

First published February 2018 by Startoucher Ltd

Unit 7, Hayters Court,

Grigg Lane, Brockenhurst

United Kingdom SO42 7PG

startouchers@gmail.com

Copyright © C.J. Odle 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or distributed in any form, without the prior

written permission of the publisher

The right of C.J. Odle to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of the characters

depicted to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

To Sheena

## Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Acknowledgments

About the Author

## Chapter One

Jake Connolly slept in the middle of his king-sized bed, the sprawl of his lean frame the sole point of untidiness in his penthouse. Pristine and spacious, the apartment's empty walls and sleek furniture had bold, clean lines. The exclusive designer called the style Minimalist Plus, and when awake, Jake found the effect calming. Now, though, he tossed and turned, his dark hair awry as he kicked the blue satin sheet from his body.

The display on his charging phone read four a.m., but in downtown LA, true darkness lurked only in pockets. While an eerie wind gusted outside, ambient light seeped into his penthouse from cars, from neon signs, from the nocturnal beat of a city that had abandoned the normal rhythms of sleep.

Sweating, Jake continued to twist and kick, gasping like a free diver surfacing for air. When the lull did finally arrive, it brought no solace. Eyelids tightly shut, he lay rigidly on his back, fists clenched, face pointing toward the ceiling.

Suddenly, he sat bolt upright as if waking from a nightmare, except that he didn't wake up. His body relaxed while his eyes pinged open, dim with a far-off glaze. He swung his legs out to the side, standing up in a trance, oblivious to the feel of the hardwood floor as he padded along.

The open layout of the penthouse allowed Jake to cross it without the obstruction of doors. In boxer shorts he sleepwalked his way through the living room area, around the Italian couch; the TV and sound system; and the pyrite cube display, the fool's gold glowing softly as he passed.

He padded silently into the kitchen area, all gleaming chrome and imported granite, a stark, spare space, the worktop uncluttered except for the microwave and coffee maker. To this Jake approached, taking out a cup and putting it in place. He turned the machine on, the soft hum as it warmed up the only sound in the apartment.

Still between worlds, Jake left the kitchen and retraced his earlier route. On reaching the bed he sat back down, closed his eyes, and reclined on his side. In an instant he was tossing and turning again.

By the time his alarm went off at six thirty, the satin sheet had spilled onto the floor. He felt groggy and ignored it, instead walking slowly to the front of the penthouse to take in the sweeping view from the floor-to-ceiling windows. As dawn broke, the city opened up to the horizon, sunlight washing clean all traces of the night. Traffic already dotted the roads, and Jake could see tiny figures scurrying to work along the sidewalk far below. He yawned and grabbed his phone, checking his messages automatically as he stretched out.

Due in Burbank court at nine a.m. for the water rights case, Jake hesitated before changing into his running gear, tired and for once sorely tempted to let discipline slide. But no, he'd do his usual few miles, forcing himself to stay in shape, his body just as much a project as his career. Aged thirty-one, he hadn't become such a rising star by lacking grit. Tough local college, scholarship to Harvard, then slogging his way up Goldstein and Baker, one of the top three law firms in LA.

But even rising stars needed coffee. Jake walked over to the kitchen, while around him the city continued to come alive. The apartment benefited from the best soundproofing Jake had been able to buy. Even so, the buzz of it filtered through as he strode across the floor...

And found the steaming cup waiting. It sat in the coffee maker, hot and ready even though he couldn't remember setting the machine. It was an accusation, as clear and damning as any piece of evidence or contractual clause. As hard as Jake tried to come up with an explanation for it, only one really made sense. He glanced back across the apartment toward his bed, then again to the cup.

"Not _again._ Fuck."

Jake ran the way he did every morning, with a focused determination to shut out the world. Everyone he had to pass was an obstacle, every moment of interaction a delay. He kept the earbuds from his phone in, music drowning out the sounds of the city, blocking even the echo of his own breathing from intruding. When traffic forced him to pause on the edge of the sidewalk, he jogged in place, impatient for the opportunity to hurry on.

Grand Park was nearly empty as Jake set off on his second circuit. Normally, he barely noticed the scenery around him, but today one sight stopped him. An elderly Chinese couple was doing tai chi in the shade of a tree, the two of them flowing with such ease and power, Jake pretended to stretch so he could watch. Every light movement of their hands was rooted to the ground below. They stepped forward in perfect unison, lifting up onto one leg and extending the other as their arms spread wide. It was more graceful than anything Jake could have managed, even though he had to be thirty years younger.

The woman took up a pose with her hands out in front of her while Jake waited for her to do something, but she didn't. The man, meanwhile, started walking in circles, faster than typical tai chi, but with the same sense of wholeness. His movements turned sinuous every time he switched direction, his body seeming to fold and unfold as he did.

Jake remained transfixed until the bleeping of his phone's alarm shattered his absorption as neatly as a dropped vase. "Damn it," he muttered. He'd now have to sprint back to the apartment to make it in time for the case.

Jake had bought his Porsche Cayenne Turbo SUV for its spirited driving along the dirt tracks of California's mountains. Out there, it charged its way around with enough speed to make him feel totally alive. Stuck downtown in traffic en route to the Golden State Freeway, it was simply an expensive frame for his frustration.

"Come on," he said as another light turned red. He resisted the urge to slam his hand against the wheel. It wasn't bad luck—luck only existed for those who believed in it. If plans went wrong, you worked harder, you didn't whine about it. Although exactly how hard work could make traffic lights turn green, he didn't know.

He sighed and looked to his right at the graffiti-covered wall painted with strings of signature tags, odd-looking scrawls, and occasional attempts at real art. One piece of graffiti caught his eye, mostly because of the blank border around it. Elsewhere, the lines and tags swirled over one another, claiming and reclaiming space, an argument in spray paint. In this one spot, those painting around it had conceded.

"History is myth," Jake read aloud. "What does that mean?"

Before he could ponder the answer, his phone rang, loud and insistent. The display showed the name of his boss, Giles Bennett.

Jake glanced at the clock on the dash: 8:31 a.m. Steeling himself, he took the call.

"Jake, where the hell are you?" Giles demanded over the car's speakers. It was always a demand with Giles. His voice was too loud, too bluff, for anything else.

"I'm stuck in a jam."

"That sounds like an excuse, Jake," Giles said. "When are you going to be at court?"

"I'll get there soon," Jake promised, although he couldn't see how.

"Well, hurry," Giles said. "There's plenty of meat on the table, and I'm ready to start carving."

Giles cut off without the niceties of a goodbye. Clenching the wheel, Jake spied a gap ahead and darted forward into it, doing his best to ignore the blaring horn of the white van behind.

When Giles had talked about carving he hadn't been joking. Their client, a multinational water bottling business, was paying them top dollar to defend a test case against a crank organic almond farmer. Jake's firm had advised the water bottlers on ways to establish their right to use the stream on the farmer's land, playing a slow, patient game for the eventual payoff. Picking the right grower had been a big part of it. One who paid attention to every aspect of his farm would have been a problem. One like Henry Rinder, however, the too-rich son of minor British aristocracy, regularly in and out of rehab... that was easier.

A sensible man would have settled a long time ago, but this one wanted his day in court, presumably hoping if he could get his story plastered over enough newspapers he could at least win the PR war. Jake's clients were naturally concerned about their brand. After spending millions marketing the purity and honesty of their water, they didn't want their image tarnished. And that was the real challenge. The case itself presented no difficulty other than their clients coming out of it looking like the good guys.

This didn't concern Jake now as much as getting to the courthouse. After leaving the freeway and making his way through the suburban streets of Burbank, he raced up East Angelino Avenue, and then turned into the courthouse garage. With three minutes to spare, he screeched around the first two levels before spotting a space on the third. Jake swung his Porsche into it, his front bumper scraping the car on the left. He jumped out and fished his briefcase and a bulging plastic bag from the passenger seat, straightening his suit before taking the elevator to ground level and jogging the short distance to the main entrance of the courthouse.

The low-rise concrete building of Burbank Courthouse looked as though it had been carved out of a huge brick. As he approached the front, he could see a group of protesters jostling outside, monitored by two policemen. An occupational hazard these days; people thought if they shouted loudly enough they could change the law. The media were also out in force, an unexpected bonus. Jake had banked on phones being pointed at him when he solved his clients' PR issue, but actual news cameras were much better.

"Time to play," he said and pushed his way through.

Sixty minutes later, Henry Rinder and his attorney were back outside, keen to take the fight to the media. Jake followed closely behind.

The noise of the protestors hit them like a wave.

"No water, no life!"

"Drought means death!"

"Corporate scum!"

Obviously, news of the result had already gotten out.

Henry stepped up to the microphones and cameras being held by the assembled reporters.

The shouting stopped.

"I promise you, even though this has gone against me today, I will continue to find ways to fight for farming in ethical, meaningful ways!"

Jake stood to the side, waiting to catch the crowd's attention. His eyes alighted on one girl who seemed determined to rewrite her message to reflect the day's events, her placard running out of space. She spotted Jake and pushed her way forward, shoving a leaflet into his hands that explained in small writing everything the evil water bottlers would do to LA's environment.

"You're killing our planet," she insisted.

Jake smiled. "Me in particular, or just my clients?" He delivered the line not for her, but for the reporters, willing them to take notice as he spoke.

They spotted him soon enough, turning their cameras to him in a ring of expectation. They knew when they were going to get a better quote than anything offered from an old-money farmer.

"Do you have any idea how much water they're wasting?" the girl asked.

Jake reached into the plastic bag he'd taken from the car and pulled out an empty gallon water bottle. Or almost empty. He held it up to let the cameras focus on the contents. A single almond rattled inside, clear and easy to see. Jake had originally been going to use a whole bagful, but one made for a better image. One would be something the watching public could remember, put up on its social media feeds, talk about.

"Water is our most precious resource," Jake said. The cameras closed in to get a clear shot of the almond. Hopefully, they were also getting a good view of his face. He wanted them to recall who had done this. "It is always regrettable when we can't solve our disputes outside of a courtroom, but water is a resource worth fighting for.

"But what are we really fighting about?" He paused for emphasis, hoisting the bottle higher. "Henry Rinder will tell you it's about heritage, or the environment. About a big company coming in and stomping all over the little guy. It's not. It's about this. An almond."

Jake tipped the bottle and spilled the almond onto his palm. "One almond takes a gallon of water to grow. California almond farmers like Henry Rinder use 1.1 trillion gallons of water each year. That's enough water to supply all homes and businesses in Los Angeles for three times as long. And yet the government urges _us_ to take less showers and not water our plants." He let the figures sink in, then clenched the almond in his hand and held his fist up. "That's nuts!"

There were sniggers from the media and cameras flashed in front of him.

"Almonds are a luxury product, and over 70 percent of our almonds are exported overseas, mainly to China. The prosperous middle classes in other countries benefit while we suffer.

"The organic almonds from Henry Rinder's farm cost fifteen dollars a pound. He wants you to believe my clients have been criminally wasting _his_ water. The truth is this—almond farmers like him criminally waste _your_ water."

He looked toward Henry and his attorney and then back to the cameras.

"Would you rather be clean and have fresh, safe bottled water, or be dirty and thirsty but have plenty of expensive almonds? My clients tried to work with Henry Rinder to find a way to share the abundant water around his farm, but he was never there."

Jake didn't give the reason. It would look better if the news people found out about the farmer's time in rehab for themselves. He looked around at the crowd again. He'd won and they knew it, even if he'd taken some liberties with the facts. It didn't matter. What mattered was the story people would repeat, a story where his firm's clients triumphed as the good guys.

Jake's eyes met those of the girl who had given him the leaflet. He could see the contempt in them, almost pity, and although it shouldn't have disturbed him in his moment of victory, it did. He'd had clients to protect. The rest... well, that was somebody else's problem.

## Chapter Two

"To our new partner, Jake!" Giles said, raising his glass. Across the bar, Jake's face stared down from a TV, the music too loud to hear his speech, but the almond was clearly visible. "Winning and making us look good, all at once!"

"To Jake!" the others from the firm toasted.

Jake knew Giles liked to think of his department as a sports team. Plenty of preparation, leave everything out there in the courtroom, but always, _always_ celebrate the victory. If it meant drinks all night at the bar down the street from their office, Jake certainly had no grounds for complaint. He felt too much like a winner tonight.

His mood was only heightened by the presence of Rosaline Marsh. At thirty-eight, Rosa was the youngest equity partner in the firm by a lot, focused as a shark at work, and probably just as focused at the gym given the way she looked. She possessed a hard-edged beauty that seemed utterly impersonal at the office, her dark hair always pulled back tightly, her suit always immaculate. After a few shots, however, there were hints of fuzziness around the edges. A hair out of place here. A button undone there.

As soon as he'd come in, Jake had seen Rosa sitting alone at the far end of the bar, perched on high stool and nursing a tumbler of amber liquid. He spent some time talking with his tall and imposing boss until the effects of the second vodka hit home, and then his eyes kept being drawn toward her. He ordered a third and swilled the liquid around in the glass before taking a pull and walking over.

"You were very... impressive today," Rosa said. Around them, the bar was thick with lawyers. Taking over every spot between the long stretch of the bar and the pool table. It would probably have put off the regulars, except the firm had hired the entire bar for the evening, and there weren't any regulars in there.

"Thank you," Jake replied as he stood directly in front of her.

"But then, impressive is a good word for you." She reached out for her drink, and her hand just happened to alight on Jake's arm. "You've been working out."

"It's LA," Jake said with a smile. "Doesn't _everyone_ work out?"

"Really?" Rosa said, tilting her head to one side. "You aren't going to come back with a compliment of your own?"

"What compliment could do you justice?" Jake shot back, slugging the rest of his drink. It burned the back of his throat.

"Smooth," Rosa said. She put a hand on Jake's chest, leaning forward just a little with her lips parted. "I guess if I want compliments, I'm going to have to try a little harder. Another drink?"

Jake didn't say no. Just as he probably wouldn't say no to anything else that night. They both knew where this was leading, the frisson of the chase as enjoyable as the final consummation.

"You said something about trying harder," Jake said, and this time his hand made contact with Rosa's. Her fingers found the inside of his wrist, tracing a small circle there, sending shivers up Jake's arm.

"Strictly speaking, since I'm the senior partner," Rosa said, "you're the one who should be making an effort. But I imagine you have no problems being... generous, when you need to be."

"I'm sure I can keep up with whatever you have in mind," Jake said.

Rosa slipped off her stool and edged forward, and suddenly Jake was breathing in the expensive lilac notes of her perfume, feeling the brush of her leg as she pressed up against him. He struggled to resist the urge to kiss her, aware of attracting attention from their boozy colleagues.

"I don't want to do this in front of the others," Rosa whispered. "Let's get out of here."

Jake opened his mouth to suggest his place, but the words wouldn't come out. Pain shot through the base of his skull, radiating out from the spot where it joined his spine like a firework going off. For a moment, the room swam in front of him.

"What do you think?" Rosa asked. She looked like she hadn't noticed the change in Jake. That, or she didn't care.

"Sounds like... a good idea," Jake managed. "Give me a second."

He staggered in the direction of the bathroom, certain with every step that he was going to fall, keeping himself upright solely because he couldn't afford to let the partners see any moment of weakness. Once in the bathroom, he hunched over a sink, splashing water over his face while the pressure inside his skull built.

Then, as if from a distance, he felt his legs finally give way.

For an instant, the image of a desert rose in front of him, sun flickering over sand, dunes rolling in waves, heat blurring the air into mirages...

Then the scene vanished in light-tinged afterimages, leaving only the hardness of the bathroom floor behind. Jake groaned, then reached up to grip the counter. He managed to pull himself up to a sitting position, then stood. The pain in his head had subsided but still throbbed painfully. Slowly, methodically, he straightened his suit and wiped his face with another spray of water. Only when he was certain he looked as normal as possible did he walk back out into the bar.

Rosa was waiting for him where he'd left her, freshening her lipstick, but Jake felt as weak as a newborn foal and kept his gaze down to head quickly for the exit. Giles stood in the middle of a nearby cluster of associates, busy telling the story of his genius in picking Jake out of the pack.

"Giles, I have to get going," Jake said.

"So soon?" Giles frowned. "We're only just getting started."

Jake nodded, the movement making his head feel like it was filled with lead. "You won't need me to keep going. Have fun."

Once outside he relaxed slightly, and took a few steps in the direction of his office to return to his car. But he soon realized he was in no fit state to drive, so he pulled out his phone and used an app to order a taxi. He leaned against the shop front of a shut café where he sometimes grabbed lunch, then crouched down and waited. The ride home took ten minutes, but to Jake it felt like an hour. He stumbled past his doorman, unable to return the usual greeting, and slumped into the elevator, holding it together long enough to get through his front door.

Jake sat in a leather chair by the huge windows of his apartment for a long time, staring out while his skull continued to throb, the band of pain around its base ebbing and flowing but not leaving entirely. He got up to drink a couple of glasses of water, then returned to the chair. The pain lessened slightly, and he tried to think logically about the incident in the bar. It had been many years since his last vision, during a period in his adolescence he did his best to forget. Maybe this time the cause was overwork or drinking too quickly, hopefully just a one-off event. Yes, that must be it; all he had to do from now on was to get enough rest and watch the alcohol.

Jake thought about the few times over the last couple of months when he'd found a hot coffee waiting for him in the morning. He hadn't wanted to admit it, but perhaps he really was sleepwalking again. As a child his sleepwalking had lasted for a year, between the ages of five and six. It cleared up on its own, and he'd long since forgotten it. Maybe the recent pressure and stress had reactivated it, and this had progressed to trigger a full-blown vision. He really needed to be more disciplined about getting enough sleep. Cleaning up his diet and cutting down on caffeine wouldn't go amiss either.

He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. In every other post-case celebration, Jake had partied late into the night, determined to prove he could do it and still show up for work. He was always at the heart of it, keen to impress Giles with his stamina and social skills. His boss wouldn't be happy about him leaving early. Neither would Rosaline Marsh. If the evening hadn't taken such a strange turn, they might have been together in his penthouse, wrapped up in one another in a way that would have been as complete as it was impersonal. Would she be offended that he'd left without a word? Jake couldn't imagine a partner like her appreciating being abandoned, even if she heard how ill Jake had been.

Ill—that was one word for it.

After his experience at the bar, though, Jake did feel ill, mentally and physically spent. He really needed to rest, but his nerves felt too overwrought to permit sleep. He continued to gaze at the night sky, staring up beyond the skyscrapers, hoping the faint glow would eventually let him—

The lights came before Jake could finish the thought, two brilliant ovals appearing suddenly and streaking in shades of gold edged with green across the width of the sky from left to right high above the tops of the tallest buildings. The ovals were far too perfect to be some trick of the weather and shone with an intense brightness against the dimness of the night.

They hung motionless for a moment at the far right of Jake's view, then flashed back across the sky to leave afterimages burning on his retinas. The ovals blurred their way from one side of the horizon to the other, swift as shooting stars, speeding and darting for what seemed like forever but must have been no more than a few seconds, before vanishing into the night from where they'd first appeared.

As the lingering images dissipated in Jake's eyes, he kept looking at the spot where the lights had come from, both willing them back into existence so he could prove they were real and simultaneously hoping they wouldn't return. Why was this happening? Could he really be seeing mysterious lights? Perhaps the desert vision and vodka had overloaded his brain and made him hallucinate, because he'd never seen something like this before, and his previous childhood visions had been in his mind's eye only.

What were a few lights after a whole desert, after all? Jake shook his head. It wasn't real. Just his imagination, nothing more. Once he focused on that, it became easier to push more uncomfortable feelings to the side. Even his headache seemed to be fading rapidly. Maybe enough to let him sleep now. Jake got up and wandered toward the square of his bed. His fatigue was so great, not even thoughts of Rosa intruded on the simpler desire for rest.

## Chapter Three

Jake slept heavily and woke up around nine a.m. He got up and took a quick shower before knocking back a large black coffee and a painkiller. His head still felt sore, but with an important meeting scheduled for later that morning, he had no time to think about the events of last night and instead focused on looking as sharp as possible in one of his best suits. From the firm's point of view, winning cases brought celebrations, but not any kind of pause. The reward for success—more work. It was about what you did the next day, for the next client, as you continued your ascent. An ever more successful cog in the corporate machine.

He ordered a taxi and checked his appearance in the mirror a final time before leaving. During the fifteen-minute journey, he flicked open the morning paper the driver handed him and found a feature about the water rights case on page two. He folded the paper as the car pulled up to his office, then paid the driver and leapt out, striding quickly into the building and taking the elevator to the seventeenth floor.

The conference room at the firm contained everything an old-fashioned lawyers' office needed, yet recreated on a grand scale. It boasted a massive leather-topped table made from the finest Brazilian rosewood, with luxurious leather chairs handcrafted to resemble antiques. Oak paneling on the walls was set off by awards and articles about past victories. All the audiovisual equipment the firm needed to conduct business was discreetly hidden away. The stately atmosphere suggested an office that could have been from a hundred years before.

Jake entered and saw it was full. He knew the firm had just been appointed by a prestigious new client keen to brainstorm their case and begin litigation. Giles sat at the head of the table, flanked by Alexis Vale from corporate, and James Van Zyl, who handled the firm's intellectual property and trademark work. Alexis and James had both been with the firm as long as Giles, both well established in their fields and as immaculate and serious as cliff faces. They were heavy hitters at the firm, usually brought in for the most lucrative of clients.

Representatives of the new client took up most of the room. Yamagata-Evans & Associates were obviously keen to be taken seriously. Along with the elderly Mr. Yamagata and his younger partner Mr. Evans, there were six other suits. Jake had done the research; Joshua Evans was a trust-fund Ivy League dropout who had ended up in Japan while traveling the world. He'd fallen in love with Mr. Yamagata's youngest daughter, and a scandal had ensued. Financial problems with her father's business had paved the way for a substantial cash injection from the Evans estate, and over the next few years, Joshua had surprised everyone with his newfound maturity. There was now a grudging mutual respect with his father-in-law, but it was still a strained relationship. Joshua had a smooth, boyish face, while Mr. Yamagata looked dapper despite his advanced years.

"Jake," Giles boomed, and checked his watch. "Cutting it fine. Let me introduce you to Mr. Yamagata."

Jake walked over the far side of the table where Mr. Yamagata sat next to Alexis.

"Ah, yes," Mr. Yamagata said as Giles introduced Jake. "Your protégé."

"We heard about you solving GL's small hedge fund problem," Joshua said from the opposite side of the table. "Very impressive."

"Indeed, so impressive they asked for you specifically, Jake," Giles said, winking discreetly at him. "They want you to take the lead on this one."

Jake shook hands with Mr. Yamagata and sat in the empty chair at his side. Mr. Yamagata smiled and turned toward Giles. "One should make use of talent when it is there. And you have a very talented young man here, when it comes to managing difficult situations without losing face."

Jake couldn't help feeling smug. Partner and now this. He straightened the leather-bound pad of paper laid in front of him, then reached over to one of the two steaming coffee jugs and poured a generous amount into an elegant china cup. He sipped it slowly as Giles cleared his throat and formally started the meeting by asking Joshua to recap the salient points of their predicament.

Jake listened closely as Joshua leaned forward and began to speak. The case appeared to be a complex monster of litigation. Two years ago, Yamagata-Evans & Associates purchased a small Japanese manufacturing company primarily for the value existing in its patents. One involved a technology designed to improve cell phone download speeds ten times over. An American rival had started marketing a version sufficiently similar to give grounds for a suit.

All clear-cut enough, except there were also accusations of industrial espionage floating about. Calls for the protection of American businesses being threatened by the Japanese. Declarations that everyone in the field had been working on the technology all along.

No, Jake had been wrong. Not a monster case. A soap bubble. It could be coaxed and blown into growth, but it could also burst with even the slightest wrong move. It would be as much about perception and presentation as the actual facts. Exactly the sort of case he excelled in. No wonder Yamagata had—

The pain was as sudden and intense as the previous night. He lurched forward and grabbed the back of his neck. Again, it started at the base of his skull in a band that constricted and crushed his spine. As agony shot through him, it took an almighty effort to get out of his chair and stagger toward the door. He couldn't risk collapsing unconscious on the table, and he didn't even have enough time for an apology as he made his abrupt exit. Once safely out of the room, he leaned against the wall of the corridor, breathing hard.

A moment later, Giles rushed out, following behind less like a mother hen than like the military chasing after a deserter.

"What the hell?" Giles demanded, his face red with anger. "What do you think you're doing, walking out on a client like this?"

Jake shook his head, which only made the throbbing worse. He tried to focus on Giles, but the swaying and blurring of his vision made him feel nauseous.

"First last night and now this?" Giles pointed to the conference room. "You think clients _want_ a lawyer who will walk out on them at the drop of a hat? Mr. Yamagata is very traditional about these things."

Giles straightened up and adjusted his tie. "Be in my office in twenty minutes. I've got to get back in there to try to smooth this over."

Giles hurried back inside, not even asking if Jake was OK. Probably just as well, because Jake couldn't describe how he felt right then. He slouched down further and hung his head as the subtle ribbed lines of the gray carpet began to swirl before his eyes. Then the color and texture changed, mutating into a brown and beige pattern that looked strangely familiar. With a grim fascination Jake realized he was looking at the carpet of his adoptive parents' home. He peered at it, and then through it, into a vision of his childhood. There they all were, sitting on the worn living room sofa watching TV. Jake and his mother and father.

He tried to resist by twisting his head, but it made no difference. Vivid memories flooded back. Jake was thirteen when the visions had begun. He saw his adoptive parents reacting with expressions of disapproval, even worry, when he'd first told them. He relived the day his father had called him a daydreamer and liar, because he'd talked about seeing things that later came true. He'd soon learned to keep those experiences to himself and suffer in silence. The visions had become more frequent as puberty approached, and then he'd discovered how to push them away by concentrating with all his might to squeeze them from his mind.

Jake gritted his teeth and focused. The pain increased dramatically, but he clenched his temples, determined to squeeze the childhood scenes away. They faded as the pressure in his head subsided and the corporate gray carpet returned to line the corridor. Jake breathed deeply and stood up straight, grateful for some semblance of normality. He could go to the bathroom and freshen up before his meeting with Giles.

Jake was usually relaxed in Giles's office. He'd spent more than enough time there since he'd joined the firm, working closely with Giles on cases and also going to him for advice. He'd gotten used to the feeling of the hard chairs and the pictures of Giles's moments of legal glory contrasted with luxury vacations displayed on the wall behind his desk.

He scanned the room and sat in one of the client chairs before reaching up to gingerly touch the back of his head. Even though the pain had lessened, pressure remained, and he kept clamping down on it to prevent it from rising up again. Every time he stopped concentrating, stopped fighting it, it felt like the world started to shift around him, becoming more penetratingly real than it should have been. It felt like he was slipping _through_ that reality, through a flimsy gauze screen covering another dimension.

Jake couldn't allow it to happen. Giles was right: he'd just abruptly walked out of a meeting with a major client who had tapped him to be the lead attorney. Jake had enough credit in the bank to avoid being fired, but it was hardly the type of behavior befitting a new partner. He took out his phone, trying to force his brain back along its usual lines by reading work e-mails.

"So," Giles said when he finally burst through the door, red tie swinging. "Please enlighten me. What just happened?"

Jake took a breath and forced himself to smile. "Nothing. Just a blip."

"Just a blip. Right." Giles didn't go around to the other side of his desk; instead, he perched on the near edge, close enough to his in-box that a wrong move would have mixed up affidavits from a dozen cases. No longer Giles the vengeful boss, but Giles the father figure. Jake almost preferred the former.

"First you walked out of the bar, and now a pivotal meeting," Giles said. "There has to be _something_ going on."

Jake cracked his knuckles. What could he say to him? No way could he talk about visions and strange lights. At best, Giles would laugh at him. At worst, it would get him drug tested by the firm's doctors.

"It's just a couple of bad headaches," Jake said. "I got them a few times as a kid. Apart from today and last night, I've been fine."

"Except for the half a dozen other times in the last couple of months," Giles said, looking straight at Jake. "Do you think I haven't noticed when you've zoned out in the middle of my saying something? The times when you've been staring off into the distance?"

Jake feigned surprise, "Giles, I don't know—"

"Don't try to bullshit me," Giles said. He drummed his fingers against the edge of the desk. "Remember who you learned that from. You've had issues for months, and I know exactly what's going on."

He did? It wasn't entirely impossible. Giles had a reputation for obsessively researching everyone he worked with—client, associate, or partner. Perhaps he had managed to drill down into the furthest reaches of Jake's childhood and somehow unearth his unusual visions.

"It's overwork!" Giles declared. "You think I haven't seen it before?"

"No," Jake said. "It's not that, it's—"

"I've seen it a thousand times," Giles insisted. "Every year, a fresh batch of eager beavers work themselves to death to make partner. Heck, we work them to death, because what else are associates for, right?"

Jake couldn't disagree. While Giles believed in leaving no stone unturned, it wasn't usually him turning them.

"But when you make partner it's different. We want you here for the long haul. You're a moneymaker, and I'm not going to lose you. So you're going to take two weeks off."

Jake started to interject.

"No, no arguments," Giles said, raising his right hand. "I don't want to hear it. Two weeks off. Go to the beach. Swim. Surf. Whatever it is people do. Just don't do it here. I don't want to see you in the office, understood?"

Jake tried to argue but realized he was in no position to. Perhaps Giles was right and the constant years of excessive work had finally taken their toll. Two weeks off could be just what he needed to recharge his batteries and put the strangeness of the last couple of days behind him.

He sighed. "Understood."

## Chapter Four

The next day, Jake drove to the sea. He spent the late morning swimming off Venice Beach, cutting through the water smoothly, although not as smoothly as he once remembered doing. The salt water and sun felt good on his body, and it took some time before he emerged from the water to dry himself with his towel and walk along the shoreline.

He found a quiet spot beyond the main crowd and laid his towel carefully on the sand before sitting down and staring out at the waves. It was a perfect September day, the sun glistening on the water, with a faint breeze and the temperature just right. But Jake couldn't relax; his mind kept replaying the mysterious lights in the sky and the visions of the desert and of his old childhood home.

He'd had his first vision when he was thirteen. He could clearly remember seeing Haylie Baxter, a girl who lived two blocks over, being hit by her father. He'd had the vision when he was out playing in the park, so real he could have been in the room, even though he was nowhere near. He remembered trying to tell his adoptive father and just getting an angry glare in response.

"Boys like you shouldn't go around making up stories," he'd said. "You could get someone into trouble, lying like that."

But he hadn't been lying, and Haylie and her mom had moved away the next summer.

Other memories came to him. Seeing what some of the questions were going to be on a teacher's surprise test. Most of his classmates thought he'd cheated. The county fair he visited with his mom, where guessing the number of marbles hidden in a jar had seemed obvious because the number had just appeared in his mind.

Until the age of fifteen, the visions were sporadic, three or four a year. Usually he just zoned out and found himself looking at what he could only describe as a TV screen. A friend who was there once when it happened told him afterward that his eyes had gone blank and he'd swayed on his feet. He'd felt no pain. Then puberty hit with a vengeance, and the visions became more frequent and disruptive. Once he'd even fallen over unconscious at school, and the teacher had thought he was having an epileptic fit.

After that, he began in earnest to try and block them as soon as they arrived. He quickly discovered that trying to resist brought on pain. A throbbing pain so intense, he gave up the first few times, crying in frustration as the images swamped his mind. But with persistence, and by summoning up previously unknown reserves of willpower, he'd learned to push through the physical agony and squeeze the visions out of his head. By the end of his fifteenth year, they'd stopped completely.

