Alien Morning Read online

  “It is that,” I said, and looked up myself, thinking if she stayed I could haul out the telescope and show her Saturn’s rings.

  And there, nearly directly overhead, something was moving. A satellite, maybe. No, two of them. No, five. More.

  A group of satellites, moving across the sky in a slowly changing pattern? It made no damn sense at all. UFOs? There’d been a big scare the year before in Brazil, but, you know, get real.

  I pointed at them and Chloe looked to see them. “What are they?” she wanted to know.

  “No idea,” I said, but I was sure sweeping them, full zoom, seeing it happen. They looked to me like the space stations. Both of those went overhead often enough and I had myBob tell me when the situation was right for me to see one or the other, bright in the night sky as they reflected the light of the sun, always zooming along until they fell into shadow and faded away.

  These looked the same, but some of them were moving in random patterns while others sailed sedately along in a straight line. There were slight flares of light here and there among the lights. I counted ten of them just when the first of them faded into darkness as it moved into the Earth’s shadow and then the rest and that was that. Interesting while it lasted, just a couple of minutes all told. There, and then gone.

  “Did we get all that, myBob?” I asked my helpmate, and “We did,” he said back, and asked, “I haven’t posted it yet. Should I now?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not?”

  And he did that, and so that’s how one’s life changes: with a “Why the hell not?”

  2

  Sweeping had its critics; too explicit, too few filters on the content, too much celebrity and not enough real news, too much action, too little privacy, too little effort to establish context, too much tits and ass and not enough Shakespeare.

  But the receiving sets were selling well and it was possible that within six months sweeping would really be The Next Big Thing and I’d gotten in early and so didn’t mind all the carping. One thing I’d learned during my basketball career was to ignore the critics. I’d never read what the sportswriters had to say, didn’t make friends with them, didn’t try to win them over. I just played my game, got my rest, and stayed out of trouble.

  And so it was with sweeping. It is, by its nature, a very public endeavor, inviting an audience into your head and your heart and asking them to come along for the ride. Crazy. Invasive. Foolish.

  All of those things, yes, but after the insanity of the first few weeks, when I’d worn out myBob with instructions on keeping my first channel running twenty-four mostly boring hours a day, I’d learned to just play my game, pick my spots, and then shut it down every night at some point and, just like hoops, get my rest and stay out of trouble. Even as my numbers climbed as a sweeper I had myBob log off when I slid into theta waves. myBob read the interface and when I slid into sleep he uncoupled me from the clouds. In fact, I set myBob on manual and had to click in to recouple, so I could enjoy that half-awake state for a while in the morning as the sun came through the blinds and the smell of Blue Mountain coffee percolated upstairs from the kitchen below. I thought of all this as my daily visit to digital rehab.

  The morning after Chloe’s visit I stayed uncoupled as I came up from a good, deep sleep, my REMs fading away along with whatever I’d been dreaming about. I hardly ever remembered my dreams.

  The spot next to me on the bed was empty, so Chloe was up and about. I sat up, said “Hey, Chloe, you here?” and got no response, so that meant she was downstairs. It occurred to me that some morning coffee and morning Chloe might make for some great sweep content, so I stood, as painfully as usual on my bad left knee, and hobbled on into the bathroom to piss and brush my teeth, in that order. Then downstairs, the knee working better, as it always did once I got it moving in the morning.

  I stumbled down the stairs and headed toward the kitchen. I had the timer set to pour the beans, grind them, and brew starting at 7 A.M., and yet here the coffee was, brewed and ready, though the digital clock on the wall said it was just 6:39 and a pleasant 22 degrees Celsius on a nice November morning in Florida. Busy little Chloe, though she was nowhere to be seen: out walking on the beach, I guessed.

  I poured myself a cup. It was stronger than usual, and good. I took a sip, thinking how there might be a lot of chatter once I brought myBob out of hibernation. What the hell had those lights been last night? Probably something military and provocative from the Chinese or the Indians. Or maybe some new ad campaign from Spaceflight.com. Or, perhaps, it was aliens and the end of the world. I sipped. The coffee was really very good.

