Page 22 of Overgrowth

Chapter 11

Tucson, Arizona: July 29, 2031

Nine days pre-invasion

1.

Graham was up and out of the room when I finally opened my eyes, squinting in the light that cascaded through the window. Fresh clothes had been laid out for me on the chair next to the door. They were new, the tags still on, and all my size. I smiled as I pulled the jeans on, buttoning them snugly around my waist. One major advantage of having a cosplayer for a housemate: I think Mandy usually knew when my sizes changed before I did.

Having clean, fresh, real clothes made me feel better than I would have imagined. While I was NASA’s “guest,” they’d kept me in surgical scrubs, like stripping me of my clothing would make it easier to strip me of my individuality and—consequentially—my identity. They could make me the perfect lab subject if they just refused to give me a bra.

If they’d been trying to make sure I would think better of the invaders than I did of the human race, they’d done a bang-up job. At least my fellow aliens treated me with the dignity I would have expected them to extend to a dog.

Opening the door revealed a long hallway, and the sound of voices drifting back from a central gathering point. I walked toward them, realizing as I did that I couldn’t remember entering the forest the previous night. It had never been a nightly occurrence for me, but I’d never been sharing physical space with two of my fellow aliens before. It was going to take a little while for me to figure out what the new normal was.

I stepped out of the hall into the dining room. Graham and Mandy, who had been stealing bites of egg off of one another’s plates, stopped what they were doing and smiled at me. Jeff, catching the shift in their attention, looked over and smiled. The others—David and Lucas—kept eating.

“Where are Toni and Tahlia?” I asked, heading for the table. There was an open seat next to Graham. I settled into it, reaching for the platter of toast.

Jeff shook his head. It was a very small motion: if he hadn’t been directly in my field of vision, I would have missed it. I stopped, hand extended, and frowned at him.

“I’ll get you a smoothie,” he said, standing and heading for the back of the room.

“What Captain Grumpy-pants is trying not to say in front of the humans is solid food isn’t really good for you,” said Mandy. “You can eat it—it won’t make you sick or anything—but you’ll only get nutritional value from it if you prime your system first.”

“Which you do by drinking blood.” Lucas stabbed his eggs with more force than strictly necessary. “In case you needed the reminder. Drink blood, digest cereal. Don’t drink blood, have fun shitting cornflakes for a week.”

“Lucas,” said Mandy quietly.

“What?” He looked up. “Don’t you like me reminding her that things have changed? That things are still changing? We’re prisoners in this house because we agreed to help a friend. A friend we thought was a person. I think she can handle a little honesty.”

“I don’t need to be reminded that things are changing,” I said, looking pointedly at my arm. “And I am a person. I never claimed to be human.”

“You never did anything that would prove you weren’t,” he countered. “I work in tech. I talk to people every day who want so badly to be special that they’ll swear they see ghosts, or talk to the fairies, or have prophetic dreams. Weirdoes who don’t hurt anyone don’t get corrected when they’re weird. They get tolerated. You were tolerated.”

His words, true as I knew them to be, still stung. I looked at him as levelly as I could manage, and said, “Well, maybe it’s time to think about who else you may have blown off for no good reason.”

“Maybe it is,” he agreed, and stabbed his eggs again.

Jeff returned with a tall ceramic mug, setting it gingerly in front of me. “That’s all you get for the day, but it should be enough to let you digest human food,” he said. “Drink it slowly.”

The blood had been heated to body temperature and swirled with something dark. I took a tentative sip. The dark swirl was chocolate, bittersweet and miraculously perfect against the salty backdrop of the blood. I took another, larger sip, trying to savor the taste, trying not to let myself gulp it down.

My stomach grumbled. I put down the mug and resumed my reach for the toast, and this time, no one stopped me.

“Since we’re all up now, how about you get around to the top-secret invasion planning?” Toni flashed Jeff her brightest smile. “Tell us your secrets so we can betray you better.”

“What’s terrifying is that you clearly think that will work,” he said flatly.

“Actually, I’m with her,” I said. The toast tasted like, well, toast. It wasn’t a symphony of flavors like the blood, but it didn’t turn to ashes in my mouth, either. I licked my lips, resisting the urge to reach for my mug as I continued. “I sort of need to know what’s going on. I’m grateful to you for breaking me out, but I have no idea what’s been happening. I’m pretty sure I’ve been fired from my job by now. I couldn’t call in while I was being held captive by NASA.”

“Last alphabet org I expected to see getting serious about the invasion, by the way,” said Toni. “Sure, it’s aliens, and aliens are technically a space thing, but they have no budget. They’re at like, cans with string stretched between them levels of funding. People never understood how important space planning was.”

