Page 2 of Overgrowth

Chapter 1

Seattle, Washington: July 13, 2031

Twenty-five days pre-invasion

1.

My alarm went off promptly at 6:02 a.m. I sat upright in the dim light of my bedroom, gasping and clutching the blanket to my chest. My curtains glowed like jewels under the pressure of the sunlight trying to break in from the outside. Dropping the blanket, I slapped at my phone until my finger managed to slide the alarm notification over to Ignore—more out of luck than anything intentional on my part. The sound silenced, I staggered out of the bed, tripping on my own dirty laundry and nearly stepping on the cat. He gave me a dirty look as he moved aside. I didn’t care. I was focused on getting to the window, on opening the curtains.

Sunlight flooded the room as I pulled them open, shocking the last of my exhaustion away. I closed my eyes and inhaled, breathing in the faint, sweet scent of morning, and everything was fine. Everything was amazing.

I love the summer. Most of my friends grumble about the way climate change has rearranged the Seattle seasons. “If I wanted to see the sun every damn day, I’d live in California,” they say, and then they huff off to get their sunscreen and their sunglasses and their sun-sun-go-away goth T-shirts, and I guess I can feel sorry for them, even as I feel totally happy for me. I’m a sunshine girl. Always have been. They’ve had decades of Washington tailoring its weather to them, and it’s only fair that I should have a few years of the weather tailoring itself to me.

Sure, rising sea levels and declining air quality mean my time in the sun—ha-ha—will probably spell the end of life on Earth as we know it, but at least I’ll be warm until the giant tsunami comes and sweeps us all away.

Besides, I never wake up properly when my alarm goes off before the sun comes up. I don’t mind clouds. Sunlight is better than rain, but the sun is always there, even when the sky is a blanket of gray. I do mind darkness.

I breathed in sunlight and breathed out wakefulness. The cat twined around my ankles, chirping his weird, breathy chirp, and by the time I opened my eyes, I was ready for the day. Outside my room, I could hear my housemates going through their own morning routines. For Mandy, that involves singing in the shower, even though she sounds like she’s gargling bees. For Lucas, it means cooking something way too elaborate for the hour, so he can pretend he’s the master of his own schedule, and he doesn’t care about needing to do dishes as soon as he gets off work. Now that I was paying attention, I could smell frying eggs and sweet baking waffle batter. If I hurried, I might be able to get him to share. He always makes too much, never having quite gotten the hang of portion control.

I stayed where I was. The cat gave another turn around my ankles and I bent to scoop him into my arms, letting him slam his furry head into the bottom of my chin so hard my teeth clacked together from the impact. He settled down to purr. I watched the sunlight filter through the trees in the backyard, and tried—as I did almost every morning—to remember my dreams.

Trees. Screaming. The flower with the dragonfly petals I used to see everywhere when I was a little girl. Something in the air, the taste of copper, the feeling of lightning in my veins. The same jumble of unconnected images that haunted me most nights, as formless and fading as they always were. My therapist says the key to my depression is hidden somewhere in my subconscious mind; I’m supposed to write down my dreams for her. My dream diary is like a checklist of the same elements, over and over again, a tidy recipe for making me slowly lose my mind.

When I was three years old, someone snatched me off the street in front of my grandparents’ old house near Mt. St. Helens. They kept me three days before bringing me back unharmed, still wearing the same dress and little sweater I’d had on when they’d taken me. Then they’d disappeared, fading back into whatever nightmare they’d slithered out of. They were never caught. They were never identified. For all I know, they’re still out there somewhere, snatching happy little girls and hauling them away for whatever reasons seem to make sense to them.

I got lucky. I came home. Dehydrated and confused, but still, I came home. Mom can even laugh about it now, the way I came out of the woods and told her the aliens had stolen her real baby.