Why had the sleepwalking and visions returned after so many years? He scanned the horizon of the sea from left to right. And what about the lights? He'd never seen anything like that before. One thing was certain: he'd pushed himself physically and mentally for many years, especially the last five. The most probable answer was also the most obvious. As much as he hated to accept it, his nervous system was fried.

Jake rolled up his towel and got up to walk back toward the boardwalk. He studied the others relaxing on the beach, apparently without a care in the world. If everyone else could find ways to relax, surely he could too. He strolled past the sun worshipers and the volleyball players and thought about how to spend his vacation.

Maybe he could grab a package deal to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. Giles had arranged a corporate retreat there a couple of years before, but Jake hadn't had time to enjoy it. Now he did. The more he thought about it, the better the idea seemed. A luxury all-inclusive resort with plenty of water sports, amazing seafood, and attractive women.

Jake already felt better and decided to book the vacation as soon as he could. But first he needed to eat. He walked off the beach to retrieve his beach slacks and polo from his car in the parking lot, and then wandered around the backstreets of the boardwalk. He spotted a small deli with a white-and-red awning shading a few tables from the sun. Jake sat down at a small circular table, and when the waitress arrived, he ordered a pastrami on rye with a double expresso.

He checked a few e-mails on his phone while waiting, and then forced himself to set up an out-of-office message. Next, he surfed the net for deals to Mexico, and when the waitress brought his order, he put the phone aside to savor the richness of the pastrami and the bitter taste of the expresso. He paid the bill, and he was just about to return to his car when he saw the gallery.

More importantly, he saw the woman standing in the sun by the entrance. The gallery itself was typical of the bohemian neighborhood, where someone had converted the ground floor of their home into a shop front to attract customers from the flow of pedestrians meandering back from the sand. Nothing typical about the woman, though. A curvy brunette, wearing a white long-sleeve tunic with a print that he knew without having to ask that she'd designed herself. Her glossy hair was tied back with a ribbon of the same material.

Normally at this point, he would have ignored her, too busy with work to play. His determination to make partner had meant that his love life over the last few years amounted to nothing more than occasional one-night stands. But now he felt different. He'd driven himself too hard and needed to loosen up. He hesitated for a few seconds and then turned to walk toward the gallery. He crossed the street, squinting slightly in the sun as he walked toward the entrance. The woman stood with her eyes closed and her face tilted up to catch the rays. Jake guessed she was in her late twenties.

"Enjoying the sun?" he asked.

"Yes, I am." She opened her eyes and laughed, unfazed by the interruption. Jake looked over her shoulder at the artworks on the walls. Quadrangles of vivid color hung on the white surface. She stepped to the left and gestured with her hand. "Would you like to come in?"

"Sure, thanks." He walked in. As well as the artworks, there was also a sofa and a narrow archway leading to a back room. Jake stepped around slowly, studying the paintings. They were better than he'd expected, with plenty of landscapes, beach scenes, and occasional pieces obviously inspired by the distant hills. Not quite photo-realistic—instead, semi-dreamscapes, mixing the real with views Jake couldn't quite place. The woman followed him a short distance to his side, quite content to let him browse in silence. Jake felt a magnetism build up between them.

"I like the art," Jake said, turning away from the paintings. "Are they yours?"

"Most of them." Her brown eyes sparked as she smiled. "A few are by my friends too."

"I'm Jake." He offered his hand.

"Nice to meet you, Jake. I'm Sarah."

"You live here?"

Sarah nodded. "Above the shop. My mother owned the building before she passed. It seemed like a good place to set up."

Jake glanced outside at a couple walking by. "It's a great spot to catch people's eye." Although initially it hadn't been the art that had caught his eye. He began to smile and then noticed a large painting hanging on the wall in the room beyond the narrow archway. He gestured to it. "Can I take a look?"

"Absolutely." Sarah stepped through the archway, and Jake followed. The white walls were completely bare apart from the large canvas in front. A steep stairway to the right led to the upper floor, and he saw a long, battered sofa on the left. Above the sofa, a window provided light. The canvas dominated the room, and he stepped toward a herd of wild horses streaming across the prairie, a glorious sun rising over the mountains behind, painting the clouds in a range of gold and orange hues.

"Wow, is that yours?" he asked.

"Yes. Mustangs. So much freedom."

Jake studied the lead horse at the right, its eyes blazing and its muscles undulating as it powered ahead. "Nice detail on the lead stallion."

Sarah laughed and raised her right hand to reach for a turquoise pendant that hung on a silver chain around her neck. Jake hadn't noticed it before. "Men always think that." She looked directly into his eyes. "It's a mare. With herds of wild horses, she leads while a stallion guards the rear."

Jake took an involuntary step back as Sarah watched. He quickly recovered his composure and then laughed. "I guess I'm a typical guy after all." He scanned the canvas but the horses emerged from the left-hand side and the end of the herd was out of sight.

This time he looked directly at her. "So where is this mythical stallion?"

She held his gaze. "He—"

" _Sarah_ , we're here!" a female voice shouted from the entrance to the gallery, and they turned around to peer through the archway at two young women dressed in shorts and T-shirts holding trays of food.

"Sandy, Jess, great." Sarah waved them in and turned toward Jake. "We're just getting set up for a party; you're welcome to stay." He glanced at his watch—3:40pm—and remembered his plan to book a vacation. "Thanks, but I have go. You'll have to tell me about that stallion another time."

"Will do." She smiled, and Jake walked through the narrow archway and said hi to the two women before stepping outside.

Jake walked down the street and soon found himself on the crowded boardwalk. He looked at the throng of people, then remembered it was Saturday. Although when he left the gallery he'd intended to pick up his car and drive home, he was in a good mood and didn't want to leave the beach quite yet. He strolled along the boardwalk, keeping an eye out for somewhere to stop and have a drink.

There, perfect. He spied a small bar with tables directly on the sand, not too crowded and with a large canopy over each table to provide shade. He sat on one of the white plastic chairs and studied the menu. A waiter eventually came over, and Jake ordered a draught beer. It was ice cold when it arrived, and he sipped it slowly and watched a couple of kids a few feet in front of him kicking a ball around.

He couldn't help thinking about Sarah, and her painting of the wild mustangs. Maybe he should have accepted her invitation to the party. He could see her face now, her eyes defiant as she told him the lead horse was a mare. She'd obviously enjoyed that moment, and if he was honest, so did he. He smiled and took another sip of his beer before holding the frosty glass in mid-air. When did he last feel such an immediate attraction?

Jake knew the answer. Eleanor Sullivan, Harvard Law School. Over six years ago. She was the daughter of a prominent Democrat with roots in New Hampshire, a gorgeous and ambitious blonde who fell in love with a poor kid from Queens, New York. He sighed and put the beer back down on the table. At first, it had been a whirlwind romance, almost a fairy tale. She was the key to the world of money, status, and power that he'd always dreamed about.

But the dream soon turned sour. He remembered the exact moment: Christmas at the end of their first year together. She'd convinced him that the differences in their backgrounds didn't matter, and had even persuaded her parents to give Jake a chance. The whole clan had gathered to sing carols around the crackling log fire in the living room of their New Hampshire mansion as a thick flurry of snow fell on the extensive gardens outside.

Jake was singing along, a glass of mulled wine warm in his hand, when Eleanor looked over to him and smiled. He smiled back and then realized he was looking at his future. Predictable, conventional, and safe. He took a sip of the wine and choked, suddenly feeling stifled by the warmth of the fire and the cloying smell of old money. People who took their wealth and privilege for granted, and whose only desire was for more of the same.

They split up soon after that. Jake gave the excuse that his recent appointment to Law Review left no time for a relationship. Eleanor took it badly and became bitter. She then used her connections to try and frustrate his progress. Jake grew to hate the cold winters at Harvard, and he vowed to move somewhere hot as soon as he graduated.

"Hey, mister!" He snapped out of the past to see the kids' soccer ball underneath his table. He smiled and picked it up to throw it back. Whatever it was that Jake wanted from life, he definitely wanted to feel free. He didn't know exactly how to achieve that, but the painting of the wild mustangs and Sarah's challenging yet enticing eyes had stirred something deep inside.

He downed the rest of his beer, paid his tab, and started to walk back toward the gallery.

As Jake approached the gallery in the late-afternoon sun, he saw Sarah by the entrance in jeans and a white tank top, greeting an influx of people ambling in from the street. Most looked like what Giles would have labelled "artistic" types, which meant they would have been reprimanded back at the firm for the unusual style of their hair or the number of tattoos they had. One carried a beat-up acoustic guitar.

Sarah gave a friendly wave as Jake stepped toward the entrance. "I thought you had something more important to do!"

He smiled and threw his hands up. "Priorities change." They looked at each for a few seconds until a couple of tanned surfers walked up, and she invited Jake in.

"There's plenty of food and drink. I'll catch up with you later."

"Great." Jake stepped inside and could see that a table had been set up on the left of the room opposite the sofa. It held bottles of wine and trays of food, with plastic cups and plates on the side. Under the table were a variety of buckets with beer stashed on top of ice. A few people crammed together on the sofa, eating and chatting. Reggae music blasted out from a couple of large speakers in the back room. He stepped up to the narrow archway and could see a young couple dancing with bottles of beer in one hand and cigarettes in the other. A young guy with frizzy, bleached hair stood in front of the large canvas peering intently at the mustangs.

Sandy and Jess clomped down the stairway carrying more trays of food, greeting Jake as they walked through the archway to place them on the table. He grabbed a beer and cut a piece of quiche from one of the trays, then took them to sit down on the long, empty sofa in the back room and watch the party coalesce. The vegetarian quiche was surprisingly good, and the cold beer was refreshing.

More people showed up, and both rooms started to fill, but it never felt too crowded. Sometimes there was a slight bottleneck at the narrow archway as people went back and forth, but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. As the drink took effect and night fell, the music got louder, and the dancing became less inhibited. People began to spill out onto the street.

Jake got up to grab another beer, his third, and returned to sit at the end of the long sofa to carry on talking to Jimbo, the young guy with bleached hair. Six people were now squashed together on the sofa, and a joint was making its way down the line. Jake found himself feeling relaxed for the first time in months, even before the joint reached him. He took a drag. The world seemed calmer in the moments after, and his gaze drifted across the room to where Sarah danced unselfconsciously. She looked over, their eyes locking as Jake exhaled. Sarah stopped dancing, and almost as if drawn by the pull of his gaze, she began to make her way across the room toward him.

It seemed obvious the two of them should take a walk, away from the noise and movement of the party. They threaded their way through the people dancing in the gallery and emerged into the cooler air of the street. The two surfers were talking to a couple of girls, a line of empty beer cans at their feet. Jake and Sarah stepped to one side.

"Great party," Jake said.

"I'm lucky to have such good friends."

"I'm sure it's not just down to luck." Her dark-brown hair fell to her shoulders and her eyes shone with the same intensity as when she'd talked about the mustangs. Wild and fierce, yet also captivating. Jake glanced over at the surfers and the girls and suddenly felt like going somewhere more private. "How about a stroll to the beach?"

"Let me see... can I trust you?"

"Of—"

"Only joking." Sarah laughed and started to make some karate chopping motions with her hands. "I'm a big girl and can take care of myself, let's go."

They walked down the street toward the boardwalk, past the closed deli and a small still-open clothes shop. Sarah stopped to chat briefly with the owner, and Jake discreetly checked his watch—eleven p.m. The boardwalk was deserted, save for a lone cyclist with a small, yapping dog trailing behind. He greeted Sarah as he passed. Bright streetlights illuminated the colorful graffiti of the shutters on the closed shopfronts. She crossed over to the sand and turned right, flipping her hair over her shoulder with one hand.

"This part of the beach is pretty safe, even this late." They walked in silence for a while, the sand lit dimly by the ambient light from the boardwalk. To their left, the waves of the sea crashed gently to the shore. In the far distance Jake could make out three figures sitting in front of the surf, and the sound of a guitar drifted on the breeze.

"Have you always lived here? Jake asked. "You seem to know it so well."

"Pretty much, except for around a year. If it weren't for Mom leaving me the house, no way could I afford to rent. It's crazy now, what you have to pay. It's really changing the area."

"And what about the art—have you always been an artist?"

"Another inheritance from my mother. She used to be a potter and encouraged me to be creative. I grew up making a mess with paints, crayons, and clay. I loved it. It was a lot of fun."

"Your paintings have real vitality," Jake said, clasping his hands behind his back.

"Is that a compliment?"

He laughed. "It is."

"I try to paint from the heart."

"From the heart sounds good." Jake was careful with his words. He didn't want to flirt right now. Walking with her, listening to her, the strength of his feelings made him wary of appearing superficial.

Sarah stepped toward the boardwalk and then stopped and turned to face Jake. "Sandy and Jess will keep an eye on things, but I should get back." She laughed. "I love my friends to bits, but they can't be trusted for a minute."

Jake smiled. "No problem."

They turned right to walk along the boardwalk and return to the gallery, and came across a tall wino stumbling around drunk, clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag. Dressed in a dark hoodie, he held what appeared to be a firework in his other hand. He veered toward Jake and Sarah before lurching over the boardwalk to plant it in the sand. They watched while the man took out a lighter and sparked it on the third attempt. He lit the fuse, which fizzled as he stepped back. _Whoosh!_ It flared into the night sky and burst into concentric rings of intense color.

Jake clapped. "Bravo!" The wino gave a deep bow before stumbling off.

"Crazy guy, in a good way." Sarah smiled, and turned to start walking briskly along the boardwalk, past the colorful graffiti on the shuttered storefronts. Under the bright streetlights, Jake noticed that Sarah was wearing the same pendant as before. This time the turquoise stone was tucked under her white tank top, but the faint outline was visible beneath the thin fabric. Sarah's street soon appeared, and they turned left onto it.

"So, mystery man, what is it that you do?" she asked, slowing down and flipping her hair again. "Presumably not selling a few paintings in an inherited shop?"

"I'm a lawyer," Jake said. For the first time in his life, he felt almost apologetic about it, and he didn't know why.

"The world always needs people who are going to look after the innocent," Sarah said. It was probably the kindest remark anyone had ever made about his profession.

As they approached the gallery, a gaggle of partygoers spilled out onto the street and started to walk toward them.

Even dressed casually for the beach, Jake carried his wallet, so he took out a business card. "This is what I do." He stopped, and so did Sarah.

"It looks more like you're giving me your number," Sarah joked.

Jake flipped the card over and retrieved a pen from his pocket to write his cell number on the back. "This is me giving you my private number. So, do you—"

A figure in a strange, gray-headed costume suddenly appeared in front of them. The costume swelled out around the occupant's body in latex and foam. Saucer-sized eyes bulged from the mask, while three-fingered hands stretched out toward him. For an instant, Jake's chest contracted, tension flashing with fear, and something worse: recognition. He forced himself to breathe again. Of course he recognized it. It was every clichéd sci-fi movie's depiction of an alien, the effect spoiled only by an oversized T-shirt advertising some convention. That, and the bunch of fliers gripped in one of the three-fingered hands.

"Come to the convention or see your world annihilated!" the alien demanded in tones of doom that would have worked better if the woman in the costume hadn't sounded quite so young or been struggling to contain her laughter. "Seriously, California's biggest alien expo, this weekend. Come along. Learn the truth. Take a flier?"

"Shouldn't an alien expo have something a bit more high tech?" Sarah countered with a laugh. She waved away the proffered fliers.

Jake took one. It was a particularly lurid green, as though trying to proclaim its alien-ness in dye, with details of the expo spelled out in a range of fonts, suggesting it had probably been designed by two or more people with a lack of consensus. It should have been something to laugh at as the "alien" rushed off down the street. Instead, he folded it neatly before tucking it into his wallet.

The boisterous cluster of guests passed them on the street.

"Hey, Sarah! Great party, thanks."

"Nice one!"

"See you guys later." Sarah waved, and then called out, "Who was that in the E.T. outfit?"

"Some friend of Jimbo's."

Sarah looked at Jake. "Well, you don't see aliens every day. Although, I guess around here..."

Jake wished he could dismiss it as easily. In his head, he knew of course it had just been one more instance of the kind of oddness you found in LA, just another day in the big city. Yet his heart still beat too fast, and a subtle sense of unease continued to worm its way through him.

"Where were we?" Sarah asked.

Jake shook his head. His buoyant mood deflated. He'd been hoping... well, he wasn't sure what he'd been hoping for, but now other, unsettling thoughts occupied his mind.

"I need to get back," Jake said.

"You're sure?"

"Sorry."

"OK, see you around." Sarah looked disappointed. Jake gave a short wave before turning away and walking down the street.

## Chapter Five

Once home, Jake returned to the leather chair by the windows and looked out at the night sky. He had his computer out and was checking weather websites, trying to find any recent mention of an unusual storm or light activity over LA. He scrolled through the previous days' forecasts. Hopefully there would be a jokey segment somewhere telling their geekier viewers exactly where to look to see the upcoming meteor shower.

It would have been reassuring. One mention of a safe, predictable astronomical event, and the whole episode could have been forgotten. The "alien" had unnerved him, and the uncomfortable feelings he'd pushed away when he'd seen the brilliant ovals streaking across the sky returned with a vengeance. If they were simply a natural phenomenon, then he'd just have to deal with the sleepwalking and the vision, both of which could feasibly be explained by stress.

There was nothing. Not on NBC or the local KNBC. Not even on Fox. A trawl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's website didn't turn up anything but the usual round of storms, tornadoes, and other weather warnings for the rest of the country. A similar search through NASA's website also drew a blank. Jake began to look for contact details, but then he forced himself to close the lid of his laptop.

"You're thinking of contacting NASA to ask them about strange lights in the sky?" Jake muttered to himself. "Could you sound any more like a crank?"

He leaned back in the chair and gazed once more at the night sky. After a few aimless minutes, he sprang to his feet and ferreted around in one of the carefully concealed storage units by the front hallway. He pulled out a large box and opened the lid... Yes, there it was.

His adoptive parents had bought him the telescope in an attempt, Jake suspected, to steer him away from his stories about strange visions. The more he learned about the hard sciences, their theory went, the less credence he would give to anything he couldn't explain. The telescope had lain dormant for years, but Jake hadn't been able to bring himself to throw it away.

He took it out, dusting off the lenses and making sure all parts were intact before setting it up on its tripod. He did it furtively, partly because in LA there were some pretty strict anti-stalker laws in place for Hollywood, but mostly because he couldn't help feeling uncomfortable. As if by simply looking skyward he risked opening up Pandora's box.

He peered through the telescope, trying to remember how to align it properly and focus the lenses on the patch of sky where the lights had first appeared. Once in position, he waited. And waited. Jake was someone who found it difficult to be patient. Yet he forced himself to persevere.

Nothing happened. The sky remained defiantly blank. Again and again, Jake found his eyes drawn downward toward the seductive lights of the city, and each time he needed to blink away the haze, letting his eyes adjust once more. He waited an hour, two. Long enough that if he'd had work in the morning he would have chided himself for wasting time better used for sleep.

Eventually he got up. The other night the lights had been and gone long before now. They weren't coming again. With a shrug, Jake stepped away from his telescope and went to bed.

Desert. Searing heat, radiating down with fierce intensity. No shade, nothing to offer relief. This heat might last forever, slowly baking him to death on the sand. Jake was dressed for work, his feet shifting, sinking in, and forcing him to step and keep stepping to maintain his balance. He looked toward the two dunes in front of him, which were rising upward to take crisp bites out of the clear blue sky.

He reached down and touched the sand, lifting a handful of it and feeling the grains slipping through his fingers. He could hear the dry whisper of the sand sighing as the dunes shifted. There were no plants that he could see. Only the sand, scattering around him in the endless wind.

Jake turned toward the figure before it appeared over the dunes, not yet a shape, just the merest shimmer in the heat.

Slowly, the shimmer became a blurred figure. It moved with a smooth certainty, gliding over the loose sand.

There was something about it. An element of otherness. Something not quite right.

Jake stumbled backward, his feet slipping and sinking. Unable to tear his eyes away, he felt a deep terror. If he could see it, he would understand, and suddenly confronted with it, Jake wasn't sure he was ready. That he would ever be ready.

The figure moved toward him inexorably, and with every stride its silhouette became sharper and clearer, distinct against the bright sun. There was something wrong with it. The head too big, the arms too thin, the torso unlike any human.

Jake stayed frozen to spot as his mind tried to catch up with what his eyes were seeing. The figure came ever closer, and translucent white skin became visible. It couldn't be right. It couldn't be...

The dream cut off abruptly as Jake's eyes snapped open. Lost momentarily in the space between dreaming and waking, he struggled to understand where he was. Only when he finally tumbled from his bed did the panic start to recede.

On all fours, he waited until his breathing returned to normal and the sweat faded from his skin. He just wished the image from his dream would fade as quickly, the translucent white-skinned creature standing in the sun with its oversized black eyes.

Jake climbed back into bed but couldn't fall asleep. Not with the image of the alien filling his mind, and the strange sense of how real the dream had been. Much more vivid than the vision in the bar, and unlike anything he had ever experienced. He'd felt no pain during the dream, but perhaps that was because he'd been powerless to resist. He'd never had a lucid dream, or even seen an alien in a vision before. Jake stared upward, his skin clammy with fear and his heartbeat erratic.

After an hour or so, his pulse calmed, and he got up to take a long, hot shower, and then made some coffee. He waited until dawn, and then switched on the TV before making breakfast. Normally, Jake grabbed breakfast in a hurry, often on the way to work. Sometimes he missed it completely. Now he took his time, scrambling three free-range eggs and grilling two strips of bacon before finally taking his plate and sitting down on the sofa in front of the TV. The news ran in the background with the usual round of politics, violence, celebrity gossip, and sports. Jake only left it on because it was preferable to the silence.

_"Finally,"_ the newscaster said, _"we have a live report from the intrepid Tasha Baker on the phenomena being seen around Los Angeles at the moment, with several people spotting strange lights in the sky."_

Jake dropped his fork onto his eggs and turned the sound up.

_"Thank you, Grant. Several people around the Greater Los Angeles area have reported seeing lights in the sky over the past few nights. People describe oval-shaped lights that have come and gone quickly, moving in straight lines, and exhibiting a variety of colors."_

Jake put his plate down on the sofa and leaned forward. The lights were real. That much was certain. There were interviews with a few people who claimed to have seen them. Their responses varied from excitement to outright disbelief.

_"I mean, you hear about this kind of thing,"_ one woman said, _"but you assume it's only crazies and drunks who ever see it, right? But when you see it for yourself, it changes things."_

It was obviously a slow news day based on the amount of attention the story received. After the eyewitness accounts, a meteorologist assured viewers there was no reason for alarm.

" _How do we know these lights are not UFOs?"_ Tasha asked.

_"Although no current astronomical phenomena are likely to be responsible, I can say with 100 percent certainty, little green men are not about to land in Los Angeles!"_

_"Could it be the northern lights?"_ Tasha asked.

_"I think we're a little far south for those,"_ the meteorologist replied.

Jake flicked through the other channels but drew a blank. Only KNBC was covering the story.

He turned off the TV and finished his eggs and bacon. At least he hadn't been hallucinating when he'd seen the lights. But that wasn't much comfort. In fact, considering his dream, it was no comfort at all. Quite the opposite. Would the dream turn out to be prophetic? Just like his adolescent visions...

Jake picked up his plate and walked to the kitchen, where he methodically washed up and made some more coffee, then sipped it slowly while leaning against the granite worktop. A shaft of sunlight struck his face, and he strode over to his desk to open the drawer where he filed papers and notes. Jake sought out the lurid green flier for the alien expo. Last night he'd put it away without thinking. Now he unfolded it gently, spreading it out and holding it flat as if it might fly away.

"You're not really thinking about it?" he asked himself aloud.

He was. More than thinking about it. The sleepwalking and vision he could accept as being caused by exhaustion and stress, but although possible this had also caused the dream, particularly after seeing the "alien" at the party, Jake couldn't explain it away so easily. There was something too undeniably real about the translucent white-skinned figure.

Jake had always been skeptical about extraterrestrials, but now he felt on shakier ground, and a crack of self-doubt taunted him. He opened his laptop and browsed the website for the expo. Located in a conference room of a downtown business hotel, the list of exhibitors included amateur scientists, and even an ex-military advisor to the Pentagon. There was also a woman claiming to be a high priestess from Atlantis.

Jake lowered the lid. The expo might hold a clue that would help him get to grips with whatever was going on. At the very least, it should also provide a bit of light relief.

Fifty minutes later, Jake was parking his Porsche in the lot of a smart business hotel, six blocks down from Grand Park. The hotel was close enough to his apartment for him to walk, but he still felt slightly fragile and enjoyed driving in the lighter traffic of Sunday. This was the day that he normally got up early to venture out of the city and explore the San Gabriel Mountains roads.

Jake stepped into the elevator and went up to the fourth floor. The doors opened directly into a surprisingly large room. He bought his ticket from a woman sitting at a desk to the side of the entrance, and she handed him a program before he walked in. Jake estimated that there must be at least eighty exhibitors, and even at ten a.m., quite a few visitors were already milling around.

The well-lit conference room had four rows of stalls, one on each side of the long room, and a double row back-to-back in the middle. Jake started to browse the stalls on the far right. The frontage of the first announced a support group for those identifying as alien abductees. A thin man with an earnest expression sat behind a table displaying books on abduction, while two elderly ladies stood asking questions.

Jake walked on and stopped at the display of an independent documentary producer making a film about global sightings of UFOs and then at a stall selling cookies in the shape of flying saucers. He was still hungry.

The overall atmosphere of the expo appeared a little strange, caught between carnival and absolute seriousness, as if those there were determined to enjoy themselves but worried that doing so might make it less likely people would believe them.

Jake felt torn. A part of him desperately needed to talk to these people in the hope that he would find others who might have experienced the things that were plaguing him. The skeptical part of him, however, refused to take this seriously. He paused, stuck between the two, and was just on the verge of leaving when he spotted the alien outfit.

Jake stared at it. It was unmistakably the one from the party, identifiable even in a room full of costumes and masks, latex suits, and adventurous makeup. The costume hung at the back of a stall at which two young men and an equally young woman were sitting. None of them looked older than college age. With the almost-identical posture of their tall, gangly bodies, the two young men could have been brothers, except one was clearly African-American, and the other Asian, possibly Korean. They tapped away behind a pair of high-spec laptops, only glancing up occasionally.

The young woman seemed to be making more of an effort at interaction with the people who strolled past. She was shorter than the other two, slightly built, with a bob of hair dyed electric blue. He watched her talking to a middle-aged woman in a flowery skirt who gestured with her hands as if to emphasize a point before picking up a leaflet and wandering off.

With no one else browsing, Jake took the opportunity to cross the aisle and approach the stall. The woman looked up and smiled, her porcelain skin framing green, catlike eyes. She had a penetrating gaze for someone so young.

"Hi," she said, and continued staring.

Jake scanned a small pile of leaflets that accused the government of hiding the truth about aliens, but compared to the other stalls he'd seen, there was very little information openly on display.

"You believe the government keeps the truth from us?" Jake asked, picking up a leaflet and playing for time. He couldn't quite manage asking directly about the outfit.

"More than believe. We know."

As she spoke, Jake felt sure it was the same woman from the night before.

"Hang on a sec, you're the man from the party last night," she said, smiling. "You looked really freaked out by my costume. How come you were at the party?"

"Sarah invited me. And you?"

"A friend of mine, Jimbo, told me about it. I thought it would be a cool place to hand out some fliers after going around the main bars. Guys... _guys_."

The two behind their computers looked up for a moment. The one with Asian features wore a gray tracksuit and had a mop of dark hair, while the dark-skinned guy had a short Afro and a bright-orange T-shirt.

Jake introduced himself, and the young woman replied,

"I'm Marina. This is Billy and Adam."

"Gemini," Billy, the Korean-looking one insisted.

"Gemini?" Jake asked, noticing Billy had a small tattoo on his middle finger. He peered at it and realized it was the mathematical symbol for pi.

Marina explained, "The guys call themselves Gemini, and together we're a collective dedicated to exposing government cover-ups. We find the evidence of alien contact on Earth they don't want us to see."

"And there's a lot of evidence, is there?" Jake asked, glancing up at the hanging costume. Under the bright lights, the collapsed face of the latex costume looked silly and harmless. His skepticism surged to the fore.

"The government's been covering it up for years," Billy said, his eyelids blinking rapidly as he tapped away at his laptop. "But if you know where to look... there's stacks of stuff online."

Adam looked up and winked at Jake with a wide smile.

"She's seen aliens," Adam said, nodding toward Marina.

Jake looked at her. "Face-to-face?"

She shook her head. "I... have visions of things sometimes."

Jake's pulse quickened and his mind raced. "Visions of things? What else apart from aliens? Have you seen anything in a desert?"

"No. Why do you ask?"

Jake clammed up, despite meeting for the first time someone else who had visions.

"It's OK," Marina said, swiping at her electric-blue bangs which had fallen across her eyes. She looked directly at him. "It's getting more common. Some people even think we're collectively going through a kind of evolution of our sixth sense."

Jake tottered on the brink of telling her about his experiences.

Marina bent down and opened a leather handbag to take out a colorful pack of cards. "Would you like a tarot reading?" She asked this as naturally as if offering him a cup of coffee. For a moment, Jake actually considered it, wondering what would happen if he—

His phone went off. He didn't recognize the number, but he picked up anyway.

"Hello, who is this?" he said, stepping away from Marina.

"No need to sound so put out," said the woman's voice. "You did give me your number."

It took Jake a moment to realize who it was, and then his voice softened. "Sarah, hi."

"I'm just calling to see if you'd like to hang out tomorrow."

"I'd love to," Jake said, glancing across at Billy and Adam tapping away, while Marina slowly turned over a tarot card.

"I'm a bit tied up right now, but I'll call you later. It'll be great to see you."

Jake hung up and stepped back to the stall. Talking to Sarah had broken the fragile arc of him opening up to Marina. He looked down at the three cards laid out on the table.

"I'm going to have to decline your Tarot reading. Sorry. I've got to run."

"Sure, no problem." Marina smiled and flipped over another card from the deck.

"You can always get in touch if you need us," Adam said, grinning.

"But I don't have your—"

His phone beeped, and for a moment the shape of a business card was clear on it, white edged and pristine, with the word "Gemini" in the middle. Below it was a web address appearing to be little more than a string of numbers.

"And we can always find you," Billy assured him.

After leaving the convention, Jake's lack of sleep finally caught up with him; he felt exhausted and drove back to his apartment in a daze. He slept heavily for a few hours, then woke up groggy and hungry around five p.m. He got up, and ordered some food from a local Chinese restaurant before calling Sarah to arrange to meet for lunch the next day. The food arrived, and he ate while sitting on the sofa watching a favorite Clint Eastwood film. He cleaned up, and as night fell, sat in his leather-and-chrome chair in front of the window with a bottle of beer, sipping it slowly and thinking about the convention.

So other people did have visions. He'd read about it but had never met someone like himself before. Jake took a longer pull on the beer. He'd been that close to telling Marina about his experiences. He wondered what had stopped him. He sighed and put the bottle down on the hardwood floor before instinctively glancing toward the far left of the sky where the lights had first appeared. Nothing unusual could be seen.

Jake leaned back in the chair. At least he was going to see Sarah again. She was the one bright spot in the otherwise disturbing chain of events of the last few days. If Giles hadn't forced him to take a break, they would never have met. He felt too tired to try and untangle the other thoughts scrambling around in his mind. He just wanted to sleep, and so he walked to his bed and crashed for the second time.

