What if Your Conscience was Only a Transmission?
Writers of the Future Contest Honorable Mention
Margary McClellan did not remember when the voices started, only that they’d been with her longer than they hadn’t.
This morning, she brushed her teeth, and they whispered sweet nothings; persistent murmurings undergirded her day-to-day with the casual air of existential subtitles. Mostly, the voices spoke gibberish, the caterwauling a ragtag collective of two or three voices droning simultaneously in her ear. Margary learned to drown them out; she compartmentalized them to allow room for her own thinking.
She drove to the store, and her ear’s covert and incessant monologue murmured in the background. This time, just one voice broke through the clamor: ‘Szzcience fiction will lead you aszztray,’ it said. It buzzed in a tremor so nonhuman that she liked to imagine it as the sound a swarm of insects would make should they attempt to speak English. Science fiction will lead you astray. What could that possibly mean? She didn’t read, much preferring salacious reality television, the kind with thirty seasons to get through instead. Finishing one of those programs felt like a real accomplishment.
She dropped it; Margary needed flour for her focaccia.
Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to live a soundless existence, the way others did. She wondered, how can they think straight with so much silence? At this point, she needed the burbling backdrop to function. Of course, there were drawbacks like everything. She’d mistake someone speaking to her as one of her crickets. That’s what she called them: crickets. Because they buzzed like insects, and they commentated on her life like Jiminy.
When she was young, Margary’s mother had taken her to a specialist.
“Do these voices tell you to do anything?” the doctor had asked.
“To make my bed,” Margary had said. “To finish my chores.” If Margary had been truthful with herself and the doctor, she would’ve told the psychologist that she could not truly delineate the crickets from her own inner monologue. And even that was influenced by her mother and father, so really, what did it matter where it came from? Only later in life was she able to identify the external streams of consciousness from her own.
An overly active imagination, the doctor had said. A child’s superpower. A diagnosis of schizophrenia could not be made accurately until around sixteen or seventeen in most cases anyway, she’d said. Best to let nature take its course unless the voices begin to ask for more, to mention danger or harm. Even if they did say such things, Margary told herself, she would not tell. Living without her crickets was akin to amputating a functioning limb. Her mother dropped it. Despite this one unsettling feature, the existence of which Margary was conditioned to keep to herself, she was a good child; she made her bed, and she finished her chores.
At checkout, the attendant spoke over her crickets so that it all became a mishmash of noise. Margary simply nodded and slid a hundred-dollar bill to the clerk, then went about her day.
‘Aszz we were szzaying. Follow the man that comes at szzzix,’ they repeated, once she was alone back in her car.
That was the other tantalizing, inseparable benefit of the crickets: they revealed to her the future, albeit in an entirely gnomic manner. Any attempt at dulling this preternatural ability with antipsychotics or tranquilizers would be met with violence if necessary. She could not abide it. For better or worse, Margary and the crickets were one.
So, a man is paying me a visit, she thought. “Would it be so difficult to just say what it’s for,” she asked aloud, her face red-lit by the car’s brake lights ahead. Her protestation was met with the familiar and collective din: crickets.
Once at home, the groceries needed putting away and the cat needed feeding. All at once the sun was low in the sky, the mockingbirds trilling away just loud enough so Margary could make them out above her own soundtrack.
I better go load the wash, she thought when the faint, dissipated rumble joined forces to say, “Szzzix o’clock. It’szz szzzix o’clock.”
“Oh my,” she said, flustered. “Forget my head next.”
Slipping out to her front stoop, she was surprised to find no one there. Never had the crickets misinformed her, the failures in communication solely born from her own stubbornness, her lack of faith in their foresight. She remembered clearly the crickets telling her to fake an illness and avoid class in grade school. Despite her desperate entreaties, they refused to tell her the reason, and so she decided she could not stomach the lie and went to school in the face of their advice. That day, at the last crosswalk between her and the elementary school doors, a car struck her and broke her arm in three places.
Countless times, dubious first dates were met with a buzzing, judgmental cacophony, yet she insisted on seeing the men again. And countless times, the crickets proved to be right. She had given up doubting their powers. Besides, their powers were hers, too.
So, she waited patiently on her stoop. There would be a man any second, any minute now, waltzing up and announcing his intentions, replacing the muddled haze of a future foreseen with the translucent, bedazzling present. His footsteps betrayed him before his figure appeared visible beneath the streetlight.