Grandma never learned to laugh about it. There had still been shadows in her eyes when she died a decade ago, more than twenty years after I’d been taken, and she was never easy with me the way she was with my little sister. It was like, by being hurt, I had become an invitation for the universe to do more harm, and she couldn’t let herself love me out of fear that the next time something happened, it would be the last time.

I miss her. I never understood her, but I miss her. She never understood me either, but in a way, I think she understood me better than my mother did, because she realized I wasn’t kidding. She did need to worry about the aliens.

“Stasia?” Lucas’s voice was accompanied by a light knock on my bedroom doorframe. I turned away from the window with only a faint pang of regret. The sun and I would see each other again. The sun and I always did.

Roommate number one, and the owner of the house: Lucas Evans. Tall, skinny, with a collection of vintage cartoon T-shirts only a geek could love, and a girlfriend who kept her apartment on Capitol Hill more out of the love of lizards than any other mo tivation. He was holding a plate that I found honestly way more interesting than his face, because the plate was covered in waffles, and the waffles smelled amazing.

“For me?” I asked.

“You’re still in your pajamas,” he said.

“That’s good. I can get syrup on my pajamas and be on time for work without needing to change my clothes twice.” I held out my hands, opening and closing them in the classic “gimme” gesture. “Waffles.”

“Don’t you need to be at work soon? You should probably put clothes on.”

“ Waffles, ” I repeated, with more urgency. I opened and closed my hands with more vigor. “Mars needs waffles. Give me the waffles.”

“Put on your clothes,” Lucas countered, and shut my bedroom door, the waffles still in his hand, but now shut out in the hall where I could neither see nor smell them.

“Asshole!” I called amiably, and went digging for clothes.

Like most of the people I know in Seattle, all three of us work in tech. Sort of. Mandy is a project manager, keeping people doing things and controlling her team with a terrifying iron fist out of proportion to her pixie-scale body. Lucas is a programmer, which is how he’s able to afford silly things like “an actual house,” even if he needs the rest of us to feel comfortable with his ability to pay the mortgage. Me, I’m in customer service. I answer phones, answer email, and get yelled at for a living, usually by people who don’t understand how not paying their $25 bill for four months results in them owing more than $100, or how a tree falling on the phone lines means their internet stops working. It’s an endless grind, but it pays. Quite well at this point, since I’ve been there for more than five years, while most customer service drones quit after two, if they make it that far.

As the lowest-tier worker in the house, I’m also the only one who has to go into the office, which makes no sense to anyone other than the corporate overlords who get paid for timing my bathroom breaks.

I like solving problems. There are so many problems in this world that can’t be fixed. At least when somebody’s cable goes down, I can generally make it better, or dispatch a technician who can. My call times aren’t the best in the company. My customer satisfaction scores, on the other hand, are through the roof. Best of all, my job doesn’t come with a dress code. I can wear whatever I want.

Today, as with most days, “whatever I wanted” was jeans, a nerdy T-shirt—this one with a silhouette of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors and the slogan “Don’t feed the plants”—and a pair of comfortable shoes. Mandy and Lucas worked from home but still had to buy nice shirts for their many videoconferences. I may not make as much money as either of my housemates, but what I don’t get in my bank account is more than balanced by not being forced to wear business formal five days out of seven.

I followed the smell of waffles down the hall to the dining room, where Lucas had cleared half the miniatures from the previous night’s Pathfinder game out of the way in order to set up the plates. Mandy was already planted firmly behind hers, a plastic bag tied around her neck to protect her dress as she mowed through her breakfast like she thought the meal was going to be canceled.

“Morning, Mandy,” I said, walking past her to the beverage fridge in the corner of the room. Lucas didn’t like having our sodas and Brita filters getting in the way of his precious trays of cold cuts and marinating meats. The solution? Mandy’s old dorm fridge, which was continually packed with everything from her real-sugar Coke—imported from Mexico—to Lucas’s insulin.

She grunted her response, far more interested in inhaling waffles and bacon than in talking to her housemate. I didn’t hold it against her. Talking to Mandy before she’s had enough calories to fuel somebody five times her size is generally pointless.

