The Frequency of Aliens Read online

  The Frequency of Aliens

  Gene Doucette

  The Frequency of Aliens

  By Gene Doucette

  GeneDoucette.me

  Copyright © 2017 Gene Doucette

  All rights reserved

  Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs

  This book may not be reproduced by any means including but not limited to photocopy, digital, auditory, and/or in print.

  Contents

  Prologue: The Notion at the End of the Lane

  I. March

  1. School Daze

  2. Flowers for Algernon

  3. Bring Out Your Dead

  4. Remember the Albatross

  5. The Affairs of Dragons

  II. April

  6. True Stories

  7. More Human Than Human

  8. Who Hears a Horton?

  9. Paranoid Enough

  III. May

  10. Strangeness in a Strange Land

  11. Cabin in the Woods

  12. The Alien in the Cupboard

  13. The Ghost and Ms. Collins

  14. Row Your Battleship

  15. Party at the End of the World

  16. A Friend In Need

  17. Communication Breakup

  18. The Backroads Less Traveled

  IV. Summer Break

  19. Occupation Hazard

  20. Crossed Signals

  21. The Monster at the End of This Book

  22. Surrender Dorothy

  23. The Briar Patch

  24. The Secret Garden

  About the Author

  Also by Gene Doucette

  Prologue: The Notion at the End of the Lane

  When a spaceship that was unquestionably of non-terrestrial origin touched down in a small field in a small town in Massachusetts, it set off a series of events—both small and large—worldwide. Quite a few of those events were fascinating in their own right, being the sort of thing the human race’s collective psyche could only learn about itself following a first contact event. Especially in this case, where the intelligence behind that first contact was truculent to a maddening extent.

  In other words, the ship landed and then didn’t do anything, for a solid three years. It didn’t move, or open. Nobody from inside it talked to anybody outside it. No other ships showed up behind it. It just refused to do anything, not even take a soil sample or stick a thermometer out of an orifice.

  And yet, the consensus was that it existed, and this was a very important fact.

  One specific consequence of this important fact was that every last person who fervently believed in a pet theory of some kind, turned to the nearest person who did not believe in this theory, and said, “you see, I told you I was right.”

  It didn’t at all matter if this pet theory pertained to extraterrestrials, or to outer space in general. The spaceship was an unfathomably impossible thing, and so it proved, by extension, that there were other unfathomably impossible things out there which also were true.

  This didn’t make a tremendous amount of sense as a logical syllogism, but in the days that followed the public announcement confirming the ship’s existence in Sorrow Falls, almost nobody was feeling particularly rational.

  In the American Northwest, Bigfoot sightings quadrupled; the Loch Ness monster made dozens of appearances, including—according to several witnesses—an appearance at a wedding reception; and three different teams of climbers on Mount Everest insisted a talkative Yeti helped them up a particularly challenging pass. El Chupacabra appearances became so common in Brazil that new sightings—including some very good photographs—were relegated to the back-pages of the newspapers if they were reported at all. The same could be said for eyewitness accounts of the Jersey Devil and the Mothman.

  It wasn’t just the cryptid urban legends that saw a boost. Vampire sightings became extremely popular in certain regions of the United States and Western Europe, werewolves apparently roamed the countryside in parts of Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, and something called a rakshasa made regular appearances in India.

  Worldwide, people began seeing ghosts with a degree of regularity that almost made collective delusion the less likely explanation.

  At the same time, just about every pseudoscientific idea got a tremendous boost. The Flat Earth Society began holding quarterly regional meetings that filled up arenas. One in ten Americans reported, in a survey taken six months after the ship landed, that they had been abducted by aliens, and there were nightly UFO sightings all over the world.

  Then there were all the SETI projects: hundreds of people—from self-taught astronomers using homemade equipment to large telescope arrays in places like Latvia and Argentina—reported discovering extrasolar signals from various parts of the night sky, but (importantly) all from different parts of that sky.

  It was a crazy period in world history. The general opinion of rational people at the time was that the surge in fringe beliefs was a manifestation of public hysteria, and needed to be taken just as seriously—from a sociological perspective—as the riots, religious schisms, and mass suicides happening in the same period.

  However—and this was important—there was no reason to believe any of them.

  The ship’s existence was, perhaps, comforting to someone who felt with all sincerity that it confirmed that the planet’s surface was in fact flat, but that didn’t mean they should be taken seriously. Likewise, vampires didn’t suddenly become real; the sky was not now suffused with text messages from alien civilizations; and that wasn’t Bigfoot, it was a bear.

  It was tough to say whose pet theory suffered more when the ship finally did do something, but it was probably the majority who continued to scoff at those obscure theories that came out the worst. Because on the night of The Incident (as it came to be called—The Night of the Living Dead was already taken) Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, was overrun by actual zombies.