“Hello, sir. Nice night out, isn’t it?”
The man appeared taken aback, half-halting in his haste. It was clear to Margary he hadn’t expected this interruption. “Erm— hello, there. Have a good one,” he said, jerking his head down in an awkward bow.
“Where are you going?” Margary asked. “Why are you in such a hurry?”
The suit he had on was well-worn, hugging his chest so that it bulged at the midsection, an unflattering mound of fabric which highlighted all the places tailors unanimously agreed should remain hidden. This pleated, bulge of a man stopped in his tracks, assessing the voice and subsequently, the person attached to it. Slowly, wearily, as if treading over a copperhead without waking it, he doubled back.
“What’s that you say?”
“I said, where are you going? You know, I have this feeling… let’s call it a premonition, that you and I are fated to meet. Now what do you make of that?”
He wiggled his mustache in contemplation. “Don’t much believe in fate. Feel the same way about destiny, too. You were right about one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m in a hurry. Goodbye miss.” He did an about-face and began to walk away.
“Wait!” Margary tucked a straw brown curl back beneath her crimson bandana. The man stopped once more and turned at her voice. “You work for the government, don’t you? The feds,” she said.
The man stood dumbfounded on his mark, taking her in with a newfound hunger. The way he looked at her in that moment, Margary felt very strongly she was some sort of oasis in this man’s uncaring, lifeless desert.
A thin smile split her face, looking down on this gaping man. “You don’t have to say it. I already know it’s true.”
Of course it was true. The crickets had told her so.
…
The man was a federal agent named Kelsey Donner who’d been called out to Margary’s neighborhood on what turned out to be a bum lead. Licking his wounds, he’d been walking back to his car to continue down the list of remaining Arvees when Margary flagged him down. Now she sat in his backseat humming to herself as he drove them both to Langley.
“How long have you had these… premonitions?” he asked the rearview mirror carefully. She wasn’t nearly as cagey about her powers. Not like the others he’d found.
“Just as long as I can remember.”
“They don’t bother you at all? I mean, how can you possibly think with all that lousy buzzing in your ears? It’s enough to make someone go insane.”
She looked up at him sharply. “Does your stream of consciousness threaten your sanity?”
A pain point, he remembered. These Arvees liked being different, but they did not tolerate the label of ‘other.’ He was rustier than he expected. They sat in silence after that. Donner let the highway lines mesmerize him and scanned the roadside for daredevil deer. Don’t push too hard, he thought. Don’t forget, she’s the one that approached you.
Once at Langley, Agent Donner escorted the young woman to his office, eager to begin the tests and see what kind of specimen he’d stumbled upon. In his department, they were all too familiar with Remote Viewers or RVs. Donner had still been wet behind the ears during Operation Stargate, the collective intelligence and military effort to study these psychic phenomena, while assessing whether they had any practical national security applications. It had all been considered a wash by the end of it, and too many people in leadership were afraid to be stamped with the hard-to-shake label of ‘kook’.
But those Arvees had real powers, whether the agency had any intention of leveraging them or not.
“It’s awfully dim down here, Mr. Donner.”
“Yes,” he grunted.
“And cramped.”
The carefully tuned instruments were stacked on top of each other like a hoarder’s clutter. Donner just grunted again in response. His office was a basement in the bowels of CIA headquarters. He was one of those ‘kooks’ now, the ideological leper other agents avoided, their gazes averted anytime they passed by in the halls.
“Sit here, Miss McClellan, please.” He wiggled his mustache and motioned to the only bare surface in the room.
Let’s see, he thought. Which device can tell us most? He would need to wait for the morning when his partner arrived before carrying out the double-blind experiments, truly testing her capability. His hand swept brusquely over the EEG headset, a wire-dense helmet that revealed little of the brain’s mysteries in normies and even less, in his experience, for the Arvees. For those researchers in Donner’s community studying psycho-potential phenomena, this lack of aberration in the Arvee’s measured brain waves was one point in favor of the remote mind theory— the idea that their thinking occurred outside of their own brain.
Beside the EEG sat a biophoton resonator, a clunky-looking tool that measured the faint aura of photons emitted by the subject’s brain. Again, Agent Donner passed it over with a sigh, as there was no measurable difference between Arvee and normie emission.