Roommate number two: Amanda Reyes. Five-foot-one in her stocking feet, and incredibly fond of shoes with heels that add eight inches to her height and make her walk like she’s slightly drunk at all times. Her wardrobe consists almost entirely of cute dresses, demure, plain-colored ones for work and wild, extravagantly patterned ones for play. She likes to refer to herself as a manic pixie nightmare girl, which is not inaccurate. She also likes to talk about how her existence as a smart, successful, educated Mexican American woman in tech makes her a unicorn, which is another way of saying “a horse with a giant fucking knife stuck to its head.”

I have good roommates.

Pitcher of water in hand, I returned to the table and reached for my own plate. I was cutting my waffles when Lucas emerged from the kitchen and took his own seat.

“Morning,” I said.

“You found clothes,” he said.

“I don’t spend all my time in my pajamas.”

“You would if you didn’t have to leave your room in order to get paid. One day you’re going to find a job that lets you telecommute, and you’re never going to get dressed again.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, and speared a chunk of waffle. “I could be a houseplant.”

“How’s the invasion going to like that?” asked Mandy.

I shrugged. “Probably not that well, but hey, if they wanted me to do something specific, they should have left instructions. Pass the butter?”

She did.

When I came back from whatever terrible, traumatic thing happened to me in the woods—a thing I have never been able to remember, no matter how much time I spend talking to experts on childhood memory recovery—I came back claiming the aliens had abducted the real Anastasia Miller, leaving me in her place. My last therapist said it was an attempt to disassociate myself from the terror of abduction, using a narrative framework I had probably picked up from something I’d seen on TV. It’s unusual for a three-year-old to come back absolutely convinced of her own inhumanity, but as it never seemed to really bother me, they eventually stopped trying to change my mind.

I told them I was an alien, and when they refused to believe me, I told them it didn’t matter, because the invasion was going to happen anyway: believe it or not, I was telling the truth, and when our motherships darkened the skies, they would have to deal with the consequences of their disbelief.

Not that I can prove it. I said I was the vanguard of an invading species of intelligent alien plants—I’ve always been very clear about that—and yet I looked human, sounded human, walked like a human, and had human bodily needs. I ate, I slept, I caught colds and twisted my ankles and did everything else a real human would do. I couldn’t even photosynthesize, despite spending the entire summer when I was ten trying to figure out how. I’m an ordinary thirty-five-year-old woman. I just happen to be an ordinary thirty-five-year-old woman who’s been talking about the alien invasion for the last thirty years.

As personal quirks go, it’s not the strangest. And it means I always have something to talk about at parties. Lucas thinks I’m a little nuts, but his girlfriend lets her lizards roam freely through her apartment, so he tries not to judge. Mandy doesn’t care one way or another. I think she’s hoping I’ll be proven right one day, just so she can see the looks on everyone’s faces when they realize they had thirty years of warning, and chose to do nothing.

The waffles were delicious. It was time to get ready for our day.

2.

Being the vanguard of an invading species of alien plant people doesn’t get me special privileges on the bus. I sat crammed between a man who seemed to think he needed to occupy my seat as well as his own, and a teenager who was trying to cover up their lack of a shower with about a gallon of cologne. I sneezed, earning myself a dirty look from the man with the spreading knees, as if I had done it solely to annoy him. I smiled sweetly in his direction.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m only allergic to manspreading.”

He moved his knee away from mine.

That helped. I was still way too confined, but at least now I wasn’t fighting a losing battle to retain my seat.

The tech industry had already put Seattle in the middle of a massive population boom when the rising ocean levels became less something for pundits to argue about and more the reason San Francisco was experiencing sudden, catastrophic flooding events. They didn’t have enough rain in California, but they had tsunamis washing into the Financial District. Silicon Valley fared better but still had to contend with rising temperatures—a new record every summer, as the previous summer faded from “the hottest on record” to “I wish it could be that cool again”—and constant wildfires.