  It only made matters worse that the zombies were directly associated with the spaceship, because that further bolstered the arguments many were already making.

  Q: What’s the connection between the Loch Ness Monster and the spaceship?

  A: Who knows, but zombies were involved so there could be one!

  Above and beyond the problem that zombies ended up being real (for at least one night) was everything else that happened during The Incident. One of the things that had been considered true for the entire time the ship was on the surface of the planet—which ceased to be the case at the end of that night, when the ship left the Earth and settled into low orbit—was that nobody could touch it. (This particular detail spawned its own crackpot theory, which was: the ship wasn’t even really there at all. This was, it should be noted, not true.)

  Unfortunately for the No-Shippers and the No-Touchers alike, somebody actually had put a hand on the ship, way back on the night it landed. Improbably, that someone wasn’t the strongest warrior in the land, or the holiest, or the rightful ruler of England. She also was not a secret alien, although this remained in dispute long after the night was over. No, it was a thirteen-year old girl. And three years later, at age sixteen, that girl—her name was Annie Collins—somehow managed to save the world.

  Nobody fully understood how any of that was true, aside from the young Miss Collins and a few other people, and so of course hardly anyone believed it. The logical/pessimistic contingent just assumed there was a better explanation. The fringe theorists believed there was a much weirder explanation. (In this regard, the ‘secret alien’ idea never entirely died.)

  Since the world had essentially stopped making sense when the ship landed, every possible idea was in play, and there wasn’t much anybody could do to correct that record. Yes, zombies had t
urned out to be real, albeit temporarily. Yes, the ship did have an alien inside of it, but that alien was (somehow) more like a non-corporeal malevolent energy-being than the giant bug-thing everyone had planned for. Yes, a sixteen-year old did… something… to save the Earth from total destruction, and yes, it appeared that same sixteen-year-old now had herself a pet spaceship that followed her around.

  However, most could agree that this position was where to draw the line. None of the other stuff people were saying during the ship’s occupation was really true, and the Yetis and vampires and flat earth theories and alien abduction scenarios could be shoved back into the closet again.

  Unfortunately, when it came to at least one fringe theory, the rational consensus ended up being wrong again. It would just take another couple of years before anyone realized it.

  Part I

  March

  1

  School Daze

  Jerry: Welcome back! Today’s guest is the girl everyone’s talking about! Annie Collins!

  (Applause)

  Annie Collins: Hi, glad to be here.

  J: Annie, according to several sources, you almost single-handedly prevented what we’re being told was an actual alien from destroying the planet. I have to ask: was it fun?

  A: Jerry, I have to be honest here, I didn’t do it all alone. I had a lot of help.

  J: But was it fun?

  A: Um. Sure. Sure, it was fun. I guess. You know. Terrifying, mostly, but fun.

  J: I bet it was! And now you have your own spaceship? Is that right?

  A: I’m not really supposed to talk about that.

  J: I also hear there were zombies!

  A: I’m… well yes, there were.

  Audience: Oooo.

  J: Well that’s great, that’s fantastic. And Annie, we have so much more to talk about after the break, but really quick: What’s next for Annie Collins?

  A: College, I hope.

  transcript, The Jerry James show

  “Annie. Annie Collins.”

  The barista—his name was Wally—wasn’t reading the side of the cup, as it only said Annie on it. He knew her full name because pretty much everyone did, and announced it loudly for the same reason: because Annie Collins was a name belonging to a famous person. Appropriately, the announcement made all ten of the customers in the shop turn and look.

  It was something like a prank. Wally got away with it because he happened to know Annie personally to a minor extent, which was to say that she went to the shop regularly; he had introduced himself in the past; and they’d had several conversations lasting more than fifteen seconds. She also knew his name without having to look at the nametag, which was useful because he changed the name on his tag every couple of weeks. Today, he was Brenda.

  “Thanks, Wally,” Annie said, sticking her tongue out. “I hate you, and I’m never speaking to you again. See you tomorrow.”

  He smiled. “See ya.”

  Annie took the cappuccino to the next counter in order to add massive amounts of sugar. This was because she didn’t actually like coffee. But she had learned some time in the third week of her first semester to value caffeine intake more highly than her taste buds, and much more highly than whatever organs were being damaged by all the sugar.

  While she was busy adding sugar, the people in the shop were fighting private battles, as they decided whether to A: pretend to ignore Annie completely, B: go up and introduce themselves, or C: surreptitiously take her picture. What all of them were definitely doing was texting and/or tweeting something along the lines of I’m sharing a coffee shop with Annie Collins right now.