## Chapter Six

Jake woke up at nine the next morning having slept well, and after lazing around for a couple of hours listening to music, he drove to the Italian restaurant in Santa Monica by the ocean where he and Sarah had agreed to meet at noon. As a salty breeze played across the veranda, they sat at their reserved corner table, elegant with its linen and single white rose. A waiter brought the menu and a bottle of chilled mineral water and then promptly withdrew. Too early for the main lunchtime crowd, the other tables were unoccupied. Jake only knew about this place because he had done some work for the owner when he'd first started out.

"This is great," Sarah said, stroking the tablecloth. "It looks expensive, though."

Jake smiled. "For such amazing food, it's a steal."

"It must be nice, not to have to worry about money."

Jake laughed. "Do you reach a point where you magically have enough to stop worrying? If so, I haven't found it."

The waiter came back to take their orders as a few more guests drifted onto the veranda. Sarah looked up from her menu, and Jake noticed that she again wore the turquoise pendant, this time over a stylish blue off-the-shoulder top. She looked sensational with the sun shining on her wavy brunette hair as it brushed her bare shoulders.

"I'll have the poached sea bass with green pepper and fennel relish, and the summer salad as a side," she said.

The waiter turned to Jake.

"And I'll have the beef with truffle gnocchi, please, also with the salad as a side."

"Something to drink?" asked the waiter.

"A glass of chilled Burgundy," said Sarah.

"A glass of the house Bordeaux," said Jake, and the waiter nodded and collected the menus.

Sarah turned around to look out over the ocean as more people arrived and the tables began to fill up.

"The sea is so beautiful." She took a sip of her water and then gazed over Jake's shoulder at a table on the far side of the veranda. A plump middle-aged man sat with his much-younger female companion, who seemed to be hanging on his every word. Sarah leaned forward to speak quietly. "Isn't that, you know, the famous producer?"

"This place is a favorite with Hollywood types," Jake replied without glancing to check.

Sarah looked at Jake and then snapped her fingers together.

"Talking of well-known people, it _was_ you on TV the other day, wasn't it? I knew I'd seen you somewhere before."

The waiter appeared with the drinks and set them down on the white linen.

Sarah raised her glass in a toast.

"To Jake. That's nuts!"

He clinked his glass against hers, and they both took a sip of their drinks, laughing.

"You know the really crazy thing?" he said after putting his glass down.

"Go on, tell me."

"I love almonds, can't get enough, especially organic. And I can only afford them because of clients like the water bottlers."

"That's so twisted. I can see why you're a lawyer! She fingered her pendant, and her expression became more serious. She looked into his eyes. "Tell me your story."

"What do you mean?"

"You've got a New York accent, so how did you get from A to B? From being a young child with dreams of the future, to living the dream here, under the bright lights of LA?"

Jake smiled ruefully and looked to Sarah's left across the ocean before turning back to answer. The restaurant was full now, but with plenty of space between each table, the buzz and chatter afforded privacy. He glanced at her and decided to be open.

"I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Queens, raised by my adoptive parents who were basically decent people, but dirt poor. I was an only child." He looked up and smiled. "That's point A."

"Sounds like a tough place to grow up," Sarah said.

"It was. I had a hard time until I took up martial arts."

The waiter arrived with their food and set the plates down skillfully before leaving.

" _Buon appetito_ ," Jake said, raising his glass.

" _Buon appetito_." Sarah clinked his glass in return and then tucked into her poached sea bass and summer salad. Jake ate a little more slowly but with equal enjoyment.

"I see what you mean," Sarah said. "The food is incredible. So tell me," she continued between mouthfuls, "what happened after point A?"

"You'd make a great trial lawyer with that kind of persistence," Jake replied, smiling. He downed the rest of his Bordeaux before dabbing his mouth with his linen napkin.

"My parents scraped together enough money for me to go to CUNY. I also got some grants and a large student loan."

"The City University. Right. What did you study?"

"Philosophy. It's one of best degrees if you want to be a lawyer. Believe it or not, I majored in knowledge and reality with a minor in ethics."

"You're kidding me?" Sarah held her cutlery in midair, eyes wide in surprise.

Jake shrugged. "It was fascinating, actually; I almost didn't want it to end."

"So you're not only well known but also an ethical brainbox." She drank the rest her wine, and her expression again became serious. "What happened to the ethics? How did you end up bullying small almond farmers?"

Jake finished his mouthful of gnocchi before replying. "You're relentless!" He sighed and rested his elbows on the table. "It's complicated. I can wheel out all the clichés, but I know what you'd say." He turned around to catch the waiter's eye, who gave a small nod and promptly came over. Jake and Sarah both ordered another glass of wine.

"Harvard changed me. Somehow the youthful ideals got swept away by the deluge of work and materialistic fervor. By the time I graduated from law school, the only thing most of us cared about was getting a high-paying job and paying off our enormous loans."

Sarah finished the last of her salad and put her cutlery down. "That was _so_ good. If materialistic fervor means meals like this, count me in!"

The waiter appeared with their glasses of wine and cleared away their empty plates.

"Something for dessert?" the waiter asked. Jake and Sarah studied the dessert menu and both chose the mixed berry gelato. Lunch on the veranda was in full swing, and the refreshing breeze carried hints of the wonderful flavors being served.

"From New York to Harvard, and now Los Angeles. The journey from A to B," Sarah said, chilled glass of white Burgundy in her hand. "And what's next? Where is point C?"

Jake took of slug of his Bordeaux and looked at her. Her eyes flashed with that beguiling mixture of challenge and enticement. She knew his life could be more than it was.

"I honestly don't know," he said as the waiter returned with their gelatos, carrying the elegant glass dishes on a small silver plate. He set them down and withdrew.

Jake took large spoonful. "This is amazing, bursting with flavor." Sarah nodded in agreement, too busy eating to speak.

He finished his gelato quickly and looked up. "That's more than enough about me. What's the life of an artist like?"

Sarah scooped out the last of her gelato from the bottom of her dish. "Underpaid, mostly." She laughed and then popped the spoonful into her mouth.

"I bet seeing people enjoying your art has its upsides."

"That part is good. And I like the sense of community the gallery provides."

A few of the other diners were finishing their meals and leaving. Sarah sipped her wine and leaned back in her chair with a contented expression.

"And the fact you can have a party just because you feel like it?" Jake suggested.

"There should never have to be a reason to have a little fun," Sarah said, touching her pendant with her right hand.

He gazed at the circular stone encased in silver, its turquoise blue streaked with delicate threads of a darker hue.

"That's a beautiful pendant. It's obviously very special to you."

Sarah looked him in the eye before holding the pendant between her thumb and forefinger. "It is, my grandmother gave it to me. She's a half-blood. The Native Americans say that many, many years ago, the rains came after a long drought. The people were so happy, they wept tears of joy. Those tears soaked into Mother Earth with the raindrops to become Skystone. Turquoise."

Sarah looked at him again, her eyes moist. "Stone of sky, stone of water, stone of Mother Earth." She released the pendant, and it fell softly against her chest. A single tear fell down her face.

"Sorry," Jake said, "I didn't mean to—"

"It's fine," Sarah replied, her face brightening as she wiped away the tear. "When my mother died a few years ago, I went off the rails. We were so close. I just couldn't handle it. I ended up getting into trouble with the law, and my grandmother suggested I go stay with her on the reservation for a while."

"The year you spent outside of Venice Beach?"

"Right. She and the other elders on the land taught me so much. It was there I first saw mustangs. I grew up and became strong. I learned to follow a path with heart, a path with spirit. When I left, my grandmother gave me this pendant so I would always be connected to her, and to the land."

"That's a beautiful story," Jake said.

"Thank you."

Jake reached over to stroke her cheek, and then it seemed obvious he should kiss her. He leaned forward, his lips barely brushing hers at first. No need to—

_No, not now,_ Jake thought as pain shot through the base of his skull, and he jerked back in his chair.

"Jake, are you all right?" Sarah asked, her eyes wide with shock. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No... no... I'm fine," he said, clutching his head in his hands.

"You don't look fine."

"I'm all right," Jake said, although he was far from it. The throbbing pain was making him feel as though he were about to pass out.

He lurched to his feet and rushed across the still-busy veranda for the exit, almost knocking down a waiter by the door. Jake clenched his temples and tried to squeeze the pain away, and it subsided just a little. In a mad panic he fumbled for his wallet and thrust some hundred-dollar bills into the waiter's jacket pocket.

"Look after her!" Jake said and hurried outside, searching for his car, while behind him he could hear Sarah calling out.

He reached the safety of his car and clambered in, clenching his temples and biting his lip until it bled, trying to force back the sprung jack-in-the-box of pain. Wincing, he drove off quickly, pulling out of the parking lot and then swerving like a drunk for two hundred yards before pulling into a small turnout that offered a semblance of privacy. He buried his face in his hands, and braced himself by resting his forehead gently against the leather of the steering wheel.

If Jake thought the desert had been detailed before, it was nothing compared to this. He was there. Absolutely, completely there. His car nothing but a distant memory as his feet sank into the sand. Heat rained down, and Jake could feel the sweat rising on his skin as he turned toward the spot he knew the figure would be coming from.

It walked out of the haze as before, obscured by the heat at first, the shimmer distorting its shape. It glided over the sand between the two dunes, a clear blue sky overhead. The figure began to resolve, its thin arms and large head distinct, and then the white translucence of its skin. This time, though, Jake didn't wake up before it came into sharp focus. The figure kept walking until just a short distance away from him, close enough for Jake to have spoken to it if he'd had the words.

There were differences between the figure and the costume Marina had worn, but they were only the differences between living skin and trickery. Translucent, hairless, almost jellyfish-like skin covered a slender frame with an overlarge skull. Eyes too big even for that head stared at Jake, dark as pools of obsidian.

Jake felt the large black eyes drill into him, transfixing his mind like a pinned butterfly. His body froze, and a subtle vibration started inside his head. He tried to move his feet but couldn't. He felt no connection to them. The vibration left his head and swept slowly down his body in a horizontal band, rising upward again once it reached his feet. He tried to scream in frustration, but his mouth refused to cooperate. He concentrated and focused as the band touched his chest.

With an explosive karate shout, Jake tore a foot from the sand and charged toward the alien.

The steering wheel felt hard beneath his forehead, and the smell of leather filled his nostrils. With a groan, he lifted his sweaty head from the wheel and checked his face in the rearview mirror. A trickle of blood on the side of this mouth had started to congeal. He relaxed into his seat, then groaned again, and rolled his head to avert his eyes from the bright sunlight.

When Jake thought about the vibrating band sweeping through him, he could feel a phantom of it still inside him. He shuddered and opened the glove box, relieved to see a half-empty bottle of water. He screwed off the cap and drank most of it, saving the last dregs to tip over his forehead. The water felt good on his skin as it ran down his face. Jake sighed.

The alien had been scanning him. That's what it had felt like.

Jake's head began to clear, and he suddenly remembered Sarah. What must she have thought as he'd recoiled from her just after their lips had touched so tenderly? He wanted to call her to apologize and explain, but what could he say? He didn't have an explanation, or, at least, not one that he would want to share. If she knew what was happening to him, well... who would want to spend time around a freak?

As far has he could see, there were two options. Either go and check himself into a clinic and get dosed up with god knew what, or actually try and find out why he was seeing this alien. His time at the convention had proved that other people also went through similar experiences, even full-scale abductions. Jake pulled out his phone and checked Gemini's virtual business card.

He contacted Gemini through their website, and the address for their headquarters was texted to his phone in under a minute. He texted back suggesting he stop by in a few hours, and they confirmed straightaway. While Jake was driving home, Sarah called twice, but on both occasions, he let the call ring out. After the second call, his phone beeped, and the voicemail icon flashed, but he decided to listen later.

As soon as he got back to his penthouse, Jake strode across the hardwood floor toward the bathroom area, unbuttoning his sweaty shirt and peeling it off as he walked. He flung it down and turned the power shower to max before hurriedly removing his remaining clothes and stepping in. The steaming water pummeled his body and helped cleanse his mind of the unpleasant afterimage that lingered from his vision.

Jake got out of the shower and wrapped a fluffy towel around his waist and then lay flat on his king-sized bed for an hour until his phone showed four thirty p.m. He dressed and left his apartment to drive to Gemini's headquarters.

Their headquarters were only twenty minutes away, in a leafy suburban house in Mid-Wilshire that looked like the last place on Earth a youthful collective would operate from. Specifically, in the basement, which Adam led him down to. One glance at the unmade bed in the far-right corner, the pizza boxes on the floor, and the mess everywhere else told Jake everything he needed to know.

"This is your parents' place, isn't it?" Jake guessed.

"I've got to live somewhere," Adam pointed out. "And they mostly leave us alone here. They're cool." He wore jeans and a bright-yellow T-shirt that emphasized his long neck, and his Afro had been cut shorter.

Jake scanned the basement to take in the details. On the far left was a large desk with laptops, keyboards, and monitors. Behind the desk stood a haphazard stack of servers and cables. Billy sat in front of a monitor tapping away, the tiny lights on the servers flickering as he worked. On the near right of the room, Marina slumped in the middle of a large beanbag, her blue hair even more vibrant under the bright ceiling spot light directly above.

"His mom doesn't complain too much about the servers down here," Marina said. "Mostly because he paid for the house."

"He paid for the house?" Jake exclaimed in surprise.

"The guys won some money in tournaments," she explained.

"Baseball?" Jake asked. "Football? Chess?"

"Computer gaming," Marina said.

"We've got everything we need down here," Billy said from the other end of the basement. "A totally secure network with plenty of power. No one can find us."

"Unless they ask the pizza guy?" Jake suggested.

"We're careful about that," Billy assured him, even though Jake had been joking. "We're careful about _everything_ "

"What can we do for you?" Marina asked. "Your message sounded urgent."

Jake still hadn't worked out the best way to put it. He stared at the brown carpet in front of Marina's purple skirt and short leather boots while Adam stood by his side. Billy looked up from the other end of the basement, and suddenly Jake felt three pairs of eyes on him as they waited for him to speak.

"Hey, Jake," Adam said, putting his hand on Jake's shoulder. "Relax, man, you're with friends."

Jake let out a long sigh. "I've experienced some... stuff. I used to have visions in my teens—"

"I knew you were psychic!" Marina exclaimed, sitting up straight on the beanbag. "Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt."

"Jake ran his hands through his hair and took a deep breath. "The visions were nearly always prophetic. They stopped when I was fifteen, and I'd almost forgotten about them. But over the last few days, they've started again. I also had a lucid dream for the first time."

"What have the recent visions and dream been about?" Marina asked.

"Of a desert, with a jellyfish-skinned alien with large oval eyes."

"Have you seen other kinds?"

Jake shook his head. "I've never seen any kind of alien until now."

"Well, I've seen aliens like yours," Marina said. "They're a kind of Gray."

"Gray?" Jake asked, confused.

"Yeah," Adam said. "Gray aliens are the classics, the ones you see in films. You know, the long, dangly arms with three fingers, short little guy with the big bulb-shaped head." He grinned and gestured with his hands in the air to emphasize the shape.

Marina pushed herself up from the bean bag. "Most Grays, like the name suggests, have gray skin. But a few are sort of translucent white. That's what I've seen anyway."

Never in his life had Jake imagined he would be comparing alien visions with a young woman with electric-blue hair. "But why are they called Grays?" he asked.

"Roswell," Marina and Gemini answered together.

"I've heard of it, but don't recall the details," Jake said, throwing his hands up.

"New Mexico, 1947," Adam explained. "A UFO crashed on a ranch, and the government covered it up. Tried to make out it was some sort of weather balloon. But too many people were involved, and some started to blab. Bodies of some little guys were found." He gazed into the distance. "Must have been quite a party."

Marina brushed her bangs from her eyes. "And that's where the whole alien Gray tag started. The alien bodies recovered had light-gray skin."

Jake vaguely remembered being drunk and watching a documentary on cable TV. As far as he could recall, the whole thing had been debunked years ago, but he decided not to mention it. He suddenly felt torn again, as he had at the alien expo. When Adam and Marina talked about alien bodies and Roswell, it sounded like something out of _National Enquirer_ , and Jake found it hard to take seriously. On the other hand, he couldn't deny the truth of his own experiences.

"Jake, what happens in these visions?" Marina asked. "What does the alien do? You said it was in a desert, right?"

"Well," Jake began, "it just stares at me with its large eyes."

"Nothing else?" Marina's mischievous eyes glinted.

He flinched before replying, hesitant to reveal more. "No, nothing else. Why do you ask? Isn't being stared at by a jellyfish-skinned alien enough?"

"Sorry, it's just that recently a couple of people online reported visions of being scanned, like the alien was checking them out. I've never had that, though."

"Still"—Adam smiled—"that's not as bad as being abducted in broad daylight."

Jake tensed up, his pulse quickening.

"Did you hear about the lights on Friday night?" Marina asked.

"I—I did, actually." Jake's throat tightened, and he put his hands on his hips to stem the rising feeling of panic. "There were two, right?" He tried to play for time as his mind churned with the news that his scanning experience wasn't unique.

"Yeah. Two bright ovals," Marina confirmed.

"Showtime," Adam said and then strode over to sit down next to Billy. They tapped away at their keyboards in unison, and Jake could see why they called themselves Gemini.

"Hey, Jake," Billy said, waving him over. "Come and check this out."

Jake walked over to the far left of the basement, feeling calmer now that the questions had stopped. Billy motioned for Jake to stand behind the desk at his side. Gemini's fingers flew across their keyboards, pulling up page after page of information on the two monitors. Jake watched the small pi tattoo on Billy's middle finger bouncing around.

"The government doesn't want anyone to see this," Billy said.

"But their network security is so weak," Adam said, "they might as well just publish it."

"You're been breaking into government databases?" Jake asked, pretty sure he shouldn't be involved in that kind of activity.

"Don't worry, it's easy," Billy assured him.

Adam swiveled the large monitor in front of him toward Jake. "Look, man, here are the lights." Crystal-clear HD footage showed the two oval lights streaking across the sky. Racing from left to right, high above the skyscrapers of LA, exactly as Jake remembered them.

"Where is this footage from?" Jake asked.

"The most secure part of the LAPD mainframe," Adam replied.

Marina walked up to Jake's side as Billy pointed at his monitor.

"Here's the Roswell stuff."

A slideshow of photos passed before Jake's eyes. The images were in black and white. He could see the remains of what appeared to be a flying saucer lying broken in a field. Three US airmen stood with their hands on their hips staring at the fragments, while another airman peered out from the open window of a military jeep. The next photo showed a gray alien lying twisted on the ground, and a fragment of the flying saucer could be seen to the far left. A man in a white lab coat held a large-format camera with a flash attached and hunched over the small figure. The next few photos showed a succession of top military officials standing by the crashed spacecraft, and then by the twisted body on the ground.

"Go on," Marina said. "Show him the autopsies."

Billy nodded and hit a single button on his keyboard. The screen went blank and filled with an image of an alien lying on a mortuary slab. A doctor in a white coat leaned over the body with a scalpel in his hand, about to make an incision on the top right of the chest. On the other side of the slab, two men with cameras bent down to take shots. A nurse with a clipboard looked toward the doctor, pen poised in her hand.

Billy pressed another key, and the image changed. The alien's chest had been cut open, and a bloodlike liquid spilled out of its body onto the mortuary slab. The image was black and white, and so the exact color of the liquid wasn't clear, but it looked dark. The doctor with the scalpel was leaning over the figure, pointing into the chest. Two other doctors peered in, while the nurse with the clipboard took notes.

Jake stared at the screen. Unless this was an incredibly elaborate hoax, it had to be real.

"Adam," Marina said, "the memos." Adam touched the keyboard, and a cascade of files opened. He clicked one, and it expanded to full screen. Jake stepped closer to read the contents. On the scanned page of official White House stationary, President Truman signed off a request from the military to keep all Roswell material highly classified. The government agreed full disclosure would cause widespread panic. The second paragraph acknowledged the request to set up a special task force to study the technology of the spacecraft and promised an answer would be forthcoming shortly.

Adam clicked on another file, and this time the letterhead revealed a government department Jake had never heard off. He read slowly. The memo detailed two military facilities in the USA where parts of the recovered alien bodies were being analyzed. There were also samples at Harvard and at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The memo was stamped "Top Secret," and dated 1948.

"Jake," Marina said. "I know this is a lot to take in. Even having had visions, it still threw me when I first saw it. But it's real. Aliens have been visiting us for some time, and most eyewitness accounts give pretty much the same description."

Jake edged out from behind the desk and walked over to the beanbag to sit down.

"But we haven't even shown you the autopsy reports yet," Billy complained.

Marina glared at Billy and stepped toward Jake. "Are you OK?"

Jake put his head in his hands and tried to think, the bright spotlight above him. He felt stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. Either aliens existed, and he'd seen one in his visions and dream and potentially been scanned. Or they didn't, and his imagination was making the whole thing up. Both options were equally unpleasant.

Gemini's evidence had been compelling, and Jake's instinct as a lawyer found it hard to reject. Which led to only one conclusion—a conclusion he couldn't face.

"I made a mistake coming here," Jake said and then strode toward the door.

## Chapter Seven

What did it take to wipe away the truth? By evening, Jake didn't have an answer, but he was willing to make the effort to find out. He picked up a case of beer from his local store and drove back to his apartment. The first bottle hardly touched him, the second and third sloshed around in his stomach yet still left him sober. He downed the next one even quicker.

Except that it failed. Every time he closed his eyes, he could see the strange creature from his visions and dream, waiting for him like an unwanted guest. Jake tried what he could to distract himself, turning on music, then cranking it louder until certain his neighbors would complain. Right then, Jake would have welcomed the argument, if only to release the tension.

It got late, and then later. Jake knew he couldn't simply stay awake all night, but equally he doubted he would be able to sleep. He remembered some sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet, left over from a brief period of insomnia a few months before, and he walked over to rummage around and dig one out. He knocked it back with a glass of water, and eventually it helped enough for him to drift off into something approaching dreamlessness.

He still woke too early, getting up and throwing on his running gear without even stopping to eat. Maybe hard physical exercise could achieve what self-medicating couldn't.

Jake pounded the sidewalk, oblivious to the noise of the traffic, even without his earbuds in. He inadvertently bumped a few Tuesday-morning commuters, knocking coffee and papers out of hands. His phone rang, and he checked it, but when he saw Sarah's name he let it go to voicemail. He still hadn't listened to her first message, and now the icon flashed to show another.

Jake ran in the direction of his gym, got there, and hit the weights. Running gave him too much time to think, but the raw effort of trying to shift so much metal took more concentration. Even this failed to stop his thoughts from intruding, so Jake grabbed one of the punching bags in the corner, putting on gloves and slugging out his frustration. He remembered the pictures of the autopsy at Gemini's headquarters, and slugged the bag even harder.

Jake kept up the pace, trying to obliterate the thoughts of aliens with the fatigue a complete workout provided. He slumped into one of the rowing machines. He'd always thought of himself as an athlete, so now he set his sights on the kind of time a real athlete might manage, aiming for a stroke rate in the high thirties.

Luckily, he felt the moment when the vomit started to rise from his stomach and managed to dash to the bathroom in time. He bent over one of the sinks while the bitter taste filled his mouth, hating the way his body could be so weak. It felt even weaker once he'd thrown up, and he stood there shaking in the aftermath.

After a while, Jake showered but still didn't feel clean. On impulse, he headed for the gym's sauna. He sat inside wrapped in a thick white towel, enveloped in steam, sweat running down his body in small rivulets. He showered again, then couldn't help looking at the gym's massage rooms. Normally he didn't bother with what he considered to be pampering. Today he felt he needed it.

The hardest part was putting his body in a stranger's hands and doing nothing. Jake lay on his stomach while the masseuse started to work the knots from his shoulders, back, and calves.

"You have a lot of tension," she said.

A lot, then less. Slowly, the effects of the massage started to work through him. There were candles burning nearby, releasing their scents of essential oils. This added to the growing sense of calm in the room.

Pain detonated at the base of his skull, and he cried out.

"Sorry," the masseuse said, thinking she'd dug her thumb in too deeply below his shoulder blade.

Jake felt as though long needles were being pushed into his ears. The sharp points radiated blinding white flashes that strobed inside his mind. He clenched his temples and fists as he lay there helpless, the masseuse continuing her slow, rhythmic movements. The electric light raced from his head and down his body like forks of lightning discharging. His body shuddered again and again.

"That's great," the masseuse said. "You're releasing a lot of pent-up energy."

Her soothing words floated gently through his mind and carried Jake to an eye of calm within the typhoon of agony.

_Releasing a lot of pent-up energy... releasing a lot of pent-up energy._

Jake unclenched his temples and fists. It was time to stop fighting. In his teenage years, he'd learned to squeeze the visions away by overcoming the intense physical pain of resisting. But now he realized that he'd only squeezed the pain deeper inside his brain to plug the point where the visions emerged from.

Gradually, the electric-white flashes receded and the shudders became less frequent as the hands of the masseuse continued to work the tension from his body.

Jake let the vision wash over him when it arrived. The blistering desert shimmered in front of him, the two tall dunes in the background. The blurred dot between them slowly resolved into the figure of the alien as it approached. Its jellyfish skin became apparent as it glided forward on the sand, its black oval eyes staring out of the bulb-shaped head. Yet this time, it stopped some way in front, as though unaware of Jake's presence. Then another alien appeared from the distance and walked toward the first. The two strange creatures stood silently facing each other, oversized heads nodding, gesturing with their three-fingered hands.

One turned its head, and Jake sensed that it could see him.

Jake looked up at the azure desert sky, and the blue dome began to darken. The mantle of night was drawn in seconds, and he gazed at the twinkling stars of the Big Dipper, following the line of its handle to the polestar. The constellations above began to swirl and shuffle, rearranging the night sky. When they stopped moving, Jake scanned for a familiar pattern. There were none. He had the uncanny feeling this vista could not be seen from the Earth...

The masseuse finished kneading Jake's muscles and then started to pummel his back lightly with the heel of her palms. Jake shifted in and out of the vision, relaxing with the ebb and flow.

Jake watched as a parade of stars passed before his eyes. No, not stars—worlds. Jake saw cold gas giants, massive and regal, orbited by moons as large as planets. There were smaller, hotter spheres, their atmospheres mere traps for unknown gasses filtering starlight into ribbons of color. There were cold, barren rocks with atmospheres long since torn away.

And then other worlds. Worlds Jake seemed to glide down onto, taking in strange deserts and oceans, grasslands that looked both familiar and strange. He saw creatures who didn't resemble the animals he knew but which were built along similar lines, maybe because there were only so many ways life could be shaped. He saw more of the white aliens, in curved, luminescent rooms.

At some point, the masseuse left the room. Jake didn't mind. He lay there, as relaxed as he'd ever been, visions of other places running through him like a dammed-up stream finally bursting its banks.

Eventually, Jake sat up and prepared to leave. He pulled on his clothes and walked out of the gym, feeling freer, lighter, and finally at peace.

He headed for a bar just down the street from the gym. The bar was small and quiet, occupied by a few regulars who probably never left the place, a couple of women in suits who'd come in for lunch, and a guy playing pool in the background. A TV above the bar displayed an obscure news report rather than the usually inevitable sports.

Jake ordered a beer and a sandwich and tried to make sense of the TV program. A dour scientist talked to a presenter about the encroachment of arid areas onto farms and grassland, and the ways local wildlife was struggling to adapt. Jake half listened as he ate his lunch, surprised that no one in the bar had complained about the choice of channel.

_"But there are examples where grasslands have fought back,"_ the scientist was saying. _"Here in California's Mojave Desert, near the Kelso Dunes, plant life has found ways of stabilizing the advance of the sands and even reclaiming ground—"_

At the mention of a desert, Jake glanced up, then narrowed his gaze. As the camera panned to show two dunes, he recognized them. He leaned forward, the sandwich in his hand forgotten. It had to be a mistake? Just some odd coincidence. The camera cut away for a moment, concentrating on the grass and low scrub on the borders, but when it cut back to show the dunes again, he was certain.

Jake had seen those dunes. He'd caught the same flash of sunlight between them, standing very near to where the camera now lingered. He flinched as he recognized the exact point where the haunting figure in his visions and dream had appeared from, gliding down the gap between the two shifting peaks.

Jake's mind scrambled to find a simple explanation. Maybe he'd seen pictures of the Kelso Dunes somewhere, and somehow the alien had superimposed itself in his mind over this landscape that he already knew. But his visions and dream were _exactly_ like the shots of the Mojave just shown.

It would be far too much of a coincidence if random pictures he'd seen of the Mojave years ago, and then forgotten about, had been of the exact same spot. And anyway, didn't the shapes of dunes change over time with the wind?

Jake became aware of the sandwich in his hand, and he took a large bite before putting it back on the plate. As he carried on chewing, he became more and more convinced.

The Mojave Desert held the key to understanding his strange experiences.

"Hey, Lewis, change the channel! Football's on!"

Jake didn't protest. He'd seen what he needed to. Instead, he sipped his beer, trying to work out what he should do now that he'd discovered the location of his visions.

He never considered it could actually be a real place, or one quite so close. The Mojave was northeast of LA, and he would be able to drive to the Kelso Dunes in just a few hours. He pulled out his phone and did a quick search and discovered people were not allowed to drive right to them. He would have to hike the last part.

Jake had no choice but to go. As a teenager, he'd repressed his visions in order to fit in with his family and friends. No one had accepted who he was, and this made him reject a vital part of himself. His previous teenage visions had proved fleeting, one-off glimpses into the future. The strange alien in the desert, however, just kept coming. Almost like a summons.

There was no way to know exactly what he would find, or what would happen to him if he drove out to the Mojave Desert. He didn't care. He finished his beer and paid the tab. It was time to stop running.

Jake was going to face his destiny head-on. He was going to the Kelso Dunes.

Back at his apartment, Jake packed some water, a spare set of clothes, and a flashlight before printing off a couple of maps in case his GPS failed to work in the desert. As he approached the front door to leave, he stopped in his tracks, suddenly thinking of Sarah. He placed his duffel bag on the hardwood floor and dug his phone out of his pocket to listen to her messages.

" _Jake, why won't you pick up? Are you OK? What happened? Call me, I'm worried about you Whatever it is that's going on, talk to me."_

He listened to the second, and this time Sarah's voice was noticeably upset.

" _Jake, its... seven a.m. on Tuesday morning. I didn't sleep that well. If you don't want to talk, at least send me a text to let me know you're OK and explain what happened. Please."_

Jake sighed and walked back into the main living area of the penthouse to sit down on the leather sofa, laying his phone by his side. He put his hands behind his head and gazed at the black rectangle of the TV. He could see her now, wavy brunette hair cascading to her bare shoulders, the turquoise pendant in her hands, eyes moist as she talked about her grandmother. Jake remembered how she'd asked him about point C, and his heart had skipped a beat. He let out a longer sigh and then picked up his phone to compose a text.

" _Dear Sarah, how can I begin to apologize for running out so suddenly. I can't explain why now. Please give me time and I will, I promise. What happened yesterday had nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me. It's just something I need to sort out. I'm going away for a while, and will call you as soon as I get back. You're an incredible woman."_

Jake sent the text and walked toward the door.

He nursed his Porsche through the late-afternoon LA traffic, inching his way across the city until he passed beyond the skyscrapers and the town houses, the stores, and the endless parking lots. He drove out onto more open roads, heading east toward San Bernardino, then turning north as the sun began to set.

The last embers of dusk slowly faded to night as he drove past the lights of the towns on the way, Victorville and Barstow. When he reached Interstate 40 and turned east again, he breathed a sigh of relief. Now even his GPS remained silent. In another hour and a half he reached the Kelbaker Road turnoff and yawned as he steered onto it.