Humanity had two choices: try to clean up their mess and undo the changes they had already made to their home planet, or run for someplace that wasn’t in quite as bad of shape. Naturally, they’d gone with the latter. Seattle and its environs were growing fast enough to put kudzu to shame. Almost everyone I knew with a spare room was renting it out, even the people who would have been happier living on their own, because there was no housing. The former Californians complained constantly, about everything from the rain to the buses to the state of the roads. None of them offered to go home. For better or for worse, climate change and the tech industry had given us a glut of people, and they were our problem now.

I hugged my purse against my chest, trying not to pay too much attention to the people around me. Most of them were ignoring me as fiercely as I was ignoring them, eyes fixed on their phones or closed entirely as they focused on the songs playing through their headphones. It seemed like the more people we packed into a small space, the more time everyone spent trying to pretend no one else was real.

My therapist calls that “disassociation,” and says it’s part of why I continue to say I’m an alien. Whatever happened to me during those three days, it was bad enough to make me disassociate from my species. It was the kind of trauma most people will never have to deal with, and I should feel lucky that a little disassociation was the only thing I’d come away with.

Well, that and the nightmares, and the flower with wings for petals, like some hybrid of plant and insect, impossible, incredible, blooming just out of reach. No matter how many times I dreamt of it, I could never reach it, never pluck it and have it for my own. I wasn’t worthy. Maybe no one was.

Or maybe it was the flower that would destroy the world.

The bus turned onto the company campus where half these people worked, myself included. I sat up straighter, checking my things. Supposedly, the bus company had a lost and found service. Functionally, anything left on the bus was likely to disappear, even among a crowd like this one, well paid and supposedly cared for. I could have something worth taking. Gas coupons, for example, or a valid Canadian shopping license. If I left my purse or my backpack, I would never see them again.

The brakes hissed as the bus pulled up to my stop. I rose, timing the motion to the sway of the vehicle, and let myself out through the back door. A few others followed me. I knew some of them, and we exchanged weary nods as we turned toward the boxy building that would be our home for the next nine hours.

Customer service jobs used to be largely outsourced to countries where it cost less to staff a call center, India and Mexico and China and even Brazil. That changed shortly after the tech industry shifted its heart to Washington. Now, any company that wants to be considered for tax breaks under American law must be able to prove at least sixty percent of their staff is employed in North America. Some companies staff their centers in Canada, but that’s less about tax breaks and more about fear of the weather continuing to shift, forcing the companies to move again, over the border, into the great thawing north. Most companies wanted to be able to continue saying they were American—go patriotism, go marketing—and so they brought their call centers home, eating the cost of domestic labor in the pursuit of future profit.

Thankfully, American call centers came with American unions, and unions came with the kind of demands unions have been making since they first began. When the call centers came back, they weren’t the horror-story factories we’d heard of from older friends and relatives. We still spent our shifts yoked to phone, email, and chat, but we weren’t subjected to “open floor plans” that seemed like genius to management looking to be sure we weren’t playing online during work hours, but which had turned even the briefest customer interaction into a struggle not to piss off our coworkers. We had reasonable attendance policies and benefit packages, and a glorious lack of dress codes.

I approached the front door, swiped my badge, and got the brief green light that signaled my permission to be in the building. I stepped inside, my coworkers repeating the procedure behind me, and smirked. It’s always amused me, the way green equals “go” in American culture. That whole “secretly a plant person” thing.

Well. Not so secretly. Despite years of therapy as a child, and several managers telling me the joke has gotten old and I’d have an easier time getting promoted if I’d knock it off, I’ve never been able to swallow the urge to tell everyone I spend any extended period of time with that hey, by the way, I’m here because the invasion is coming, and people should probably know. It’s like a nervous tic. Hi, nice to meet you, my name’s Anastasia, I’m secretly an intelligent alien plant and one day everything you love will be devoured.