Margary began to fidget in her chair, although she remained quiet. He supposed her voices kept her company. How amazing, he considered, that this woman could sit here comfortably with him and her voices, when decades ago she would’ve been lobotomized. At the thought, his eyes instinctively darted to another, sharper device, in the corner; it was rarely used these days.
“Alright,” Donner said, holding up a tablet facing away from Margary. “We’re going to start with a few diagnostic tests in order to assess the extent of your abilities. I’d like you to tell me what’s on the other side of this tablet as the images appear. Do you think you can do that?”
“I’m sure I can, sir, if the crickets are up for it. They seem rather indisposed at the moment.”
“Indisposed? You do have control of these powers, don’t you?”
“Sure I do. The same way the moon has control of the tides,” she said, a little too curtly for his liking. There were no hints of smugness in her features. It appeared she was merely relaying her lived experience. This was the first alleged Arvee he’d found that demarcated their powers so distinctly from their own consciousness.
“What do you mean by that exactly?” he said, his pen hovering above the notebook. He heard a rumble in the distance, feeling its vibration in his chest. A freight truck carrying an extra-heavy payload presumably. Donner was much too concentrated on this strange Arvee to probe further.
“The tides respond to the moon’s gravity, you know, but the moon can’t control where it sits at any given time. As long as I exist, so do they. I can push and pull on them in a sense, but it’s just an afterthought to my being alive. To my position.” There was a dreaminess in her eyes when she explained it, a far-off look that went straight through the Earth’s atmosphere.
“I see…” Donner jotted down gibberish on his pad self-consciously. He had no clue how to reckon this woman’s experience or to measure its credibility. “Can you tell me what’s on my tablet’s screen?” An image of a panda bear flashed for a second and disappeared.
“I haven’t the slightest,” she said immediately.
Donner chewed his pen’s top like an embittered gerbil. “Hm… these voices— they alerted you to my presence outside on the sidewalk. This should be well within your power. How about this one?” This time a photo of a sprawling deciduous forest taken from bird’s eye view lit up the tablet’s screen.
“They don’t seem to be so interested in this exercise. Oh, hold on,” she lifted her finger as if putting Donner on hold to answer the other line. Reflexively, he gripped his pen with white knuckles as the woman held her own private séance. She looked back at him, her cheeks flushed with acute embarrassment. “They say it’s quite a silly game to play. Like asking a grand master to explain how the pieces move on the board.”
“They think this is beneath them?” he said.
Margary folded her hands across her lap. “In so many words.”
In a quick succession, the door to the office swung open as if blown from its hinges and a suited man in shiny black shoes stood at the door. His chest heaved for breath like a marathon runner. Donner instantly recognized his partner, Albrecht, who appraised the newly discovered subject with a terse grunt, immediately turning his attention to Donner.
“There’s been a… an incident,” he said, his eyes flicking nervously between Donner and Margary. “Out in the yard. You should come at once, Kelcey.”
What was it, nearly three in the morning now? As a government agent, the sentiment of the stray cryptic word was not lost on Donner. This was clearly CIA business, off-limits to civilians.
“Wait here, Miss McClellan. I’ll be back for you as soon as I can manage.” A tickle in his stomach began to grow as he lurched in pursuit of Albrecht, following him to the door. A trickle of perspiration wetted his bushy blonde mustache.
“If you’re attempting to keep the spaceship landing secret from me, it won’t work. My crickets already told me it was taking place,” Margary said from her chair, blithely working the creases out from her skirt.
…
This, Margary was beginning to understand, was the problem with these uptight, bureaucratic, imitation scientist wannabes. Sure, they struck the proper note, played the part with a fervor no one could deny, but there lacked a certain innate curiosity required for real exploration. If Margary told Donner she held the key to a door to another world, she was sure he’d ask what material it was made from and jot down its dimensions in his notebook. Only a minimal amount of exploration could be done in polished formal oxfords.
Any potential for ground shattering, earth-breaking truth was mediated by a protective film of ‘objectivity,’ lest the researcher get carried away by his flawed and all-too-human intuition. It wasn’t like that with others.