  I heard the creak of the rusty gate that led out to the boardwalk and then to the beach. That’d be Chloe coming in from her walk.

  She was smiling, and drying her hair with a beach towel. She’d been for a morning swim in the warm embrace of the Gulf. Good for her. She wore a T-shirt over her swimsuit, and the shirt read “Sweep Me Off My Feet” across that very nice chest of hers, in two lines. I got the joke.

  “Peter?” she asked, smiling. “You’re not sweeping right now?”

  “Correct,” I said. “Left the bowl amp upstairs. You want me to go get it?” I couldn’t remember what the contract called for, but what the hell.

  “No, no. Just like checking?” she said. “I hope you don’t mind that before I went out for my swim I had myBetty tell your coffeemaker to have a cup ready for you when you came down the stairs?”

  “No, that’s fine, Chloe, thanks. And the coffee is good.”

  “myBetty told me you take your coffee like dark, Peter? I hope that’s OK?” She finished rubbing her hair with the towel. “You mind if I shower? myBetty has the car coming in a few minutes? I need to be at the airport by nine-thirty?”

  I smiled, said “Sure,” and took a sip of the coffee. Suddenly it tasted much too strong. I wondered if it was somehow because of all her question marks.

  “By the way,” she asked, “did you see like all the contacts you got from last night’s sweep?”

  “No, sorry? There were a lot of them?” There I was, doing it again myself, those damn question marks. “myBob uncouples when I go to sleep and I have to manually click in again the next morning.”

  “Really?” She greeted that with disbelief. I supposed she was always connected, all the time. Like most of the country, most of the developed world. Everyone lived a double life, one of them in the real world, the other in the clouds; and most of the people I knew were living both those lives at once. Hence, my optimism about the new sweep technology. Live your life, sure; but live mine, too. And mine, I was betting, was a lot more interesting than most. I, for instance, knew Chloe Cary.

  But I’d learned to pace myself, so “Really,” I said. “I haven’t gotten around to that yet.” I held up the cup of coffee. “Taking my time with this great cup of coffee.”

  “You know,” she said, “no one knows what those lights were all about? Everything I read and watched said that everyone is just guessing?”

  “And are they still up there?” I asked, taking another sip of my coffee, and then blinking twice to wake up myBob.

  “No, they like came and went?” she said. “They were there and then they like disappeared? We were like the only ones to get that great look at them? I don’t know, I think it’s just some promotional thing? Maybe they’re—”

  myBob, awake now, interrupted. “Yes,” he said. “Chloe is correct. Ten objects were visible, but quickly disappeared. Very unusual.”

  “Thanks, myBob,” I said.

  “Would you like to see that information now? It condenses down, as Chloe says, to ‘We don’t know.’”

  “No, messages first, please, myBob. After I look at those I’ll read over your summaries.” I took a final long sip of the coffee and then put it under the machine’s spigot for a refill. It was starting to fill when Chloe came over and stood on her tiptoes to give me a kiss.

  “Well, whatever they are I’m glad they came wh
ile we were on the beach, Peter?” she said. “My numbers are looking great and the celeb sites are all over us this morning?”

  “Great,” I said. “We’ll follow up next week? I’ll come out your way?” As per the contract, I didn’t mention where. “Messages ready,” said myBob. “And you’ll be happy to know that your sweep of those satellites last night was the best footage in the country, perhaps in the world. There’s a lot of interest in talking with you about the hows and whys of your capturing the imagery.”

  “They think I know something useful about those lights?”

  “Not really, but they need to fill time, otherwise they don’t have much to say. All questions and no answers,” said myBob. “I’m deep into search, and it’s all guesswork about what those were. Something is up there, doing something, and we don’t know who it is or why or how it so easily avoided detection until last night.”