Mostly people are pretty cool about it, because mostly people don’t believe me. It’s funny how that works.

Half the cubes in my section were occupied by the time I reached my seat. The cube walls were a compromise between the union’s demand for privacy and sound baffling and management’s need to hold us accountable for every second that we spent on the company clock. When unoccupied, the walls were solid white. As each cube’s occupants arrived, they would hit the button next to their nameplate and the walls would turn translucent, allowing us to be monitored without sacrificing the sound-muffling effects of the material. The walls could be set to solid again during breaks and lunches, when we were free to surf company-approved websites, deal with personal email, and otherwise goof off.

It’s not a perfect system. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a perfect system. Everything has its flaws, when it’s looked at from the correct angle. Why should someone who makes their productivity targets and doesn’t goof off be subjected to the same degree of monitoring as someone who never does what they’re supposed to be doing? Why could some people get away with dozens of violations before they got so much as a note in their files, while others got fired after their first actionable offense? It didn’t make sense, because nothing really makes sense if you dig deeply enough.

Take my coworkers. Some of them liked me, because I worked hard and was happy to answer questions. Others thought I was a stuck-up jerk, because I’d refused multiple promotions and preferred to spend my time at work working, rather than socializing. In the words of the old reality-show classics, I wasn’t there to make friends. Friends were a nice bonus, if they happened, but really, I was happier just knowing I had a job I could leave behind at the end of the day.

You’d think—or at least, I would think—they’d be grateful to have someone who kept her head down and the team’s numbers up. Instead, I was subjected to a continual low-level hazing, like being perpetually, casually cruel would one day cause me to go, “Oh, wait, I was wrong, I really do want to go out drinking with you at the end of my shift.” As I hit the button to clarify my cube walls, it became painfully clear that today was going to be no different.

Working in a cube farm doesn’t leave many opportunities for self-expression. No more than ten percent of any given wall can be covered, either with personal items or work-related paperwork—after all, what’s the point in having walls you can see through if people persist in blocking your view with nonessentials like the escalation phone list? But people are people, and people will always find a way to mark territory. Little toys, potted plants, even the occasional low-maintenance fish, they all have their place in the ecosystem of the office, allowing each cube’s resident to feel as if they have some control.

In my case, that control took the form of a picture of my cat, Seymour; a small potted succulent that had proven functionally unkillable, surviving three desk moves and an accidental week without water when I was out with pneumonia; and a retro motorized piggybank shaped like an off-brand Audrey II. It made a cute snapping sound when I fed it coins, and it never had more than fifty cents in its belly, to avoid tempting people to break it open in order to buy a candy bar.

And it was gone.

I stood there for a moment, looking at the place where it should have been, then looking to either side, in case I had somehow moved an eight-inch-tall chunk of plastic without noticing. No bank. I stepped into the cube and opened the drawers of the filing cabinet next to my desk. Sometimes people would hide things in there, thinking they were funny, or the custodial staff would move things during the cleaning process and forget to put them back again. No bank.

According to the clock on my computer, I had five minutes before the official start of my shift. That was five minutes before I would have to explain my tardiness to my managers. They were sympathetic people, for the most part, and accustomed enough to the socially awkward people who gravitated toward support work that they would probably understand when I said my bank had been missing. Of course, this would be the third time in a ninety-day period that the disappearance of a personal effect had resulted in my clocking in late. That could be a problem.

I don’t like problems. Problems spawn solutions, and solutions are almost always worse than leaving things the hell alone. Putting my purse carefully on my chair, I stepped out of the cube, back into the aisle. Everyone I could see was focused on their computer screen, but very few of them were on calls, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching me, waiting to see how I was going to react.

“I seem to have misplaced my bank,” I said, voice clear and calm and barely shaking. Lucas would have been proud to hear me talking to people that way. He’d known me since the idea of public speaking would have been enough to send me crying into the nearest bathroom. “It’s really too bad, because I love that bank. I’m going to sign in and then go deliver my vacation request to my supervisor. I hope my bank is back when I start taking calls. I’m pretty sure if I have to tell management someone took it, we’re all going to get another six-month ban on personal items at our desks, and that would be a real shame.”

