necessary to insist it be shut off.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you, but if you want to go home again, you need to start taking this seriously.”

“Home again at all?”

“Like I said, I don’t want to scare you.”

“Despite which, you’re going to say something terrifying, sure. Ed, you worry too much. I have this covered.”

“Annie…”

“Trust me.”

She turned her chair back around.

“Sorry,” she said to the major. “Ed thinks I need to give you a better answer, so I’ll try. It was blue and fuzzy. There wasn’t any visible technology, and as much as I was sitting in a chair inside a chamber, the spaceship was an unmanned probe that wasn’t built to carry and sustain biological life forms. It created the chamber to accommodate me. So, blue, fuzzy and comfortable, I guess. Especially once the ship added air conditioning.”

“According to your statement, you spoke to an alien, explained to him he was in the wrong place, and suggested he look elsewhere. He was…” He read to quote verbatim again, “…really cool about the whole thing.”

“Yeah, he just needed directions.”

“You were in the ship for over three hours.”

“He needed a lot of directions.”

“And those directions required him to enter lower orbit?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do, Ms. Collins. That’s where the ship is now.”

Annie wanted to add that so much more happened in those three hours, beyond even the parts she wasn’t telling Major Corcoran. There was the part where Ed and Violet hijacked the zombie network and made everyone go to sleep, and the part where everyone who wasn’t dead already woke up at sunrise fully healed of whatever wounds they’d incurred overnight.

That was easily the coolest trick anyone pulled, but nobody was talking about it because the rest of the story was that over 200 people died over the course of the evening, and when the survivors awoke there was a literal scramble to get everyone protein before they collapsed or began actually eating brains or whatever else they could get their hands on.

Annie told the president to send pizza, but on that he didn’t listen. Fortunately, he paid attention to everything else she told him.

“I understand,” Annie said. “You’re a little confused, see, the alien isn’t on the ship any more. The ship is just a probe, he showed up later. Like, what, a month ago?”

“I can pinpoint the date,” Ed said. “If you need it, major.”

“I’m not confused, Ms. Collins. I’m dubious. A non-corporeal super-intelligent electrical space ghost inhabited a weapon with world-destroying capabilities until you knocked on the door and told him to go away, and then he did. This is what I’m dealing with. You can imagine how unhappy that story has people on my side of the table.”

She gasped.

“Space ghost? That’s an awesome description! Ed, did you think of that?”

“Annie…”

“I know, take it seriously.”

“It’s very serious,” the major said. “All we have to go on is your word that there’s no alien intelligence remaining in the ship. It manifested as a hostile, and now it’s in low orbit.”

“Right, but I don’t know how else to help you, major. I mean, if you want to try nuking it now, I guess you can. It won’t do anything, and I have no idea what that would do to the upper atmosphere, but sure. Ed, what would happen if a nuclear blast, like, bounced off an object in low orbit? Wouldn’t all that force directed back toward the planet kind of suck for the planet?”

“If there’s a hostile entity in that ship,” Corcoran said, “we need to know.”

“There isn’t. Can I go home now?”

“We need more than your word.”

“I don’t really think you do.”

Major Corcoran was the kind of person who needed glasses, Annie decided. He needed them for moments like this, so he could remove them dramatically and rub the bridge of his nose, or throw them on the pile of papers and sigh deeply. He could even chew one of the earpieces and point across the table with them. The possibilities were endless.

He didn’t have glasses, though, so his expressions of impatient exasperation were so much less than they could have been. He could sigh, and rub his chin, but that was about all. Perhaps the military drummed the more interesting displays out of him already.

“Ms. Collins,” he said, “if this statement and these answers are all you have to offer, it may be a long time before you get to go home. I’m speaking now for the people above me, not myself. I would be happy to let you get on with your life, but if you think the government isn’t going to find a way to detain you solely because of your age or your current celebrity status, you’re mistaken. Right now there’s an entire team of scientists waiting to perform medical tests on you, and that’s not even to satisfy a security concern. I’m the only thing standing between you and a long, uncomfortable existence as a de facto prisoner of the state. I need you to stop treating me like an enemy and start being more cooperative.”

Annie laughed.

“Oh, come on.”

“Annie, he’s serious,” Ed said. He looked pale and worried. It was cute.

“Look, Ed, he’s either bluffing or he’s an idiot, and I don’t think he’s an idiot.”

“Well, this interview is over,” Corcoran said, addressing Ed. He reached for the tape recorder.

“Hold on, hold on,” Annie said. “Keep that running. Ed, here’s what the major isn’t telling you… unless he doesn’t know either and the people pulling his chain sent him in here without all the information he needed. Doesn’t matter. I’m guessing someone who listens to this tape knows, anyway. Two days ago, a message showed up in a place where a message shouldn’t show up, on a computer nobody is supposed to know about. I’m going to keep on giving the major the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s bluffing and knows about that message.”

At that point, the major did turn off the tape recorder.

“Yes, I know about the message.”

“Go on. For Ed: what did it say?”

“It said…” he cleared his throat, as if these were perhaps the most difficult words ever. “It said ‘Annie Collins was here’.”

“Which is funny because I wasn’t there when that happened, I was in a hotel a few blocks from here, having all my standard electronic communications monitored. I mean, I’m assuming that’s true, you guys aren’t that stupid.”

“She was being monitored closely,” Corcoran said, to Ed.

“So here’s your problem, major. You’ve got a spaceship in an established orbit carrying sensitive data from every government database in the world. You think since the ship took off after I climbed out, and the message appeared in that secret computer while I was in custody, therefore an alien is still on board, planning something terrible. If that’s the case, I must be lying to you. But that’s only one possibility. The other possibility is I’m telling you the truth.”

“Then how did the message…” Corcoran stopped in mid-sentence, because that was when it came to him. “Oh.”

