Page 6 of Overgrowth

Zoom was all fucked up. After the third time my call dropped without connecting, I started to wonder whether it might have something to do with the alien transmission. Not in the sense of “the aliens are screwing with the internet”—the aliens weren’t close enough for that, and I didn’t think they knew enough about Earth communications to be jerks on that kind of micro level—but in the sense of “everyone on the planet is talking about this, and that probably means the network is overloaded.”

I leaned back in my chair and glared at the screen. Glaring has never been known to fix network connectivity issues, but there’s always a first time. We’d never received signals from an extraterrestrial source before, either.

The structure of the thought hit me a split second after the thought itself. I forgot to glare, suddenly sunk in an existential dilemma even more frustrating than my Zoom issues. Were “we” receiving our first extraterrestrial signal? Did I have any right to include myself in that group, given how much of my life had been spent willfully denying inclusion? Or had “they” received their first extraterrestrial signal, while I’d received proof that I was no longer going to be alone in a world filled with complex, confusing mammals?

The screen beeped. The plain white square was replaced by the interior of a high-tech tent, with scientific equipment around the edges of the frame and a man’s sweet, earnest face at the center. His cheeks were covered in reddish stubble, signaling that Graham had once again decided that being in the field was the perfect excuse to stop shaving. There were no visible bandages. That was a nice change.

“Stasia,” he said, sagging in relief. “I was hoping you’d call.”

“Why not call me?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t know whether you’d be at your computer, or whether you’d be in any condition to talk.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “You’re the one in the swamp. I didn’t know whether you’d be at your computer, either.”

“Of course I am,” he said. “I told my team lead I needed to be here in case my girlfriend, the alien, decided to call and tell me to come home.”

“Seymour misses you.” I held up the cat as a demonstration. Seymour dangled in my hands, a dead weight, not acknowledging my claim. “And yes, I miss you, too. But I’m not going to tell you to come home before you’re done. You’re doing good work.”

“I’m doing grunt work,” he said. “It’s not the same thing, even though I appreciate your faith in me.”

“It looks good on a résumé and it keeps you working in your field, which means you don’t have to look elsewhere for your scaled delights, and I don’t have to move someplace with more snakes.”

Graham smiled, fond and concerned. “That’s my girl,” he said.

“Always,” I said, and smiled back.

Graham and I met in college, when we’d taken the same English elective to round out our course load. He’d been planning to become a herpetologist; I’d been planning to become a computer scientist. We’d both been derailed by the world, but we’d held on to the core of our disciplines, and we’d held on to each other. The make-outs were nice. The sex was nice, too. The friendship, though, the understanding and affection… those were better.

After school, I’d decided eighty-hour weeks and nervous breakdowns weren’t for me and gone into customer service instead, while Graham had gone to work in the research division of a large software company. His team did general science, with the goal of finding ways to apply that science to new technological breakthroughs for his employers. As long as they were willing to let him keep spending all his free time on his beloved snakes, that was fine with him.

The only bad thing he’d ever done to me was Roxanna. She wasn’t a coworker, but she was a colleague, and he’d been the one who urged her to go to Burning Man, just to try it out. Without him, Lucas might have found a girlfriend I was less inclined to drown in the nearest body of standing water.

Oh, well. Nobody’s perfect.

“How are you holding up?” he asked. “Is it… you know?”

“I’m okay.” I shrugged. “A little shaken, I guess? I’m having to ask myself a lot of questions. I don’t know that I’m going to like all the answers I get. But I’m okay.”

Graham looked at me oddly. “You didn’t answer my second question.”

“I need you to come home.”

It was the sort of bald, needy declaration that rarely arose between us. Graham blinked, looking nonplussed. Then he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess you answered it after all. Is tomorrow soon enough?”

“It should be,” I said. “Is it going to be a problem?”

His laugh was unsteady. “Honestly, no. A few of my teammates have asked about you. They wanted me to find out whether you recognized the signal.”

Graham has never questioned whether or not I’m what I claim to be. If Mandy chose to believe me because it didn’t hurt anything for her to do so, Graham chose to believe me because he didn’t think I’d lie to him. That meant he’d known what he was doing the first time he’d invited me to one of his company get-togethers, and hadn’t been bothered in the slightest when I had introduced myself to all of them as the vanguard of an invasion. They were computer people, and scientists, and that meant that for the most part, they were exceptionally tolerant of strangeness.

I think some of them actually hoped for proof of my extraterrestrial nature, since it would give them a leg up on the competition. No better way to win the software wars than to be the first to press into the rest of the galaxy.

“Oh,” I said, and laughed unsteadily.

Graham went still. He leaned closer. “Stasia,” he said, “ did you recognize the signal?”

I didn’t trust my voice. I bit my lip and nodded, trusting his knowledge of my expressions to make my meaning clear.

Graham’s eyes widened. “Wow,” he said. “So this is… You think it’s real? It’s not some sort of hoax?”

“I don’t know this Dr. Vornholt,” I said.

“No one knows him,” said Graham. “I’ve been calling in favors all morning, and nobody has any idea who he is.”

“Then how—”

“Did he get access to the equipment he’d need to pick up this signal? No idea. I think we may be dealing with someone publishing under a fake name.”

“That feels like a vote in favor of ‘hoax.’” I frowned. “But I’ve heard that signal before. I… I understood it. How could I understand it if it was a hoax?”

For a moment, Graham didn’t say anything, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. I could understand it if there was nothing to understand, if the part of my mind which insisted I was an alien was feeding me false data. My understanding of the signal was both the lady and the tiger, because either it proved, absolutely, that I was truly alien, or it proved—with the same certainty—that I had never been an alien at all.

“We know the signal was intercepted by the Portland Observatory,” said Graham. “We could go there and ask to speak with Dr. Vornholt.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t find him.”

“I can’t. No one can. Which makes me think the ‘fake name’ theory is probably the right one.” Graham smiled, half-encouraging and half-strained, and the absence of artificial cheer was probably the best part of his expression. “What do you say? Want to go to Stephen King country and see if we can find the person who talks to aliens?”

I didn’t have to think. “Yes,” I said. “I have some vacation time. I’ll make this work. Just… come home, okay?”

Graham’s smile slowly dissolved into a cautious frown. “You got a bad feeling?”

“I want you to stay near me until this is over. Whatever it is.”

Whatever it was, it was going to get worse before it got better… and “better” was still very much in the eye of the beholder.

“Come home,” I repeated.

Graham hesitated before he nodded.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”