No one said anything, but a few sets of shoulders tightened, and a few heads turned in my direction, like their owners were trying to gauge my seriousness with a sidelong glance. I didn’t say anything else, only turned on my heel and walked away.

I was halfway to my supervisor’s desk when I realized I’d forgotten my paperwork. Dammit. I clenched my teeth and kept walking. Much as I wanted my bank back, I didn’t want to catch the thief or thieves in the act of returning it. It wouldn’t do me any good to know, and I’ve never been good at pretending to be okay with someone when I’m not. If I knew who kept messing with my things—instead of just suspecting—I wouldn’t be able to treat them the same way. That could be a problem. A “we involve HR, because you’re not acting like a team player”–level problem. I hate dealing with HR. They always look at me like I don’t know how to person right, and they’re going to have to grade my performance.

I don’t know how to human correctly. But I’m pretty good at being a person. I have thoughts and feelings and opinions, and that’s enough to qualify. Right?

Scott looked up when I approached his desk, a frown already on his face. “Ana?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, too quickly. I’m Ana at work and Stasia at home, and Anastasia on the rare occasions when my mother calls to ask for money. Compartmentalization is good according to my therapist, who says having a name for every major role I play lets me keep things straight in my head. I say that eventually I’m going to run out of names, and what’s going to happen then?

“Uh-huh.” His frown faded, replaced by a look of understanding sympathy. “You know if you’re having trouble, you can tell me. I’d be happy to have a talk with the rest of your team.”

“I know that if I tell you something, you’re required by law to act on it. Which means you’d have to have that talk with the rest of my team.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing’s wrong.” I put on a bright, sunny smile, trying to believe it enough that he could pretend to believe it too. “I was going to bring you my vacation paperwork, but what do you know? I left it at my desk.”

“Uh-huh.” He glanced at his screen, where the team-monitoring software would tell him what state we were each in. “Your shift starts in two minutes. I’ll log you in and put you into not-ready, since you were talking to me, but next time, remember the paperwork you’re supposed to be delivering, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, before turning and scurrying back to my cube.

My coworkers were focused on their screens, on their customers, on their jobs. My bank was sitting in front of my keyboard, where I couldn’t possibly have missed it before. I picked it up. It was light enough that I knew my fifty cents in pennies and nickels had been stolen, along with the AA batteries that made its snapping mechanism work. That didn’t matter. I put it to the side and sat down, reaching for my headset.

Time to get to work.

3.

By the end of the day, I was starting to seriously reconsider my desire to maintain gainful employment. Maybe Lucas would let me live in the house without paying rent if I agreed to do the dishes.

Or maybe he’d get tired of the fact that I have no real skill when it comes to cleaning, and he’d throw me out, and I’d wind up working somewhere even worse. Someplace where the people would be just as unfriendly and willing to tease, but with stricter hours, or even—horrors—a dress code. I don’t even own a business casual wardrobe. I’d need to get a job to pay for dressing myself for my job. No. I needed to stay where I was, to keep enduring the teasing and blowing the bell curve all to hell.

Besides, I actually sort of liked my customers. They were each a puzzle to be solved, and once it was untangled, they went away forever, fading conveniently into the low background roar of experience. That wasn’t something to give away without a fight.

My remaining coworkers wouldn’t meet my eyes as I gathered my things and walked for the door. I could hear them whispering behind me, and no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that I was being paranoid, I knew full well that if I turned around, I’d find them artfully not looking. They didn’t like me, thought I was weird and standoffish and a know-it-all, and maybe they were right about all those things, but that didn’t make it okay for them to treat me the way that they did.

“See you Monday, jerks,” I muttered, and left the building.

Home was calling, and I was ready to answer.