“C’mon, I even signed it for you guys. But look, it doesn’t matter. Either there’s an alien presence controlling the indestructible spaceship, or the sixteen-year old you’ve been trying to intimidate for the past half hour is. One way or another, we’d both like it very much if you arranged for me to go home now.”

“SO ARE you going to tell me what really happened?” Ed asked.

It took about a week to convince the necessary members of the government that Annie, a sarcastic but otherwise seemingly harmless young woman from a tiny Massachusetts town could exert control—somehow—over an extra-terrestrial warship. This was undoubtedly how long Ed had been holding onto this question. It might even have been why he insisted on being the one to return her to her home.

They were crossing the southern bridge to Main Street when he asked. At that point they were already seeing some of the impact on the town from the last time they were in Sorrow Falls. The bridge they were going over had scuffmarks on the side railings, there was still broken glass and debris in the margins, and the traffic was about double what it should have been. Up ahead, right near the library, there were several mobile satellite towers.

The media had returned.

Two days ago, Annie spoke to the most positive-sounding, enthusiastic woman on the planet. Her name was Nita, and she was a publicist. Nita was arranging a modest media blitz. This was something of an unfortunate inevitability. Annie needed the media to make sure everybody knew who she was. She was still the little girl who touched the spaceship when nobody else could and didn’t particularly want people to know that, but she appreciated celebrity as a form of protection in this case.

The ship in orbit holding international secrets was a better form of protection, but one couldn’t be too careful.

Soon, Annie would be appearing on national television in a variety of controlled settings and telling her side of the story. She hadn’t decided yet what that story was going to be, but there was still some time.

For the short term, she could ignore all the mobile TV units who would no doubt fall over themselves to talk to her.

“You didn’t like the story I gave to the army?”

Ed laughed.

“That was barely a story at all.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“How about with so I met an alien.”

“Okay. So, I met an alien. He was pretty much as Violet described.”

“Terrifying, vengeful, willing to destroy the planet?”

“Maybe not terrifying. Confused. But that isn’t what I mean. He was a sentient idea. So I treated him like one.”

“I’m not sure I understand how one treats a sentient idea.”

They made it off the bridge and hung a left, up the hill to Spaceship Road. The whole area was an unfortunate combination of wrecked vehicles and roadside memorials. There were entirely too many memorials. Even more than when the ship first landed, Sorrow Falls was never going to be the same.

“Ideas aren’t meant to be alone,” Annie said. “They’re supposed to be shared. I asked him to share himself.”

“To… is there a non-creepy way to phrase that?”

“Probably.”

“So, um, was he a good idea?”

“Not a clue. He was right when he said he was too advanced for me to really understand. But that didn’t matter. As soon as I had him in my head I started thinking of a nicer version of him.”

Ed didn’t have a response to this. He just looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

On their left, they were coming up on the field where the ship had been until recently. The army still had the place cordoned off, and a state policeman was directing traffic. The campers were all gone. This made Annie sad.

“You gotta understand, everything worked different in that ship. It responded to thoughts. Actually, no, that’s not really right, it responded to ideas. I had to formulate a complete idea and… push it to the ship, I guess is the only way to describe it. The alien was kind of the same way, only more… pure. I couldn’t think the ship into being something other than what it was. But I could think him into being a slightly less malevolent idea.”

“Even if you didn’t understand it?”

“Apparently, yeah. Because I took his idea and imagined a version of him that wanted to leave the planet and go find another one.”

“And that worked.”

“He left, didn’t he?”

Ed smiled.

“Annie, honestly I’m in the same position as everyone else. You tell me he left and I have no way to prove that’s true or untrue. I’ll take your word for it.”

“C’mon, Ed, after all we’ve been through, would I lie to you?”

IT WAS another twenty minutes of traffic and wreckage before they arrived at their destination, which was not Annie’s house. They went past the house, but her mother wouldn’t be back from Boston for another four days, so technically Annie still couldn’t stay there alone. That was sort of okay, because her address wasn’t a secret and there were two news trucks parked on her lawn already.

The destination was Violet’s house.

They’d called ahead; Violet was sitting on the porch waiting. As a courtesy, her ‘parents’ weren’t around. There was no point in maintaining that illusion any longer.

“Meant to say, thanks for keeping her out of this,” Annie said.

“You’re welcome. I didn’t have a lot of choice, though. Nobody else remembered she was even there. I would have come off as crazy, talking about the dead kid with the anti-zombie baby coffin space capsule. I have about a million more questions for her, though, so I’m planning on coming back. Unless she makes me forget her too.”

“I think it’s too late. You’ve got an idea of her now.”

“I’m not going to get used to that.”

“I don’t expect to either.”

She leaned over in the car seat and gave him a long hug.

“Thanks for everything,” she said. “And hey, we saved the world or something.”

“I think we did,” he said. “Thanks for being the best translator I could have asked for.”

She kissed him on the cheek, and then climbed out.

Ed waved to Violet, and drove off.

Annie stood at the base of the steps for a time, just listening to her own breathing and appreciating the silence and isolation of the woods. Violet’s cabin was a whole lot more appealing to her this time around. After the past couple of weeks, it was exactly what she needed.

“So,” Violet said.

“So.”

“I’m glad you came back.”

“Yeah. Me too. I didn’t really know where else to go, anyway. You’re the only one who can understand. Plus, you’re my best friend.”

Violet came down the steps and hugged Annie, then leaned back and looked her in the eye for several seconds.

“He’s still in there, isn’t he?” she asked.

“I think I’m gonna burst. I need a chalkboard and a computer and a ton of paper and then you have to explain to me what all of it means, because I don’t get half of it. But it’s beautiful.”

She smiled.

“I’ll do my best. Are you hungry? I still have some of your food here.”