Page 8 of Overgrowth
The officer showed us to a small, square room equipped with its own miniature X-ray belt. The door swung shut behind us with an ominous “click.” Graham and I exchanged a look.
“I would check to see if it just locked itself, but I don’t think I need to, and I’m pretty sure we’re on camera,” he said. “If the sound ‘accidentally’ cut out, it would look like I was trying to escape.”
“So let’s not do that,” I agreed. The TSA has improved since its inception, but they’re still a government agency, and they have more power to disappear people than I like to think about. If we pissed them off or drew too much attention to ourselves, missing our flight would be the least of our worries.
This was what happened after a single confirmed alien signal was reported to the public. What would happen when the ships arrived? When the invasion began? There was no coming in peace, not when people were so eager to give in to fear. There was coming in aggression, or there was staying a safe distance away, abandoning me and the others like me to whatever this planet had in store for traitors.
A door on the far side of the room swung open. Three more guards stepped through. One of them had another canine unit, holding tight to its harness as it strained to reach me. Unlike the first canine unit, which had been a standard German shepherd, assistant to police and security forces everywhere, this one was a bloodhound, face framed by droopy ears and droopier skin, eyes sad among concealing folds. There was nothing sad about its nose, which twitched as it tested the air. It kept its focus on me.
The handler wasn’t moving fast enough for the dog. “Baroooo!” announced the bloodhound, voice too large for this small space. “Baroooooooo!”
“I didn’t think they were supposed to bark when they were working,” I said, swallowing the urge to take a step back, to put some distance between myself and the eager beast.
I’ve never been much of a dog person. They don’t care for me, and I don’t care for them, and as long as we give each other a wide berth, everything’s fine. Something about the way I smell upsets them. That was probably what was happening now, why the bloodhound looked ready to pull its handler clean off his feet in order to get to me.
The guard in the middle held up her tablet, swiped her finger across the screen, and asked, “Are you Anastasia Miller and Graham Fordham?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” said Graham. Neither of us offered any more information. That was never a good idea when dealing with law enforcement of any kind.
“I see here that your final destination is Portland, Maine. Is this correct?” The question was mild, but when she looked up to study our faces, her eyes were sharp. “What is your business in Maine?”
“We’re visiting the observatory that captured the alien signal,” said Graham. “I’m a scientist, I work in novel fields, and we’d like to see if we can get access to the raw data feed.”
“I see,” said the guard. “Is there a reason this data feed can’t be provided to you here, in Seattle?”
“Data changes when it’s compressed or re-expanded. There may be no fidelity loss within the signal, but it’s possible there’s something I can’t find unless I study the original.” Graham smiled, trying to look easy in his own skin, like this sort of thing didn’t bother him in the slightest. “It’s like an art historian wanting to go to France to see the Mona Lisa. Yes, she’s been scanned and photographed more than any other painting in the world, but there are things that can only be discovered by sitting down with the lady and really getting to know her.”
“I see,” said the guard. She tapped her tablet surface. “Miss Miller? Why are you accompanying Mr. Fordham? I don’t see anything here about your having a background in data analysis. Or art history.” There was a cruel lilt to her last two words, like she was mocking not just the analogy but Graham himself.
So much for the pretense that we needed to carry our IDs for easy review while in the airport. We’d shown them at the check-in desk, and that had been enough for the airport security systems to know who we were. Security cameras, complete with facial recognition and gait analysis, had been following us ever since. The TSA knew exactly who we were, and wouldn’t be losing track of us until we exited the airport at our final destination… if even then. It would be easy to yield to paranoia, picturing a world where we were tracked all the time, no matter what we were doing.
Maybe we were witnessing the latest steps toward exactly that. Privacy has been dying since I was a child, and the alien signal—the potential for invasion—could be the excuse the government needed to clamp down hard and never let go.
“You know who I am,” I said, not making any effort to keep the weariness out of my tone. “You know why I’m going.”
“Anastasia Miller, age thirty-five, master’s degree in computer science, currently employed as a second-tier customer service technician for a local internet provider—really?” For the first time, the guard looked faintly bemused. “Why bother with an advanced degree if you were going to take two steps past entry level and stop?”
“I put down roots,” I said. My mother had asked me the same question, on one of the rare occasions when my mother had asked me a question at all. We had fallen out of the habit of questioning each other, somewhere between my disappearance and my insistence that I was my own person and that person was not a human being.
“I see.” The guard lowered her tablet. “What is your interest in the alien signal?”
I could feel Graham watching me. Not hoping I would keep my mouth shut—he’d never asked me to lie about my convictions, even as he’d asked me to please tell him if I ever decided I wanted to be human again, to be helped through whatever made me abandon my humanity as a bad dream—but waiting to hear what I was going to say, and how much trouble I was going to get us into.
Smiling my biggest, sweetest smile, I said, “Well, I’m from Mars, see, and I wanted to listen to the signal without any Earth tech in the way, so I could figure out if it was our neighbors, the Jovians, trying to make first contact before we could.”
The guard frowned. “The Jovians would be…?”
“Oh, they’re from Jupiter. They’re sort of big jellyfish with tendrils a mile long and terrible breath.” I fanned the air exaggeratedly. “You don’t want to make first contact with them. They’re big jerks.”
“Is there a problem?” asked Graham. “I didn’t think flying while alien was against the law. Since up until a week ago, most people thought aliens didn’t exist.”
“Anastasia Miller, age thirty-five,” said the guard again, more disgusted this time. “According to our files, you have been claiming to be extraterrestrial in origin since you were three years old. That’s rather unusual for a child, don’t you think?”