  Annie mostly found it funny. Annoying, sometimes, but mostly funny. Knowing Annie personally was effectively useless to anyone looking to leverage her fame for greater things, because she wasn’t rich, and she couldn’t introduce someone to other famous people, with the possible exception of a few semi-well-known military persons and the president. If anything, getting to know Annie meant someone in the government would be performing a background check.

  Basically, Annie was famous for something that happened in the past, not something she was currently doing or would be doing in the future. It meant the people she could call friend—like Wally, annoying as he was—tended to actually be friends, so far as she could tell.

  Annie liked to think she was pretty good at sniffing out someone coming at her with an agenda. A year’s worth of appearances on talk shows contributed a great deal to her understanding of the artificiality of the human condition as it pertained to engagement with persons of great fame and fortune. One of the things she learned was that strangers tended to interact with their idea of her, and to deal poorly when that idea didn’t jibe with who Annie actually was. The ones who tried to continue to interact with the wrong version of Annie were the ones who wanted something. If they adjusted their understanding and tried to figure out who Annie actually was, there was hope.

  Annie finished prepping the cappuccino, and headed for the door.

  In the corner, near the bathroom, a guy had his cell phone out, trying to line up a decent shot. He looked to be about the same age as Annie, and probably attended the same college. They might even end up in the same classroom sometime in the next few years. Maybe by then, he’d be used to the idea enough to not bother relating their shared existence to his social media circle.

  She paused at the door, and turned to look at a spot somewhere just above the kid with the phone. He was going to take the picture anyway; might as well make it a good one.

  Agent Cora Blankenship was waiting on the other side of the door. Cora was another kind of person Annie had learned to grow accustomed to in the past couple of years: the kind who was paid to follow Annie around.

  “Morning, Cora,” Annie said.

  Cora—Annie couldn’t bring herself to call her Agent Blankenship, even in formal settings—was only a little taller and looked only a little older than Annie. In truth, Cora was twenty-eight, which meant she had nearly a full decade on Annie, but they appeared to be contemporaries, which made the daily transition into the on-campus experience a tiny bit less awkward.

  “Hey, Annie,” Cora said, with a smile that was largely genuine. “We late for calc?”

  “We are indeed. I was up cramming.”

  “Figured.”

  The coffee shop was directly across the street from one of the side entrances to the lower campus. It was only the second-nearest source of coffee in relation to Annie’s dorm room, but the cafeteria coffee was unsustainably bad, which was to say that no matter how much sugar and cream Annie added, she still couldn’t tolerate it.

  She kept waiting for the day when she’d just suddenly start liking coffee, or the day she discovered something that worked just as well but which she liked better. Bonus, if it was also a legal substance.

  Once across the street—a two-lane affair that had no active traffic, because the only thing to get to-and-from in these parts was the college itself—they fell into the speed-walk style that was the customary mode of transportation for the entire campus, especially between periods. Annie’s 8:20 calculus class was off the commons in middle campus, which was a good long walk in the springtime, and the kind of distance that inspired Nordic epics in the winter.

  “What’s today, philosophy?”

  “Yeah, second period. Midterm’s worth a third. You can put in your reports that I actively despise David Hume, if you want.”

  Cora laughed. Annie thought that probably would end up in a report, and further, that this report would go to a team of analysts who would spend a few weeks debating the significance of Annie’s hatred of empiricism in general and Hume in particular. Of course, She only hated Hume on this day, and only because she was about to be tested on him; otherwise, she rather liked what he had to say.

  Annie hoped that this hypothetical room in which her blanket hatred of Hume was hashed out included at least one developmental psychologist telling everyone not to take the mood swings of a nineteen
-year old all that seriously. This seemed unlikely, though, because no matter how many times Annie tried, she couldn’t get the United States government to calm down about her.

  There was a spaceship in synchronous lower orbit directly above Annie Collins, give or take a few degrees. This ship happened to be the most dangerous weapon in the entirety of human history. That it was under the exclusive control of a teenage girl was essentially the worst-case scenario for everybody who ever had to deal with a teenage girl. This was especially so for the largely male elected members of the US government, a collective body that had not shown itself, historically, to be particularly good at understanding women of any age.

  Some wondered, privately—always privately—what would happen if Annie had a bad breakup? Or what if ‘women’s issues’ (because menstruation came with euphemisms in the halls of Congress) made Annie particularly moody one day? Essentially, what if this hormonal ball of young lady decided to vaporize the entire East Coast because she had just Had Enough? Another teen might slam a door, and cry, and eat a tub of ice cream, these important men reasoned, using the best examples they could think of from some combination of twenty-year-old sitcoms and Archie comics. This teen could eradicate all life on the planet.

  In short, Annie Collins was potentially a destroyer god, and from a demographic that probably wouldn’t vote for any of them. This was a genuine nightmare.