“Honestly, that’s probably why they were able to focus on the invasion,” said Graham. “They don’t have much public funding, but there have always been people willing to throw them a little money here and there to look into their pet projects. I wouldn’t be surprised to find an entire privately bankrolled alien affairs division.”

“Which suddenly has the chance to become relevant,” I said. “Did anyone catch the name of the woman who pulled us off the plane? I’d like the chance to thank her personally for how she handled things while I was in her care.”

“Agent Donna Brown,” said Jeff. “She’s been working with their alien-monitoring team for years. They have files on all of us. Even a few Toni didn’t know about.”

I wanted to ask how they knew that, but it would have been a waste of time and energy. We had multiple trained computer professionals in this room; Jeff alone had been good enough to track me down based on a single encounter in a space that didn’t actually exist. If he’d been able to convince Lucas to work with him, or get Mandy on the phones and working the social-engineering angles of the problem, there was nothing they couldn’t uncover. And then there was the forest to consider. So many people, with so many different skills, all working toward a common, if fuzzy, goal.

“I have printouts,” said Toni. “I’ve recreated my wall in the pool house, since no one was using it. I can show you if you like.”

“Huh.” I eyed her. “Are you helping us, or are you plotting against us?”

“I’m planning to betray you at the earliest opportunity, carrying as much information as I can back to my own species,” she said. “If I want them to believe me when I say I have what it’ll take to take you down, I need to have lots of good data. Only way to get that is to cooperate with you people. I’m not doing it under duress. I’m doing it because those fools refused to listen when I told them there were aliens among us—and now I find out they were listening to someone else. Well, I’ll show them. I’ll show them all.”

“And if you help the enemy in the process?” asked Lucas.

Toni shrugged. “If I help the enemy enough, maybe I can claim sanctuary when our vegetable overlords assert their dominion over the planet. I can be flexible. I hate them for what they tried to do to me, but I like my own skin better than I like my high horse. You might want to consider a little flexibility yourself, buddy-boy. You’re in this room as much as I am. If the humans think you’re a traitor and the houseplants don’t want you, you’re going to find yourself in an awfully tight spot.”

“I can take care of myself,” said Lucas sullenly.

“Well, I can’t,” said Mandy. “I’m not saying I want to side against my own species in the upcoming war, but I don’t want to be alone out there, and we were already targets, just for living with Stasia as long as we did. Sorry, Stasia. You know it’s true.”

“You’re right, I do,” I said. “I’m sorry. I never meant to endanger you. I guess I didn’t think the invasion was really going to get here.” I turned to Jeff. “What do we know?”

“More signals have been coming in while you were out of play,” he said. “They’re getting strong enough that people with ham radios and satellite phones have started picking them up. They come in on just about every band humanity knows how to access, and they’re loud. I’d guess we have maybe a month before the armada gets close enough that we can pick them up within our broadcast range, and another month after that before they’re here.”

I frowned. “I thought our range was continental.”

“For now,” he said. “We’ve been reaching out. People are relocating, quickly, quietly, before the new security measures go into wide distribution. A surprising number of humans refuse to believe that we’re here.”

“It doesn’t help that NASA, for whatever reason, didn’t release any footage of themselves studying you,” said Mandy. “If they’d been smart, they would have made you the face of their invasion.”

“They were intending to,” said a man, walking in a few steps ahead of Tahlia. “Hello, Stasia. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

I blinked, running quickly through the list of names that could be his. He was roughly my age, with neatly brushed, side-swept brown hair and a carefully neutral expression, like someone had told him not to move his face too much lest he develop wrinkles. His suit probably cost more than any of us made in a year, even Lucas. If he and Toni’s father shopped at the same tailor, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Which meant…

“Hello, Senator.” I waved the hand that held my toast in what I hoped would look more like a polite greeting than a threatening gesture involving food. “I didn’t know you were coming here. I thought I was going to meet you in the forest.”

“Plans change,” he said, walking to the table and settling in one of the open seats. Mandy and Lucas were staring at him: one with hope, the other with fear. Toni and David appeared unflustered. Maybe growing up rich—or in David’s case, working with Toni, who was sort of a whole barrel of oiled ferrets in a woman’s skin—had inoculated them against this sort of thing. “Agent Brown decided to call a conference in Washington about the alien menace this morning, which seems to be her way of staving off accusations that she mishandled Miss Miller. Which means the cat is well and truly out of the bag. Even if she had managed to limit journalistic access to the event itself, no one was going to keep that quiet.”

“National security—” began Lucas.