She’d told her friend about her powers in high school. Her classmates had treated her as the pariah, an inevitably self-inflicted position in the social hierarchy since Margary herself didn’t feel much in common with others. She had company enough with her crickets and didn’t seek out connection. It was Laney that sought her out, filling the seat across from her at the lunch table sophomore year. She’d filled the awkward spaces between them with anxiety-rushed stories about her brothers and her lazy, crazy mother. Laney did the talking for the both of them, and she became another voice in Margary’s great and ethereal concerto.
After Laney’s headlong diatribes, the human equivalent of a dog rolling over and revealing its stomach, Margary began to feel more and more comfortable, until finally she figured Laney should know about her condition. One day, outside of the band room, Margary laid it on her friend, the naked truth.
Once the initial shock wore off, Laney had so many questions, those fundamental questions of the how of it, the why’s and the when’s. Despite Margary’s lack of answers, it felt right to bask in that unknowing with another person. Just because she couldn’t see the cogs that made it run, didn’t make it any less marvelous.
She’d had to prove it to her, of course. Sure, Laney had been a good enough friend to go through the motions of acceptance, but accepting a friend and accepting their logic were two different processes. Margary had waited, hoping the crickets would come through for her, for Laney. It had meant so much to Margary, she remembered, that the crickets cooperated with this silent request. After a few minutes and some restless shuffling from Laney, the crickets spoke. They told her Laney ate oatmeal with cinnamon every morning, something Margary had no way of knowing. When she told her friend her proof, Laney wanted her to use her power on everyone in the school, especially Jeremy, the boy Laney had a crush on.
Margary smiled in that lonely basement room, remembering Laney and her unquenchable thirst. Sometimes she wished she had the answers, that she wasn’t some serendipitous vessel.
‘The szzpaceship will land tonight. Do not be alarmed,’ the crickets had said on the car ride over. Margary steeled herself against the mystery of it all, embracing the wide-open possibilities the crickets presented her. Just as they told her, she would follow. She would not be alarmed. Something more than trust existed between them; the only thing niggling the back of her mind was the possibility that some day they might stop chirping completely.
…
Close on Albrecht’s heels, Donner jettisoned out onto the Langley lawn. The environment was cast in a dim ochre hue from the facility lighting, even the smoking rubble. The only two souls bearing witness, both men stopped in their tracks fifty yards away from the scene, an invisible forcefield of debilitating fear obstructing their progress. Donner could make out an inorganic grey mass in the lawn’s depression. The ship was half-buried in the grass, a brown sodden tail where it had skidded to a halt.
“You saw this happen?” asked Donner, not knowing what else to say under the circumstances.
“I heard it,” Albrecht said. “I fell asleep in my office, but I heard it and came out here. What do we do? Should we call someone?”
They both gawked at the scene, half-waiting for some external catalyst to force their hand so they didn’t feel so damned impotent. Nothing moved in the desolation. The smoking mass held a certain serenity sitting all alone on the lawn, a grotesque monument. A monument to what exactly? Donner attempted to step closer to it but found himself drawing further back.
“It won’t hurt you,” Margary said behind them, nearly bringing the tachycardia in Donner’s chest to a mortal cadence. “The creatures inside are dead,” she said.
Donner didn’t bother to ask how she knew, despite his partner’s face turning three shades more ashen. “We should call someone,” was all Donner could think to say, his feet stanchioned firmly to the ground. He watched as Margary McClellan drifted unhurried over to the wreckage, her face impassive. “What are you doing?” he yelled.
Once she arrived at the divot, she crouched down to inspect the ship. Nothing grabbed her for a meal it seemed. All of her extremities remained intact from his vantage point.
“What does she think she’s doing?” Albrecht gawked.
“Quit that! That’s a dangerous artifact,” said Donner, bustling over to the site, his mustache quivering agitatedly. “That’s government property!”
At the center of the crash site, the ship sat smoking, having taken minimal damage under such violent circumstances. It held its shape, which appeared to Donner the spit and image of a champignon mushroom, a convex cap-like structure at its head and a tubular base sprouting from its center. As he sat there surveying the scene, he noticed a strangeness in the quality of the light that beamed from the fixtures above. At first he rubbed his eyes, for fear that sleep had overtaken his senses, but there was no adjustment in his vision. The cap, perpendicular to the ground, stood as tall as his head, about six feet.