“Not really,” I said. “Children don’t distinguish fantasy from reality the way adults do. I’ve known children who said they were monsters, that they were ghosts wearing new skins, that they were going to devour everyone they loved—and those are the well-adjusted ones. For a child to say ‘I’m an alien’ is perfectly normal.”
“What about for an adult?”
“I can’t speak for everyone,” I said, with a shrug. “In my case, I’m pretty stubborn. The more people told me I couldn’t be an alien, the more I insisted, and eventually it just stuck.” Eventually, it had been picked up by the tabloids and the gossip blogs looking to follow up on the mystery of the disappearing, reappearing child. Various alien-encounter groups had invited me to appear before them as a guest, starting literally on the day I’d turned eighteen and been able to legally insist on receiving my own mail.
I wasn’t sure whether my visibility made me a better scout or a worse one. It definitely made me worse at infiltration, since there had never been a hope in hell that I’d be able to stay hidden. But I kept smiling politely at the guards, while the bloodhound continued to strain toward me, nose quivering, bloodshot eyes locked on my body.
“Barooo,” it said again, sounding as annoyed as was possible for a dog. It had found what it wanted, and it wasn’t being allowed to catch it, or being told what a good hound it was for doing the spotting.
I was okay with that, since what it wanted was me, and I didn’t know why, or what it would do if it got me. My hands were tingling, a clear response to stress. Was this how I found out for sure I wasn’t human? In an airport security room, with a trained dog trying to—
Wait. “What does that dog do ?” I asked, suddenly frowning. “Is it an alien-sniffing dog? Do you have an alien-sniffing dog? That doesn’t make sense. Nobody even knows what the aliens would look like. How would we know what the aliens smell like? I think this is a stunt. I think you’re trying to… I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but you’re trying to do it to us, right now.” I stopped smiling and started glaring.
“Take him out of here,” snapped the guard. The bloodhound’s handler wrestled the dog back under control before dragging him back out the door. The third guard, the one with neither tablet nor dog, remained where he was, standing at the soft slouch that seems to serve the TSA as attention.
The guard with the tablet returned her gaze to me and Graham. “Were you aware that there are, presently, fifteen thousand American citizens who claim to come from another planet?”
“No,” I admitted. Given the size of the US population, the number seemed refreshingly low, like it could also be the number of ambidextrous natural redheads with heterochromia and lactose intolerance. If I were the government, I wouldn’t have been worried about the resident extraterrestrials at all. I would have been worried about the ones now coming in my direction.
“Further, were you aware that one-third of those individuals regularly utilize air travel services?”
“Everyone takes a plane to get where they need to go, when where they need to go is far away,” I said.
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “Not everyone claims to be extraterrestrial in origin.”
“Wait,” said Graham. “Are you saying this is all… what, the TSA equivalent of an improv show? You use a trained dog to make us think you can pick up something strange about us, and then you try to get us to admit to doing something wrong? We’re about to do something wrong. We’re about to miss our flight.”
The guard’s smile was arctic. “I’m not sure I see where that’s my problem, sir. I’m just a public servant, trying to do my job.”
“I would say this was a little farfetched, if it weren’t happening to me and my girlfriend right now in real time.”
“Life is frequently a little farfetched,” said the guard. She looked at me. “Mars, huh? How come that isn’t in your file?”
“I’m shy.” Shy, and capable of lying. I didn’t know the name of my home planet, if I could even be said to have a home planet: people don’t usually say they’re from wherever their ancestors lived, they say they’re from where they were born. Well, by that standard, I was as American as anyone. I was born, I died, and I was born again, all in the forests of Washington State. Maybe my genetic material was from outer space, but everything that made me Stasia Miller was from Earth. I wasn’t human. That didn’t mean I didn’t belong here.
The contradiction was painful if I thought about it too much. There were probably people who would be happy to tell me how wrong I was, how delusional it was to assume the place where I was raised was the place where I belonged. They were probably the same people who insisted that naming football teams after racial slurs was “honoring” the people they’d killed and imprisoned in order to take the land the stadium was built on. The question of who’s being colonized and who’s doing the colonizing has always been a societal one. Individuals can stand to either side of the divide.
Graham looked flatly at the guard. I did my best to do the same, standing my ground and not letting my discomfort show. She tapped her tablet a few more times, not making eye contact with either of us. Maybe she thought that whatever red flags were on our files were catching.
Given that Graham had never claimed to be from another planet, maybe they were.
“If you will put your possessions on the belt, I’ll have one of my agents escort you to your plane,” said the guard brusquely. “Boarding is about to begin. We’ll get you on with the priority group.”
“Thank you,” said Graham.
“Are we going to get this when we fly home, too?” I asked.
The guard finally looked up, finally met my eyes. She looked haunted, like something had removed all the light from inside of her, leaving her empty and afraid.
“You’re going to get this every time you fly for the rest of your life,” she said. “We’re not alone anymore. Until we can know for sure that you’re one of us, and not one of them, you’re going to get this. Because we don’t know what they look like. We don’t know where they come from. And we don’t know what they want.” Her smile was abrupt and startling in its ferocity.
“Have a nice flight,” she said, and turned and left the room, leaving us alone with the third guard, who moved to start the X-ray belt. Graham and I exchanged a look before we put our bags down. We wanted to object. We wanted to argue. We needed to fly.
The plane wasn’t going to wait for us, and after this—after all of this—I didn’t want to count on being able to catch a later flight. The invasion might not even have time to start. More and more, I was starting to feel like humanity was going to tear itself apart without our help.