  “So I need to be presentable and get started with those interviews. Can you start setting them up for me, in order of importance, starting in ninety minutes—five minutes each, with a five-minute break in between. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said myBob. “There are messages from your brother and sister, too. You’ll handle those on your own?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll do them first, on the smarty. The interviews—maybe they’ll want those out on the beach, standing where we were when those things went by overhead?”

  “Sounds good to me,” said myBob. “I’ll propose that when I’m setting things up.”

  A car horn beeped outside, two short taps, very polite. Chloe yelped in surprise. “Oh, that must be my limo?” She headed toward the stairs. “Peter, can you go out and say I’ll be ready in five? I’ll grab my things and then shower and change on the plane?”

  “You’re not going commercial?” That was a good sign for her.

  “The studio diverted its plane that left JFK this morning after dropping off Tiffany Dust? Isn’t that great?”

  It was. “And that plane is landing in forty minutes and needs to be in LAX by eleven A.M. Pacific, I’m told,” said myBob, audibly so Chloe could hear it.

  “Wow?” asked Chloe, “myBetty’s not that good. What version is your myBob?”

  “I’m perfectly functional,” said her myBetty, also now on audible and a little chippy, it sounded like to me. Great. “Quiet, myBob,” I said to mine, thinking he’d respond unless I shut him up. Good: not a peep.

  I smiled at Chloe. “Sure, Chloe. We want to keep the studio happy, right?” And there, I’d done it again, ending with a question.

  “Yeah, right?” she asked as she headed upstairs. I went outside to let the driver know. Nice limo, and the driver said he’d caught the ferry just right to get out to our island. If Chloe could hustle it up they’d catch it on the return crossing. She did. They did.

  And then I settled down to handle the messages from my brother and sister. Do that, take a shower and shave, get tarted up a bit for the nets, and then do the interviews. A busy morning ahead. But the numbers! I was whistling to myself as I pulled out the smarty and swiped to the Family Inbox for the incoming from brother Tom and sister Kait.

  Tom’s was in written form, because he liked to read and write things. That was fine—I liked those things, too, much to the hilarity of many of my alliterate friends.

  Tom wrote that he had a colleague at the university, a physicist, who had to talk to me, immediately. My brother and I had gone our separate ways since our parents died, and we didn’t talk often. He was busy building his career in marine biology and I was busy sweeping my way into something vaguely successful. That was our excuse. But the truth of it was that the way our parents had died and the secret they thought they’d taken to their graves had pushed a wedge between me and my little brother. I knew things that Tom didn’t know, about our father, especially, and I’d gone ahead and swallowed those realities.

  Tom had adored the old man, and in turn he’d lived up to Father’s expectations for him. He’d left high school with enough science credits to start as a sophomore at Vanderbilt; then he’d sailed right through his undergrad biology degree before turning to research in grad school as the way to find his truths in life. His doctorate, his tenure, his research at Rice and then the University of Florida, and now, home again, at St. Petersburg University: These accomplishments won him respect and love from Father. It wasn’t surprising that Tom’s response to my lack of enthusiasm over how we remembered dear old Dad had been to elevate Father to sainthood: the perfect man, the perfect doctor, the perfect father, the perfect husband.

  He was none of those things, and at some point, I supposed, Tom and I would have to deal with that. For now, though, it was easier to simply call him and set up a late lunch for one-thirty so I could meet with the colleague and see what was up. The call was brief and cordial.

  The other family message was a voice-only from sister Kait, whom I hadn’t heard from in a good six months: “IMPORTANT,” it said in that neutral subject line auto-voice, and so I opened it and listened as Kait rattled off a semicoherent message about how she had a good friend who was a scientist and who knew the truth about those lights, and they were UFOs, from another planet, you know, aliens, and that the woman had to talk to me, immediately.