The light was curving around the stem of the ship. Donner lowered his head closer to the ground, and the light became a perfect halo surrounding its body, never reflecting from its surface as it should. If he were to guess, the capsule looked a little longer than a full-grown man, maybe seven or eight feet from cap to the end of the stem. Absurdly, the stem of the mushroom appeared to hover above the ground.
“My word…” he said under his breath. Margary was reaching toward the mushroom cap with a reckless abandon he couldn’t believe. “Stop that. You’re under the custody of the United States government, Miss McClellan. If you were hurt… we’d be liable,” he finished lamely. She ignored him, grasping the top of the structure with steady hands and twisting it until some piece of it came free. Donner noticed the light reflecting off the cap’s muted metal surface, the way he was used to. Margary meanwhile moved with a feral conviction.
“If I die, Mr. Donner, you can put it on the record I waive my option to sue. In any case, you two ought to have a look at this.”
…
Despite the clear and concise directions being beamed into her skull, Margary hadn’t been able to shake the fear from her belly after opening the ship. That primordial mystery that plagued her mind, everyone’s mind from birth was fired like buckshot into her conscious thinking— are we alone in all this? Is there something, someone more?
And on top of it all, she was the ceremonial representative, the opener of the box? It was all too much. The crickets had told her what was behind door number one, but yet she still gagged.
The aliens were observably dead. If it weren’t for her crickets, she wouldn’t trust her eyes, but their bodies lay inert inside the capsule, no sign of breath or any other organic functions. After she registered the scene, the smell hit her, a toxic waft of ammonia and decay. She propelled herself backwards instinctually away from its origin. She’d caught a glimpse of the creatures before being forced to cover her mouth, her eyes watering immediately. They were long, with slender, curving bodies like a serpent’s, but there appeared to be so many of them crammed in the ship that she couldn’t make out how many of them there were amidst the messy tangle of their forms.
Albrecht stood above her, shaking his head, his skin taking on a greenish tinge. Donner crawled over, still on his knees, repeating his emergency alert recording: “We should call someone. I think we should call someone.”
‘Take their bodieszzz inside with their ship. Szzzee what you can learn from them, then give them a respectful burial,’ the crickets told her. ‘You will not come to harm.’
A consummate soldier, Margary followed her orders although she had no clue what the nature of the war in which she fought was. She attempted to pick up the capsule from the stem but felt her hand gently repulse. Again, she reached for purchase and watched as her hand distorted in the ship’s energy field.
“Will you gents help me carry this?” she said, reorienting herself on the side of the mushroom cap. “They didn’t make this model with petite ladies in mind.”
This seemed to wake Albrecht up. “Just what do you think you’re doing?! This is a national security site, hell, the world will know about this in a few hours.”
In his catatonic trance, Donner proved even less help somehow than Albrecht.
“I’m going to phone my boss,” said Albrecht.
“He’s not going to believe you,” said Margary.
“Oh, did your schizophrenic voices tell you that one too?” he said with venom.
“No,” said Margary, keeping her voice level. “I just know how people are. Phone your boss for all I care. Just help me lift this.”
Albrecht considered but ultimately relented, helping lift the thing from the lip of the cap. Absurdly, it couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds, but it was cumbersome in its distribution, top-heavy in a surprising way. Its weight was disconcerting relative to its size. It was far too light to be constructed from any sort of metal. Albrecht carried the ship like every second he held it was a year off his life, but Margary reveled in its novelty. She’d never felt a material quite like this one. As they walked it across the courtyard back to Donner’s office, Margary took note of the same distortion field playing tricks on the light her eyes reported, shimmering the paved walkway like a heat mirage hovering above an asphalt horizon.
They set it down on the floor in Donner’s office. Again, the stem of the ship refused to rest and floated at an eerie perpendicular angle to the ground, jettisoning papers and debris in the process. Donner stumbled in after them, a crazed hangdog look plastered across his face.
“You’ve brought the artifact to my office, have you?” he said with more curiosity than indignance. Margary nodded. Albrecht left the room as quickly as he could, off to make his call she could only assume.
The horrific smell largely dissipated, she re-opened the mushroom cap and peered back into the ship’s interior. Replaying in her mind was the dread thought that one of these things would leap upon her, duly sedated by their dead possum act, and suck the life from whatever orifice first presented itself. They lied there, dead as before, at the bottom of the stem.