Jake tried to focus on the road in front as his headlights carved a luminous band in the night. His eyes felt tired, and he turned on the radio. He listened for a while, then switched it off. With the windows open at least the flow of the wind helped to keep him awake, but even this had a lulling, repetitive rhythm. Jake slapped his face twice in quick succession and nearly missed the left turn for the Kelso Dunes Road.

"Concentrate," he told himself as he drove onto the wide dirt road.

It couldn't be far now. Jake glanced to each side and could see dry scrub and broken land giving way to sand. He kept driving into the dark, his hands tense on the wheel. He cursed himself for not bringing a thermos of coffee and shifted in his seat knowing that relaxing would—

Dazzling light flared ahead of him, and a pickup truck blasted its horn like giants blowing conch shells in his ears. Jake snapped to and realized he'd been drifting onto the wrong side of the road. He jerked the wheel, and his car shot out of the way as quick as a quarterback dodging a sack, but the comparisons ended there. It skidded sideways, the wheels locking up. Jake fought the slide, then remembered too late you were meant to steer into it. It didn't matter now. He could do no more than ride it out and hope for the best.

The car screeched over the side of Kelso Dunes Road, plowing onto sand. The world spun until Jake lost all sense of direction. Yet he still seemed to be driving. He felt dissociated from his body, an impartial observer, some part of him knowing exactly where to steer as his car carried enough momentum not to dig in, moving along the firmer patches of desert.

His luck ran out when the front left wheel struck a small boulder. Jake had no chance to brace for it, and the impact felt as sharp and hard as a baseball bat across the ribs. The airbags went off, and for a split second, Jake whirled around in blur of plastic as the vehicle flipped sideways, bouncing slowly before righting itself. He groaned faintly, feeling the wetness of blood on his face as he sat up and clambered from his car.

The desert night fell thickly around him, the silhouettes of mountains in the distance. The Milky Way stretched across the heavens, and thousands of stars shone above. As Jake stared up, they began to swim, though whether from the effects of the crash or something else, he couldn't say. Not knowing which direction to head in, he stumbled off unsteadily over the sand.

## Chapter Eight

Jake lay unconscious, his naked form stretched out on a bed of crystals extruding from the floor. They pulsed green and yellow, switching to a rainbow of different colors as they reached the head. The being known as Sirius read them as expertly as a doctor from Earth might have read a medical file. The creature's impenetrable dark eyes swept over Jake as it analyzed and extrapolated. Yes, this one would be suitable. But then, Sirius had known that since the moment they'd acquired the human in the desert. Vega had agreed, but its assertion did not seem to be based on data. Very few of its assertions seemed to be, these days.

The operating room had none of the severe geometry of the world outside. An operating room there would have been a place of chrome and antiseptic white, square edges and sharpness. Even the scents would have been sharp and sterile, the smell of anesthetic and alcohol wipes.

Here, there were no straight lines, no harsh colors. Shapes and surfaces flowed into one another as if grown, and perhaps they were. A bright, pristine, and open space, light emanated softly from the walls, with a subtle tinge of orange yellow reflecting the ambiance of the nearest star. Equipment extended from the ceiling, mechanical arms and laser tools for delicate work. Glistening crystal and delicate glass, intricate metalwork and lines that seemed as much for decoration as to carry power.

It was a place of beauty, just as much as one of function. Those who created it had not seen the need for a distinction between such concepts.

Sirius stood over the recumbent body and decided it was time to begin. The alien touched one of the large crystals supporting Jake's head, and waves of yellow light began to pulse into his brain. Sirius watched for signs of consciousness, and when the eyelids flickered open, it stepped back. For the procedure to be successful, it was necessary for the human to be conscious, but Sirius knew it would be immobile and feel no pain.

Sirius called forward the assisting arms of the automated apparatus, positioning them just so before checking that they were functioning optimally. There was wisdom in caution.

Sirius stretched out with its thoughts, and the machines responded. The merest twitch of one translucent white finger, and a crystalline robotic arm slipped forward until the pointer at its tip was level with the side of Jake's skull.

Another twitch, and the laser scalpel began its work. Robot arms came and went in an intricate dance that would have appeared to have nothing to do with Sirius had an observer not been watching closely. As it was, they performed as perfectly as they were designed to do, attuned to the smallest actions of a being totally in control.

Metallic fingers peeled back flesh, crystal saws cut through bone, and then the laser scalpel created a delicate channel to access the middle of the brain. Sirius went to a hemispherical container to check on the tiny portion of cosmic plasma within. It writhed for a moment before Sirius could pulse a quieting mental expression its way. Not a true communication, barely more than a hint, but enough to make the living plasma cooperative.

With the kind of infinite patience that could have watched galaxies form, Sirius used a needle-thin probe to maneuver the plasma into place, layering it over what to Sirius's mind was the characteristically underdeveloped pineal gland of the human. Another pulse, and the plasma woke up, sinking into the tissue beneath and joining with it. Sirius instructed the machines once more, and robotic fingers delicately closed the edges of the wound together. The sealing tool came next, its gentle light flickering down in a wash of healing far more sophisticated than anything on Earth. Just the most cursory examination of Jake's body had revealed places where flesh came together in scars from past injuries; Sirius would not be so sloppy.

For a moment or two longer, Sirius studied Jake, assessing the result of the operation. Not admiring its handiwork but simply checking there were no adverse reactions, no unexpected complications. Sirius was not a being who tolerated complications.

Sirius regarded the human lying there, the one who had answered the calling. The alien wondered if this... creature could really be suitable? This body was so different from its kind, lacking even the photosynthetic liquid in its skin necessary to feed on starlight.

But Sirius had its duty, and it was nothing if not a being to follow its duty.

Jake became conscious and aware of lying in a strange room. His body felt completely numb, and he could only move his eyelids. Something had happened in the desert, knocking him over into the space where he sleepwalked and dreamed strange dreams. When the jellyfish-skinned creatures had come to him he hadn't even tried to resist.

He remembered staggering for few hundred feet before collapsing onto the desert floor. When he came to, two pairs of large black eyes were looming above, and three-fingered hands straightened out his body on the sand. Then he began to feel a subtle vibration inside his head. The tingling sensation slowly swept down his body in a horizontal band, just as it had in his vision...

One of the aliens stood above him now, performing an examination, an operation... something. Extended mechanical arms moved, and Jake knew they must have been moving on him, in him. He couldn't feel it, numbed to the point of no pain, but there were plenty of other sensations.

He could feel a pulsing around himself, like the beating of some giant heart. The rhythm was so slow it might have barely seemed like a rhythm at all had he not been still enough to perceive it. His own heartbeat was hummingbird fast by comparison, but it was slowing down to be more and more in tune with it. He dipped in and out of dreams and visions, walking through a landscape of sandstone and granite, pillars of the same material rising up unimaginably high around him. Each one had been carved by a thousand hands; thoughts and dreams and faces cut into the surface by so many generations that it was impossible to guess at what the untouched rock might have looked like. Jake traced the surfaces with his fingers...

And found himself standing in a forest where every tree seemed to be heavy with birds. Crows and starlings, parakeets, kingfishers. Owls looked down from above, heads twisting to follow as Jake passed. Raptors sat with haughty expressions. Some of the birds broke into laughter in the voices of people he'd met, and Jake jerked his head around to look. When he looked back, he saw a single bird sitting on a tree stump, a raven as large as a small child. It opened its beak, and this time its laughter shook the air around him...

Jake floated in empty space, though he had no trouble breathing, and the vacuum did not touch him. Ahead he could see stars clustered together, nebulae forming around him. The universe in all its vastness—for a moment Jake felt he could stretch out to every corner of it...

"You know you're dreaming, don't you?" he told himself, but a different version of him spoke. Another Jake stood a little to the side on the grass of a meadow that reached to the horizon, thick with wildflowers. Another Jake stood next to it, and another, until they stretched as far as the meadow did. At first glance, they appeared identical, but he knew they weren't. Each was minutely different, a version of him for every second he'd existed. They opened their mouths, speaking with one voice that filled up the world. "You're dreaming your life, and you need to wake up."

Jake looked around again, and the visions began flashing by faster than he could follow. Butterflies skimmed over beds, stealing thoughts from dreamers. People walked below him, their entire lives spread out like a stylized tapestry.

Jake stood in a maze made from mirrors, reflection after reflection of himself distracting from any hope of finding a way through.

"Wake up, Jake!"

The mirrors shattered, the butterflies scattered, the threads of the tapestries snapped. The heartbeat Jake had heard stopped, leaving him in silence, and in that silence, everything rushed in. Everything that was. Everything that had ever been.

In a single moment, Jake saw it all. Every pulse of life on worlds he never would have imagined existing. Stars spread out to infinity, but Jake felt like he knew each one. Lines of energy stretched between them, in a web with yet more webs beneath it, down to the level of matter and below. Jake felt connected into it, simply because he existed.

A consciousness shone, impossibly vast, consisting of billions of minds all with their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. Yet Jake felt he could understand this incomprehensible vastness, that it all made sense as naturally as if it had always been a part of his life. He floated in the middle of it, connected to it, one with it. He melted into the web of consciousness, and it flooded through him. He could no more control it than he could the tide. But he didn't feel helpless. Only that he was exactly where he needed to be.

Jake slipped in slow motion through the web as he began to return to his body. Then, as smoothly as it had come, the vision faded. With a great inrush of air that it took him a second to recognize as his own breath, Jake woke up one last time.

He was in a small, bare, and rounded room with luminescent walls. As he got up from a twin-sized bed that extruded from the wall, the bed flowed back into the pearly surface with a liquid motion until no trace of it remained. The walls glowed brighter, and he realized with surprise, the clothes he wore now came from the duffel bag he'd brought with him from the city. The aliens must have put them on him after the operation.

Jake recalled seeing robotic arms gliding through the air toward his head and the alien looking into his eyes before stepping out of view. Had they operated there? Jake ran his hands tentatively around the base of his skull and then explored his scalp, expecting to find stitches, a bandage, something. Instead, his fingers touched only smooth skin and hair. He might have dreamed the whole episode, except here he was, in this small, strange room, which was surprisingly comfortable despite the bareness. Besides, if they could absorb a bed back into the wall, they could presumably operate without leaving a scar.

In spite of everything he'd experienced, Jake felt safe. Safer than at almost any other point in his life. He felt protected. The walls of the room seemed more like a barrier to keep out anything harmful, even if they also kept him inside. Curious, he looked for a door and finally found one, fitted flush to the wall. While he couldn't see any way to open it, he didn't feel a compulsion to leave.

He realized an extraordinary shift had taken place. He felt so different to the way he did before, he could barely recognize the man he used to be. That man was alone... empty, somehow. Cut off from the world, locked within himself as surely as Jake was shut within this small room now. They were nominally the same person, but it was hard to feel the connection between them.

Everything else in the universe felt sublimely in tune. While he might not be experiencing the same sense of oneness with existence that he'd felt during his recent vision, Jake knew it was there, waiting for him. He moved his hand slowly through the air and had the sense that even such a simple motion could impact other lives in ways he couldn't see or anticipate.

He sat on the floor in the middle of the room and listened, just listened, while his heart beat and his breath moved softly. The man he used to be would have been banging on the door demanding answers about what had happened to him.

The man he was now was content to wait.

Jake didn't have to wait very long. Perhaps those in charge had been watching, or perhaps they checked up on him. Either way, the door to the room soon slid silently open.

The creature who entered had the same translucent white skin and dark eyes as the one who'd operated on Jake, the same oversized skull and short, relatively weak-looking body. Yet Jake sensed this was not the creature from the operation. That one had possessed an air of cold efficiency while this one seemed warmer somehow. It carried a sealed oval container, and Jake noticed its long hand had three fingers and a low-set thumb.

"Welcome," the creature said, and it took Jake a moment to realize he hadn't heard the word in any conventional sense. Instead, it simply arrived in his mind, in English. Jake looked at the alien's face and could see a thin slit of a mouth and two small holes for nostrils. As the alien spoke again its mouth remained motionless.

"I am Vega. I am aware your kind requires sustenance."

It placed the container on the floor.

"Where am I?" Jake asked aloud.

"Try it our way, please," Vega projected into his thoughts.

"I don't know how," Jake insisted.

"Yes, Jake. You do."

And to his surprise, he did.

"Like this?" he asked, sending his words toward the alien without speaking aloud.

"Yes, exactly like that."

For a moment, Jake marveled at how it could be possible. And then it became obvious. Connected to everything, he just needed to reach out for a specific connection and then project his thoughts along it like vibrations on a guitar string.

"Where am I?" he asked telepathically. "What did you do to me?"

"You are aboard our ship," Vega pulsed. "We brought you here to help you."

"Why?"

"You have always had the capacity to receive visions, to see things. Recently this intensified. Your pineal gland is your body's gateway to the universal consciousness, and it had started to become unstable. This accelerated your development in a way that rarely happens for your species."

"What kind of development?" Jake asked, and he couldn't help thinking about what this must look like to an observer, he and this translucent-skinned alien conversing soundlessly with one another.

"You would call it your spiritual or psychic development," Vega sent. "It is simply your deepening connection to the universe."

The alien said it as though it was natural, even normal.

"So, I had... what?" Jake asked calmly. "The spiritual equivalent of a burst appendix? What did you do? Take my pineal gland out?"

"No, nothing so extreme." Vega's thoughts carried a tinge of horror far more precise in its nuance than any tone of voice could have. "We stabilized the gland to ensure the process would not run out of control. To do this, we placed a small amount of living cosmic plasma connected to the universal consciousness within the gland."

"Living plasma?" Jake echoed. If Vega's thoughts had conveyed disgust at the idea of removing the gland, presumably his own managed to convey his confusion.

"Cosmic plasma is an essential component of the universe, connected to the deeper universal consciousness," Vega sent. "It is a... manifestation, if you will. Its discovery has shaped our technology for many generations."

"What would've happened if you'd left my pineal gland alone?" asked Jake.

The alien's large black eyes narrowed, and the smooth skin of its forehead wrinkled.

"Over time, your visions would have become stronger and more frequent, eventually leading to psychosis and then total mental collapse."

"And now that you've stabilized it? How will this affect me?"

"This is not the time for an explanation," Vega pulsed, and its slit mouth gave a faint twitch. "You are tired, and must rest."

Jake wanted to say he was fine, but in truth he felt exhausted.

"It will take a while for the effects of the operation to wear off," Vega pulsed. Jake sensed the flicker of its thoughts toward the wall. As the bed extruded again, Jake had the impression of Vega and the ship as parts of a unified system, rather than as machine and operator. "Rest now. You can find us when you wake."

Jake still had questions and wanted to protest, but fatigue overwhelmed him. He lay down on the bed and immediately fell asleep.

## Chapter Nine

When Jake woke up, the door was open. Perhaps it had been left open as a sign he could roam freely. For now, though, he sat up on the bed with his eyes on the oval container that Vega had left behind. Hunger assaulted him, and he wondered just how long he'd been asleep.

He instinctively glanced toward his watch but only found a pale band of skin where it had been. He picked up the container of food and puzzled over how to open it, until an instinct prompted him to try pushing against it telepathically, pulsing the way he did when talking to Vega.

The container opened in his hand like the petals of a flower, and the faint aroma of peach wafted out. He peered at what looked like a thick type of porridge, and ignoring the shell-shaped spoon, he dipped a finger in to dab some tentatively on his tongue. Jake had to admit, the luxurious texture and peachy taste was surprisingly good. He grabbed the spoon and wolfed the rest down.

Once he finished eating, he placed the container on the floor and rested on the bed with his back against the luminescent wall. The thick porridge felt nourishing in his body, and his energy levels surged. Jake considered going to find Vega, but he didn't feel ready to leave the room yet and wander around the interior of an alien spaceship.

Jake gazed at the shimmering wall opposite him. As a teenager, he'd been scared of his visions and had done his best to repel them, despite the intense pain it brought on. For years after, he feared the visions would return, and then, gradually, this fear left and the whole thing became a distant memory. But it turned out that, because of his unstable pineal gland, in less than a week, he'd had the most intense visions of his life and then had been forced to accept the evolution of his abilities. Now he was able to communicate without speaking and open a container with his mind. Jake wondered what else he could do thanks to the cosmic plasma.

In the past, he'd been at the mercy of his visions—so could he turn the tables and induce a vision? Choose what to see? He closed his eyes and, as naturally as breathing, began to think about Sarah.

And then he could see her. She held a stick of charcoal in her hands, alone in her studio, sketching a portrait that looked suspiciously like him. She had finished the basic outline, but the expression on the face looked too sad, too empty. The vision shifted to reveal a large canvas, his portrait set against odd shapes and clusters of stars. Jake could see tears at the corners of Sarah's eyes. Was this his fault? He'd clutched his head in agony seconds after their kiss at the restaurant and then staggered out. Sarah had called twice to find out why and check that he was OK, and he'd just sent a short text and then vanished. He longed to reach out to wipe her tears away.

Jake swallowed. He didn't want to see Sarah upset and alone. As if in answer to his desire, the image shifted. Now, he was looking at a messy basement, too deep in pizza boxes for comfort. Billy and Adam tapped away at their computers in the far left as Jake's viewpoint raced forward and behind the desk to show the monitors. A series of maps flashed before his eyes: Mount Shasta, Kelso Dunes, Sedona. Jake's viewpoint zoomed back across the basement to see Marina slumped on the beanbag, turning over tarot cards with her usual intensity. As Jake stared at her, she glanced up with a frown. He wondered about the state of her pineal gland, and whether she would hear if he said something.

The image shifted again, and Giles's office came into view. Giles was studying a case file, associates coming and going while he snapped and snarled at them. He didn't seem his usual jovial self, and his desk was stacked with files without Jake around to pick up the slack.

Again, he thought about calling out, although Giles wouldn't hear him. No one alive was more wrapped up in himself, and anyway, even if Giles did hear, he'd probably just order him back to the office.

The vision faded, and Jake's mind returned to the room where he'd awoken. He got up from the bed, unsteady at first, but as he tested his balance, he felt more confident. He walked out to discover a corridor whose crystalline walls arched in an almost-perfect tube. As well as the light pouring softly from the gently curved walls, there were lines of energy crackling along them, like neurons firing just below the surface. Every so often, a closed-off aperture could be seen, probably some type of door. Jake considered trying to open one, but instead, he walked along the corridor, looking for any sign of Vega or the creature who'd operated on him.

The corridor appeared to wind on forever, never running straight, flowing in a way that probably made sense only to whoever built it, assuming it had been built and not simply grown. Jake didn't feel lost, though. Something about the organic interior of the ship made it easy to navigate, and he felt certain of the direction he was walking in.

He eventually found an open aperture in the tube and walked into a circular room twenty feet across. A pyramid-shaped object the size of a large apple rested on a pedestal in the middle of the room. The pyramid glowed with white light, but flickers of other colors rolled across it, almost too quickly for Jake to follow.

Around the pedestal, three ethereal screens hung in the air, insubstantial as floating gossamer. On each there streamed a rapid succession of images, data, maps, and readouts. One screen was close enough for Jake to reach out and wave his hand through. He felt a tingle of something like static electricity as the cobweb-like substance flowed around his hand.

Vega stood by a console on the curved edge of the room, along with the one who had operated on him. Jake was puzzled as to how he could identify the two aliens with such certainty when their appearances were so similar, but he could instantly discern Vega.

The aliens were communicating telepathically, standing opposite one another with obvious connection, occasionally gesturing with their three-fingered hands. Jake could feel something on the outer edges of his mind, like a conversation in another room half heard but not quite comprehensible. He tried to tune in and bring it into focus, but encountered some sort of wall that blocked him.

Although they didn't allow him to eavesdrop, the two aliens didn't appear particularly bothered by Jake's presence. They made no attempt to stop him as he walked around the room, running his hands over the shimmering surface of the windowless walls, pausing as he discovered designs etched into them, so fine that they were only apparent to the tips of his fingers. He traced them gently, but if they did contain words, they were written in a language far removed from those of his world.

The two aliens turned their bulb-shaped heads toward him.

"Jake," Vega pulsed into his mind at last. "I would like you to meet Sirius. It is the one who performed your operation."

Jake stepped forward, wondering about an alien equivalent of shaking hands. He didn't think that asking them to the take him to their leader would go down particularly well.

"I remember," Jake pulsed, concentrating to project the words telepathically. "Thank you."

"You are thanking me?" Sirius sent back.

"Vega told me my pineal gland had run out of control, and that you stopped it," Jake pulsed. "It doesn't sound like it would have been good for me if you hadn't."

"It would have ended your existence," Sirius sent to him. The alien turned and stepped to the white pyramid at the heart of the room, touching it as the colors changed. Vega joined it.

As the two jellyfish-skinned aliens stood together in front of the bright pyramid on the pedestal, Jake suddenly wondered if they had a specific sex. He stepped to their side to discretely scan their unclothed bodies for clues.

"We are asexual," Vega pulsed without looking up.

The pyramid started to flash yellow and light orange.

"What's that?" Jake asked. "What are you doing?"

Again, he could sense that the two aliens were conferring. Vega answered, raising a thin arm to point at the pyramid.

"You would call this a computer."

"A computer," Sirius pulsed with something like amusement. "The primitive machines they possess hardly warrant the term. They do not even grow them, let alone use the plasma within them."

"You cannot blame them for what they have yet to learn," Vega sent back.

"That remains to be seen," Sirius pointed out.

"So," Jake asked, "what does it do? How powerful is it?"

"Powerful?" Again, a sense of amusement pulsed from the alien as its large black eyes regarded Jake. "Ah, the human obsession with power. Let me demonstrate."

Sirius waved a hand, and a three-dimensional image of Earth appeared, rotating slowly. Countless points of light dotted the surface.

"Each one of these is a device on your world. If you took all of them and put them together, still you would not have as much power as the Pyramid."

Jake didn't know what to say in response. Yet one important question needed to be asked. "Why have you come here?"

Sirius didn't answer; instead, it turned to the Pyramid in the middle of the room. Images kept flickering across the ethereal screens in the air, never pausing, never slowing. Jake tried to concentrate, but the slew of fragments tumbled too rapidly to discern patterns. Were these images Sirius's answer to his question? There was stock market data from New York, a time lapse of orchids flowering, a children's television show.

There seemed to be no order to it now, no reasoning behind it.

"What is all this?" Jake asked.

"We cannot reveal this information to you," Sirius replied. It didn't look back from its work. Jake was clearly not as important as a historical documentary, a selection of poems, a thermal image of the Yukon.

"Why am I here?" Jake asked. "Why did I get those visions of you?"

"We cannot tell you that either," Sirius replied. The lack of emotion in the alien's telepathic responses had the kind of flatness Jake knew from his encounters with city hall. The same "it's more than my job's worth to appear remotely human" feel. Although in this case, Jake reckoned the alien had a reasonable excuse.

"Well, what _can_ you tell me?" Jake demanded, aloud this time. His voice was shockingly resonant after the silence of telepathy. Like yelling in the middle of a library.

The two aliens conferred silently in front of him, as if they were parents trying to work out how to speak to a child about a difficult topic. No, not like that. More like some government department trying to work out which sections of a document to redact. At one point, the aliens became animated, thin arms and three-fingered hands waving around as if arguing.

Sirius finally pulsed another answer Jake's way. "We are downloading and analyzing all the available information on your species."

"What do you mean?" Jake pulsed back. "What information?"

"All of it," Sirius sent, turning toward him as if it should be obvious. "Your 'internet,' of course, the contents of individual devices and tablets, data produced by our own observation devices and satellites."

"How does your computer do all this?" Jake asked.

"It contains enough power to access your satellites, in addition to the terrestrial internet," Vega explained. "It searches out signals from beyond our ship, and once connected to them, it can penetrate all live computers on each individual network."

"The download takes less than thirty Earth minutes but has been run multiple times. Each update is amalgamated," Sirius pulsed, its forehead furrowing. "With something as important as this, it is imperative that we work with the sum total of data available."

"As important as what?" Jake sent. "What is it that you're not telling me?"

Vega answered. "It is not possible to discuss our objective, Jake. Not yet. We are busy, and you need to rest. The operation went well, but your body still requires one cycle of sleep for healing to complete."

The alien walked to the console and lightly touched one of the crystal buttons on the surface. A shelf extruded from the softly glowing wall to the left, holding a container of food.

Vega picked it up and handed it to Jake. "We will be waiting for you."

Sirius gestured toward the entrance and then turned to press the fingers of its right hand flat against the side of the Pyramid. The images cascaded even faster across the gossamer screens.

Jake knew there was no point asking further questions. He walked out of the room and turned right, the neurons beneath the crystalline surface of the tubed corridor firing softly as he stepped along. What were the aliens doing? And why had he been called out to the desert by his visions? The way Sirius refused to answer his question about that made him think there must be a reason. Jake gazed at the floor and slowed his pace.

The aliens possessed psychic abilities and technologies far superior to those of his species. Sirius had been almost dismissive of human computers when explaining the power of the Pyramid. A device so powerful, it had the capacity to download the contents of the terrestrial networks in less than thirty minutes, and then analyze every scrap of available information about mankind.

Why would they need so much intelligence? For an invasion? It was what aliens traditionally did in movies, but that would only require data about Earth's defensive capabilities, wouldn't it? Not every item of public and private communications. The need for such comprehensive research implied that Sirius's and Vega's mission concerned all aspects of human life, and the scientific nature of the observation suggested... what? An alien equivalent of a wildlife documentary? Look at all the humans, aren't they cute? Or it could be for some other purpose; something utterly incomprehensible to the human mind.

Jake reached the open aperture of the room where he'd slept. The door closed after he stepped in, and the bed glided silently into position. He sighed and plonked down, suddenly overcome with fatigue. He remembered the container of food in his hand, and pulsed into it. The lid again opened like the petals of a flower, and the peachy aroma escaped. Jake picked up the shell-shaped spoon and began to eat. The first time he'd eaten the thick porridge, his energy levels had soared, but now, he barely had time to finish before collapsing on the bed and falling fast asleep.

Jake woke up feeling refreshed and calm. The door slid open as he got up, and the bed receded silently into the wall. He stepped into the curved corridor and turned left to walk back to the control room. Jake felt the telepathic presence of the two aliens about twenty seconds before they came into view, waiting for him by the entrance.

"Come with us. It is time to tell you more." Sirius gestured for him to follow.

Sirius and Vega walked twenty-five feet up the crystalline corridor before an aperture slid open on the right and the aliens stepped through. As Jake followed, he found himself in a small, circular chamber ten feet across. It had the same pearly-white walls and floor as the other rooms he'd been in, but quartz-like crystals extruded from the ceiling. The door closed, and the ceiling began to pulse with an intense white light. His vision went blank.

Jake assumed the aliens' ship would be orbiting above the world. Instead, as they were transported by a shaft of light to the ground, he discovered they were still in the Mojave, tucked away in the dunes. Jake gazed at the impressive toroidal disk of the spacecraft. It glowed majestically in the dark and was suspended thirty feet above the ground, anchored in perfect stillness by a column of light that passed through its middle from high above and struck the desert floor.

The stars stretched across the night sky like a glittering celestial tapestry.

Vega pointed to a cluster of them. "This is where we have come from. You would call them the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. Our current worlds are there."

"Worlds?" Jake asked. "Not world?"

Vega spread its hands. "Once we lived on one planet, but that was a long time ago. We quickly spread out, and we learned as we went. The Pleiades has been our home for the last fifty million Earth years."

"What did you learn?" Jake asked.

"You could not begin to comprehend," Sirius sent.

"We learned about the universe," Vega pulsed. "About the ways time can be manipulated and the body renewed. We learned how to shape life and how to utilize the inherent capacity of our minds. We discovered how to extend our life spans almost indefinitely through cellular regeneration and consciousness transfers."

"Eventually," Sirius sent, "we looked for bigger questions to explore. Finally, we began the biggest experiment of all. Startoucher."

"It is our ancestors' project," Vega sent. "One that Sirius and I were assigned to oversee, two hundred and fifty thousand Earth years ago."

Jake gasped. The two creatures in front of him were older than any civilization on earth, older even than humanity itself.

"We told you about the tissue regeneration," Vega explained. "We have transferred ourselves several times as well. Avoiding madness proved difficult for a while. For a long period, we experimented with other physical forms, but this... this is us."

"What is Startoucher?" Jake asked.

"More than 3.8 billion Earth years ago, our people harnessed comets," Vega pulsed, "and seeded them with life, subtly distinct on each. They wanted to see how different starting points would shape evolution. They sent the comets to world after world, anywhere capable of supporting life."

"Are you saying you initiated life on Earth?" Jake sent, then shook his head. "No, it can't be right."

"Is it so hard to accept?" Vega asked. "Your scientists even have a word for it—'panspermia,' the theory of life arriving on comets. Evolution as you know takes billions of years to unfold. Phase two of the project began when Sirius and I were assigned."

"Phase two?" Jake sent. "What did you do two hundred and fifty thousand years ago?"

He could hardly believe he was asking that.

"We started humanity," Sirius pulsed. "We wanted to observe the effects of introducing modified DNA into archaic great apes, 'hominins,' to see if it would bring us closer to the project's goals. On other worlds, we engineered different forms of intelligent life. On this planet, we created your kind."

Jake didn't know what to say. The two aliens in front of him were literally claiming to be his creators. It was like getting to chat with God, if God had been a short, translucent white alien. As shapes for a creator went, it was hardly the most impressive.

"And what are the project goals?" he asked.

Vega's fingers moved slowly up and down. "The project was started so long ago, there is some confusion over the aims of the very first experiments."

"What we know with certainty is that for a billion years," Sirius pulsed, "the objectives were varied. Eventually we narrowed our focus. We wanted to understand the role new beings could play in developing a world, and we needed to create genetic diversity as insurance against the future. We possessed so much control over our physical selves, the only way to produce anything new was to introduce a random element and let evolution take its course."

"Has humanity brought you nearer to your current goals?" Jake sent.

"The Pyramid will—" Sirius pulsed but stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Jake faintly heard the whirling blades of a chopper growing closer by the second. He searched the night sky and spied the winking lights. Its path would not cross directly above the alien craft, but it would fly close enough. He studied the column of brilliant light that passed through the middle of the ship and realized it cut off abruptly at the top. Jake guessed there must be some kind of shield over the craft, preventing it from being visible. Otherwise, the aliens would have been discovered soon after landing. Still, Sirius had seemed distracted by the noise of the chopper.

"It is time, Vega," Sirius sent. "The Pyramid analysis will be finishing."

They returned to the control room of the ship, where the Pyramid continued to stream images across the ethereal screens. Everything his species knew, or said, or built, existed somewhere as data. The aliens were analyzing it all as part of their experiment. The same experiment that had brought life, and then humanity, to Earth so long ago.

Now Jake thought he could understand what they were trying to do. These two beings were responsible for the birth of humanity, and they wanted to test the progress of what they had engineered. Jake had the brief impression of a large family looking to welcome a long-lost member, learning all they could before they finally revealed the truth.

But another explanation loomed. One far more human in its unpleasantness. The whole process reminded him of something he'd done too many times in his career to ignore it.

"You're building a case file," Jake sent, gesturing toward the images on the screens.

"The analogy appears to be broadly correct," Vega pulsed with a hint of apprehension. "We are trying to see how our human experiment has gone."

"And whether to continue it," Sirius added, stepping in front of the Pyramid and studying the colors flickering across its surface.

"Whether to continue it?" Jake repeated. "You're not just talking about stopping observing, are you?"

"No," Vega admitted, throwing its thin arms up in the air.

"We have a duty as scientists," Sirius pulsed, turning from the Pyramid to look directly at Jake. "To both this world and the universal consciousness. We introduced life to this planet. We have given it time to grow and adapt. If one species we created evolved to be a serious threat to its home world, or eventually to the worlds beyond, we would have no choice but to remove it."

