So Colin and Jason didn’t know who to believe. Grandma and Daddy were both scientists, who were the smartest people in the world. Someday Colin was going to be a scientist, too, although Jason wanted to be an astronaut instead. When Colin was a scientist, everything would all be clear.
Meanwhile, he just listened. To everything. Nobody, he sometimes thought, knew how much he heard.
“Daddy,” he said as they walked from the car to the broken porch steps, “the trees are not happy.”
“Don’t I know it,” Daddy said.
Daddy didn’t understand. Grandma, on Skype, didn’t understand. Even Jason didn’t understand. Jason didn’t hear what Colin did.
On her birthday, Marianne saw a picture of herself on the cover of a news magazine.
She stood in line at the supermarket in Barnsville, a Canadian town west of Toronto. The town was small, the supermarket barely deserved the name, the magazine rack held only three magazines, which were a dying commodity anyway. Two were American, and Time had pictures of her, Harrison, Ahmed Rafat, and others who’d researched aboard the Embassy. The photos ringed big red letters: ARCHITECTS OF THE SPORE PLAGUE: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Marianne’s fingers trembled as she put the magazine in her basket, along with coffee, milk, bread, cheese, and dish detergent. The clerk smiled, took her money, and did not seem to match her with the photo. At home, Marianne collapsed on her sofa and read the article and its many sidebars.
“Home” was this small rented bungalow ever since Stubbins had brought her here two and a half years ago. Canada was far less rabid about the damage the Denebs had caused to her ecology than was the United States—but then, when wasn’t Canada less rabid? Something about the United States seemed to provide a fertile medium for culturing hate groups, irrational scapegoats, mass shootings, and the blame game. When Jonah Stubbins had tried to buy a TV station in the United States, there was suddenly none available. When he’d tried to buy broadcast-frequency bandwidth from the FCC, his application had been denied. A few cable companies welcomed him, but they were small and local. To get the airtime he wanted, Stubbins bought a Canadian station, from which he broadcast illegally to the United States. “I’m a goddamn Tokyo Rose,” he’d said to reporters, but not to Marianne. She’d heard about it anyway.
The Time piece, a series of articles, began with an essay by Hugo Soltis, a popular columnist known for his anti-Deneb views:
Seven years ago, every country on Earth fell apart. And they’re still falling.
Humanity managed to survive a global death toll of over fifty million people from the spore plague, the majority of victims in Central Asia. We managed to survive the die-off of eight mouse species, with all the economic havoc resulting directly and indirectly from that extinction. What we are not managing to survive, in any meaningful way, is what has happened to our most precious resource: Earth’s children.
Enrique Velasquez, age two, lives in Compton, California, with his parents and older sister. Enrique cries almost constantly, as he has since birth. He is underweight and has been diagnosed with “failure to thrive.”
Allison Porter, in Chicago, is three. For the first two and a half years of her life, she cried—“wailed, screeched, screamed,” according to her parents—as much as Enrique. For the last six months, Allison has been on Calminex, the child-targeted tranquilizer from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Allison is calm now, but she moves and talks more slowly than what was once normal for three-year-olds. She has trouble learning.
Jazzmyn Brown is five and a half, one of the children in the womb when R. sporii struck Earth. Jazzmyn’s mother, like Enrique’s parents, cannot afford Calminex. Jazzmyn’s mother, a drug addict, surrendered her to the Florida child-protective services, and since then Jazzmyn has been in and out of eleven foster homes. No one can cope for long with her tantrums and chaotic behavior.
Michael Worden, four, has no chaotic behavior, no nonstop crying, no daily doses of Calminex. Born deaf, he is a bright and happy little boy in Oklahoma City, where his parents and two sisters are all learning American Sign Language right along with Michael.
Are these the only choices for an entire generation of children: to be on drugs that retard development, to be born deaf, or to live an existence filled with crying, frustration, and pain? Because there is pain for these children; functional MRIs confirm this. An entire generation has been genetically modified in their most complicated and human part: the brain. Everyone on planet Earth knows this, and how it happened.
But what happens next? Is there any hope on the horizon? And where are the researchers who helped bring this about by cooperating so fully with the alien Denebs? Did these human scientists know what would be the consequences of the spore plague?
And if they didn’t foresee it—should they have?
Most puzzling of all to many Americans: Why are at least some of them still working with those organizations, government and privately owned, who want to build a spaceship and renew contact with the aliens who did not bother to warn us of all the consequences of this plague? In this magazine’s recent poll, 68 percent of randomly contacted people disapproved of the four spaceships still under construction. “We have enough problems right here!” Enrique’s father says, and who should know better?
Marianne read with growing anger. To say that the scientists on the Embassy had “helped to bring this about”—how could a once-reputable news magazine even print that? Or blame the Denebs for failing to warn humanity about what they themselves didn’t know? Or that the Denebs were aliens, when all evidence said they were human? How?
The rest of the articles were more balanced. One discussed the chemistry and side effects of Calminex. One reported on the four spaceships still under construction, including the funding and engineering problems of building an unknown structure powered by unknown physics to specs dictated by an unknown race. One article examined the world’s economy, slowly recovering. One explored the ecological shifts from the mouse die-off: which animals were filling the vacated niche of fast-multiplying omnivores, how plants were adjusting.
And one traced the present activities and whereabouts of key Embassy research staff, those who had stayed until the very end.
Dr. Ahmed Rafat, geneticist. On staff at GlaxoSmithKline in London.
Penelope Hodgson, lab assistant. Housewife in Tempe, Arizona.
Dr. Ann Potter, physician. Retired from practice, living in Washington, DC.
Robert Chavez, lab assistant, working at the University of California at Berkeley.
Lisa Guiterrez, genetics counselor, changed her name to Lisa Garland, living and working in Chicago. She deeply regrets her involvement with the aliens, saying—
Marianne skipped to the last paragraphs.
Dr. Harrison Rice, immunologist and Nobel Laureate, living in New York City and working at Columbia University, reportedly on brain anomalies in mice.
Dr. Marianne Jenner, evolutionary geneticist whose son Noah was allegedly kidnapped by aliens, living in Barnsville, Ontario, Canada. She creates content for the JS Network, owned by Jonah Stubbins, which feeds pro-Deneb programs and speeches and scientific statistics to American television and the Internet around the globe.