‘Exzztract them. They szzerved us well. They deszzerve honor and dignity in their handling.’ Margary took a big gulp and reached her hand inside the ship. Like resisting water when thirsty, resisting the crickets was an unthinkable act. She trusted them more than she trusted herself. After some grappling, Margary pulled her hand back out holding a five-foot creature, the fuel of a lifetime’s nightmares.
…
The damned loony Arvee had grabbed one of the ship’s passengers and was proceeding to wave it menacingly at Donner. He wanted to divorce it from her hand but couldn’t muster the courage to come close to touching it. He was disturbed by the alien, but he was terrified of this woman. Was she one of them? Beneath her alabaster skin, were there creatures just like that controlling her every movement?
Donner took a blood-curdling look at the creature; it was long and slender like a snake, but that’s where the similarities ceased. At each end of it, where a snake would sport a head and tail, two long pincers protruded— or were they stingers, the type a scorpion carries? They were sharp and severe with a pointed end. And between them, along the course of the oft-segmented body, each segment had bristly looking hairs. Margary laid one out on the desk, and Donner could make out a protuberance of some sort, whether it be a mouth or a sucker or some mechanism to void refuse. A shiny, metallic silver, it was so incredibly foreign to Donner’s sensibilities that he sat entranced by the mysteries of its body, lying there vacant of any vitality it once had. He imagined what it looked like when it was alive, moving and writhing away, but quickly thought better of it.
While he had been analyzing the one, Margary had extracted two more. The fact three of these slender beings had traveled in such a tight space fascinated him. Were they intelligent? Agents on a mission, perhaps? Objective science-types on a journey to survey the known universe? Or, less likely to Donner’s mind, were they here on accident, knocked off course somehow and low on fuel. Fuel! Where was the fuel on this thing, anyway?
“Donner,” said Margary, disrupting his train of thought most despicably. “We need to bury these people.”
“I don’t know to whom you’re referring, ma’am. Unless you’re speaking of me and my partner, I see no people anywhere in the vicinity. Unless of course, you’re referring to these horrible things,” he motioned towards the space snakes.
“Yes. They are people. They deserve our respect. Our reverence.”
“They deserve exactly what they got. I suggest you let them be until the proper authorities get here.”
As if summoned, Albrecht stormed in, huffing. He took one glance at Margary, then another back at his partner. “The brass is on their way. It took some convincing, but I think they heard the severity in my voice.”
“Good,” said Donner, relieved. “They’ll sort this thing out. Best to let the experts deal with this sort of thing, don’t you think, Margary?”
She stood there looking dumbly at Donner then at Albrecht then to the specimen on the table, a perfectly three-pointed stare down. Albrecht shrugged his shoulders, a sympathetic acknowledgement of the strange work the two had shared over the years in dealing with these Arvee types. Margary took her chance. With an alien in each hand, she bolted, fast enough to shirk the lulled agents.
Donner and Albrecht alighted on her tail, but the office days had caught up with them; they were no match. As she ascended the stairs back out to the grounds, she screamed behind her, “They’re meant to be buried! The crickets sent them. They told me! They deserve respect!”
…
It took nearly a month to sort out by the end of it. Albrecht had called in the bigwigs, which, once the word was out, included CIA, FBI, NASA, Homeland Security, NSA, and DIA brass as well as the military and army buzzcuts. The scene was riddled with suits and guns. Scientists surrounded the crash site and scolded Donner and Albrecht for allowing a civilian to contaminate the ship and the landing site. Their boss berated them for the same. “You have guns don’t you?” he had said with a face like a beet. “It’s a matter of national security.”
They didn’t know. They hadn’t been there. Donner was facing an ink black fear—the kind that contaminates the soul, somehow mixed with a touch of the euphoric, having been the first to realize humanity wasn’t alone. Wasn’t special. Alien life! What else was out there? Had these bureaucrats been there when the ship landed, they would’ve felt the same thing. No one had been thinking straight, especially Margary.
Like some crazed prophet, she’d careened across the Langley lawn with two flaccid creatures in each hand, screaming about a proper and respectful burial. It seemed the only thing important to her. With authorities arriving shortly after, she’d managed to dig much deeper than Donner had expected, her nails bleeding, caked with dirt in her funerary efforts.