"Remove it," Jake echoed. "Just like that?" Fear, disgust, disbelief—and anger pulsed through his connection with the aliens.

"We must consider the possible harm of not acting," Vega sent. "If a species kills everything around it, we would be responsible. Please calm down."

"You're talking about killing billions of people the way I might destroy a wasp's nest," Jake pulsed with an energy that was like a spike in an electric current. "You have no right!"

"We have every right," Sirius sent with a stern resoluteness that carried a hard metallic feel as it slid into Jake's consciousness. "The right and the responsibility. There are species in our experiment who have thrived and evolved successfully, but mankind..."

"You're talking about this like it's nothing," Jake complained.

"Not nothing, Jake," Vega pulsed softly and then raised a thin hand to silence Sirius. "We understand the scale of what we might have to do. But you've experienced the universal consciousness. We must consider the greater good."

"Whatever the cost?" Jake asked. He'd felt the scope of the cosmos, but he was still human.

"Whatever the cost," Sirius answered.

"And why I am here?" Jake sent, glancing from one alien to the other. "You still haven't given me an explanation."

The Pyramid started to emit alternate waves of brilliant yellow and white light.

"Wait," pulsed Sirius. "The results are coming in. Your role will be clarified once the Pyramid has reached a conclusion."

## Chapter Ten

As the night drew to a close, Gemini's initial excitement had turned into something approaching frenzy. And not just because they'd run out of pizza an hour ago. Billy and Adam tapped away on their computers, trying to make sense of what they were seeing.

"Could it be the Chinese?" Adam asked, running his hand over the top of his Afro.

"You think everything is the Chinese," Billy said. "Just because they hacked through your firewalls that one time..."

"It has to be someone."

It had to be. For the last day or so, something sinister had combed through the net like a search-engine spider, but far more sophisticated. Or, at least, more powerful. Not much sophistication was involved in taking everything it found.

Marina sat on the beanbag, turning over tarot cards. "We must try Jake again."

"Again?" Billy asked, his face incredulous. "It's four-twenty in the morning."

Marina flipped a card. "He's important. I can feel it, like he's connected to the aliens in some way. I... I could have sworn I saw him yesterday, and tonight I've been getting visions too."

"Isn't seeing someone who isn't there kind of the definition of a vision?" Adam grinned, his white teeth flashing.

Marina shook her head. "It was as if he was actually here in the room. Very different from tonight's glimpses of a desert."

"Could it be an alien landscape?" Billy asked, not looking up from his keyboard.

"I don't know," Marina said. "Maybe. But Jake's been in those desert visions too, so probably not."

"Unless he's been kidnapped and taken to an alien world," Adam said.

"Jake did tell us he'd seen a jellyfish-skinned alien in a desert," Billy added.

"I called him six times last night, and each time it went through to his voicemail." Marina said. "Same thing happened the day before when I left a couple of messages."

" _Definitely_ kidnapped by aliens." Adam nodded.

"Maybe he didn't want to speak to us because he's freaked out," Marina suggested, putting her cards down and brushing some fluff from her long purple skirt. "He did leave in a hurry. Perhaps he's been busy with work or friends, or even just lost his phone."

"I guess all that's _technically_ possible," Billy said, looking up with his eyelids blinking rapidly. "But chances are, he's been taken. That's totally awesome!"

The trouble was, Marina had started to suspect he might be right. "Guys, we really need to contact Jake. Can't you find out where he is?"

Adam turned to Billy. "I'll call Sigma. He should have the results by now, and it's nearly seven thirty in Canada. You try our favorite cop."

Billy nodded. Around six months ago, he'd trawled through the LAPD website looking for a suitable candidate to exploit with social engineering. Sergeant John Richards ticked all the right boxes. Middle aged, active in his local community, and with a recent appointment to missing persons. Further digging online also revealed a keen interest in muscle cars and a year-old divorce.

Billy had then sent an e-mail with a phishing link, purportedly coming from a female organizer of a muscle car rally the handsome policeman had attended. The intrigued officer couldn't resist clicking the link to claim his two free tickets to the LA auto show, and from that point on, Billy had access to his computer by exploiting his internet browser and outdated version of Windows.

After reviewing the sergeant's e-mails, it became apparent that warrants for phone location data were usually served electronically, especially when the case was urgent. Three months ago, Gemini had photoshopped a search warrant as a favor for a hacker friend, and within twenty minutes had received the triangulation data for the cell phone in question. Software vulnerabilities in the LAPD e-mail server allowed all relevant correspondence between the sergeant and the network operator to be deleted.

Billy pulled up the search warrant template and began to customize it with Jake's details.

Adam meanwhile called Sigma, the code name for their Ukrainian associate who worked in Google's AdWords division in Waterloo, Canada. Sigma was a highly paid engineer specializing in the development of search algorithms, the complicated formulae that determine the search results returned, and how they could be optimized to make money through advertising.

When Jake had visited Gemini's headquarters and explained about his visions of aliens in the desert, Billy and Adam had deemed it worthwhile to hack Jake's Facebook page and send the log-in details to Sigma. Although Jake rarely used Facebook, his timeline stretched back to his college years, and they uncovered his interest in karate, working out in gyms, and driving off-road vehicles in the mountains. They also sent his LinkedIn data in addition to details from his career, including high-profile clients and case topics. Gemini asked Sigma to run a learning detection algorithm on all this data to build up a semantic "fingerprint" of search interests.

Once Sigma had created this fingerprint, he entered it into the anonymized database of fingerprints in the AdWords system to pull up the larger digital "body." This was a process called "Fuzzy Matching," and once complete, it provided Sigma with full access to Jake's entire search history on Google.

"Sigma apologized for the delay," Adam said. "He was working late and clean forgot. He'll send last month's data dump now."

Billy blinked rapidly as an e-mail arrived in Sergeant John Richards' mailbox.

"Looking at the cell towers, the last signal from his phone came in from Cima in the Mojave just after eight thirty on Tuesday night." Billy looked up. "The e-mail explains there are very few towers in the desert, so no triangulation was possible."

"Bingo!" Adam exclaimed as he skimmed through Sigma's report. "Jake was searching for info on Kelso Dunes around lunchtime on Tuesday."

Marina stood up, her green eyes glinting. "It all fits. Jake told us about his visions in the desert, and now I've seen him there too. He was definitely holding something back when he came here. Did you see how he flinched when I asked for more info?"

"You could be right," Adam said. "Over the last week, there have been UFO sightings in the Mojave."

"Plus," Billy added, gazing at the pi tattoo on his finger, "one of the two recent reports online about being scanned took place in a desert."

"We're going," Marina said, putting her hands on her hips. "Get ready."

"Do we really have to go now?" Billy asked.

"Yes," Marina replied. "We'll take my car, it's only five thirty. If we're lucky, we'll miss the morning jam."

Sarah was painting. Up all night, she'd begun late afternoon with brief sketches that had developed into this much bigger piece. She didn't want to be painting, not now, not this, but she felt compelled. Half the time, her hands had moved automatically, her mind unaware of what she brushed until it emerged on the canvas. With a final stroke, she put down her brush and held her palette in midair as she studied the portrait of Jake.

Had she been wrong to call him after the party? It hadn't felt like it. It felt like a door unlocking after being shut for far too long. She remembered how she'd felt when he'd asked her where the stallion was and held her gaze. She could feel his strength and confidence, but there was something else, a wildness, a yearning to be free like the mustangs racing over the prairie. Even if he worked as a lawyer in a suit, Sarah could sense another, much deeper side to Jake, waiting for the right person to bring it alive. She'd been attracted to him almost instantly the moment they'd met and was pretty sure Jake felt the same way about her.

She picked up her brush again. She'd been working on his face in the painting, using broad strokes of color to establish the outline of his features. Now Sarah switched to working on the background, figuring out what kind of landscape suited him. The way you set a portrait said as much about the subject as the face. So how best to depict Jake?

He'd run off. Even worse, he'd done it twice. The first time, Saturday night at her party, he'd left so quickly Sarah had wondered if he wanted to spend time with her after all. She'd been willing to forgive him because it was already quite late when he'd gone, and a successful professional like Jake probably did have urgent work to do, even on a weekend.

Sarah painted in some sand. She wanted to recall something of the beach scene where they'd walked, and the orangey hues looked perfect. She couldn't imagine Jake with the greens of a forest. Although born in New York, Jake was an LA guy through and through, and hotter tones were required. Briefly, she thought about putting a cityscape behind him but decided it didn't feel quite right.

That Jake had run off a second time really worried her. He'd refused to take her calls, and then had replied hours later with a short text that failed to explain why he'd reacted so badly to their kiss. Sarah had called a couple more times to try and find out, but again he'd refused to answer. If any other guy had behaved like that, Sarah would have kicked him to the curb in a heartbeat. But with Jake she didn't want to. She knew what she should be doing, yet here she was painting his portrait from memory, his features stuck indelibly in her mind.

As her brushed moved, the background took a stranger turn, more surreal, with deeper colors set against the sand, threatening shadows, and stark moments of relief. She painted in swirls and peculiar shapes, oddities that shouldn't have fit but did. Hues of a night sky crept in, with clusters of stars, the beginnings of a nebula fading into the abstract designs around it. She began to use subtle shifts in shading to try to connect this background to Jake, conveying the impression of a dreamscape.

Sarah cleaned a brush in turpentine, then dipped it in fresh paint to work on his eyes, dotting the reflection of the stars without knowing why. Why add all this to Jake? Did she not know enough about him to paint a more literal image? If so, why keep painting? Why not do what she should have done in the wake of the party, and forget about him? This was LA, after all. Good-looking guys weren't exactly hard to find.

She sighed and took out her phone. One more chance. She would give him one more chance to live up to the initial promise. At the very least, she deserved an explanation for his behavior. Maybe this early in the morning she'd catch him off guard before he got up for work.

Sarah found his name in her contact list and waited for the call to connect.

In the control room of the ship, Jake watched the Pyramid as it concluded its analysis, with the entire existence of mankind on the line. The images cascading on the gossamer screens began to slow and fade, then the waves of brilliant yellow and white light emitted by the Pyramid dimmed to only a flicker. Surely humanity's fate should come down to more than simply the flickering of an alien machine.

Vega turned toward Jake and tried to reassure him. "Perhaps the Pyramid will tell us humans are likely to evolve and overcome their aggressive tendencies."

"Does he have faith in his species?" Sirius pulsed, peering at the Pyramid.

That was the problem. Jake didn't know how this would go. The world suffered from too much violence and destruction for him to feel optimistic, and there were a host of other issues that could force the aliens to make good on their threat.

The Pyramid fell dark, then flickered on again, half of it lit with bright-white light, half of it a pale yellow.

"The results of the analysis are in," Sirius pulsed without a hint of emotion. "And the data is... confused."

"What do you mean, it's confused?" Jake demanded. He lost patience with the alien. How could it be so calm while it contemplated genocide?

"Not confused," Vega pulsed and then gestured with its long hands. "Balanced. The evidence in favor of mankind and the evidence against are almost equal."

"So, now what?" Jake asked. "Do we get the benefit of the doubt? No human trial would condemn someone with the evidence so finely balanced."

"We must communicate with our superiors," Sirius sent, then stepped back from the pedestal. Vega walked over to Sirius's side, and both aliens stood ramrod-straight as nictitating membranes closed slowly over their large black eyes.

Jake felt it the way a swimmer might feel the rise of a whale in the ocean. An electronic communication, traveling across vast distances of space that, at the speed of light, would have taken years to reach its destination. This pulsed instantly through the interconnected web of the universe. He didn't pick up the detail of the conversation, but he had the sense of a discussion, even an argument, taking place between Vega, Sirius, and whomever listened.

Jake resented being shut out of it, as if he were a client waiting while lawyers argued in chambers before a judge.

"We have spoken with the Council of the Supremes," Sirius announced, membranes rising to uncover its jet-black eyes. "It represents the collective voice of our species, and it has decided that there should be a—judgment of the facts."

"A trial?" Jake pulsed.

"You would call it this, yes," Sirius replied.

"It is the protocol when the margin is so close," Vega explained. "Your species will be given the opportunity to defend itself. Witnesses will be gathered to represent it, and to speak on its behalf."

"Is this why I'm here?" Jake asked. "Because I'm a lawyer?"

Sirius turned toward the three gossamer screens and swept its right hand in front of them. The screens shimmered brightly and then disappeared. The alien then pressed its palm flat against the surface of the Pyramid, and the pale-yellow and white lights went out.

Vega stepped toward the curved wall, a few feet to the right of the console. The alien pulsed into the floor and three stools rose silently in a triangle.

"Jake," Vega sent, "please come and sit."

Jake walked over to sit on the stool indicated by Vega. The alien turned toward the wall by the stools and pulsed again. A section of the luminescent surface became as clear as glass, revealing the first hints of dawn in the desert outside.

Vega sat down, and Sirius walked over to join them. Both of the aliens' faces had grave expressions as their stools rose until their unnaturally rounded heads were level with Jake's eyeline.

"Come on, guys, _how bad can it get_?" asked Jake, the seriousness of the situation almost comical.

"Jake," Sirius pulsed, "you are here because we broadcasted an encoded message across the greater Los Angeles area. We used a biometric frequency specific to the human pineal gland. Those whose glands were receptive would have begun to see visions of us here in the desert."

"With nearly twenty million people in the catchment area," Vega continued, "we expected two to five individuals to respond strongly to this frequency."

Jake suddenly remembered Marina telling him two other people had also reported visions of being scanned.

"The strength of the signal being broadcast was increased," pulsed Sirius, "until one of those individuals found their way to the desert."

"You, Jake," sent Vega, "you were the most sensitive. When our monitors alerted us, we collected you up from the other side of the dunes."

Sirius pressed the fingertips of its hands together, and Vega did the same.

"So you called me here by destabilizing my pineal gland," Jake sent, crossing his arms. "And then you were forced to operate? Why?"

Vega turned toward Sirius.

"When I analyzed your brain's memory banks prior to operating," Sirius pulsed, "it became apparent that in your teenage years you had repressed the natural growth of your pineal. This, in conjunction with our encoded frequency, caused the instability."

"OK, OK, I get it," Jake pulsed and threw his hands up in the air. "But what's the prize? What do I get for being the chump with the overactive pineal?"

"Jake," Vega sent, leaning forward slightly, "if mankind must be removed from this planet, then two representatives will be taken back to our home in the Pleiades to ensure the species does not die out. This particular Startoucher experiment will have failed, but we would not wish to lose out on the potential for further genetic development."

"Representatives?" Jake pulsed as he flinched at the thought. "You mean I'm—"

"You would be one of them," Sirius sent. "You represent an interesting strand of genetic material. Especially now since you have the cosmic plasma implant."

"You said there would be two," Jake sent.

Vega nodded. "We would require a female specimen as well, to allow your species to continue and to facilitate future cloning."

"Who?" Jake asked. He had visions of the aliens searching for his female equivalent, forcing the two of them together in an experimental lab and watching over them as if the humans were monkeys in a cage.

"It is for you to decide," Vega pulsed. "We have learned through experience that couples make the transition better when there is a strong compatibility."

The two aliens sat with their long hands on their laps, waiting for Jake to speak.

"And what if humanity wins the trial, what then?" he asked.

"You can still return to the Pleiades with us, should you wish, Sirius pulsed. "Or, if you prefer, you can remain here on Earth. Your brain's memory banks from the last two weeks would be wiped clean to ensure that you had no memories of us and the Startoucher project."

Jake looked to his left through the clear panel in the wall. The rays of the sun filtered through the dawn sky to cast a pale light over the scrubby sand and dunes. High above the desert, a solitary bird glided through the air. How Jake wished he could fly with it across the horizon and avoid having to turn back and face the aliens and their bulging eyes.

The whole thing was like some kind of sick joke. If everyone else on Earth was killed, he would survive. The idea was repellent, even if he did get to have a female companion. And what if mankind won? Then he could return to Earth with his recent memory wiped. Jake realized with a chill that his memories of Sarah would vanish in an instant.

He sighed and turned toward the aliens. Their translucent bodies looked thin and feeble, but their minds were powerful, and instinct told him that any attempt to attack would be swiftly rebutted.

"Do you have other questions, Jake?" Vega asked, its translucent forehead furrowing.

"When am I supposed to go and find someone to come back with me to the Pleiades in the event mankind loses?" Jake pulsed, his lawyer's mind on autopilot.

"The trial starts in twenty-nine Earth hours," Vega replied. "You will leave in a short while, and if you do not find someone before the trial, Sirius will select the female specimen."

Jake glanced at Sirius's somber face and felt no confidence in the alien's skill as a matchmaker. He put his head in his hands and tried to navigate the rapids swirling through his mind.

"And what about the trial?" Jake sent, straightening up. "Where will it take place?"

"Here on this ship," pulsed Sirius. "I will be the prosecutor and Vega will speak on behalf of mankind."

No surprises there, thought Jake.

"I could go and fetch the army when I leave," Jake pulsed. "I could stop you from doing this."

"We would not allow you to do so," Sirius pointed out, its thin mouth twitching.

"And it would not stop anything, Jake," Vega pulsed back. "Even if your human military tried to destroy this ship, our reprisal would be swift and decisive. No, Jake, a trial must take place. It will be recorded, so those who come later can learn more about humanity at this critical stage of its development."

Jake bit back an angry response. "All right," he pulsed. "If you're going to be the prosecuting and defending counsel, who will the judge be? Another one of you? Because if so—"

"The judge will be one of the Supremes," Sirius sent. "Supremes are evolved beyond even us. They have moved past the need for a limited physical existence and are not involved with the petty details of the material universe. I trust this will be a sufficiently impartial judge for you."

Sirius got up from its stool and turned to Vega. "I must prepare. I have witnesses to gather."

## Chapter Eleven

Jake and Vega watched on the control room's gossamer screens as Sirius made its journey to collect witnesses. The alien left in a vehicle appearing to be a small oval capsule, the top half an elongated dome of clear, glass-like material and the lower base glowing brightly as it ascended from the main craft. It slipped through the blue sky above the desert so quickly and silently, only someone watching for it would have noticed.

"How will Sirius collect the witnesses?" Jake asked. "Simply land and persuade them?"

"Sirius will establish a temporary wormhole between the pod and the space where each individual is located and use it to transport them to the interior of the craft," Vega explained. "Once on board, Sirius will use a pacification laser to render them unconscious. It will be safer to transport them like this."

"So you're going to beam them up and abduct them?" Jake pulsed.

"Sedate and remove for necessary study," Vega corrected him.

"And you're letting the prosecutor of this case also pick the witnesses for the defense? That doesn't sound like such a good move to me."

Vega gestured to the screen. "All the witnesses will be neutral and chosen according to who best represents the collective voice of your species. I am sure Sirius will select correctly. The procedure is well established."

The president of the United States looked out over the immaculate lawn from a balcony of the White House, taking a minute before returning to the Oval Office. Despite a marathon morning session, his team still hadn't surmounted the blocks and arguments against putting their bill through Congress. It wasn't enough to prove a bill would be good for the country, because what was proof to the average radio talk show? It was a question of building support little by little, both in the country and in the legislature. Meetings and more meetings, press conferences and promises.

He gazed up at the cloudy sky. He briefly wondered if there were other worlds out there. And if so, did they have press conferences?

"Mr. President," his press secretary said, "I think we have some better wording for the speech to Mothers of America this afternoon."

"Let's hear it," the president said. He looked at the lawn again, taking one last moment to appreciate the simplicity of it before returning to endless complication.

In that moment, light surrounded him, and he disappeared.

Professor Helen Allen marked papers in her office in one of the deeper recesses of Oxford's corridors. Papers written by first-year students who had chosen philosophy as their discipline but who hadn't yet mastered the ethical implications of copying most of their answers from the internet. Or who simply churned out the same references to Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche, and Bentham, predictable and uninspired.

"An interesting moral problem," she said aloud. "If my students are producing identikit answers, does the weight of moral responsibility rest on me or them?"

And if so, should it affect the marks? She didn't have enough time to get to the bottom of it, because at that moment, she found herself plucked away from her office and rendered neatly unconscious.

Dr. Nils Gardener was monitoring the collision of two superdense particles at CERN toward the end of a long day when the light came for him. He was possibly the only person on the planet in a position to appreciate the beautiful efficiency of Sirius's made-to-order wormhole effect when applied to the transportation of a human being. Under other circumstances, seeing it firsthand might even have sparked vital advances in long-range transportation.

Unfortunately, as the light came down over him, he was concentrating on the data flow from the Large Hadron Collider, absolutely determined to disprove Labousier's latest theories and stop them clogging up the stream of his research funding. As such, by the time the tunnel enveloped him, he had fallen fast asleep.

When the light came for the pope, he didn't think it an act of God. Afterward, he would feel quite guilty about that. He was kneeling on increasingly arthritic knees with his hands clasped in prayer before the stained glass of one of the Vatican's many chapels. Yet when the light came down, he didn't for an instant assume his prayers had been answered. Instead, the cardinals with him went on to report (though only in private) his last words before disappearing had been perfectly clear. Exactly what they meant theologically, or about the Vatican's knowledge of the wider universe, went on to be quite hotly debated.

"Oh," he said, _"alieni."_

Amita was wiping the dinner dishes and worrying about her son Ravi when Sirius's pod arrived. She spent a lot of time worrying about Ravi. His brother, Sanjay, was a good boy, a clever boy, who worked hard every day in the markets and went to school in the afternoons. Sanjay would probably find work in an office somewhere, a _good_ job. Ravi hung out with the rough guys in the back streets of Kolkata, or played cricket on the maidan when he should be studying. Amita had no idea what would become of Ravi once she was gone.

And then, suddenly, she was.

The president of China skimmed over the summaries on his desk as the clock on the wall showed ten minutes before midnight. Most of the reports were economic, disclosing the rate at which factories scaled up their production amid the latest growth trends. A few concerned the activities of dissidents, but he pushed those to the side. If he had as little to fear from the more ambitious members of his own party as he did from the average dissident, his life would be a lot easier.

He reached for his coffee and settled into reading a report on slowing economic growth in the rare earth metals mining industry, and as a result was almost grateful when the tunnel of light came down to snatch him up.

He had to admit, even by the standards of his enemies, this approach was impressive.

The native shaman lay in a hammock strung between trees in the middle of a vision when Sirius came for him. He'd been alone in the Brazilian rainforest for three days; such isolation proved increasingly rare with the number of loggers and coffee planters moving in.

After gradually working himself into the right space to speak with the local spirits, he'd received dreams and visions in return. What the spirits revealed concerned him. Omens of judgment and destruction. He initially thought they had something to do with the men in suits who sometimes came to his village to persuade them to move, or with the increasing devotion of the young in his tribe to football and city life rather than the old ways.

When the light came for him, though, he knew.

Paige had been making banners after breakfast when the tunnel of light snatched her. She always made more banners and placards than she needed to for protests, partly because there were always people who showed up without them, and partly because she didn't find it easy to confine her thoughts to just a single expression. There was an art in making something big enough and colorful enough to catch the eye of passersby to leave no doubt about the importance of the threat to the planet. The main trick was making them in her room without her parents complaining about the space they took up.

"I'm sixteen!" she would say. "I can do what I like with my room!"

And then they'd make her tidy it anyway, which was simply unfair. This time, though, she would make a difference, regardless of who it upset.

It probably said a lot about Paige that when Sirius abducted her, she assumed it was either the government or big business trying to silence her. It was the kind of thing they did, after all.

Back in the control room, Jake and Vega watched the screens as the shaft of light beamed Paige aboard Sirius's pod. She crumpled to the floor in the landing bay.

Vega waved a hand and the screens became transparent. "All eight witnesses are safely in position."

Just eight witnesses representing billions... It didn't seem enough, Jake thought. "Do we at least get to appeal to this... Supreme?" he pulsed.

"If the Supreme evaluates that either of us is making a biased case, it will adjust accordingly," Vega sent.

"You shouldn't have let Sirius pick all the witnesses," Jake pulsed. "Trust me, I know when a witness list is being stacked. Our president is hardly a shining example of the best mankind has to offer."

"Sirius is a scientist, interested in the truth." Vega threw its hands in the air. "You do not need to worry, Jake. It is not your role."

Jake sighed and shook his head. It was too much to take in, even with the cosmic plasma inside his brain. His mind was completely scrambled, and when he scanned around the control room, he felt trapped in the middle of a surreal nightmare and longed to wake up.

Except this wasn't a dream.

"Jake," Vega sent softly, its tone conveying concern. "I know this is difficult to process all at once. But the fact that you were the first to respond to our signal shows you have the ability to adapt. There are only twenty-seven Earth hours remaining before the start of the trial at noon tomorrow. You must go soon and find a female and convince her to come with you, and be back here two hours before the trial begins. Can you do that?"

Jake put his hands on his hips and looked into the pools of Vega's large black eyes, and his head began to swim. He tore his gaze away and strode out of the room, feeling better as the telepathic connection with the alien began to recede. He turned right and walked back to his room, the neurons below the surface of the crystalline tube flickering softly as he passed.

The door to the rounded room slid open silently, and the bed flowed from the wall. Jake sat down and breathed deeply. It felt safe here. Perhaps this was what prisoners sometimes felt in their cells, shut snuggly inside their tiny corners of the world.

Jake gradually began to feel calmer, and he leaned back against the softly shining wall and tried to make sense of the last few hours. Life on Earth was an experiment, and humans a second phase of that original project. Now the alien creators of humanity had come back to check on the results and decide whether or not to allow his species to continue.

Was it so hard to believe? Scientists on Earth already used genetic engineering to create new forms of life, and each year space travel and colonization of other planets seemed less like science fiction. Given enough time, mankind would probably have similar Startoucher-like experiments...

Could the military take out the aliens? Back in the control room, Sirius and Vega had promised swift reprisals if any attacks were made. Jake wondered if that was a bluff to head it off... But the alien technology was so superior, it would be unthinkable if they weren't capable of dealing with the weapons of his world. Jake estimated that Sirius had gathered all eight witnesses in less than ninety minutes. What kind of power source would permit a small space pod to travel that fast? Any attempt to bring in the military would surely backfire.

He briefly considered the trial and the possible outcomes. If humanity lost, he could elect to go down with the sinking ship and refuse to join the aliens in the Pleiades to play happy family. He guessed they would select someone else, or even force him to go. Besides, though sobering to admit, his survival instinct was too strong not to go, even if billions of others did perish.

Jake was left staring at the one question he'd tried to avoid: Sarah... would she go to the Pleiades with him? Cosmic plasma or not, that was going to be the hardest conversation of his life. Chances were she would turn him down, since she'd be crazy to believe him, and even if she did, she'd be crazier to actually go. But if he could just convince her to come to the trial, maybe humanity would win, and then they could stay together on Earth. Except the aliens had told him his memory of the last two weeks would be wiped, and he imagined the same thing would happen to her and the eight witnesses.

Jake got up, and the door opened silently. The future he could deal with another time.

Right now, he had to find Sarah.

## Chapter Twelve

"Jake's here, I can feel it," Marina said, hands on the wheel of her vintage Subaru. She loved its maroon color and rear-end spoiler, and usually took the driver's seat because she felt safer. The guys had an unfortunate tendency to get distracted. She'd once caught Billy trying to hack his way into the Starbucks ordering system with his phone while cruising down the middle of the freeway.

Gemini sat in the back, and Joni Mitchell blasted out of the sound system. As Marina lowered the volume, Billy took his fingers out of his ears. It had been a predictable journey up until this point. Hours of actual driving, despite leaving early and initially being stuck in typical LA traffic. It was hard to see what Jake would want all the way out here on Kelso Dunes Road.

Marina scanned the scrubby sand on either side of the road, and Adam had a GPS receiver attached to his laptop to record the coordinates. Before driving into the desert, they'd stopped for gas twice as a pretext to ask if anyone had seen Jake. No one had.

"Are you sure about this?" Billy asked, frowning. "No disrespect, but the psychic stuff is... a bit dodgy."

"He's somewhere out there."

In a movie, Marina might have slammed on the brakes or skidded off onto the sand. Instead, she looked for a safe spot to pull over. Adam looked faintly disappointed she wasn't being more dramatic about it as she gestured to the right.

"Somewhere out there?" Gemini looked at the mixture of desert brush and finer sand and then turned back to gaze at the dunes in the distance. The day had yet to really heat up, but as the sun rose, the temperature would increase rapidly.

"Could you be a little more specific?" Adam said, smiling.

"That way," Marina said, pointing across the desert.

Billy looked over at her grumpily. "Well? Go on, then."

"I'm not driving up onto the sand, Billy," Marina said. "It isn't allowed."

"Why not?" He didn't look impressed.

Neither did Adam. "We scoff at rules!"

"So it isn't you who runs upstairs to put plates in the dishwasher because your mom insists?" Marina countered. "Anyway, we're not doing it."

"We have to walk?" Billy asked.

"That's right," Marina said. She got out and grabbed her wide-brimmed hat and a small backpack from the passenger seat. Even with the heat of the day not cranked up as high as it could be, the sun's rays baked the ground.

"I still don't know why we have to do this," Adam said, hiding his laptop under the front seat before climbing out. "He's just some guy we met at a con. If we're going to go looking for people we've met, couldn't we go try to find those sisters who—"

Marina stopped him with a look. "Adam, I've been seeing visions of him since we met him."

"Well, I've been seeing visions of those sisters since—"

_"Adam."_

"All right, all right," he said, adjusting the baseball cap on his short Afro. "You know, if we ever do meet aliens, and it turns out they're bent on world domination or something, we should probably just deploy you to talk to them. I'm pretty sure they'd run for home."

Marina ignored him and peered toward a small boulder a hundred feet ahead. "We need to start searching."

Billy put on wraparound sunglasses before finally getting out of the car.

Marina had a flash of sand followed by clean walls, of Jake and someone definitely not human. It passed as quickly as it arrived, the kind of flash she normally found annoying because it didn't tell her anything useful. Except this one did—an inescapable sense of the direction.

"OK, guys," Marina said. "Back in the car, it's straight ahead."

Billy and Adam groaned in unison and rolled their eyes before climbing back in. Marina drove half a mile farther up Kelso Dunes Road and then slowed as they passed the main parking area on the right. A group of early-morning hikers could be seen returning from the main dunes trail, but she ignored them and the trail to continue driving. A mile later, they reached the end of the road and pulled into one of the two small parking areas. She quickly got out and then motioned for Gemini to join her.

Marina gazed at the desert from underneath her hat as another vision flashed through her mind.

"This way," she said and then charged across the scrubby sand in her short leather boots and purple skirt.

Adam grinned at Billy as he put on his John Lennon sunglasses and followed her. Billy bent down to tie the laces on his white sneakers and then trudged behind Adam.

It was hard walking on the undulating surface of the western edge of the dunes, so it was just as well that Marina had brought three twelve-ounce bottles of water in her backpack. The dunes might have made a good place to trek and sandboard, but people who enjoyed those pursuits were typically more athletic than Gemini and Marina. Adam's dark skin gave him an advantage, but only a little. The oppressive heat made them all want to run back to the Subaru and blast the air-con.

As they summited a small dune, their feet dislodged sand that flowed downward in waves, releasing an eerie sound like the booming of a Tibetan monastery trumpet.

"What's that noise?" asked Adam, stopping and taking off his sunglasses to gaze at the waves of sand in front of him.

"That's freaky!" added Billy, holding out his phone to film it.

"It's why they're called the singing dunes," said Marina, continuing to plow ahead. "It's nothing to be afraid of. Just some kind of natural phenomenon."

For well over an hour, they struggled on, each carrying the backpack in turn, exhausted from lack of sleep and the relentless heat. Adam and Billy were close to collapse when Marina stopped in her tracks in the throes of another vision.

