Page 4 of Overgrowth

Seattle, Washington: July 16, 2031

Twenty-two days pre-invasion

1.

Work, again: the slow grind against a stone made of people who hated me for being different and good at my job. Another talk with my supervisor about the way people touched my things, ending with the not-so-subtle suggestion that maybe it was time I clean all the personal items out of my desk. It felt like failure. It felt like giving ground. It also felt like the only way to win. Sometimes retreat is your only way to take the resources your enemy wants away.

A few of my coworkers looked over and snickered when they saw me packing my toys. I guess they saw the failure on my part, and the corresponding victory on their own, as clearly as I did. At least until the message from HR hit our inboxes, stating that since we had shown we couldn’t be respectful of one another’s things, we could no longer keep any personal items in our cubes. This included family photos and office supplies brought from home. Boxes would be distributed by the end of the day.

The snickers stopped then. So did the smug looks, replaced by glares. I wanted to tell them this wasn’t my fault, that if they had left me alone—if they had shown me the simple courtesy I was expected to show them—we would all be able to keep our nice things where we wanted them, and no one would be able to take them away. I didn’t say a word. Anything I said would only have made things worse, by proving I was smug about getting my way.

This wasn’t my way. This sort of passive, sneaky backstabbing wasn’t my way. I had always been open about what I was and what I wanted, and I had at least tried to make friends. I had tried.

The end of the work day is always nice, but I don’t think I’d ever been so glad to see the clock tick over. I grabbed my bag and my box of personal effects and hoofed it for the door, hoping to avoid confrontation with any of my coworkers. That was the last thing I needed to make my day truly terrible.

Home. Yes. Home, and Seymour, and a big bowl of buttered popcorn while I put some terrible movie on the TV and stopped dwelling on how much I was coming to hate the human race. Moments like this, I truly hoped I was right about my origins, because the invasion couldn’t come fast enough for me.

A few people were already at the bus stop when I walked up. They were all from different teams or different offices, and so there was no active unfriendliness in the air, just the tired distance of people who really didn’t want to talk to a stranger. I appreciated that. Tomorrow, and the yelling at me for ruining their desks, would come soon enough. I put my headphones on and tuned my iPod to one of my best “hate the world a little less” mixes, trying to let the music soothe my soul.

Bullies are bullies, no matter how old they are, and they always find a way to blame the bullied for the consequences of their own actions. I was weird. That was reason enough for everything to be my fault, and it always would be. It always will be.

Humans are awful.

A few more people arrived at the stop. They struck up a lively conversation, and soon, almost everyone was chatting with a surprising degree of animation for a Monday afternoon. I considered removing my headphones long enough to find out what was going on. No one looked actively distressed. It was probably some development on the latest season of America’s Got Talent, which had been running since I was a child, and nothing I needed to worry about. I needed the peace and quiet more than I needed to know why they were so excited.

Decisions like that that had long since solidified my reputation as antisocial. I wasn’t going to change it any time soon.

The bus pulled up. We all got on, and I sat quietly as everyone chattered and waved their hands. This degree of excitement was unusual, and again, I considered finding out—but the song on my iPod was a good one, and I had been dealing with people for so many hours. I just wanted to get home. If this was such a big deal, there would be something about it online.

People got on the bus. People got off the bus. Some of the new people joined the ongoing conversation, waving their hands enough that I started to suspect this was something bigger than reality television. The more crowded and enthusiastic the conversation became, the less I felt like taking off my headphones. Joining a discussion with six strangers was one thing; joining a discussion with twenty was probably better avoided.

By the time we reached the park and ride where I was meeting Lucas, I was exhausted from the effort of not paying attention to what was happening around me. I hopped off the bus and trotted to the car, relieved to see Lucas waiting for me.

He started to talk as soon as I had my door open, his mouth moving fast as he gestured with one hand. I shook my head and pointed to my headphones.

“Just a second,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”

He knew that. I always got into the car with my music playing, like hearing even a few seconds of unfiltered street noise could hurt me. I slammed the door, fastened my seatbelt, and hooked the buds out of my ears, stuffing them into my pocket.

“All right,” I said. “I can hear you now. What’s up?”

Lucas stared at me, wide-eyed and apparently stunned. “Stasia,” he said. “Have you had those things on since you left work?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“So you don’t know. You actually don’t know.”

I frowned. “Don’t know what?” It couldn’t have been a terrorist attack or a quarantine or any of the other big, scary things they liked to warn us about on the news. There would have been some sort of announcement, not just people talking on the bus, and they would have been scared, not excited. There was no way I’d missed anything that important.

“Holy shit.” Lucas slumped in his seat, raking his hair out of his eyes. It made him look disheveled and younger than he was. It was rare enough to see Lucas off-balance that I didn’t say anything, just blinked and waited for the world to start making sense again.

“Okay,” he said, after a long moment. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start this car, and we’re going to drive home, where I will show you what I’m talking about. And then we can have a reasonable conversation, without me staring at you like… I don’t know, like some kind of asshole who stares.”

“Right,” I said, bemused.

Lucas put the car in drive. He didn’t turn on the radio. That, alone, was a solid signal that something was going on. He’s like me, in that he lives for his music. A silent moment is a moment wasted. Well, we were wasting a lot of moments now, letting them trickle through our fingers and into uncomfortable stillness. I didn’t know how to deal with this sort of silence. I spindled a fold of my T-shirt between my fingers, and waited for it to end.

My therapist says silence scares me. She says it’s old scar tissue from what happened when I was three, that my captors probably kept me locked somewhere until they decided what they were going to do with me. I do okay with music, and I do okay with voices, but the absence of both isn’t something I handle well.

