EXCERPT 1: CHARACTER AND DIALOGUE

Cass woke up with an awful feeling, like she hadn’t really slept. Dreams of dollars and deadlines. She clicked the faux Deco light, staring at the shadows it made on the pillow, burning and blurring untrodden paths, too close to see clearly, too vague to set out on. Her naturally not quite straight black hair was as tangled as her troubled thoughts, an explosion of darkness, like some wild expressionist had etched her night in a thousand lashes, slicks of it polluting the cleanish white pillow. Mad mixed metaphors. I’m an alliteration sensation. This isn’t going to be easy. But crashing and burning is so bracing. Another day another dollar, Cass thought. Another day I won’t spend as an artist.

Uncertain brown eyes, this way hot chocolate, that way black coffee, and lips so full and questioning they never really needed lipstick. But her beauty slouched in an unlit corner of herself, carving a death mask out of a waking moment. It wasn’t just about art. I had so much to tell her, she had so far to go to unlock her memories, her forbidden life.

My life had its secrets too, on board the ship. Words I never heard: How did you sleep last night? Did you have any dreams? Dreams? We don’t have nights. Arbitrary in space, right? Our unspeakable dreams were left unspoken. They came from somewhere they never told us about, while we replenished. We daydreamed too. Rushes of conflicting scenarios launched by unaddressed wellsprings, like seeing our donors only once every few years. Unnecessary, apparently. They always behaved like it was an inconvenience, putting us together. It made us feel like we’d failed them. I know better now. They failed us.

Our makers and breakers were unprepared for our emotions. They’ll be as unprepared a thousand years from now as they were last night. To them, dreams are aberrant traits to be excised. I don’t need fixing. I need letting loose. They knew we’d inherit some human traits, but their scope ended at the reach of their objective. Our lives revolved around the breeding program, but our minds centered on meeting our human relatives, and that often meant we fixated on a dream world. But they let us work it off, I suppose. We played roles to placate abductees who had broken through memory walls. They always needed to feel special, chosen, unique. Just feeling like an individual would’ve been enough for me. We did what we were told, and sold. Things could’ve been so different. We suffered a unique kind of abuse. Extreme detachment and obsessive attention in equal measure. We were well cared for. We were the future. Were. Well I am I suppose. I have to be.

How do some people seem to step right into your life and change it irrevocably, while others you thought you knew become like strangers?

The journey to the kitchen sink, seven feet of it and each one a triathlon. Hopelessly decaffeinated time passed, a vacuum that could suck the terror out of a zombie. Why is my t-shirt on backwards, and inside out? Am I losing it? At last, autopilot coffee hissed into existence.

Pouring a cup from the half-full pot she slumped before her Mac in the narrow hallway – her office. A brick wall painted white on white, drips off it thick as concrete. The steaming mug splashed a few escapees on the black Ikea table, a pair of inky oval drops looking back at her. She swept them away. Life is a million designs a minute, spawning, stealing, duping, dying. The cogs of habit cranked up the day as the digital world exposed itself before her with the confident indifference of a machine – all seeing, all reaching, unknowing. Her face looked ghoulish in the half-reflecting monitor, then was lost in the bouncing rainbows of cavorting garbage, declaring the day must have its way. Every pixel dared her to look away.

‘Virgin Mary on piece of toast, sold on Ebay for $28,000.’ ‘Restaurant patrons lose appetite watching couple have sex on tape.’ ‘Get a six-pack like a human Ken doll.’ ‘Top 10 ballads for funerals.’ ‘Beached eyeball turns out to be from swordfish.’ ‘Skinny inmate escapes through hole in fence.’ Dammit! Gott’s been on here again. She closed her eyes. Why is not thinking so draining? You’d think it would recharge you. Bring it on. The dots of truth per inch of it, infotainment. ‘UFO over the White House.’

“Oh please.” But it was everywhere. ‘Welcome to the Universe.’ Sound bites tentacle-tight on jpegs too perfect to be real. This is a gas but what’s it doing on Google News? Did human DNA finally merge with a potato? And this is how they tell us? Freedom fries all round. Cerebral cannibalism.

OK. I’ll let my fingers do the walking. New York Times: ‘Extraterrestrial on White House Lawn – proof we are not alone’. CNN: ‘Is this an alien invasion?’ Washington Post: ‘Unprecedented: proof of extraterrestrial life’. BBC World News: ‘Aliens land in every earth capital’. The Guardian: ‘If aliens are here, what are our governments doing to protect us?’ Reuters: ‘Aliens – What could this mean for planet earth?’ Le Monde: ‘Why weren’t we prepared for this?’ All over the world, the same thing at exactly the same time. So this… happened? It just, simply, can’t have.

“Shit!” Her dreadful and lovely Gott was yanking t-shirts out of the dresser in the hall behind her, tossing them over his shoulders into the bathroom and the bedroom.

“What?”

“It’s gone!”

She started to laugh. The longer it took him to catch on the harder it was to stop.

He faced her accusingly. “What?”

“They’re all the same, they’re all black!”

Giving up on the shirt thing, he propped himself up.

“You don’t understand.”

“Sometimes you escape me,” she said.

“It’s what I do best.”

She gave him a look, that look between couples who find charm in the expression of some ugly fire they love, that’s there in themselves too and only visible to this other one. Sometimes saying things helps them make sense. Human ways of thinking. I like to try.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, and not in a good way.”

“Get over here.” They kissed the day awake and she clicked through some tabs. His eyes nearly popped out of yesterday’s guyliner.

“This is it, this is it,” he mumbled, slapping open his laptop, kneeling before it on the living room floor like a kid on Christmas Day, leaving her feeling more alone than surprised. “The thought police. They finally did it.”

No phone signal. 100% battery. She checked online. Service will resume soon. Mass outages, cell towers down across the US. I guess that’s a lot of WTF texts. Actually they were mostly “Are you OK?”

Heading for the shower, one thought kept surfacing: Why do I feel so sad?

Please pick up, please pick up.

“Gott!”

“Hey doll. How’s life in the fast lane?”

“Style no content. How’s the daylight peeping through the curtains?”

“Discreet, like the truth that dare not say its name.”

“So good to talk to you.” Anything, get him talking about anything. “So how bout that huh? Alien on the Whitehouse lawn.”

“The media is a shit show. Owned up the ass.” He took her silence as a ‘do go on’. “What do the powers that beat us down get from a stunt like this? Fear right? But what’s the second act? Where’s the cavalry? The news nosebag is the same everywhere. We could be facing a global coup by big business.”

“Yeah it reeks. Just wanted to hear your voice, see what you thought, try to hash things out.” Why did I say that?

“I love it when you talk office. Say interface. Say you want to touch base on the project.”

Cass laughed, finally.

“Come on, run something by me.”

You gotta love this guy, she thought. He makes it seem so easy. “Hey don’t make me set up a meeting and go granular on your ass!”

“Ooh baby, log me in your calendar. I need a briefing, a thorough briefing.”

“Well table it. No, don’t do that. Just hold that thought, I’m coming home.”

“You’re done already? Girls! Vamoose!” Sighing theatrically, “There’s no trust in this relationship.”

“Gott? I’m scared. Everything feels… off.” Finally, he picked up her mood.

“You said it. We’ll put our heads together and figure it out, like we do everything else.”

“Thanks babe, you’re an angel.”

“Hey, cryptozoological entity, please. Over and out.”

Pacing along like a stormtrooper, she fixed her mind on simple things, ordinary things. One out of three storefronts were either boarded up or had commercial real estate ads half peeling off. Everything looks so normal, but that’s not how it feels.