"Come on," Marina said and then led them down a small slope to an open patch of firmer sand. "Jake isn't far now."

Jake found his Porsche waiting outside the spaceship, as pristine and perfect as the day he'd bought it. The aliens had obviously moved the car from the site of the crash and had managed to fix it while he'd been in their ship. Even compared to his recent experiences, it was impressive. Something tangible, human scaled. Jake hadn't known of the existence of the universal consciousness before the aliens had shown it to him, but he knew exactly how much time and effort it normally took to repair a car like his.

Jake scanned the horizon and discovered he stood at the very edge of the dunes. There appeared to be a dirt-track road in the distance, and he got into the car to drive toward it. His watch glinted on top of the dashboard, and he slipped it on his wrist, a fitting symbol for leaving the timelessness of the ship. He studied the dial: 10:23 a.m. on Friday. It had been three days since he'd driven out to the desert on Tuesday night.

Even after adjusting the suspension and gearing on his SUV, it still proved challenging to drive on the scrubby sand, and it wouldn't have looked very elegant. The noise of the engine was far too loud against the silence of the dunes, while the wheels slipped and spun, refusing to grip the unstable surface.

Ahead, the air shimmered faintly, visible in a way that it hadn't been at night. Vega had told him that two of the ship's three shields would be lowered, leaving just the camouflage screening, which he could drive through. A flicker of energy emanated from the shimmering air, and Jake could feel it like a feather at the back of his mind. That must be the remaining shield.

He was more interested in the people walking beyond it. He recognized Gemini immediately, Marina leading Adam and Billy through the desert, all three of them looking sweaty and tired as they stumbled across the sand. Jake stopped the car, expecting them to come over to talk, but they didn't. They kept looking around as if they couldn't see him. Their voices came to Jake with a muffled edge to them, as though from the other side of a wall.

"I'm telling you," Marina said. "I can hear... It sounds like a car engine."

"I can't hear anything," Billy said.

Did Marina's psychic talent give her an edge? Would she be able to see what lay beyond the shield, given time? If so, how would the three of them react? Jake wasn't sure he liked the idea of Gemini poking around a real alien ship, if only because he suspected they would probably start pushing buttons to see what would happen.

"I'm telling you," Marina said, "there's an engine. Can't you hear it? He's out here somewhere."

They were there looking for him? Jake almost got out of the car to head toward them and talk. He could guess how much it would mean to the trio to learn about an actual alien craft, perhaps even to speak to Vega. Two things stopped him.

First, a worry about what might happen next. Jake wasn't sure if Gemini and Marina were exactly what the aliens needed to see when they were trying to understand how humans had turned out. Even if it didn't affect the trial, there still remained the question of what Sirius might do to stop them from telling the world about the location of the ship. He didn't want the three of them wandering around with their memories wiped, or worse.

Second, what about his deadline? Less than twenty-four hours to find the one person he wanted to be with if this went wrong, persuade her to come with him, and then return to the desert. To stop now and give the trio a tour of the ship would be plain crazy. If anything, he needed to scare them off.

He knew what to do.

Jake sped toward the invisible shield around the ship and hoped there would be enough grip for the wheels. The air crackled as the car passed through, and Jake's attempt to steer a straight course across the desert sprayed sand all around him.

Marina and Gemini stood there gaping, and Jake could guess what it must look like: his car appearing from nowhere, sliding into being from thin air.

He reached the dirt road, and suddenly his GPS sprang into action. He turned left in the direction of Kelso Dunes Road and smiled as he saw them scrambling and shouting after him. The dirt road eventually ran parallel to Kelso Dunes Road, and he turned left again to cross a firm patch of sand to join it just before the main parking area. Jake soon passed the point where he'd plowed onto the sand and crashed, and he drove back to the freeway as fast as possible.

Vega waited for Sirius to return to the ship with the cargo of witnesses. It did not take long. The small pod had almost the same galaxy-spanning speed of their main craft. Vega could feel Sirius's approach like pressure on the outer edge of its being, Sirius's thoughts and sensations coming ahead of it like a wave.

The wave carried a hint of satisfaction at odds with Sirius's usual detachment.

"What has made you so pleased?" Vega asked as Sirius's pod docked.

"Perhaps I am just satisfied to have performed this task well," Sirius replied.

Vega pulsed disbelief at Sirius.

"Very well," Sirius sent back. "I am fascinated."

"To know how our experiment has turned out?" Vega guessed.

"Yes," Sirius replied.

They started to unload the pod. It required pulsing a pen-sized laser at the middle of each of the witnesses' foreheads before guiding them out one by one. The strobes of bluey-white light brought them to a semi-conscious state where they could walk, but did not rouse them sufficiently to permit resistance.

It was strange to consider how a species they'd brought to life could have turned out so differently from their own. Vega had studied the data about their continual wars, and about the damage they'd inflicted on their environment. If a species evolved technologically and culturally to such an advanced degree but still persisted in fighting, did it suggest the two of them had encoded an intrinsic violence into its DNA?

Sirius and Vega herded the zombielike witnesses along the tubed corridor to a room with vertical, clear cylinders of softly glowing liquid. Robot arms unfurled from the ceiling and picked the witnesses up to then lower them fully clothed into individual tanks until the viscous liquid reached their necks. One pulse of light, and the liquid set firm enough to hold their bodies, yet with sufficient give to permit breathing. After inserting feeding tubes and sealing the tanks shut, the robotic arms rose without a sound. The whole orchestrated maneuver lasted less than twenty seconds.

Here the humans would be safe, docile, and unconscious. Vega and Sirius had transported specimens across whole starscapes like this, taking them to new worlds without the subjects ever being aware of the shift.

Vega thought about the trial. The alien did not have Sirius's pretense of disinterest. It hoped humanity would survive and eventually prove the experiment a success. Genetic diversity was vital for the future of the galaxy.

"Are you ready to tell me why you are so fascinated?" Vega asked.

Sirius remained silent for a while, but over the centuries, Vega had learned to read its silences. Its fellow being was considering whether to share its thoughts.

"You know me well," Sirius sent. "Yes, I am fascinated. After all this time working together, we are experiencing something new. It is... an intriguing prospect."

"You are looking forward to the trial," Vega pulsed.

"Yes, I believe I am."

"We must remember that this is not just a trial," Vega sent. "It is not even simply about the success of an experiment. We are determining the fate of an entire species."

"I am aware of the implications," Sirius pulsed.

The silence returned and deepened as the two aliens worked side by side adjusting the controls on the cylinders.

## Chapter Thirteen

As Jake drove along the desert roads, he gripped the wheel to steady himself against flashbacks of the crystal bed, the universal consciousness, and the gossamer screens in the control room of the ship. When he finally reached the first built-up area, the sight of a suburban shopping mall calmed him, the mundaneness of it comforting after the empty spaces of the desert.

He'd known it would be her the moment Vega had told him that he would need to persuade a woman to be ready to come with him. Even though he'd just met Sarah, there was no one else he wanted to go halfway across the galaxy with. How exactly did you start persuading someone to travel to the stars with you? It sounded vaguely romantic, but the executioner's blade hanging over humanity made the context impossibly bleak.

Jake grimaced. He faced a mind-boggling task with virtually no chance of success. How could any sane person accept the reality of the trial? Jake could, only because he'd been taken to an alien ship and operated on, and was experiencing the effects of the cosmic plasma. This huge change had allowed him to process and understand what the aliens had revealed about their experiment here on Earth.

Driving back into LA, Jake again felt the strength of his survival instinct and potential to adapt. If necessary, he could discard his old life like a worn-out pair of shoes and leave this planet. He'd always been a loner, so this would just be taking it one massive step further. But Sarah had sparked something vital in him, and now that the cosmic plasma pulsed silently in his brain, Jake felt that, in some inexplicable way, they were destined to be together.

He decided to trust this feeling and ignore the logical objections.

Once back in his neighborhood, he parked his car and gathered himself for the most important call of his life. He dialed Sarah's number, listening to the ringing and trying to guess at what she might be doing. Would she be painting the canvas he'd seen in the vision? Maybe she would have given up by now, throwing it out, along with all memories of him. Jake didn't think so, however. The connection between them was too strong.

"Jake?" Sarah didn't sound certain when she picked up, like she'd just woken up or thought it couldn't possibly be him.

"Hi, Sarah."

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't hang up on you right now."

"I need to talk to you. It's important. Life-or-death important," Jake said.

Sarah didn't respond, and Jake thought she might just hang up. If she did, what then? The answer was obvious. He would go to her gallery. He would wait outside for as long as it took for her to let him in. He couldn't afford to give up. Not with less than twenty hours remaining before the start of the trial.

"Jake, what's happening?" Sarah finally asked. "In the past week you've walked with me on the beach, disappeared, shown up for lunch, run off again, and answered my calls with a crappy text. I don't know what to think about you. Are you interested in me or not?"

"Yes," Jake assured her. "I'm very, _very_ interested in you. If I could, I'd take you away to the stars with me."

It sounded a lot cheesier when he actually said it, but afterward, he knew he'd told her the literal truth. He didn't want anyone else, and he had no backup plan.

"Why did you behave so weirdly in the restaurant? I need an explanation."

"I can explain. Just let me come over," Jake said.

"And this 'life-or-death' stuff?" Sarah asked. "Was that just a line to get me to talk to you?"

"No lines."

"Then what are you caught up in?" Sarah asked. "You're not representing organized crime or anything stupid like that?"

"No, I'm not," Jake said. Nothing so simple. With something like that, there were at least well-trodden ways out. "Although, if I asked you to come with me into witness protection, would you?"

"Now you're just making fun of me," Sarah said.

"Not as much as you think," Jake replied. "Please, Sarah, can I just come to the gallery and talk?"

"You still owe me dinner at a nice restaurant after running out of the last one," Sarah pointed out. She seemed to be thawing toward him at a little. "There's a new place I've been wanting to go to."

"What new place?"

"They call it Zoo," Sarah said. "The way I figure it, if we meet there and you run out, at least I'll get to have dinner somewhere interesting by myself."

"I'm not going to leave you by yourself," Jake promised. In fact, if he had his way, he would never leave her alone again. They arranged to meet at seven p.m. After the call ended, he quickly checked the radio for any news of the missing witnesses but drew a blank. Jake felt exhausted, so he drove back to his apartment to grab a few precious hours of sleep.

Zoo was everything its name suggested. The waiters wandered the restaurant in scanty animal-print uniforms. The walls were strung with foliage and flowers, making it look like the diners were in the middle of a jungle, albeit a not-very-convincing one. The windows contained bars, and when Jake was foolish enough to ask the waiter why, he explained the concept with a patronizing smile.

"To give diners the experience of being animals in a zoo at feeding time." An observation platform even hung above the cavernous dining hall, so people could come in and watch the animals eat.

Sarah's curves were on show in a ruched white top and formfitting black slacks. Her kitten heel mules completed the stunning effect, and as she gazed around the room, her eyes sparkled.

"It's like being in the middle of a piece of performance art," Sarah said.

Ordinarily, Jake would have been cynical and dismissive, but Sarah could see the value in all of it. He saw the place with her eyes and felt her joy in it seeping through. And her joy made him realize just how much he had changed.

The waiter returned, his bare arms and legs gleaming. The special aquarium sushi required a minimum two-person order; Sarah wanted to try it, and Jake was happy to oblige. They both ordered a glass of white wine, then Sarah excused herself to go up to the observation platform and take some photos with her phone. Jake studied the menu he'd kept.

_Aquarium Sushi_

_Chef-Artiste Pierre Lafitte's tribute to his Normandy childhood, and his many years wandering the tropical beaches of Asia, key elements in a lifelong quest to blend exquisite flavor with passionate art. Ethically sourced blue fin tuna, certified organic Alaskan salmon..._

Jake shut the menu and scanned the crowded room. A few tables along, he could see a waiter in leopard print using silver tongs to pick up large slabs of raw steak and place them on wooden boards in front of three burly men. Another waiter arrived and gave each dinner a robust wooden cudgel. The men looked apprehensive and gulped their beers.

Sarah sat down again as a small army of semi-naked waiters arrived. One-inch borders were clipped to the sides of their table, then a generous layer of gravel was spread over the entire surface. Next, colorful pieces of coral were arranged strategically, followed by scallop shells, each one containing two pieces of sushi. Seaweed was draped wherever the waiters felt like it, and a miniature bucket and spade was placed in one corner. The bucket contained soy sauce. Finally, tubes of wasabi were squeezed onto the arms of two dried starfish, and mounds of ginger were dumped on each center.

_"Madam, monsieur, bon appétit."_ The waiters left.

"That's quite a sight," said Sarah, picking up the tiny spade and scooping up some soy sauce to tip into one of the scallop shells. She deftly used her chopsticks to dab some wasabi under the two pieces of salmon, and then popped one in her mouth. "Not bad, but I've had better."

Jake took a sip of his wine and picked up his chopsticks. They both ate in silence for the next few minutes.

"Jake," Sarah said, her eyes narrowing. "You promised me an explanation."

_Bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang._

Jake glanced toward the burly men trying to tenderize their raw steaks with the cudgels.

"I did," Jake said. "But I don't know how to begin."

"You're married?" Sarah asked, throwing her hands up in the air.

_Bang, bang, bang. BANG._

Jake smiled. "No, it's nothing like that." He paused. "It's bigger and more complicated."

"Was I right before, with the guess about the mafia? Are you in some kind of trouble?"

"It's even bigger than the mafia."

Sarah frowned. "I'm not sure how many things are bigger." She froze in place for a few seconds. "You're not dying of some awful disease, are you? Like a brain tumor or something? Because it would explain things." She seemed to realize what she'd just said. "Sorry."

It was hard to argue with. Sudden headaches, erratic behavior...

"No, I'm not dying of anything," Jake said. "It's just—"

"Would you like to order another dish?" a waiter asked, arriving at their table in a sudden wash of zebra print.

"No, thank you," Jake said. "The truth is, Sarah—"

"Perhaps some more wine, then?"

Jake glared at him until he went away, but he knew the moment he tried to get the conversation back on track, it would be something else. People staring. Another waiter. One of the animal-skin-wearing floor show gliding by. There was simply no way of having a conversation of this magnitude in the middle of a busy restaurant. Especially Zoo. Even if they weren't interrupted again, there would be the constant sense of being stared at.

"Sarah," Jake said. "Can we do this somewhere else?"

"You're not enjoying the ambiance?" Sarah asked, and for a moment, Jake thought she'd decided to make him work harder. He looked into her eyes and waited a few seconds before speaking.

"Please, Sarah."

"All right," Sarah said, giving in. "Let's at least finish this sushi, and then we can go back to the gallery. But whatever you have to say, Jake, it had better explain all of this craziness."

"Oh, believe me, it does," Jake replied.

They reached Sarah's gallery and walked in. Jake peeked through the narrow archway and could see a white cloth hanging over an unfinished canvas on the easel in the back room. Sarah plonked herself down on the sofa to the right of the gallery entrance, and Jake joined her.

Tension rose up in him as he approached the moment when he'd have to explain the whole unbelievable story. Jake tried to work out the best way to say it. Except no best way existed. How would he even begin? The silence grew, and Sarah started to fidget, then finally shrugged with an air of exasperation.

"Well?"

Jake's heart jumped as he spoke. "This is going to sound pretty weird. But I promise you it's true. Please, promise you'll listen to all of it, no matter how strange it sounds?"

"You realize that isn't exactly a comforting way to start?" Sarah said, but she nodded. "OK, I'll listen."

"I've been seeing things," Jake said. "I've been having headaches, sleepwalking, and getting visions. That's why I ran out of the restaurant. I had a blinding headache and could feel a vision about to strike."

The tension in his chest began to ease, and he relaxed into the sofa.

"Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, I had visions, but I pushed them to one side like they never happened. I just wanted to be normal. Recently, though, they came back with a vengeance. I started to see this one scene over and over. An alien in a desert."

"You realize—" Sarah began, but she stopped herself, letting him continue.

"I saw the Kelso Dunes on TV," Jake said, "and I recognized them from the desert in the visions. I had to go. So I drove out there on Tuesday. Remember that text I sent you? I sent it just before leaving. By the time I got there, it was night, and to avoid hitting a pickup truck, I skidded onto the sand, and I have a vague memory of crashing into a rock."

As Jake paused, Sarah reached for her pendant and realized she hadn't worn it.

He glanced at her and thought about what to say next. Probably best to skip the operation and cosmic plasma for now, even if they had changed him irrevocably.

"I woke up in an alien spaceship. Two aliens were there who'd been sent to check on the progress of humanity. They're going to put us on trial, all of us. The president will be one of the witnesses; he's already been abducted. They're trying to determine whether we should be allowed to continue. One of them told me that I was there because, if the verdict goes against us and we're all wiped from the planet, I'll be one of the two humans saved to go back with them to their home in the Pleiades. They said I get to choose who to bring with me."

"And naturally, you thought of me," Sarah said, laughing.

"I'm serious, Sarah," Jake said.

"You're seriously messed up," Sarah countered.

"I know how crazy all this sounds—"

"I'm not sure you do," Sarah said, edging away from him. "If you really knew, you wouldn't be saying all this."

"But I'm not crazy," Jake insisted.

"Jake, you're seeing things, you're blacking out. You're talking about _aliens_. About the president being abducted. If that's not crazy, I don't know what is. Or maybe... maybe you do have some kind of brain tumor. Headaches, erratic behavior, it all kind of makes sense. You really should see a doctor, Jake."

Jake shook his head. "This time tomorrow there might not be any doctors. Come on, Sarah, I know how impossible it sounds, but you have to believe me."

"Why?" Sarah demanded, glaring at him. "Why would anyone believe this?"

Jake got up and strode through the archway to where Sarah's picture rested on its easel, hidden by the cloth. He turned the room light on and grabbed the edge of the cloth.

"Jake, don't touch it!"

Jake pulled, whipping it away and hoping against hope for his vision of her painting to be true. If this turned out to be just some gentle watercolor of the beachfront, things were going to get very awkward, very quickly. But it wasn't. Jake's own features stared back at him, surrounded by desert and stranger images, symbols, and clusters of stars.

"Look, that's the Pleiades above my head!" he said, pointing. "Some part of you knows this is true. You've connected to all of this somehow, even if you haven't been aware of doing it. Sarah, if there were another way I could prove this, if I could take my time and explain this to you gently, I would. But there _isn't_ any time."

Sarah shook her head, and kept shaking it, as she pushed herself up from the sofa.

"I can't... This isn't..."

Her uncertainty tipped over into more. It gave way to something else, and with tears on her face, Sarah ran, kitten heels in hand. Out of the gallery, down the street, and out along Venice Beach before Jake could do anything to stop her.

Sarah raced down the beach, her black slacks blurring as the sand flicked up around her feet. She ran because she didn't know what else to do. Because only a few places in the world made her feel safe, and Jake had scared her out of the main one.

Even at nine o'clock on Friday night, other people were strung along the sand. Two young men juggled flaming torches while a third played a didgeridoo. Behind them, a drunk couple shouted and waded into the surf. Shadowy figures huddled together in small groups, and a gang of tattooed girls roller-skated down the boardwalk waving at the homeless.

Normally, the eclectic crew of her neighborhood wouldn't have bothered her. Sarah was used to it. She'd lived virtually all her life in the same house and walked along this beach so many times it should have become boring. Often, she liked to stop and watch, filing faces and characters away to include in future paintings, maybe even inviting someone back to her studio to sketch their portrait.

Now she just kept running. Every strange person on the beach was a reminder of something she needed to escape from. Every stare she received was more fuel to keep her moving.

She should never have agreed to meet Jake again. She should have turned around and walked away the moment he'd started to behave so weirdly. She'd experienced enough strangeness for one lifetime already, without adding a guy who claimed to have talked to aliens.

Sarah slowed a little. Ever since she was a child, she'd fled to the same place. Going there when she'd argued with her mother, or when she'd felt the need to be alone. It had seemed utterly magical to a kid, but somehow it hadn't stopped being special even as she'd gotten older.

The painting taunted her, by far the hardest part to accept. Talk of spaceships, aliens, and seeing things was easy to dismiss as nonsense, to tell Jake to get help, and move on. But the painting shocked her to the core because she couldn't deny the message it contained.

Sarah stopped and bent forward, panting to catch her breath. She only had to cross the road, and she'd be there. A bushy hedge with trees behind it lined the side of one block, the dense foliage providing camouflage from the street. She took a while to find the right spot to enter and then edged into the springy thicket, having to use force to push through. Two tall trees faced her, waiting like familiar friends. She hugged one of the wide trunks and then flopped down on the other side, hidden from sight in her tiny oasis of nature. She tried to recall the last time she'd felt the earth beneath her like this... Not since her mother died.

Why had she painted the portrait like that? She searched for an answer but soon gave up. She hadn't been able to get Jake out of her mind. And now it turned out that he was out of his, and wanted her to escape with him to another world. But if his unbelievable story was such a fabrication, why did it link so strongly with what she'd painted?

She leaned against the tree, hugging her knees in the tight womb of her childhood hideaway while a sea breeze rustled the leaves and tears rolled gently down her cheeks.

Jake waited on the sofa for some time after Sarah left. He'd wanted to run straight after her, to try to persuade her, but something had stopped him. Not the kind of instinct stemming from psychic powers. Just plain common sense that said running after someone down Venice Beach shouting about aliens wasn't going to be the best way to convince her.

Instead, he forced himself to give her space, studying the surreal painting in front of him. It looked exactly like his vision, the same odd shapes and clusters of stars. If he'd still needed to be convinced of his sanity, and of the events in the alien ship, this would have been the way to do it.

It hadn't been enough for Sarah, though, and Jake could guess why. He'd had a week—no, since the age of thirteen—to get used to the idea of the impossible. He'd given Sarah only minutes. Worse, he'd shown her irrefutable proof. Not just upsetting her world but tearing it apart and hoping to be there to catch her when she fell. Well, she'd fallen. Now Jake needed to find a way to help her come to terms with it.

He got up from the sofa, turned out the lights, and pulled the shutters down before setting out to find her. As Jake stepped onto the beach, he found his eyes automatically drawn toward the sky to search for the Pleiades, but the light pollution from the city and the bright moon prevented many stars from being seen. Jake scanned the jugglers and the figures lurking in the background, and although his instinct was to rush by, he slowed down, forcing himself to relax.

Jake tried to reach for the state he'd experienced when he'd woken up from the operation. He walked toward the shoreline, recalling what it felt like to connect with the universal consciousness. He gazed out over the sea as the memories of his first attempts to direct his visions to people he knew floated up in his awareness.

Then the inexplicable sensation came back to him, as fresh and as pure as if he'd only just experienced it. Somehow Jake knew this experience would never tarnish. Absolute clarity, absolute unity, a vast, luminous web of connection stretching toward infinity.

Jake thought about Sarah, and instantly he saw her. She crouched in an enclosed space, a soft bed of leaves beneath her, with tree trunks framing her body. He could see the tears on her cheeks. And he knew where she was.

He retraced her route along the beach, picking out her path as if her prints remained clear and undisturbed in the sand. Jake jogged almost in a trance as people turned to look at him. He didn't know what they could see in his face, but there was obviously something. They stepped away to give him space as he jogged past, an invisible force pulling him toward Sarah like an angler reeling in a fish.

## Chapter Fourteen

Jake found the spot in the thicket of bushes where Sarah had entered, and if he hadn't been so certain about his vision, he would have walked straight past. He considered calling out, but part of this involved showing her just how much he'd changed. Jake gathered his thoughts and concentrated, reaching out with his mind until he could feel Sarah's presence in the small enclosure beyond. He could sense her presence in the same way he'd been able to feel Vega's and Sirius's back on the ship, connected to him by the strands of energy linking all beings. Jake formed the words carefully in his mind, then sent them out as clearly and precisely as he could.

"Sarah? I'm here. I'm outside. Please come and talk to me."

Jake watched as Sarah shyly emerged. The hedge reached above her waist, and Sarah had to lift her arms up and twist and turn before finally slipping out. It wasn't the most elegant of exits. Even so, Jake couldn't take his eyes off her. He could feel the connection pulsing between them, enhanced by the intense telepathic link.

"Can you hear me?"

Sarah hesitated only for a moment, then ran forward to throw her arms around him. Their contours fit together perfectly, and Sarah clung to him as though he were a life preserver in a vast ocean of doubt.

"Yes," Sarah whispered. "Yes, I can hear you."

It felt so good to hear those words. Jake held her gently as the tension drained from both their bodies.

"You've been telling the truth, haven't you?" Sarah asked, stepping back. "About the aliens... about all of it."

"I have," Jake said, speaking aloud.

She took his hand and held it above the springy thicket and, silently led him to her sanctuary. As they sat down on the ground and leaned against one of the trees, Sarah saw her kitten heels and smiled.

"Look, I forgot my shoes."

"Your feet are beautiful."

"Forget the flattery," Sarah said, squeezing his hand. "Explain the whole story again."

Jake did his best. He told her about his visions, about finding the aliens in the desert. He told her about what they'd done to him, about the experiment they'd been running for 3.8 billion years, and then the more specific experiment of the last two hundred and fifty thousand.

"So humans—all life on this planet—comes from the stars?" Sarah asked, gazing up through the branches of the tree before turning back to Jake. "It's all just an experiment?"

"An experiment they've apparently run on countless other worlds. And now Vega and Sirius have returned to see whether it's been successful."

"And if they decide it hasn't?"

"It's not just their decision anymore," Jake explained. "The trial taking place tomorrow will have a different kind of alien as a judge. Far more advanced, apparently."

"But if we lose the trial...?"

"Then, yes. We'll be 'removed,' I think is the euphemism they used. Although they didn't go into how exactly this would be done."

"With you as the only person they take with them?"

"You too," Jake said. "If you'll come."

Sarah winced. "This is all too much. Knowing it's real doesn't actually make it better."

"I know," Jake said, clearing his throat. "It's hard for me too. It always has been. Being the only child of adoptive parents wasn't easy, and when the visions started as a teenager, the way everyone reacted made me feel even more isolated. That's why I worked so hard to suppress my second sight. By the time I was an adult, I always had this feeling of holding back."

"Because you couldn't tell anyone about what you were experiencing," Sarah said. "You couldn't share your true self. I didn't let you either. I pushed you away."

Jake could hear the guilt there.

"It's OK," he assured her. "I know how crazy it sounds. How can I explain that to somebody?"

"You explained it to me," Sarah pointed out. She paused, scuffing her feet on the ground. "I know what it's like, feeling alone. My dad left when I was so young I don't really remember him. It's always been me and my mother. When she died, it was just me."

"And I know what that's like," Jake said. "My adoptive parents died a few years ago, and even though they couldn't accept who I was, I still miss them."

Sarah nodded. Being with her was like finding his missing other half. No wonder his previous life had been so empty and incomplete. He contemplated what it would mean if they ended up with the aliens hurtling through space toward the Pleiades.

Jake knew the answer. It would mean the end of humanity and the dawning of a life he couldn't even begin to fathom. They would become the aliens, stuck in an extraterrestrial culture with no concept of how to navigate it. Two lonely humans, the last of their kind, forever exiled from Earth.

But despite this unknown and alien future, a part of him felt excited by the prospect. The moment when he'd been connected to the universal consciousness had brought the awareness of a universe far larger than he could have imagined. Now he might be given a chance to actually explore it. A chance to explore it with Sarah.

"Come with me to the stars?" he asked. Corny, but he meant every word.

"Come back with me to the gallery?" Sarah countered.

"Yes."

They got up, linking arms, and pushed through the hedge to walk silently along the beach. Jake had never been this close with anyone. The connection between them was more than physical, more than emotional. As the waves washed ashore, he felt truly at peace.

They didn't bother turning the lights on when they got to the gallery. There was no need. Sarah knew her way in the dark, and Jake trusted her. She led him through the archway and slowly up the steep wooden steps to her apartment above.

They walked along the narrow corridor, then Sarah swung open a creaky door, and the silver of the moon poured in through the windows and skylight, illuminating everything in pale shades. It was a magic kingdom, the simple furniture and ordinary clutter of life fading into the shadows. The soft edges and lines that the light picked out were as different from Jake's home as it was possible to get.

Their lips found each other in the moonlight. Kissing Sarah seemed as natural to Jake as breathing, and she responded with the same ease. There was no clumsiness, no hesitation. Their bodies pressed together, and Jake could feel the softness of her curves. They pressed closer and he felt the passion just below the surface, thrumming as tight as a harp string.

Their hands explored one another's bodies, at first running tentatively over clothes. Then they started to undress each other, laughing as they fumbled with buttons and zippers in the softly lit bedroom. Sarah stepped back from Jake for a moment, clothed only in the silver glow of the moon. She gazed at him with her eyes wide open, and he returned her gaze with an equal amount of magnetic intensity.

Sarah held out a hand and led him toward her. Rather than a bed, Sarah had a futon on the floor; Jake would have gone to her then, even with the prospect of bare floorboards to lie on. They tumbled to the firmness of the mattress, and Jake explored her body again with his hands, his mouth.

Somewhere above him, Sarah gave a soft gasp of pleasure.

They made love in the lambent light, their bodies undulating in a hypnotic rhythm. There had been plenty of other women for Jake, mainly one-night stands and brief flings, but no one could compare to this. It had always felt like he and his partner did nothing but take, trying to extract as much as possible from the limited time they shared, even in his one-year relationship at Harvard. With Sarah, it felt as though they were both simply giving, parts of a larger whole, carried along by the beautiful power of it all.

Jake could feel their beings, their energies, as surely as he could feel the smoothness of Sarah's skin, the burning touch of her lips. He felt the moment when the two of them melded together on a level he never would have believed existed. There was an instant where there ceased to be her, or him, just one glorious blending of everything they were.

Afterward, they lay in the silvery light on the futon, Sarah's hair pooled around her head where she rested on Jake's chest.

"Wow," she said with a smile. Just that, one syllable. But it was enough for Jake. It certainly summed up his feelings.

Normally this would be the point in the proceedings where he would feel the urge to make an excuse to get up and leave. He relaxed as Sarah's weight pressed against him, the feel of her shifting with every breath she took. Soon there would be aliens and judgments and possibly the end of the world. For the next few hours there was simply this, lying together looking up at the moon, not even needing to speak.

## Chapter Fifteen

Marina stood in the middle of Gemini's headquarters yawning. It was one thirty a.m.

When Jake's car had appeared from nowhere in the desert and sped past, the three of them had watched as he drove to the dirt-track road in the distance and then turned left. They had looked back to gaze at the spot where the car had come from and could see nothing but sand. By then all of three of them were close to collapsing in the heat, with only one bottle of water remaining.

"We better get back," Marina had said, hands on the hips of her purple skirt. "Something is definitely going on, but we need sleep and proper supplies. We also need to speak to Jake."

Gemini had reluctantly agreed. Billy had taken photos and a GPS reading with his phone and then used the compass and decided Jake's route would be easier to return on, even if longer, because they would avoid the steeper sand. It took half an hour of stumbling across the desert to reach the dirt road and turn left onto level ground. Luckily, the sky had then begun to cloud over. Nevertheless, it had taken another eighty minutes before Marina spied the end of Kelso Dunes Road to their left, and they'd crossed over the short patch of desert to join it.

By the time they'd returned to Gemini's basement after stopping to eat at a diner, it was nearly five in the afternoon. All three had crashed, exhausted. Adam in his bed, and Billy and Marina on thin mattresses. Adam had gotten up at midnight and raided his parents' huge fridge upstairs before making coffee and waking the others.

They could barely contain their excitement as they sat on the floor, slurping coffee and munching sandwiches.