Luckily, Lucas didn’t need to stop for gas or anything else on the way home, which made the ride as short as possible. I sat up and blinked when the driveway came into view. Mandy’s car was already there, waiting for us.

“The hell—?”

“Like I said, I don’t want to be staring at you like some kind of asshole,” said Lucas, and pulled into his side of the driveway. He paused to give me an unreadable look before getting out and heading for the door. I stayed where I was for a long moment, staring after him, trying to get my nascent panic and flowering confusion under control. Something was happening. Something big. I just had no idea what it was.

Slowly, I undid my belt, got out of the car, and followed him to the open door.

The television was on inside, paused by the remote in Mandy’s hand, while Mandy herself was seated on the couch and twisted all the way around to watch me come in. Lucas was standing off to one side, looking suddenly and profoundly uncomfortable.

I squirmed. “What?” I asked. “Am I being evicted?” Drawn by the sound of my voice, Seymour trotted down the hall and twisted around my ankles, chirping and trilling for my attention. For once, it didn’t make me feel any better. My mind was racing, thinking about how much harder it would be to find an apartment that allowed pets—and how I could never leave Seymour behind. Sometimes I thought he was the only good thing about the world, and without him, it would be easy to forget anything about this planet was worth preserving.

Wait. No. That was a bad thought, the kind my therapist called “intrusive,” although apparently most people have intrusive thoughts about self-harm and breaking things, not about eliminating all life on Earth. Or maybe the people who have extinction-level invasive thoughts just don’t like to admit it. Maybe they’re all smarter than I am and know how to keep their mouths shut.

“Does she know?” asked Mandy, attention going to Lucas.

Lucas shook his head.

“Okay. I thought— Okay. We’re going to do this. Stasia, come sit down.”

I went. I sat. Seymour leapt onto my lap, turning around once before curling into a tight knot of black-and-white fur. I began to stroke him automatically, letting the familiar motion soothe me.

“I don’t know what I did, but I’m really sorry,” I said. My voice sounded high and panicky, like I was on the verge of bursting into tears. I probably was. “Please don’t make me move again. I don’t want to move.”

Mandy’s eyes widened. She was still in her work clothes, which just added to the surrealistic quality of the moment. Seeing Mandy on the couch, wearing a dress that looked like it belonged on an elementary school teacher instead of something covered in jellyfish or sugar skulls or the word “fuck” printed over and over again in a cheerful cartoon print was… jarring. It was wrong.

“We’re not kicking you out,” she said, almost offended. She slanted a glance at Lucas, who winced and took an involuntary step back. Not unwise. “I thought Lucas was going to bring you up to speed in the car.”

“I didn’t want to do it twice,” he protested.

“You mean you chickened out and left it for me,” she said sweetly, and turned back to me. She handed me the remote. “I pulled up the report you need to see and paused it for you. Just press Play.”

I looked at her blankly. She gave me an encouraging nod. I turned to the television. I pressed Play.

Sometimes I wonder how we survived when televisions were only televisions and not a way to watch Netflix and YouTube and a hundred other streaming services, some more specialized than others. Mandy had paused on the CNN science news stream, which was one of the only sub-streams not inclined to dissolve into wild speculation about the sex lives of celebrities when there was nothing better to talk about.

The talking head of the moment—a redheaded woman with a solemn, lineless face, like she was being CGI-refined in real time—looked at the camera and said, in a pleasantly modulated voice, “We have received confirmation from NASA, the ISS, and other related parties, and can now report with near certainty that the signal you are about to hear is extraterrestrial in origin. Again, this was recorded at seven thirty-five p.m., Eastern Standard Time, by Dr. Anthony Vornholt of the Portland Observatory.”

Her composure flickered. Only for a moment. Long enough for me to see the raw animal fear behind her eyes, hot and bright and terrified.

“It is my duty to inform you that we are no longer alone in the galaxy. Our neighbors have finally found us.”

The picture cut out, replaced by a black screen with a white rectangle in the middle, framing a single line of text which identified the sound’s original location and the astronomer who recorded it. I barely noticed. I was too busy listening to something that should have been static but was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard, something I had never heard outside my dreams. It was the sound of branches rubbing together in alien air, the song of dragonfly petals trembling in a forest the size of a continent. It went on and on, chiming, climbing, moving through musical formations that were alien to anything Earth had ever borne. I knew that if I listened hard enough, long enough, I would understand it. I leaned forward, completely focused on the sound—

Then it stopped.

I jerked upright, startled. The television was off. Mandy had taken the remote out of my hand while I was transfixed. She was looking at me, mouth a thin line, that same animal fear showing behind her eyes.

“Anastasia,” she said. “What was that?”

“It was beautiful,” I said. I felt suddenly, utterly serene. I hadn’t been wrong. All that time, all those years, I hadn’t been wrong. It had taken decades for them to come for me, but now that they were here, things were going to change.

I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t a liar. I wasn’t a human being. I was what I’d always claimed to be, and my people were coming to take me home, and maybe I should have been upset to realize I wasn’t what I seemed to be, but I never asked to look human. I never asked to lie through the shape of my bones, when my voice only ever told the truth.

“But what was that?” she pressed.

I frowned, trying to figure out what she wanted me to say. “It was… it was ‘hello,’” I said finally. “It was the last warning.”

“What do you mean, the last warning?” asked Lucas.

I shrugged. “They’re coming. I told you they were, remember? They’re coming, and they wanted you to know how close they are.” They wanted me to know.

After all this time, I was finally going home.