Senator Davis silenced him with a look. “Please, son,” he said. “National security has been a farce for a long time. We’re frankly lucky we haven’t had the keys to the White House stolen and the whole place posted as a vacation rental. Which someone would attempt to occupy, getting themselves shot by the Secret Service. When we’re having a good week, we don’t leak nuclear launch codes. National security says, ‘Try not to start a war you can avoid.’ It doesn’t say a damn thing about aliens. Even if it did, we’re not the only ones on this planet. Every single country on this big blue marble gets to have an opinion about an alien invasion. Most of them, it turns out, feel negatively.”

“What does that have to do with you being here?” I asked.

“I’m getting there,” he said. “Agent Brown stood in front of a room full of people and said, ‘The aliens exist, the aliens are definitely real, we had one in our custody, we let it get away.’ Then she took questions. Most folks wanted to know if we were here to enslave the human race.”

“Eat, maybe, but you don’t seem like the enslaving type,” said Mandy.

Senator Davis laughed. “I like this one,” he said. To Mandy, he added, “For an oxygen-sucking primate, you’re all right.”

“Thank you?” Mandy ventured.

“Think nothing of it.” His attention returned to me. “She didn’t say anything about our dietary needs. I assume…?”

“They never got around to testing me on human blood,” I said.

“Amateurs.” He shook his head. “Well, regardless, she’s held her little press conference, and she had sufficient proof to rattle a few cages. They’ll be putting their oxygen sniffers in all the airports by the end of the month. They’ll get plenty of false positives off senior citizens and the unwell, but they may flush out one or two of our scouts if we can’t warn them all that the airports are unsafe. Tell me, Stasia, before your blooming began and your condition became apparent to the naked eye, did you reliably believe in your own nature? Or did you, at times, question whether you might have fallen to a very specific and seductive delusion, one which painted you as special, unique, with no need for human mores?”

“I thought those were supposed to be princess fantasies, not space-plant fantasies,” I said.

Senator Davis smiled. “To each their own.”

“Right. Um. To answer your question, sometimes I sort of doubted myself, but I was so consistent, and if I didn’t try to think about it, I knew I was telling the truth. I couldn’t be anything aside from what I was.”

“And why do you think we were planted here so early?”

“Cultural literacy,” I said, without hesitation.

“That’s the answer every one of us gives,” he said. “Do you know what it means?”

This time I did hesitate, trying to find the answer that had been eluding me. Finally, I shook my head. “No. I’ve been thinking about it, but it doesn’t make sense. We’ve been here so long. Even if the armada was on the other side of the galaxy, there was no reason to send us this far in advance—no reason except for the cultural-literacy thing. But we could have accomplished that in a year. They gave us decades.”

“That’s another word you all use, you know,” said Toni. “You all say ‘armada.’ Not ‘fleet,’ or ‘ships,’ or even ‘invasion.’ ‘Armada.’ Doesn’t that say something?”

“Yes, it says ‘armada,’” said Jeff, raising an eyebrow. The effect was surreal, given his largely green complexion.

Toni snorted. “It’s nice to know that stupidity isn’t a purely human trait. Even if you assholes eat us all, you’ll still have to deal with the limitations of your own intellect. I’ve listened to you argue about whether you were coming in peace, and here’s the final answer: you’re not coming in peace. Even if we weren’t delicious, you wouldn’t be coming in peace.”

“You can’t know that,” protested Mandy. “Cows are delicious, and PETA exists.”

“Going to ignore the part where you just compared humanity to cattle, and move on to the more-salient point that PETA exists because people abuse animals. I don’t like their approach, I don’t like the way they treat pets, I don’t like basically anything about them, and yet I can’t pretend we didn’t bring them on ourselves by acting like assholes toward our fellow creatures—who, by the way, at least share an evolutionary origin with humanity, which is more than we can say about our uninvited guests.”

The senator raised an eyebrow, looking genuinely amused. “All right, then: how do you know that we don’t come in peace?”

“No one brings an armada when they’re ‘coming in peace,’” Toni said. “They might bring a fleet, or an expedition, or even a detachment, but they don’t bring an armada. An armada is what you bring when you’re looking to fuck shit up. Your people are coming here to fuck shit up, and I don’t expect them to apologize for it.”

“Interesting,” he said. “So you think our cultural literacy will come with a precise vocabulary? Do you honestly believe every scout on this planet will choose the same words for the same situations?”

“You do,” said Toni. “And when it’s important, so do I. I’ve spoken to dozens of you. More than just about anybody else who isn’t one of you. You’re consistent. You understand that, right? When someone asks if you’re an alien invader, you say yes. When you meet someone new, you tell them exactly what you are. How did you learn to suppress that instinct long enough to get elected?”

