It was in their nature to assume Ed was wrong, and they were not safe at all, which was fine. It would keep them busy with their gadgets, looking for ways in which they were still in danger. It would keep them looking toward the woods at the zombies that were surely on their way instead of toward the house and the alien inside of it.
It freed up Ed and Annie for perhaps the most important conversation in human history. As was perhaps true for most important conversations, this one took place at the kitchen table.
“I don’t know exactly where to begin,” Violet said.
“You can begin by telling Ed he’s crazy,” Annie said, “and you’re not some kind of freaky alien zombie lord.”
Violet laughed.
“Zombie lord is a stretch. But I can’t do that, because he’s right. I’m sorry, I… I wanted to tell you so many times, especially after the ship landed.”
“Tell me what? Come on, this is crazy.”
Ed put his hand on Annie’s arm to try and calm her.
“Why don’t you start with explaining what you are,” Ed said. “As long as we’ve dispensed with the idea that you’re a sixteen-year old girl.”
“The body I’m wearing is biologically indistinguishable from that of a sixteen-year old. I think she was seven when she died, about eighty years back. A respiratory ailment of some kind. The lungs are still imperfect.”
“You’ve gotten older with me,” Annie said. “We’ve been friends for six years, don’t you think I would have noticed?”
“That’s true. But before you and I met, she—I—was a ten-year old girl for a very long time. Figuring out how to stop and restart the aging process was one of the first things I had to learn if I wanted to stay here.”
“Here like on this planet? I’m losing my mind. Ed, help me, I’m losing my mind.”
“Before this I was Susan for a long while,” Violet continued. “She started out much younger. So did Todd. I’m sorry, Annie.”
“How long have you been here?” Annie asked. “You’ve only been in Sorrow Falls for six years, but how long have you been on the planet?”
“That isn’t really correct. The first memory I allowed you to have of me was six years ago, but I’ve been here for much longer.”
“Allowed? Wait. Wait. How long? You were here before Sorrow, weren’t you? You were there when Oliver Hollis banged the drum.”
“…Yes. I was.”
“Ed, I saw that happen, in my mind, when we were looking at the drum. I was there. Violet, what did you do to me?”
“I’ll explain.”
“Is this why they’re after me?”
“Annie, calm down,” Ed said. “C’mon, we’re finally in the right place to get answers, so let’s get them, huh?”
“Right,” she nodded. “Right, sorry, it’s just my best friend the undying alien set me up as zombie bait and I’m a little freaked out about that, my bad.”
“It wasn’t intentional!” Violet said. She reached across the table to take Annie’s hand. Annie pulled back like there was a cobra at the end of the arm.
“I mean it,” Violet said. “Until this minute it never occurred to me that I was putting you at risk. The ship should have gone away by now, I don’t know why it didn’t. It couldn’t sense me. I don’t know why this is happening at all.”
“Let’s go back to the first question,” Ed said. “Tell us what you are.”
“All right.”
Violet leaned back in her chair and spoke only to Ed. Looking at Annie upset her, which Ed thought was interesting.
“I don’t think there’s an easy way to explain it, though, not to… not to a human.”
“Do you have a body of your own?”
“Not in any sense you would recognize. I would say we’re energy-based, but that’s also reductive. More like… an idea. A self-aware idea.”
“We. There are more?”
“Yes.”
“Are you the only one of your kind here?”
“Not any more, no. But for a long time, yes.”
“The meteor in the painting,” Annie said. “The one distracting Josiah. That was when you came here.”
“That’s not historically accurate. I put that there as a gag, although I was the only one who ever appreciated it properly.”
“You did the painting?”
“Yes, as Susan. I was going through an artistic phase. It didn’t last. I never met Josiah, so I made up the details of that day on the river. But you’re right, I did meet Oliver. I also bore him children. That was in a different body, of course.”
“You’re saying the Hollis family is a half-alien race,” Annie said levelly, as if with everything else she’d already heard, this one particular detail was straight-up ridiculous.
“Maybe in temperament. Biologically, no. I have no genetic material to pass along. But the entire drum ceremony has been depicted incorrectly. The land the Sorrowers found wasn’t considered cursed. It was holy. The natives kept away out of respect, and yes, fear. When they came to the tree stump and used the drum, it was to call the other tribes together, but it was also to summon my attention. I resolved many of their disputes by fiat. By the time Oliver came upon the drum, I’d already grown weary of the arrangement, and was interested in a more immersive experience with humankind. But to answer the rest of the question, the ship that fell to earth in this region many centuries ago came down before Josiah Sorrow was even born. And I wasn’t aboard that ship.”
“Who was?” Ed asked.
“Nobody. It was an unmanned pod. It’s beneath the house, if you’d like to examine it. I suspect we don’t have a great deal of free time, though.”
“You’re going to have to explain that.”
“It’s really simple. As an intelligence without a physical form I can travel the universe at the speed of light—faster, if you’d like to discuss extra-dimensional travel, although I imagine we have no time for that either. But I need a place to go. If you think of me as a piece of information, I need to be transmitted and received, just like any other piece of information. Likewise, I can only interact with the physical world through physical things. If I want to see something, I need to find eyes, or reside in something with an optical interface.”
“So the ship beneath us is a giant antenna array and memory bank.”
“Essentially.”
“Is it the same as the one up the road?”
“No. Same technology, different model. I have the equivalent of a roadside motel. Shippie is more like a tank or a battleship.”
“Don’t call it Shippie,” Annie said.
“Why not?”
“That’s something Violet and I called it, and I don’t know who you are.”
“Annie, I’m still Violet.”
“Whatever, go on. Ed, go on, ask her something.”
“Where did the technology come from?” Ed asked.
“Who built it, since we are beings without hands?”
“That’s a good way to put it, yes.”
“A very, very long time ago, one of my kind infected an advanced species of interstellar travelers with a new idea. That idea was the basis of a technology used to build a large number of probes and send them all over the galaxy, looking for planets that could support life. So far as the species was concerned, the probes were a long-term exploration plan employing inventive new ideas and bending space-time in ways nobody had ever thought of before. In truth, it was to create landing spots for us, so we could visit places that didn’t have sufficient technology to suit our existential needs.”
“Infect?”