  Kait’s life had been a rough one: bad men, bad choices. She’d been a good student and a high-school athlete until her junior year, when things suddenly took a spin downward and out of control. I was on the baseball team in college then and so nearly two hundred miles away, but it got so bad between Mom and Kait that I kept driving home on my rare free days to play the referee role. Tom just avoided them both, having his own troubles as a high-school senior with great grades and no friends. Father, no surprise, wasn’t about to get involved. Eventually, I found out why.

  Kait, our little sweetie, was, at that time, becoming a wild enigma and hard to figure out. On the one hand, she did a lot of yelling and screaming at Mom, and even at me when I was home. “You don’t understand” was mostly what she yelled at us. On the other hand, she would suddenly fall into sullen funks that could last for days. She quit the soccer team; her grades fell off the table. For a while, she plugged herself deep into the clouds, always with a screen open on her watch or her glasses, always with her music and her new, unknowable digitals. She left her circle of tangible friends—her teammates and her besties from middle school onward—and made no effort to find any tangible new ones. No one understood her, no one could reach her. In May of her junior year at St. Cath’s, age seventeen, she ran away from home.

  And then she pretty much unplugged in a kind of final step away from us. The first wearable helpmates were just out in those days, but Kait didn’t want one. Too traceable; she wanted to disappear, she told me. She’d kept her old smarty, at least, and messaged me every couple of days with brief audios and the occasional short vid, just to prove she was all right. She’d found a job in Atlanta, she was living with a friend of a friend, she was doing OK. I was her only link to the old life.

  It was horrible on Mom. She assumed the fault was hers and couldn’t forgive herself. I thought there was some truth in that and included myself in the at-fault family members, and probably Tom, too. We hadn’t helped when we might have. We hadn’t listened to Kait. We hadn’t reached out. Only Father seemed innocent. Distant Father, not culpable because, after all, he wasn’t there most of the time. He was a doctor, a pediatric surgeon; he had young lives to save.

  Kait came through it all right, eventually, but she put herself through hell to get there. In the snippets she sent me I got a feel for her struggles through the years. There was something about a guy named Patrick, a musician who’d had a drug problem but then had been clean for a whole month and really loved her. And then after that burst there was nothing for a time and then she smartied me about some grand plan to move out west and start over with a new guy, Paolo, who ran his own business and was doing great and she really loved him and it was going to be great in L.A.

&
nbsp; But it wasn’t, as it turned out, and so she moved back to Georgia and there was another guy, and then another and still another. Were drugs involved? Sure, and a lot of poorly selected lovers and a life where her wheels spun but she never got anywhere, and she never wanted to talk about it, and while I always put the best blush on things for Mom and Father and Tom, I’m sure they came to realize the truth of Kait’s life just as well as I did.

  Then Father died, and then Mom, and though Kait didn’t make it to the funerals she did send me messages, telling me she’d finally gotten her GED and then gone to Gwinnett Community College and nabbed herself an associate’s degree as a vet technician. It was the start of a better life for her, but it was too late for Mom and Father. For them, she’d been the child who’d never come home. For me and for Tom, she was the sister who didn’t even come to the two funerals. For a time, that was a wound that looked like it might never heal. I hadn’t heard from her in a year or so. She hadn’t messaged me, and I hadn’t tried to reach her in all those months and, frankly, it was a lot easier not hearing from her than dealing with the constant string of troubles. I hoped she was happier.

  I thought of those days as I told myBob to contact her through the smarty since she probably still wasn’t helpmated. She answered immediately, and it was a video call.

  She looked all right. A little thin in the face, a little pale. But OK. “Petey? You there?” she asked.

  I told myBob to put me on video, too. “I’m here, Kaity. How you doing? And how are things in Atlanta?”

  “I moved back to California, Petey, a year back. I live in L.A. now; really in Pasadena. I should have told you. I should have told you a lot.”

  “That’s OK, Kaity. Me, too, you know. We’ve been crummy about staying in touch, me and you. But I get out that way every month or two for interviews. Next time I’ll call ahead and we’ll meet for dinner and get all caught up, OK?”