"His car came from nowhere, man," Adam said, flicking some crumbs off his bright-yellow T-shirt.

"There must be some kind of alien vortex in the desert," Billy said, swiping his unruly hair from his eyes with the back of one hand. "If we hadn't been so totaled, we could have checked it out. We've got to get back."

"I thought you didn't like walking?" Marina said, her eyes teasing.

"This is different. One of us was smart enough to get the GPS coordinates."

Adam punched Billy playfully in the arm. "Yeah, if we drive to the end of that track running south of Kelso Dunes Road, it's not too far from there."

"I'm making some tea, you know I don't really like coffee," Marina said.

"Go for it," Adam said, nodding.

Marina got up to walk to the kitchenette by the basement entrance and brushed her hair with a hairbrush while the kettle boiled. She thought about calling Jake again, but every time she'd tried on the way back from the desert, it had gone straight though to voice mail. He obviously didn't want to speak to her. Billy and Adam polished off the rest of the sandwiches and took their mugs of coffee to their desk and logged on. Marina walked to the beanbag, tea in hand, and watched.

Gemini sliced their way through the world's computers, two very different-looking halves of an efficient whole, splicing code together with the speed and skill of jazz musicians improvising. Marina got a sudden image of penguins, so awkward on land, but the moment they hit the water, they swam with preternatural grace.

"Holy crap!" Adam said, running his hand through his Afro.

"Insane!" Billy added, blinking furiously.

"What's happening, guys?" Marina asked, standing up.

The guys glanced up and did a double take. Marina didn't take it personally.

"There are important people missing," Adam said, smiling.

Billy nodded. "The president, the president of China, a prominent scientist... it's all been hushed up."

They went back to hacking their way into government mainframes, although "hacking" wasn't an elegant enough word for what the two of them did. It suggested an axe when they were a scalpel, picking apart seams to slip discreetly inside. Gemini swapped information with a few trusted hacker associates in different locations. Marina watched as the two of them read communications between US and Chinese officials, none of them quite trusting the others to really say anything useful. Some pointed the finger at Russia, or even North Korea, but no one believed them.

She sat back down on the beanbag and used her laptop to do some research of her own, heading out to forums for alien enthusiasts and abductees, those who saw visions and those who merely felt as though there had to be something more out there in the universe. Marina often fared better than Billy or Adam when it came to networking with others. For all their fame among a certain kind of netizen, the guys tended to start flame wars while Marina preferred to find common ground, even with those she disagreed with.

There had been new UFO sightings in Switzerland, Italy, China, Los Angeles, and the Mojave Desert. The local times varied, but from what she could work out, the first would have been in Switzerland. No one had posted any new visions about aliens on the forums, but a couple of her psychic friends reported strange dreams about an apocalypse. Marina swapped her laptop for her tarot cards and did a quick spread. Everything pointed to change and transformation, but she couldn't discern the details.

"Hey, come and check this out!" Adam gestured for her to come over.

"Totally awesome!" Billy added.

On Billy's monitor, Marina could see a list of the latest UFO sightings, lined up against the locations of those missing. Two of the three matched. The president of China in Beijing and the scientist in Geneva, Switzerland.

"What about our president?" Marina asked. "Nothing in Washington?"

Billy kept tapping his middle finger on the desk, the pi tattoo oscillating up and down.

"I've got it," he said. "Let's check the weather today... Look... Washington was cloudy. Even if there had been a UFO, unless it flew really low, no one could have seen it."

"You're right," Adam said, hands flying over his keyboard. "Beijing and Geneva had clear skies. Plus, in Beijing it would also have been night."

Billy pressed a key with a flourish. "Taking into account time zones, the last eye witness account came from the Mojave at ten thirty a.m. While we were there!"

"We must have been that close to the alien headquarters!" Adam said, almost shouting.

Marina checked her watch—three a.m.

"Guys, where's Jake?"

Billy tapped into Sergeant John Richards' e-mail account and hastily photoshopped a warrant while Adam tried to access the Vatican mainframe. Less than half an hour later, Billy had the information Marina wanted.

"For a while, he was stationary at a location in Venice Beach, then he switched to downtown. But now it looks like he's heading back out to the desert."

"Adam, Billy," Marina said, "it's time to prepare the Beast."

Gemini had won enough money in gaming competitions to afford a state-of-the-art RV. It had Wi-Fi, a small satellite dish, and even its own generators. However, all the technology was cleverly hidden, so from the outside it looked like one of the many middle-of-the-road camper vans seen heading out of the city every day. Painted white and deliberately scuffed up, its exterior gave no hint of the hi-tech payload inside, or indeed of the bespoke pizza oven in the kitchenette.

The guys weren't going to go back to the desert unprepared, and "prepared" for them meant enough computers to hack the Pentagon, not to mention half the contents of Adam's parents' refrigerator. Marina also lived in Mid-Wilshire, not too far from Gemini's headquarters, and "prepared" for her meant picking up a change of clothes, sunscreen, and a large tent that she used for music festivals. By the time they were finally ready to drive out of LA, it was almost 4:20 a.m.

"I think we need to start telling people about this," Marina said as she steered the Beast onto Interstate 10. Adam relaxed in the front passenger seat, and Billy tapped away on his laptop farther inside.

"You're right," Adam said, pulling out his phone. "The more the merrier."

Billy and Adam began to leave messages in as many places online as they could think of. Plenty of people didn't believe them, even on forums whose members claimed to believe anything and everything Gemini and Marina could think of, plus a few things they'd never even considered. At least one poster accused Billy of being a government shill, although he couldn't understand why someone would think that. A small poll started on another site about the most overused locations in sci-fi series until one of the administrators bumped it over into a separate thread.

On every site they visited, Gemini left the same message. "There are aliens in the Kelso Dunes. They've probably kidnapped the president. We'll see you there. Bring stuff for the desert."

Lying in Sarah's arms, Jake had only slept for two hours before waking up alert and ready to make preparations. He'd gently roused her and explained that their memories of the last two weeks would be wiped if humanity won, and so they'd filmed a short video on his phone. Jake hoped like never before that one morning he would check his inbox to discover a video of himself holding hands with a beautiful woman who talked about mustangs.

How do you say goodbye to everything you'd ever known? For Jake, it was almost depressingly easy. After leaving the gallery, they drove back to his penthouse and he changed his clothes and then looked around the spacious interior with Sarah beside him, trying to determine if anything from his old life warranted taking with him to the new one. Confronted with the designer furniture and expensive gadgets, he felt like a stranger stuck between the past and an unclear future. If it came down to it, what would he really need from here if the aliens took them to another world? All the things tucked so carefully away in drawers and cupboards... well, now it seemed nothing more than flotsam and detritus.

Sarah was all he needed. She sat beside him while he drove through the outskirts of LA, retracing the journey he'd taken only five days ago. As the neon streetlights and cars flashed by hypnotically, his mind wandered to the few occasions in the past when he'd driven in the dark to meet a crucial witness or an important client. He thought briefly about the people at the office. About Giles, so bluff and focused, the man he'd been so certain he wanted to emulate. He'd been following in his footsteps, working himself into a better office, a better apartment, an early grave.

Sarah was making a phone call to her grandmother, obviously struggling to think of the words. What could she say? If she started talking about a man taking her to see aliens, Jake felt pretty sure her grandmother would do the sensible thing and call the police.

"Hi, Nana. No, nothing's wrong. Sorry, it's very early. I'm fine, really. I just wanted to call to see how you are. Well, actually, there is something. I wanted to say..." Sarah's voice caught for a moment. "I love you. No, really, nothing's wrong. I just realized I don't say it very often. Yes, I'm sure I'm OK."

It must be hard, trying to have this conversation without talking about what was really going on. Jake reached over with the hand not holding the wheel and touched Sarah's arm to show support. She looked over and smiled.

"It's just... I might be going away for a while," Sarah said. "No, I haven't been arrested. No, it's... there's this opportunity that's come up, and it's not one I feel like I can turn down. No, that's not right. It's not one I want to turn down. No, I can't talk about it. Yes, there's a guy involved, but..."

The conversation carried on, and Jake found himself envying it, just a little. He wished he had someone he could call. Someone who might demand to know why they hadn't heard all about this new person he was seeing, and whether they were planning to have children in the near future.

Eventually, Sarah told her grandmother that she loved her once more and then hung up.

"Are you OK?" Jake asked her.

"Actually, yes," Sarah replied. She looked puzzled as she spoke. "I shouldn't be. I should be upset, and angry and all kinds of other things, but I'm not. I'm OK. I think a lot of it is because you're here. And that's kind of weird too."

Jake smiled. "I know what you mean."

It was strange, almost bizarre, how OK it felt. The world might be ending soon with aliens busily preparing to judge them, yet Jake felt calm and relaxed. Even unfazed about the prospect of going to live on an alien world many light-years distance from his own planet. The changes due to the cosmic plasma were partially responsible for this, but as least as much came from Sarah being there with him. Whatever happened now, there would be someone to share it with.

They drove into the night, the rhythm of traffic constant even at 4:20 in the morning. Jake wondered if any of the people driving had the faintest idea about what was about to happen and the potential consequences.

Half an hour after Marina and the guys had left Mid-Wilshire, someone recognized Gemini's RV and started to follow close behind. A few minutes later, a hacker associate also pulled into the line. A couple were guided to join them by social media, and shortly afterward, it grew to a size where it began to be noticeable. As the Beast trundled east along Interstate 210, people used Instagram and Twitter to post images, asking what was going on.

Billy turned around and saw vehicles trailing behind them like a string of fairy lights. Despite the unearthly hour, a whole convoy had formed, with usernames taking the place of CB handles, and phones, laptops, and tablets filling in for actual radios.

Marina focused on the driving while Gemini kept up with the ever-expanding digital conversation building up online. It spread out in blog posts and Twitter arguments, forum threads, and startled emojis.

"Even though I told him what happened in the desert," Adam said, scrolling on his phone, "Bunnyninja78 says he doesn't believe we've found magically appearing cars or aliens. He reckons the whole universe is an illusion created by the machines."

"He?" Marina asked. "Bunnyninja78 is a guy?"

"Yeah."

"But he's still following us out to the dunes after what he said?" Marina asked.

"Yeah, he is."

As they left Interstate 210 to head northeast along Interstate 15, Billy gazed at the ever-increasing convoy of cars, trucks, camper vans, and motorbikes.

"Hey, Adam, turn the radio on. I think there's a news van."

Adam scanned the channels and found a talk radio show discussing it live.

_"Well, I don't know what these people are up to,"_ one of the callers said. _"Driving off into the middle of nowhere together! It's probably some kind of cult!"_

_"Thank you for your contribution,"_ the host said in the carefully measured tones of someone who allowed people to say what they wanted so long as it helped his ratings. _"If anyone else has any ideas or opinions, please call in now."_

They did. There were plenty of people who agreed with the first caller, or who thought it would turn out to be something worse: an effort by terrorists to herd people into one place, a serial killer looking for victims. Other callers thought it might be some kind of marketing stunt, with free samples of soft drink or clothing waiting at the end. One elderly lady appeared convinced a famous singer was trying to set up a secret gig in the open air. The convoy got much longer after that.

"Should we call in and try to explain?" Marina suggested. "Maybe if people understood we're going to the desert to try and find aliens, it would prevent a lot of disappointment. We could also tell them about the missing people."

"The people who'd believe us already know," Adam said. "And the others won't believe us."

Probably true. The arguments were already breaking out on the radio, with the presenter ostensibly moderating them but mostly just encouraging it all. Even this early, they managed to dig up pundits, who commented on the convoy's probable route and on what it could all be about.

_"I think we can discount with some certainty this nonsense about aliens,"_ a retired physicist said. " _And even more preposterous, the rumors about the two missing presidents._ "

Marina listened but also thought about what they might find. What would they be able to show to the people who followed them so enthusiastically? Jake's car had come out of thin air, and they knew that he'd received visions of aliens in the desert. Two world leaders were missing, plus a prominent scientist, and two of three had vanished from locations where a UFO had been spotted. On top of all this, the last UFO sighting was from the Mojave itself. But what did it all mean? Despite Gemini being convinced of the answer, she really didn't want to let so many people down. However, she suspected quite the opposite. Those in the convoy interested in the strange, the different, the alien, were heading to the right place. Whatever lay there waiting for them, Marina's instincts told her it was going to be huge.

## Chapter Sixteen

Around five a.m. on Saturday morning, two hours after driving out of downtown, Jake and Sarah felt hungry, so they left the Interstate 15 at Barstow and pulled into a twenty-four-hour diner. Jake had driven slowly so far, cruising at around sixty miles per hour, aware that this could be their final drive on Earth. Every sensation became poignant. The car lights, the highways, the trees, the dark silhouettes of the mountains in the distance, the feeling of Sarah sitting next to him as she nodded off to sleep.

The lights of the diner seemed brash after the nighttime interior of the Porsche, and they quickly made their way to an empty table by the window. A few men sat quietly at the counter, methodically eating their large plates of grilled food and knocking back cups of black coffee.

After the waitress took their orders for the "light" breakfast, Jake put down the menu and smiled. Sarah was wearing a jade-green dress with beautiful circular prints designed by her mother. Sarah had dug the dress out of her wardrobe and changed into it before they'd left her gallery, explaining to Jake that the dress was a gift for her twenty-first birthday. The turquoise pendant hung over it, the silver chain shining under the fluorescent lights of the diner.

"How much farther is it to the dunes?" Sarah asked, yawning.

"Should take around an hour and half, maybe a bit more." Jake reached across the table to take her hand.

A thin man with a moustache got off his stool at the counter and smiled at them before opening the door to leave.

The waitress returned with their wheat pancakes and fruit, along with two cups of coffee.

"Refills are free, just holler."

Jake cut off a piece of his pancake and held it in midair on his fork.

"Let's hope this tastes better than aquarium sushi!"

"I'll drink to that," Sarah replied, taking a sip of her steaming coffee.

"Pretty good," Jake said between mouthfuls. "Chef-Artiste Pierre Laffite has some serious competition."

As they slowly ate their pancakes topped with pieces of strawberry and banana, Jake wondered if it would really be their last meal on Earth. No Michelin three-starred restaurant, just a humble pancake at a roadside diner.

A trickle of pickup trucks began to pull up to the diner, and over the next half an hour, the seats at the counter filled up. The atmosphere became lively with the chatter of the early-breakfast crowd, and Jake and Sarah nursed their second cups of coffee, enjoying the normalness around them.

The sky outside lightened, and when the big clock above the counter showed six thirty, Jake got up silently. Sarah drained the last of her coffee. It was finally time to leave.

Jake made his way onto the I-40 and then drove north up Kelbaker Road. At ten to eight, he turned left onto Kelso Dunes Road and continued west until just past the main dune parking area. He adjusted the Porsche's gearing and clearance before crossing the short patch of sand and low brush to join the smaller dirt road. His GPS had shown that the dirt road ran parallel to Kelso Dunes Road but penetrated much farther west into the Mojave.

Sarah rubbed her eyes and gazed across the desert.

"We're here."

"Almost," Jake replied, touching her face.

To his left were a series of granite hills, and over Sarah's shoulder on the right were the majestic dunes, pristine against the azure sky. He slowed down as they reached the approximate point where he'd joined the dirt road after leaving the alien vehicle and driving past Gemini and Marina.

Jake stopped the car and got out to scan the desert. His previous tire tracks had been erased by the overnight winds, but up ahead to the right, he recognized the graceful peaks of the two dunes. Climbing back into the driver's seat and starting to drive, he turned slowly off the dirt road and felt the bumps of the desert under his wheels. The early-morning air carried a sweet moisture and the faint scent of the desert plants. Jake drove farther out, threading his way along the left-hand edge of the dunes.

"It feels weird to be driving so near the dunes like this," Sarah said. "It's just not something you do, you know?"

Jake understood. These were spaces that few people visited. The dunes were as different from downtown LA as it was possible to get. Driving here felt like an intrusion into a sacred landscape, a place with no need or use for humans.

"It shouldn't be far now," Jake said. He could feel the sense of the right direction pulsing in his body, pulling him forward to an open, firmer patch ahead.

"There's nothing here," Sarah said. "Are you sure this is the right spot?"

Jake just smiled. "Watch."

The alien ship shimmered into existence, as though a mirage suddenly becoming real. The toroidal disc was suspended above the desert floor and glowed faintly in the morning sun, brighter than it could have been through simple reflection. The column of light rose from the ground and passed through the middle of the spacecraft before vanishing high above.

"It... it's..." For several seconds, Sarah could manage no other words as she stared at the ship.

"It just appeared," she finally said.

"Actually," Jake explained, "Sirius or Vega must have lowered all the shields, including the camouflage screening, so we could see where to drive."

"It's incredible."

Jake nodded as he continued toward the craft. "I think there's a lot of power in there," he said. "Imagine the amount of energy it must take to cross the galaxy."

Although, now that he thought about it, something else impressed him more. Power and more power, sheer technological achievement, was a very human way of looking at it. The truly awe-inspiring part concerned the required shift in cognizing the universe to build all this.

How would it feel to be Vega or Sirius? Jake had experienced a brief flash of the universal consciousness, but what must it have been like to be connected to it so strongly for two hundred and fifty thousand years? Their technology was just one facet of this connection, the other facets unfathomable to the human mind.

He brought the car to a halt on the sand before the alien ship. They sat for a moment, facing the silence and purity of the desert. Then Jake got out and walked around to open Sarah's door.

Jake turned toward the dirt road and glimpsed the shields around the ship shimmer into existence once again, just the faintest refraction in the air appearing where they sprang up.

Jake and Sarah stepped toward the ship, and a beam of light engulfed them.

Marina followed Billy's directions, and after driving north up Kelbaker Road, she nursed the Beast left onto the dirt-track road. It was 8:10 a.m. A discussion took place amongst the cars in front about whether driving on such a small desert road was permitted, but Billy explained that if they continued north to take Kelso Dunes Road instead, most vehicles would not be able to cross the scrubby sand later on. This small road would lead them directly to the access point to walk to where Jake's car had appeared from yesterday.

As the convoy rumbled on, Adam and Billy scanned the desert. After three miles, they could see the main dune trailhead half a mile to their right, and then, a mile or so later, the end of Kelso Dunes Road. Marina drove west between the granite hills and sloping dunes for six miles more.

_"Stop!"_ Billy said, pointing. "The GPS indicates it's over there."

Marina pulled over, and the convoy of 120 vehicles slowly ground to a halt. SUVs, pickup trucks, sedans, motorbikes, jeeps, RVs, and vans began to discharge slightly bewildered-looking passengers.

Gemini put on their shades and baseball caps before walking toward the coordinates, while Marina grabbed her daypack and stepped along the side of the road, peering at the desert from underneath her wide-brimmed hat.

"Guys!" Marina shouted. "Look!"

Billy and Adam walked over and gazed at the fresh tire tracks. The three of them started to follow the clear marks, and those watching began ambling onto the sand, some with proper clothing and water for the desert, most without. The convoy transformed into a procession, with nearly three hundred people trailing Gemini and Marina as they edged along the dunes.

The sun began to heat up as the procession trudged across the desert for over twenty-five minutes. A couple of news presenters tried to conduct interviews or pieces to camera while walking, occasionally stumbling and then having to start again.

Marina and Gemini stopped when the tracks abruptly vanished. People at the head of the procession bunched together and then spread out to get a better view and to allow those behind to move closer.

Marina waited for them to work out the rest of it. To realize there were tracks coming into the desert but none going out, and certainly no sign of a car. People stared at the spot where the tracks terminated as it slowly sunk in. A couple of bikers took selfies with their phones, and more and more people pressed forward to see what the fuss was about.

"Maybe someone lifted the car up with a helicopter?" a newswoman suggested.

"No chance," replied a biker, gesturing at the sand. "We'd see the backwash of the rotor blades."

"Maybe they just drove backward in their own tire tracks?" offered an earnest young man with at least five piercings in each ear.

"How could you reverse and match all those twists and skids in the sand?" the biker replied.

"What's this got to do with the president?"

Marina let it run, not really listening to it. She was more interested in the way the air shimmered faintly just by the end of the tire tracks. She stepped closer.

"Can you feel it?" she asked Adam and Billy. "Like electricity in the air just here? Like there's going to be a storm?"

Adam frowned but then nodded after a moment. Billy held out a hand... and ripples seemed to flow out across the air, spreading as though he'd touched the surface of a pool of water.

"Be careful," Marina said.

Billy prodded the hidden surface with his index finger. "I'm fine. There's something here, though. Come on, try it."

Reluctantly, Marina reached out, and it was like pushing against a wall. Ripples spread as she touched it, and however hard she pressed, it was impossible to penetrate further. She leaned her weight against it then, only to look back and find about a hundred cameras taking pictures of her as she did so.

"Come on," she said. "Try it yourselves."

They did. Some of them were rather hesitant at first, but then, excited and amazed. More and more explored the edges of the invisible wall, and the circumference of a large circle began to be traced, people fanning out until nearly all three hundred were positioned a few feet apart. One person raised both arms horizontally to the side, stretching their hands toward each neighbor, then another, and another, until the whole circumference became ringed with people holding hands.

The two news crews stepped around the circle, filming and thrusting microphones to snatch excited quotes.

Hands broke contact, and countless selfies and group shots were taken of bodies leaning into the shields, sending ripples of energy cracking through the air. The two news crews hiked back to their vehicles to upload their footage via satellite, while other people walked along the sand until they found some hint of a signal. Gemini used the satellite and phone connections of their RV. Everyone, from the hardened alien hunters to the merely curious, did their best to tell the world about what they were seeing. Hundreds of separate images of the invisible wall hit the internet...

And immediately went viral, cascading across the world like a virtual tsunami.

In a nondescript office tucked away on the third floor of the Pentagon, Major Carlos Johnson sipped his morning coffee from a Styrofoam cup and surveyed his windowless room. His rank and security clearance entitled him to a larger office with a view, but he found it easier to concentrate here. His desk had a stack of handwritten notebooks placed neatly to the left of two computer monitors, and there was nothing else on it save a metronome on the right. The major was meticulous in everything he did and a legend in the Pentagon. Nicknamed the Bloodhound, he excelled at sniffing out items of seemingly unconnected intel and then piecing them together into a cohesive whole.

The major leaned forward in his chair and reached for the metronome to set a slow, steady beat. Some liked to work to Mozart, others to hard rock, but the Bloodhound found that the ticktock of the metronome evoked in his mind Sherlock Holmes contemplating a case in his high-backed armchair and smoking a pipe in front of the blazing coals, the grandfather clock in the corner. Tick... tock.

He ignored the images on the monitors and opened the top notebook to study his recent entries. The POTUS had been missing since twelve thirty p.m. EST yesterday, shortly followed by the lead scientist at CERN, the pope, and the president of China. The US government had hastily fabricated a story about the POTUS suddenly falling sick with a virulent fever.

No one had moved to a war footing yet. If it had just been one president who'd gone missing, it could have been more serious. The Americans might have blamed the Chinese, the Chinese the Indians. Warheads pointed, armies assembled. No one, however, could think of any country stupid enough to attack America, China, and the entire Catholic faith. Everyone worked hard to suppress the news, but stories were leaking out.

He peered at an underlined word next to the entry on the pope. _Alieni_.

Gently stopping the metronome, he turned up the volume on one monitor to watch the feed from KNBC news.

_"We now have on the line James Shilton, professor of digital technology at the University of California in Berkeley. Good morning Professor, thanks for talking to us on such short notice."_

_"Morning, Cheryl, always a pleasure. Quite a story we have brewing up in the desert."_

_"What's your expert opinion? Are these images real, or just high-quality fakes?"_

_"I'm in the lab now, having just run the images through some pretty clever software, and I have to say, after initially being skeptical, I'm now leaning toward believing something really is going on in the Kelso Dunes. Nothing connected with aliens, of course, but it's still rather puzzling."_

The Bloodhound had seen enough. He picked up the phone and punched the extension for General O'Shea.

More people trickled into the desert in ones or twos, looking for a chance to take their own pictures with the invisible wall and the surrounding pandemonium. Those in the original convoy with jeeps, pickups, or decent SUVs returned to their vehicles and drove across the desert to the wall. A couple of guys in jeeps ferried people and supplies back and forth from the dirt road to the newly emerging camp. Tents were erected and a few generators set up. Another news crew appeared. Most of those ill prepared for the heat drove off, planning to return later when better equipped.

Two policemen arrived sweaty and out of breath, having abandoned their squad car after discovering it was unable to tackle the sand. A park ranger fared better, sirens flashing as he bumped over the rough ground in his truck, gaping in amazement at the excited crowd. Backups were quickly called for.

Then the spaceship shimmered into view, and the world _really_ went mad.

## Chapter Seventeen

Jake held Sarah's hand as she gazed up in amazement at the crystals extruding from the ceiling of the transportation chamber. The door glided open, and Jake led her into the tubed corridor. Where were Sirius and Vega? He remembered the way back to the control room, and so he turned left and began to walk along the corridor. Beneath the crystalline surface of the walls, the small neurons fired and fizzed faintly as they passed.

Sarah looked beautiful in her jade-green dress, her eyes like Alice in Wonderland.

"I—I don't know what to say," she said, fiddling with her hair.

"You don't have to say anything. We'll just take this one step at a time."

They arrived at the control room, but when Jake pulsed open the door, no one was inside, so they continued down the curved corridor for a couple of minutes until they reached the room where he'd slept.

"Here's my bedroom."

The door opened silently, and as they entered, a double bed flowed into position from the shimmering wall. Sarah's mouth dropped, and Jake smiled.

"Amazing, isn't it? Feel the texture—it looks hard, but is really quite comfortable."

Sarah tentatively sat down on the bed and placed her palms flat against the surface of the lustrous material.

"It's like... almost like silk."

Jake sat down next to her, overcome with exhaustion.

"You look absolutely shattered," Sarah said with concern. "Why don't you sleep for a while? You said the trial doesn't start until noon."

"I don't know if we should."

"If we're needed that urgently, surely they'll come and get us?"

Jake glanced at his watch—eight thirty a.m. He felt wired and tense, the lack of sleep and coffee straining his nerves. Sarah was probably right: if the aliens wanted to find them, they would.

She stroked his arm. "Who knows how long the trial will last; this could be our last chance to rest before"—her voice was sad—"before everything changes."

Jake looked at her. She seemed to be in no hurry to leave the room, and besides, he had promised to take this one step at a time.

"OK, just for a couple of hours." He set his phone's alarm and kissed her before lying down, Sarah curling up beside him as he closed his eyes.

Gradually Jake started to unwind, and the flashes of road and desert slowed down and stopped. Sleep descended and he finally drifted off.

"Jake, it's ten thirty!" Sarah shook him awake, his phone beeping loudly. He blinked in confusion before recognizing her face and quickly cutting the alarm.

"I must have been out like a light," Jake said groggily. "Let's go." He pushed himself off the bed and rubbed the sleep from his face. Sarah got up to join him, and the bed flowed silently back into the wall.

Jake walked into the corridor and paused, shutting his eyes and trying to sense the location of the aliens. He could feel the subtle pulsing of the cosmic plasma as the connection to the universal consciousness began to open up.

"Look, something's happening to the walls..."

He opened his eyes to see a line of neurons firing down the right side of the corridor and knew it must indicate the route. They found the two aliens in an oval room dominated by vertical cylindrical tanks of faintly glowing gel. Within the clear, jellylike substance of each tank, a fully clothed human could be seen, eyes shut in sleep and blissfully unaware of the events about to come. Jake looked at Sarah. She shook her head in disbelief and clutched her pendant.

"Are you OK?" Jake asked as he put his arm around her.

"No. There are jellified people in cylinders."

"Those are the witnesses; they'll be fine."

"I'll be OK," Sarah said with a weak smile. "Just let me freak out for a while."

Jake smiled. "Take as long as you want."

Vega and Sirius stepped in front of them, their thoughts pulsing loud and clear in Jake's head. From Sarah's gasp of surprise, he could tell she received them too.

"Welcome, both of you," Vega sent. "Sarah, I am Vega, and this is Sirius."

The alien pointed with its three-fingered hand as it made the introductions.

Sarah froze, and for nearly twenty seconds, she stared at their translucent white bodies, oversized heads, and large jet-black eyes. As she finally regained her composure, the aliens waited patiently for her to speak.

"Jake told me about you, the aliens who are running the experiment," Sarah finally said aloud, and glanced over their heads. "Hang on... is that the president?"

"You are correct," Sirius pulsed, its forehead frowning. "We were just about to reactivate the witnesses when you arrived outside the ship. Shortly afterward, more of your kind followed."

"People followed us?" Jake tried to pulse the words to Sarah as well as to the aliens. As soon as he'd sent the words, he remembered Gemini and Marina stumbling across the sand; maybe they had returned with others.

"There are many humans just beyond our shields," Vega sent back. "We have been monitoring them for some time and have chosen to make the ship visible."

"Vega chose it," Sirius pointed out. "I feel it is unwise. It ignores all protocols."

Vega made a small movement with its shoulder, perhaps the equivalent of a shrug. "Given the circumstances, they have a right to know at least this much. That more advanced life-forms exist and are here on their planet."

Vega glanced at Jake, and he got the distinct impression the alien wanted to say more, but for some reason was holding back.

Sirius walked toward the cylinders. "Enough," the alien pulsed. "We must begin the reactivation process."

The eight vertical cylinders were lined up in a row, and Vega stepped over to join Sirius in front of the tank at the far left. The two aliens waved their hands slowly from left to right, and although their movements appeared quite random, Jake could feel the consequences in the pulses of psychic energy running through the cylinders. The first tank contained a man who looked as though he might have been plucked from the deep jungle, dressed in bark cloth, hung like a skirt, with lines of paint marking his skin.

The gel turned to liquid and slowly started to drain from the cylinder. A robotic arm unfurled from the ceiling to remove the top seal and feeding tube, and the man's eyes started to flicker open like someone waking grudgingly from sleep. He scanned the room and started to squirm in place, only a little way from panicking.

"Please be calm," Vega pulsed, and though Jake heard the words as English, he could also discern a ghostly echo of a strange language. The tube's occupant obviously heard the words in his native tongue as Vega continued to communicate. The man's eyes widened as the alien gave a brief explanation of the trial and his role as a witness.

The aliens moved back as the glass-like material of the cylinder retracted slowly into the floor, uncovering the man on the base. He stumbled slightly but then regained his balance and stepped from the base and stood stiffly in front of the aliens.

"Jake," Sirius pulsed, gesturing toward the native and another of the cylinders. "You do not possess our telepathic skills, but with the two witnesses who are unable to speak your language, you can communicate with visual data."

"Symbols and images," Vega explained.

"Since you are now here," Sirius sent, "you can facilitate adjustment."

"Help the witnesses to accept that the trial is real," Vega pulsed.

The two aliens stepped toward the next cylinder in the line, and Jake gazed at the dark-skinned witness in front of him. While the aliens had just been communicating, Jake hadn't discerned the ghostly echo of another tongue, and the native man gave no indication of having received their words. The aliens must be capable of selecting who to direct their messages to, as well as sending them in multiple languages.

The man walked toward Jake and Sarah, and Sarah offered her hand. The native held it briefly and smiled. Behind them the two aliens were waving their translucent arms slowly in front of the next tank.

"Go on," Sarah said, nudging Jake in the ribs. "Don't be rude. You heard what Vega said, use symbols or images. Say something."

Jake regarded the witness standing quietly in his bark cloth and tribal markings. He tried visualizing the Pleiades, a courtroom with the witnesses in it, and a pair of scales with a human on one tray being weighed. He sent the images one by one, focusing with great intent.