Although Donner could be considered by many an insider to the situation, he was privy to little more than the public. Officials were slowly eking out the details, enough to inoculate the populous while still maintaining political and economic stability. Scientists obtained samples from the ship and the creatures with overwhelming success. In fact, they’d identified some of the alien technology. Some reports claimed the findings would catapult astrodynamics decades, even millennia into the future.
Donner wanted to share the good news with Margary. Or else, he wanted to check on her. He remembered the look of dejection she wore, being escorted by officers off the premises as if she were being asked to leave her own children behind. With a frenzied head turn, she’d looked back to him for help. As if there were anything he could do in the face of all that government.
Donner pulled up to her house with memories of that enchanting woman he’d first met on these same front steps. He knocked on the front door. Peering in the windows, he could tell the lights were off, even through the drawn blinds. It took more than ten minutes of waiting before Margary answered his knocks. The woman that answered the door was a far cry from that bubbling wellspring from weeks ago. Beneath her eyes were sallow pits; her flesh sagged from her face in the same forsaken way her body did. Without a word of acknowledgement or greeting, she left the door open and turned her back on Donner, tottering back into the depths of her home. Donner caught a sour whiff of mold and despair.
“Ms. McClellan, I wanted to come and visit you. I hope that it’s alright,” said Donner, shutting the door hesitantly, as if questioning whether placing a barrier between him and the outdoors was wise.
“Yes,” came her sunken voice, already in the other room.
“There have been some marvelous developments in the case of our space worms.” He followed that gut-wringing voice to the living room. “I’m not sure if you’ve kept apprised. I thought I’d come share them with you.”
“I don’t care,” was all she said.
“You don’t care? But Margary, that wasn’t your perspective only weeks ago. You practically fought off the entire United States military to bury those things.”
“Things change,” she said. Donner sensed an immense spiritual weight depressing her somehow further into the couch cushions.
“Scientists have made some incredible discoveries,” Donner soldiered on, not knowing what else to do. “Those worms are symbiotic with that ship, they think. Can you believe God’s creation? Their ship, that hardened strange surface we felt with our own hands is no metal, but something in between plants and fungus. From another world.”
“Is that right?” said Margary, her eyes nearly shut.
“Yes… er— this is purely speculation of course, but they imagine these creatures are deposited as eggs within this pseudo-fungal structure, feeding on it, growing to maturity all within its structure. Something in the chemical interaction between their digestion and the fungus’ cell walls creates the anti-gravity effect. They’re trying to replicate it now, you see, for our own purposes. This particular symbiote must have floated a long way from home. They’re thinking it came from—”
“The Zeta Riticuli star system,” Margary interjected, barely audible. “Thirty-nine light years away.”
“That’s right,” Donner said, taken aback. “Your crickets divined this to you, I suppose?” There were few surprises, when one worked with Arvees long enough.
“They told me everything,” Margary suddenly became animated, frighteningly so. “They told me these beings were coming! How they would arrive, how they wouldn’t hurt us. My crickets sent them here to help us in our endeavors with space flight, to introduce an organic solution to our dumb, mechanistically predisposed minds. The scientists didn’t need their bodies to learn. They didn’t need to desecrate them, the way I knew they would. The way they do everything.” She hiccupped, a jarring sound in the sudden silence. “They chose me, the crickets. They chose me from birth. I was their messenger, and I was shirked aside like refuse.” Her shoulders began to hitch, then shake violently between her sobbing.
“Those officials were merely doing their jo—”
“Not those starched stiffs,” she shouted through tears. “The crickets… they left me.” Her voice was a shell once more. “They left me, and I’ve no idea what to do with myself. I can barely get out of bed in the morning without the comfort of their buzzing in my ears.”
“I had no idea…” Donner searched for some combination of words to assuage this broken woman.
Margary wiped her face with the back of her wrists. “Every decision I face, I’m lost. Every fork in the road is like a dagger between my ribs. Everything— my future, my plans, they’ve always been so clear to me, sent to me from this external force. They never steered me wrong. But now… I’m completely paralyzed. The correct course of action is hidden to me behind some impenetrable veil. I’ve lost my function, so they left me to die. A used-up husk,” she sniffed. “I thought they cared for me. I was a fool.”