“I didn’t.” For the first time, Senator Davis looked uncomfortable. “It was a running joke throughout my campaign. Politicians can’t be trusted, so why not elect an alien? It played remarkably well with my constituents, and with some finesse, it didn’t do too badly with my peers. I was hoping to learn to suppress the instinct, as you call it, long enough to make a run for the White House, but I’m afraid some things were never meant to be.”

“Oh, poor little fern, denied access to somebody else’s nuclear weapons.” Toni mock-pouted. “I bet that hurt your green alien heart. But yeah, see, where it matters, you all seem to have been programmed to spill your guts when given the slightest opportunity. So you tell strangers you’ve come from your home planet because Mars needs women and Alpha Centauri needs water, and you always call your ride an ‘armada.’ You’re not coming in peace.”

“Fascinating,” said the senator.

Toni wasn’t done. Maybe it would have been better if she had been. “That’s the real reason you’re here: because that programming doesn’t go away when it gets inconvenient, does it? Lots of your political rivals probably know you ran for office on the friendly neighborhood alien platform. They’ve been waiting for you to come out and say something about the current situation, and as soon as Agent Brown held her little press conference, your clock ran out. Now it’s speak or be looked at with suspicion. Maybe a blood test. Maybe one of those nifty oxygen sniffers in your office, where you won’t notice until it’s too late. No one gets to pretend to be human anymore—and that could be part of why your programming makes you so eager to blow what little cover you’ve got. This way, when the chips are down, you side with your own kind. Have you found anyone who’s decided they’d be better off throwing their lot in with the humans?”

I could feel Graham’s gaze on my face, warm and comforting. I wanted to turn toward it. I wanted to tell him I was going to stand with humanity. Humanity had adopted me, taken me in, and raised me as its own. Even if it had done so assuming I belonged, the fact was that all my formative years had been spent among humans. Humanity was what I knew, what I understood.

And just like that, I understood everything.

“I need to go outside,” I said, standing so abruptly that my chair nearly went over backward.

No one said a word as I walked out of the room. Not even Graham.

2.

The sun was so hot it felt like the light had weight, smothering any trace of coolness or comfort. I walked to the edge of the empty swimming pool and sat, dangling my feet above the basking rattlesnakes. A few shook their tails in a disinterested manner before they returned to their silent sunbathing. Either they were too comfortable to put on a proper threat display, or they were already starting to dismiss us as threats.

Was it because they were rattlesnakes, the baddest of the bad and the kings of this desert? Or was it because they didn’t register me as human? I wanted it to be the former. I was direly afraid it was going to be the latter.

Someone’s foot scuffed the concrete behind me. I turned my face toward the sun and closed my eyes, refusing to let myself look. If I didn’t know, I wasn’t deciding who to tell. If I didn’t know, I wasn’t confirming my loyalties—not yet. Even though really, my loyalties had been decided the moment my unthinking vines had grabbed hold of a little girl whose only crime had been following a delicious scent into the forest where she wasn’t supposed to go.

“I know what the cultural literacy is for,” I said. “I know why they dropped us here so early.”

The person behind me said nothing as they moved to the edge of the pool and sat down. I resisted the urge to reach for their hand. Whoever they were didn’t matter as much as the fact that they were there: they were listening.

“Cats don’t hate mice. They like to chase them. They like to hunt them. They may even like killing them, although I guess most cats like eating them better than they like the hunt itself. Mice are a means to an end. Want a full belly, catch a mouse. So when a mouse gets away, the cat isn’t mad. The cat doesn’t care enough to be mad. If you put a cat in a barn full of mice, some of the mice will always get away. They wouldn’t, if the cat cared more. If the cat knew how to hate.”

Silence. If I hadn’t been able to hear my unknown companion breathing, I would have thought that I was hallucinating.

“They sent us here to learn how to hate. To learn how to think and hold grudges like a human. The cultural literacy isn’t about preserving human history or making sure the universe will remember them. It’s about telling us what form the rebellion will take. We can’t afford to be cats chasing mice. We can’t afford not to care. We have to know how the mice think. We have to…” I stopped, catching my breath, thinking of all the people who’d mocked me or made me feel like I was crazy over the years. All the people who’d seen my insistence that I was from space as an excuse to treat me like I was less than they were.

My own people—my species, whatever it was—had done this to me. Had turned me into a freak among the ones who should have been my own kind, and all so I could learn to hate.

I opened my eyes. I turned. Graham didn’t flinch away. Instead, he slipped his hand into mine and looked at me sadly, nothing but acceptance in his eyes.

“We have to hate,” I whispered.

He held my hand as I leaned over to rest my head against his shoulder, and the Arizona sun beat down on us, and I had no idea what to do.