“More or less.”
“What did you say?”
“Open sesame. I’m surprised you guys never tried that.”
“Ms. Collins, these are important questions. What exactly did you say?”
“I said, ‘I am her’.”
Corcoran leaned forward and made a lengthy note on one of his clean pads of paper.
“That was in my statement too,” Annie said.
He held up a finger to indicate he was still writing, and evidently couldn’t do more than one thing at a time.
“Yes it was,” he agreed, putting his pen down. “All right. You went inside. According to your own statement it was…” he searched for the right folder, opened it, and read, “…blue.”
“Yep. Very blue.”
“Could you provide any more detail?”
“Um… baby blue, I guess. Not quite a cerulean. Almost a pastel.”
Ed put his hand on her arm.
“One second, major,” he said. He nodded his head, and they turned their chairs around, away from the recorder. A good one would still pick up most of their conversation, but Ed didn’t appear to have the kind of authority necessary to insist it be shut off.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you, but if you want to go home again, you need to start taking this seriously.”
“Home again at all?”
“Like I said, I don’t want to scare you.”
“Despite which, you’re going to say something terrifying, sure. Ed, you worry too much. I have this covered.”
“Annie…”
“Trust me.”
She turned her chair back around.
“Sorry,” she said to the major. “Ed thinks I need to give you a better answer, so I’ll try. It was blue and fuzzy. There wasn’t any visible technology, and as much as I was sitting in a chair inside a chamber, the spaceship was an unmanned probe that wasn’t built to carry and sustain biological life forms. It created the chamber to accommodate me. So, blue, fuzzy and comfortable, I guess. Especially once the ship added air conditioning.”
“According to your statement, you spoke to an alien, explained to him he was in the wrong place, and suggested he look elsewhere. He was…” He read to quote verbatim again, “…really cool about the whole thing.”
“Yeah, he just needed directions.”
“You were in the ship for over three hours.”
“He needed a lot of directions.”
“And those directions required him to enter lower orbit?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do, Ms. Collins. That’s where the ship is now.”
Annie wanted to add that so much more happened in those three hours, beyond even the parts she wasn’t telling Major Corcoran. There was the part where Ed and Violet hijacked the zombie network and made everyone go to sleep, and the part where everyone who wasn’t dead already woke up at sunrise fully healed of whatever wounds they’d incurred overnight.
That was easily the coolest trick anyone pulled, but nobody was talking about it because the rest of the story was that over 200 people died over the course of the evening, and when the survivors awoke there was a literal scramble to get everyone protein before they collapsed or began actually eating brains or whatever else they could get their hands on.
Annie told the president to send pizza, but on that he didn’t listen. Fortunately, he paid attention to everything else she told him.
“I understand,” Annie said. “You’re a little confused, see, the alien isn’t on the ship any more. The ship is just a probe, he showed up later. Like, what, a month ago?”
“I can pinpoint the date,” Ed said. “If you need it, major.”
“I’m not confused, Ms. Collins. I’m dubious. A non-corporeal super-intelligent electrical space ghost inhabited a weapon with world-destroying capabilities until you knocked on the door and told him to go away, and then he did. This is what I’m dealing with. You can imagine how unhappy that story has people on my side of the table.”
She gasped.
“Space ghost? That’s an awesome description! Ed, did you think of that?”
“Annie…”
“I know, take it seriously.”
“It’s very serious,” the major said. “All we have to go on is your word that there’s no alien intelligence remaining in the ship. It manifested as a hostile, and now it’s in low orbit.”
“Right, but I don’t know how else to help you, major. I mean, if you want to try nuking it now, I guess you can. It won’t do anything, and I have no idea what that would do to the upper atmosphere, but sure. Ed, what would happen if a nuclear blast, like, bounced off an object in low orbit? Wouldn’t all that force directed back toward the planet kind of suck for the planet?”
“If there’s a hostile entity in that ship,” Corcoran said, “we need to know.”
“There isn’t. Can I go home now?”
“We need more than your word.”
“I don’t really think you do.”
Major Corcoran was the kind of person who needed glasses, Annie decided. He needed them for moments like this, so he could remove them dramatically and rub the bridge of his nose, or throw them on the pile of papers and sigh deeply. He could even chew one of the earpieces and point across the table with them. The possibilities were endless.
He didn’t have glasses, though, so his expressions of impatient exasperation were so much less than they could have been. He could sigh, and rub his chin, but that was about all. Perhaps the military drummed the more interesting displays out of him already.
“Ms. Collins,” he said, “if this statement and these answers are all you have to offer, it may be a long time before you get to go home. I’m speaking now for the people above me, not myself. I would be happy to let you get on with your life, but if you think the government isn’t going to find a way to detain you solely because of your age or your current celebrity status, you’re mistaken. Right now there’s an entire team of scientists waiting to perform medical tests on you, and that’s not even to satisfy a security concern. I’m the only thing standing between you and a long, uncomfortable existence as a de facto prisoner of the state. I need you to stop treating me like an enemy and start being more cooperative.”
Annie laughed.
“Oh, come on.”
“Annie, he’s serious,” Ed said. He looked pale and worried. It was cute.
“Look, Ed, he’s either bluffing or he’s an idiot, and I don’t think he’s an idiot.”
“Well, this interview is over,” Corcoran said, addressing Ed. He reached for the tape recorder.
“Hold on, hold on,” Annie said. “Keep that running. Ed, here’s what the major isn’t telling you… unless he doesn’t know either and the people pulling his chain sent him in here without all the information he needed. Doesn’t matter. I’m guessing someone who listens to this tape knows, anyway. Two days ago, a message showed up in a place where a message shouldn’t show up, on a computer nobody is supposed to know about. I’m going to keep on giving the major the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s bluffing and knows about that message.”
At that point, the major did turn off the tape recorder.
“Yes, I know about the message.”
“Go on. For Ed: what did it say?”
“It said…” he cleared his throat, as if these were perhaps the most difficult words ever. “It said ‘Annie Collins was here’.”
“Which is funny because I wasn’t there when that happened, I was in a hotel a few blocks from here, having all my standard electronic communications monitored. I mean, I’m assuming that’s true, you guys aren’t that stupid.”