“Oh, Margary, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But you can’t stay here holed up like this. Alone. You need to be with others right now.”
“Let me waste here. I’ve lost my conscience. What else is left for me?”
That stopped Donner in his tracks. For so long, these Arvees had been like an obstacle to him, filled to the brim with unspeakable powers yet unable to explain them. To quantify them. For years he had toiled over the data, analyzing the cases, if only to make one connection between them so that he could prove the use of his work to his superiors. If he could make even a small breakthrough in the science of Remote Viewing, he might shift his fortunes and pull himself and Albrecht up from that musty basement.
But sitting there, looking at this broken, beautiful woman, that purpose formerly animating him melted away. Donner couldn’t be sure it all hadn’t been leading up to this one moment with Ms. McClellan.
“Your whole life is left waiting for you,” he said. “Will you cast it away because you can’t see it for certain?”
Only then did Margary make eye contact, a piercing, humbling stare. “I am completely alone. You can’t possibly imagine what I’m feeling.”
“You’re right,” Donner twiddled his mustache ponderously. “I can’t possibly know what it’s like to lose something so special. But I can tell you what it’s like never to have had it at all. I know the deafening silence you’re feeling all too well, in fact. I’ve never lived without it. Every day I’m faced with it. It’s as if the universe just taunts you. An unyielding, mocking silence every waking hour of the day.”
Margary sniffed, rubbed her raw and reddened eyes. “And what do you do in the face of that silence?”
“It’s trite, but it’s true: I keep going.”
“To where? To what end?”
Donner racked his brain for an answer, something beyond the placating in the realm of the substantive. Could it be this woman now needed a crash course on free will?
“Tell you what. Let’s do an exercise. I’m going to ask you a question, and you’re going to answer the first thing that comes to your mind. Do you think you can do that for me?” He took her hands in his. Margary nodded. Donner thought back to the images on the tablet that he asked her crickets to guess. Was this really any different?
“Good. Now, as I said, don’t think twice about this. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go. Right now?”
“But I can’t go anywhere in the world. I’ve got no money,” she said, dislodging her hands from his, casting her eyes down to the carpet.
“That’s not what I asked, and you know it,” he said, mustering a softness to his voice and a tender smile. “Tell me, where would you go if you could? Yell it for the world to hear.”
Her eyes returned to his in the form of a glare. “How the hell is this pathetic game supposed to help me,” she said. “Let me mourn in peace!” She began pushing against his bulk, pressing his chest with all her might, toward the front door. “Get out of my house!”
He held her wrists firmly but did not counter her physicality. Instead, he kept repeating his question, louder and louder against her wails.
“Where would you go? Where, Margary? Where would you go? If you could go anywhere? Where would you…”
“Get out, you great galoot! Out of my living room and out of my life! Get lost you no-good, uncaring sack of a man.”
“Where would you go, Margary? Where would you go?”
She had nearly forced his weight to the foyer, picking up what felt like superhuman strength in her fit of rage. He had let her get this far, but still he waited for an answer as she panted in exhaustion. Suddenly, a rosy tint climbed her cheeks as she was bent over her knees, catching her breath.
“A water park,” she mumbled.
“Excuse me? What was that?”
“I’d go to the water park,” she conceded. “If I could go anywhere, that’s where I’d go,” she said, standing up straight, then wiping the sweat from her forehead.
“The waterpark,” Donner repeated, bewildered.
Margary smiled, a great gaping one that showed all her teeth. “That’s right. I’ve never been,” she laughed. “I’d like to go someday, if ever given the chance.” She was practically giggling when she said it.
“You know what you’ve just done, don’t you?” Donner asked, eyes wide.
Margary nodded fiercely, half-sobbing, half-laughing. She gave him a hug. “I do. You don’t know what this means to me, you really don’t!”
“I did nothing,” Donner said, Margary’s head buried in his chest, wetting his button down. “Some part of you knew the answer all along, deep down. Now, what are you waiting for? Go pack your bags!”
Margary’s head shot up and stared at him, nonplussed, her brow ridge steepled acutely. “Whatever do you mean, Mr. Donner?”
He couldn’t help but smile at this wholesome wreck of a woman. “We’re going! It’s not as if you said Capri. Now grab a swimsuit and let’s see what else these new crickets have in store for us.”