Surprisingly, the man nodded gravely, and in return Jake started to receive faint visions of scenes from his life in the jungle. A palm-thatched long house in a clearing, children playing, and even the whiff of meat smoking on a wood fire. It took a few minutes, but it became clear the man was a shaman, and he viewed the whole event as simply an extension of whatever spiritual experience he'd already been having.

The other witnesses weren't quite as straightforward. They were a lot more freaked out. Dr. Gardener, the physicist, took one glance at his surroundings and started to hyperventilate—so much so, Jake worried he might be having some kind of asthma attack. Professor Allen, the philosopher, looked as though she might try and run at any moment. Jake and Sarah managed to convince both of them to stay calm for the sake of humanity, and after that, the doctor and professor were able to focus their attention on the impossible technology of the ship.

The president of the United States assumed he'd been kidnapped by a terrorist organization and got through quite a lot of bluster about exactly what Delta Force would do to them all before he got he finally got the message. The president of China assumed he'd been kidnapped by the Americans, and Jake only avoided a fight between them by stepping in the way. The pope started praying quite loudly, in between threatening to excommunicate Sirius.

Jake gave a wry smile as he realized Paige was the young protestor from the water rights case who had thrust a leaflet into his hands. Paige, for her part, initially failed to recognize Jake, due to feeling so overwhelmed. She and Amita, the Indian housewife, decided they were in this together from the start, and despite not sharing a language, they both managed to reassure one another, and also quickly bonded with Sarah.

After all eight cylinders had retracted into the floor, a pearly oval table flowed out of the wall on the other side of the room and two curved benches rose silently into position. Jake, Sarah, and the witnesses walked over to the benches and sat down, the communal mood somber.

Sirius and Vega approached with ten containers of the thick, silky porridge that Jake had eaten before, and Jake pulsed open all ten and used a shell-shaped spoon to eat a peachy mouthful. Once the others knew the food wasn't poisoned, they picked up their containers and devoured the contents. The feeding tubes certainly hadn't blunted anyone's appetite.

"All right," the US president said. "I'll accept we're having lunch with aliens. I'll accept what's going on. But now what? What's going to happen _next_?"

Outside, around the edges of the now-clear force field, the growing crowd had begun dividing up into groups depending on their take on what was happening. The geeks and the computer nerds formed a small network to the north, trying to rig up whatever power they could and sneaking over to steal duct tape from the TV people. The New Age believers were on the opposite side, some meditating, some chanting, and a few just calling out to the aliens for guidance. A cluster of UFO enthusiasts dithered halfway between the two, as though uncertain which camp to join. Those with no particular beliefs floated aimlessly. The news reporters formed their own clump but broke off frequently in an attempt to interview everybody else.

Marina chatted with a couple of psychic friends in the New Age section, while Adam and Billy tried to set up an internet link from inside Marina's large festival tent. A generator hummed softly outside, and a satellite dish pointed at the spotless sky. Whatever was about to unfold, Billy and Adam were determined to stay connected. They also seemed to be enjoying the attention they were receiving from the other hackers. Here in the flesh at last, the notorious Gemini.

Marina found herself being accosted by a KNBC reporter, who didn't look like she was enjoying the heat of the desert much, or having to talk to a young girl with neon-blue hair and a wide hat. A burly cameraman pointed his videocam at Marina while the middle-aged reporter wiped the sweat from her brow and held the mic.

"Would you mind doing an interview?" she asked.

"OK, sure," Marina said, piercing eyes staring at her.

"Everyone tells me you were at the head of the convoy. Can you tell our viewers what's really going on?"

"You can see what's going on," Marina said. "There's a spaceship."

The New Age friend by her side laughed and then tried to look serious.

"How did you find it?" the reporter asked, glaring at the friend.

"We were trying to find out what happened to a guy we know," Marina said. "He told us he'd received visions of an alien in the desert, and then we discovered that he'd gone to the Kelso Dunes."

"How did you find that out?"

Marina paused, unsure of what to say.

At that precise moment, the military, police, and more park rangers showed up.

In a perfectly choreographed Hollywood entrance, they drove in formation to the edge of the force field in their Humvees, trucks, and desert patrol vehicles, jumping out to bark orders and shove people out of the way. When one of the more overheated UFO enthusiasts pushed back, only the presence of TV cameras stopped guns from being pointed. Even so, the barging and shoving continued, building up as though waiting for the moment when a real fight would break out. LAPD choppers followed closely behind, approaching like angry hornets.

"Everybody needs to move back from the containment area," one soldier with the stripes of a sergeant yelled. "There's nothing to see here!"

Trust the military to try to put this back in the bottle and treat it as if they could pretend it wasn't happening. Mostly, the crowd ignored him, but Marina could feel the charge in the air.

The media pounced on the new arrivals. The KNBC reporter abandoned her efforts with Marina in an attempt to interview the nearest soldier. News crews took more pictures, looking for comments from the protesters, from the military, from anyone who would provide one. Now they added to the pushing, struggling forward to try to get the best angle of the scuffling, the ship, or both.

Inside the ship, Jake talked with Sarah and the witnesses, the mood having lightened after they all finished the thick porridge. Jake glanced around the oval table. The US president had an aquiline nose and a strong jaw, and looked dignified in his black suit. Next to him sat his counterpart from China in a red cashmere sweater, with a paler complexion and shrewd eyes. Dr. Gardener wore horn-rimmed glasses and had yet to take off his lab coat, while Professor Allen wore a navy jacket and silk neck scarf that complemented her gray hair. Amita had bangles on her arms, a gold nose stud, and a red bindi, and looked elegant in her purple sari. The pope was attired in his normal white robes and skullcap, and Paige's blonde hair was tied in a ponytail, the freckles on her face making her appear younger than her sixteen years. The shaman nodded sagely, the three lines of black dye on each side of his face dipping briefly.

Amita and the shaman didn't speak English, and with them, Jake was useful as a translator, pulsing symbolic messages back and forth across the table. He found it easier with the man from the jungle, but with practice and greater concentration, he began to send images more clearly to Amita. However, he couldn't receive any from her. Paige and Sarah could intuit better what she thought and felt. In English, Jake could pulse his words across to all those who spoke it, but none could reply telepathically. Sarah also told him that sometimes his messages were faint and hard to discern.

When the US president asked what Jake and Sarah's role was, Jake told him they were there as backups to the other witnesses. True in a way, but hardly completely honest. Still, there was nothing to be gained by explaining that only the two of them would survive in the event of genocide.

Despite the gravity of the situation, or perhaps because of it, a certain camaraderie began to develop. Dr. Gardener and Professor Allen talked together nonstop, and Paige, Amita, and Sarah used the doctor's notebook to draw pictures and overcome the language barrier. The pope and the shaman gave each other knowing looks, and the presidents of the USA and China took the opportunity to hammer out a deal on intelligence sharing, making Jake wonder exactly how much of his brain might end up classified if the world didn't end.

The aliens walked briskly into the room and Jake checked his watch—twelve thirty p.m., half an hour after the scheduled start of the trial.

Sirius spoke first, its words pulsing through everyone's mind.

"There is a potentially dangerous situation outside our craft."

Vega waved a hand, and a section of the luminescent wall flickered to life as a screen. It showed the crowd outside, jostling and hurling insults. Jake could see news cameras and plenty of military personal. Some of them had their guns trained on the ship, as though ready to intercept anything that tried to leave.

"You can see the obvious barbarism of humanity," Sirius pulsed, its slit mouth twitching despite no sound emerging.

"We have had this conversation," Vega sent back. "Now we must prevent harm." The alien looked over at the president of the United States. "To achieve this, we believe you should speak."

"Me?" the president said. "What exactly do you want me to say?"

"You must explain the futility of attacking our craft, that it will only backfire," Sirius replied. At a look from Vega, it continued. "Although this is most irregular."

"A rarity," Vega agreed, its forehead frowning. "But necessary."

The president stood. His experience in office made him appear taller than he was.

"And why should I tell my people that?" he asked. "If you represent an immediate threat, why shouldn't I tell the Pentagon to bomb this location?"

"Aside from the part where we're in it?" Jake pulsed.

The president turned to him. "Sometimes, a man must put the greater good ahead of his own needs."

"Not," the pope said in English, "when his need is to avoid being blown to bits."

"It would do little good," Vega warned. "Allow us to demonstrate."

The alien reached out, and now the screens showed figures, documents written in both English and Chinese.

"Those are top-secret files!" the president said as the president of China exclaimed the same thing in Mandarin. The two looked at one another, and Jake knew they were considering the implications of aliens who could access their computers.

"There is more," Sirius pulsed. "May I take an item from one of you?"

It sounded like a magic trick, but what happened next _was_ almost magical. Dr. Gardener handed over a slightly battered wristwatch, which Sirius placed in the middle of the floor. Jake felt the pulse as the alien sent something to the ship's systems, and a moment later, the watch was simply... gone.

"The ship will do the same with any immediate threat," Sirius sent. "It would not be wise to attack."

"Please," Vega pulsed. "Send out the message to keep people safe."

"But mention nothing about the trial," Sirius insisted.

Jake watched while the US president stood in front of the others to deliver the message. The screen Vega and Sirius had called up was divided into gridded sections with each one showing a tiny identical image of the president. Jake realized they were monitoring news channels across the globe, all conveniently hijacked for the moment.

"My fellow Americans," the president began, "and people of Earth. By now, you will probably have seen reports of the object appearing in the Mojave Desert. As you can see, I and others from around the world have been taken. We are within this object. Do not attack it. I say again, do not attack it. We are safe here, and we will do our best to represent you all. You must stop the fighting outside and keep all threats away." He turned to Vega and Sirius. "You can see the kind of beings I am with. They have technology far more advanced than ours. I say again, do not attack."

The screens flickered off, and the broadcast ended. Beside Jake, Sarah shuffled uneasily.

"Do you think it will work?" she asked.

"They have to do what the president orders, I guess," Jake said.

The president looked around. "If you believe that, sir, you've obviously never been to Congress."

## Chapter Eighteen

The war room at the Pentagon was getting... fractious. Generals, admirals, agency directors and political advisors talked over one another as they tried to make sense of the rapidly unfolding events.

"I'm telling you, gentlemen, we have to act!"

General Miles O'Shea, the four-star army chief of staff, had a voice like a foghorn and a cheerful ability to ignore arguments he didn't like the sound of. He'd been making approximately the same point for the last two hours, ever since the spaceship had showed up. Although he didn't call it a spaceship. He called it a hostile enemy craft.

"And what kind of action did you have in mind?" the assistant director of the CIA countered. "Our intelligence suggests—"

"Intelligence, Johnstone?" the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said. "Let's call it what it is. We watched the news."

That had been something of an embarrassment all around. The United States was the most powerful country on the planet, with the most advanced intelligence systems available. It could track everything from North Korea's latest missile tests to phone calls made by minor officials in countries the chiefs of staff had to look up before they tried to spell them. The fact that they'd only found out about the craft because it appeared on KNBC was galling to say the least. There would probably be an inquiry later, if there was a later.

The main question now concerned who should take charge.

"It's obviously the vice president," the secretary of state said. "The Constitution is perfectly clear about what happens in the event of the president being incapacitated..."

"But he isn't. He just appeared on TV," one of the four-star admirals pointed out. "He gave us clear instructions to back off."

General O'Shea snorted. "Typical navy. Never wanting to get on with the job. This is clearly a hostage situation!"

"And what do you recommend?" the admiral asked. "Sending in a ranger battalion?"

"The National Guard has the area locked down for now," the general said, apparently impervious to sarcasm. "We need to explore other options."

"I'm more interested in how they managed to get their signal onto every TV in the nation," the head of the NSA said. "The possibilities are—"

"Irrelevant," General O'Shea insisted. "There are clear protocols in the event of alien invasion."

"How do we know it's an invasion?" the secretary of state asked.

"What else would you call it?" the general demanded. "There's a hostile enemy craft on US soil. They've taken our people. They've taken the president!"

"We're aware of that," the assistant director of the CIA said. "But you obviously have something in mind."

The general nodded in the direction of the air force chief of staff. "Tell them, Rodgers."

The air force chief was quieter, but there was an edge to the way he stood up and addressed the room.

"We have contingency plans, and they exist for a good reason. In the event of hostile alien contact, we have to assume they have superior technological capabilities, with the potential capacity to destroy us all."

He cleared his throat. "Only four people in this room have seen the highly classified material from Area 51 and Roswell. Aliens exist. Our only hope lies in delivering a decisive first blow."

"And what exactly would this blow involve?" the head of the NSA asked.

The air force chief looked across at him. "It means there will be half a dozen fighter bombers scrambling from our domestic bases in the next few minutes. They will carry a mixture of bunker busting, air-to-ground, and air-to-air armaments. They will deploy those armaments with the intention of destroying the enemy vehicle before it can do anything to harm us."

"But you can't just decide to attack," the secretary of state insisted. "The president—"

"Is compromised," the assistant director of the CIA said. "We can't assume anything he says is of his own volition."

"Just because you can make someone say what you want..." the admiral began.

"It could easily be manipulation of the signal," the head of the NSA said. "Even before we consider the possibilities of mental manipulation through alien technology."

"We don't know what they are capable of," the air force chief said.

"Dead right, Rodgers," General O'Shea replied. "We don't. Which is why we can't afford to take the chance."

"You're seriously talking about ordering a strike on the location of the president?" the secretary of state asked. "That's treason!"

The six F-35s approached the spacecraft in a V formation, half a dozen of them travelling at high altitude through civilian airspace. Somewhere, an air traffic controller was probably having a fit trying to clear a route that avoided passenger planes, but the pilots of the jets simply adjusted when any other aircraft appeared on their radar screens.

Captain Jens Oliver had flown difficult missions before. He and his squadron would normally have been engaging targets over a war zone, providing support for ground troops, or trying to take down terrorist training facilities identified by high-altitude spotter planes. In theory, they were meant to be on leave, and it probably said a lot about Captain Oliver that when he'd been told the reason for being called back in, he didn't treat it as some kind of joke.

But then, Captain Oliver had seen things. You didn't fly as many missions as he had without the occasional "unexplained contact." Lights in the sky. Strange readings. And now it seemed they were going to have to engage one.

Six planes was probably overkill. Six planes, armed with bunker-busting air-to-ground weapons, multi-spectrum-seeking air-to-air armaments. Six as many as a smaller country, the French or the British, say, might commit to an entire warzone. But Captain Oliver didn't question orders. Operational decisions were made well above his pay grade. His job was to engage a target at a specified location, not to reason his way through all the elements involved with picking it out. It appeared on his screen now, and Captain Oliver couldn't help noticing the number of other vehicles and civilians around it.

"Base, we're looking at a civilian-heavy environment. Please confirm location of the strike."

"Location is correct, team leader. Continue."

Another glance brought with it a more disturbing element. "Base, I'm also seeing military vehicles down there. Friendlies close. I repeat, friendlies close."

"We're aware. Location is correct. Continue with the strike."

Captain Oliver only hesitated for a moment. "Understood."

From the ground, it must have looked like some kind of air show, normally the only context in which people saw warplanes, flying past in carefully orchestrated displays of skill and coordination. It could almost make them forget what these incredible machines had been designed to do.

The people around the ship followed their first instinct and pointed fingers and cameras upward at the sky. Only as the planes kept coming, their engines a dull roar against the blue horizon, did anyone think to ask why six fighter jets were flying toward them.

The National Guard ran first, mostly because someone got on the radio and told them what might be happening next, but also partly because some of them had seen what a Hellfire missile could do at close range in the days when they'd done regular duty in Helmand or Mosul. They threw Humvees into gear, abandoning their attempts to keep the reporters back as they tried to get clear of the blast zone.

Some of the reporters ran next, because they'd learned the hard way that when the people with guns started running, it was generally best to leave. Others joined in, and the combined rush threated to trample those too slow to get out of the way.

Not everyone ran. Some couldn't believe US planes would actually attack. They were citizens. They had rights, and they were pretty sure those included the right not to be bombed by their own military. Some decided they had no practical chance of making it to safety. The sand was too soft to run over quickly. And planes could approach far faster than anyone could flee.

Instead, they gazed up at the sky and watched dots resolve themselves into the shape of planes and then grow larger as the machines came closer. The jets approached low and rapidly until the watchers below could feel the thrum of their engines as they sped into position to release their bombs. A couple of the slower camera operators, realizing they couldn't get out of the way, decided to at least to capture the perfect record of the bombs falling.

They took some very clear shots of the instant when the six warplanes simply vanished into an empty sky.

Jake watched the screen as the fighter jets disappeared. He felt the ship's power flowing out, while around him, the others stared blankly. Except for the shaman. Jake knew he could also understand.

"Is it some kind of glitch?" Sarah asked.

Jake shook his head. "It's not a glitch."

Sirius looked at them. The alien didn't seem affected by any of it. "You were warned of the consequences of attempting to attack the ship," it pointed out. "The vehicles approaching were deemed to be a threat by the ship's systems."

"Just like that?" Jake demanded. "You made six planes vanish? You killed six people?"

"It happened automatically," Vega pulsed. "I'm sorry, Jake. Our shields would have stopped their bombs, but the explosions would have killed many of those around the ship."

"So you made them disappear." Jake wasn't going to let it go. He'd seen Sirius perform its little act with the watch. He'd heard the two aliens talking about removing mankind from Earth. Only now having seen both the watch and planes vanish in a split second did the reality of what could happen begin to sink in. "Just like you'll make all of us disappear."

"Only if the case is lost, Jake," Vega sent. The alien probably intended to be conciliatory, a declaration of its intent to do everything it could to ensure it didn't happen. Yet surely this was as unjust, a solitary alien speaking up for the whole of mankind. It appeared as arbitrary as anything his species was capable of.

Jake looked around the room, taking a breath as he tried to focus. Eight witnesses, snatched because of the valuable thoughts they had to share about the characteristics of their species and its degree of evolution. And what about him and Sarah? Their presence had nothing to do with the trial; they were only a fail-safe in case humanity lost.

He could stand on the sidelines and wait passively for the outcome, or he could try and do something constructive. After all, despite the huge changes over the last few days, he was still a lawyer and this was a court case. There must be an angle that he could exploit to help mankind.

"The world deserves to know the truth about this," Jake said. He said it aloud to emphasize its effect and make sure all those speaking English understood.

"We have already allowed the president of this socio-tribal unit to speak," Sirius pulsed. No doubt its choice of term was deliberate. A reminder of just how primitive it considered the species to be.

"He was allowed to tell half the truth," Jake sent. "You didn't let him say anything about the trial, or about the consequences for all of us if it goes wrong. It's the equivalent of a closed court."

"The trial does not require an audience," Sirius pulsed back.

"Yes, it does," Jake insisted. "The people out there aren't just bystanders with no stake in this. They're the defendants in your trial. They're the ones who will suffer the penalty if they lose. They have a right to know what's going on. They have a right to _see_ what's going on."

"Even so—" Sirius began.

"I believe Jake may have a point," Vega pulsed and then glanced at Jake. "The secret is out now, so why not let humanity see its trial? It might gain something from the experience."

"Only if it survives," Sirius sent, and narrowed its eyes. "The data is already in. Whatever happens during the trial will have no effect on the Supreme other than the witness statements."

"That's correct," Vega pulsed, "but if the verdict is favorable for humanity, it will go forward with a knowledge of its origins and place in the galaxy. Its future evolution will be enhanced."

Jake's mind raced through the implication of what the aliens had just said. However mankind behaved during the trial, it would have no impact on the outcome. Only the raw data from the Pyramid, and the witnesses' evidence, would be taken into account. This negated one potential angle, that if the world showed it could respond to the trial in a civilized manner, the balance might be tipped in its favor. Still, it must be best for the world to know, and he could work out another angle later on.

"And, if we are to be wiped out," Jake pulsed, "we deserve to know why. At the very least, you owe us that." He pointed his finger at Sirius for emphasis, and the alien turned toward Vega.

"You planned this all along when you revealed the craft," Sirius sent, its slit mouth twitching and its telepathic tone conveying something akin to anger. Vega did not respond.

The nictitating membranes on Sirius's eyes closed, and the alien became motionless, deep in thought.

"All right," Sirius finally pulsed. "Tell them. Let them see. We will move the trial to six p.m. local time to allow the species to prepare."

They put the president on screen again, taking over TV streams and internet feeds as easily as before. Once again the president stood in front of the other witnesses. This time he looked less stately and more worried. He'd seen the vanishing planes as well, but he managed to recover; he'd had plenty of practice at delivering grave news. Although he generally had a speechwriter to help him.

"Global citizens," he began. "Earlier, I spoke to tell you about visitors to our planet taking some of us aboard their spaceship. I warned you not to attempt a military intervention." He looked down for a moment. "We have all seen the tragic consequences of ignoring my earlier warning."

In the room, Jake could feel Sirius's faint disapproval, Vega's note of regret. The screens of the world wouldn't convey either. They would only show the stark image of the president, trying to explain the inexplicable to billions of incredulous people.

"I have now been authorized to tell you more of what is going on within this ship," the president continued. "The truth is that there is a trial taking place here, and we are all in the dock. Not just the people you see in front of you on your screen but all of humanity. We are accused of being a destructive and violent species, a threat to this planet and everything on it, including ourselves. The people you see here have been selected as our witnesses for this trial, and the aliens have already analyzed the entire history of humanity, everything we have ever done, and been, and written."

The president removed the white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his brow. He then drew himself taller, as though aware that this could be the last speech he delivered.

"The trial will determine the future for all of us," the president said. "If we fail here, if the decision... does not go our way... then we will be removed from the Earth. Have no doubt in your minds and hearts. We are currently facing the greatest challenge in our history. What happens here is more important than countries, or rivalries, or our personal differences. We must work together to ensure mankind remains on the planet. For now, this work involves waiting, and watching, and trusting us. We must also show our ability to respond in a civilized way to this unprecedented crisis, to avoid the destruction and suffering caused by panic and chaos. You will be permitted to watch the trial as it progresses. I can only assure you that I, and all those here, will do the utmost possible to ensure humanity survives." He took a moment to clear his throat. "I can reveal the trial will start at six p.m., local time here in the Mojave Desert."

The president stepped down, and Jake was expecting the broadcast to stop, but it didn't. The president of China stepped forward in his red sweater and shirt, delivering his own address in Mandarin and calling for the people and the Party to hold off retaliatory action. The pope adjusted his skullcap and spoke in Italian of judgment and the need for faith in what could be the end times.

The others took their turn as well, adding their own messages of support or promising to do their best. Dr. Gardener, still in his lab coat, highlighted the future possibilities of learning from a more advanced species. Professor Allen looked authoritative with her gray hair and sober jacket, and she assured the world of her ability and experience to talk through any ethical issues. The shaman spoke about spirits, while Amita gave a message for her family, the bangles on her arm jingling as she moved her hands around.

Paige's message was a little confusing and seemed to be about a premonition of how she'd _known_ something like this would happen to her eventually, but she spoke anyway, looking very young with her blonde ponytail hair and freckles, and told her parents how much she missed them.

The impact of the incredible broadcast swept like wildfire across the world. Some still believed it a hoax, but they were in the minority. A few people in remote locations stayed blissfully ignorant of their appointment with destiny, but most of the many billions alive soon became aware of the events unfolding on an alien spaceship tucked away in the Kelso Dunes. Those in the Pentagon briefly considered a nuclear strike but voted against it on the evidence of the alien's far superior technology. Instead, the commanders adopted a wait-and-see policy until the end of the trial. General O'Shea dissented.

Many people panicked. Riots broke out in some parts of the world. In Rio, long-standing complaints from the favelas boiled over into violence. In Moscow, looters made off with what they could. In Ulan Bator, Mongolia, there were fights as people argued about what it all meant. A cult in the Midwest decided the arrival of the aliens was proof of their prophesied end time, and the resulting mass suicide became a footnote on the news. Riot police around the world found all leave canceled.

For the most part, they weren't needed. Yes, there were riots, but not as many as the potential end of the world warranted. The feeds from the alien craft inspired a kind of tense, cold fear, but the whole situation remained too surreal to create a real sense of immediate danger.

Instead, people began to gather together in calmer ways. Those who hadn't been to church in years suddenly found themselves packing the pews. Vigils started in Buddhist temples, with monks chanting sutras as incense perfumed the air. In mosques and temples, open spaces and small shrines, people sought whatever comfort and answers they could. Amita's parents performed a puja at their local temple, trying to find the most appropriate deities to pray to given the strange circumstances in which they found themselves. Paige's parents went to see their priest for the first time in over a decade.

For now, the world kept turning. Not everyone walked out of work, and some basic infrastructure retained enough personnel to function. All commercial flights in the United States were canceled, leaving the TV stations who hadn't yet sent crews to the desert scrambling for helicopters and light planes to ensure they didn't miss out on the greatest show on Earth. A larger camp began to assemble around the spaceship on the sand, with the military, for the time, having the grace to stay on the perimeter and confine themselves to sealing off the area with the help of park rangers to prevent more onlookers gaining access. The last mile or so of the dirt-track road became totally blocked with cars, but those who could left their vehicles to walk on the sand and try and sneak past the checkpoints set up by the authorities.

The governor of California arrived in his private chopper; a closet alien buff, he could now give free rein to his hidden passion. On seeing many of his fellow fanatics unprepared for the desert heat, he called in a favor and arranged for an airlift of essential supplies.

Within the main zone around the ship, nearly one thousand people milled about. There were a multitude of tents and generators, trucks and jeeps, satellite dishes, and even a food stall or two.

Around the world, there were the screens.

With all the information people received coming from a live feed, the screens were inevitable. Already in place in thousands of locations across the globe to stream news or sporting events, even more were set up, and people flocked to them to watch and wait. Movie theaters and community centers filled up, food being shared and people setting up camp. This wasn't a time to be alone.

Some of the biggest screens were in Tiananmen Square and Times Square. Although the space was much bigger in China, both were crammed so densely with people it appeared impossible to squeeze any more safely in. Cultural differences became meaningless now. East and West united in their shared humanity and by their two leaders being key witnesses in the trial.

Everywhere, the police were out in force, but they typically didn't have to do anything beyond sorting out the kind of minor incidents always caused by such large crowds. People knew the aliens were watching, and generally, they were content to watch them back. Even the police turned and stared as Paige's parents appeared on the screen.

## Chapter Nineteen

The large clock in the studio behind Tasha Baker showed four p.m., only two hours remaining before the start of the trial. She sat on the long couch next to her interview subjects, with her trademark bleached hair and light-blue eye shadow, trying not to let on how out of her depth she felt. Ordinarily, she played the role of the LA reporter KNBC loved to ignore, there for the weird stories, the "human interest" snippets about the drunks who'd seen strange lights or the folks who'd found the image of Jesus in their toast.

When Tasha had seen Paige among the others on the spaceship, she'd screamed, "Oh my God!" and immediately rang her stepsister, who went to the same school, to find out where Paige lived. She hunted down Paige's parents and rushed them to the studio for an interview. With this trump card in hand, the news director at KNBC was forced to take her seriously, as the scoop would be broadcast across the main NBC network, if not throughout the world.

Ellen and Henry Adams, Paige's parents, were the perfect interview subjects. Middle aged, middle class, typically suburban, and with just enough hints of friction to indicate a skeleton in the closet if they needed to extend the news cycle into tomorrow.

Everybody liked the image of a perfect family, but nobody liked it if that image stayed perfect too long.

Tasha was her conciliatory best. She'd fought for this, almost literally, when one of the producers had come to their senses and suggested getting in Oprah to do it by video link. With her big moment being screened across the globe, Tasha refused to jeopardize it by being anything less than the picture of sympathy. Ellen was slightly pudgy around the edges and Henry graying and respectable. An optimum setting for Tasha to show off how great she looked, and how she deserved to get one of the real jobs at the station.

"So," she said, "when did you first realize your daughter had been kidnapped by aliens?"

It said a lot about her career to date that she'd learned just the right tone to ask such a question. Serious, sympathetic, but with a hint of amusement, because no one liked it if you took them too seriously when talking about aliens.

"Well, we found out that she was missing late this morning," Ellen said. "We went straight to the police, and they told us not to worry, but you can't help it, you know?"

She dabbed her eyes. Oh, please let her be one of the weepy ones, Tasha begged.

Nothing got ratings like tears, although her ratings could hardly be higher right now.

"We got home," Ellen continued, "and turned on the TV—"

"You can imagine how shocked we both were," Henry said.

"But you must have been a little relieved as well," Tasha guessed, although she would have guessed shocked if they'd gone with relieved. "To see your daughter alive and well, even if on... a spaceship."

"Yes, of course," Ellen said. "I mean, you hear about what can happen to girls out there these days, and it's just... it's horrible."

For a moment, Tasha thought she might get the tears she wanted, but no such luck. She kept moving.

"Tell me, has your daughter ever had any interest in aliens before this?"

"Well, no," Henry said.

Tasha smiled. "That you know of, of course. It can be hard to keep track with teenagers, can't it?"

"Yes," Ellen agreed, "it can. But with Paige, it was always more about her causes."

"What causes were those?" Tasha asked.

"Oh, all kinds of things. She was always out protesting, trying to make the world a better place. We... we used to give her a hard time sometimes for making such a mess while she created her posters and leaflets."

If the mother hadn't cried, Tasha would have pounced on her revelation. She could almost see the headlines taking shape now, about a court packed with biased "witnesses" obsessed with "causes." There would be debates about how representative it could be. It might last weeks, and Tasha would be at the heart of it.

Assuming they were all still here. Probably safer just to ask the next question.

"If you could speak to your daughter now," Tasha asked, "is there anything you'd like to say to her?"

"Only that we love her and are both really proud of her," Henry said. "We always knew she was going to do great things, but we never guessed it would turn out to be anything like this."

After the light relief of the interview, the countdown in New York continued toward nine p.m. EST, and the atmosphere in Times Square began to shift. The late-summer heat dropped a little, and the mood dropped with it. For much of the afternoon, it had been about togetherness. About people realizing there were bigger things in the universe than themselves, and then trying to offer each other support as it hit home that these bigger things were about to judge them.

Before, there had been a party atmosphere with singing and music, even a couple of performance artists who took advantage of the moment to make some money. It had felt like Times Square on New Year's Eve, and no one had focused on the implications of the deadline. It only mattered to be there together.

Unlike the places in the world where gatherings became nasty, Times Square knew how to handle large groups.

New Year's Eve was a joyous occasion, a time when people looked to the future, proposed to one another, made plans for what they would do next year. The closer this countdown came to its finish, the more people realized there might not be a next year. Maybe there wouldn't even be a next week.

As the clocks on the screens marked eight p.m. and time until the trial dripped from hours to minutes, the huge crowd found itself divided about what would happen. Some felt events to follow would vindicate humanity's existence, demonstrating all the good it had done. Others seemed certain they were facing the end, and watched with grim fascination. Some blamed the president for letting them know; others felt he hadn't told them soon enough. A few Republicans argued if only they'd been more heavily armed it wouldn't have happened, but nobody really listened.

It was 8:50 p.m., and the countdown kept up its relentless beat, the second hand slicing away the future as it swept slowly around the large clocks on the screens. There was something as alien and implacable about it as with any image of the ship.

The last sixty seconds finally arrived.

At New Year's, it would have meant the whole crowd chanting along with the count with varying degrees of accuracy as the drink took its toll. The crowd building up its energy for the cheering to follow. Now, one million people waited spellbound in a ghostly silence. The seconds filtered down to a handful, then ran out entirely. The image on the screens changed.

What it displayed in the wake of the numbers was clear. A courtroom.

Jake and Sarah followed as the aliens led the witnesses along the tubed corridor to a new room in the ship. The neurons firing beneath the curved surface of the tube discharged like tiny forks of lightning as they passed. They eventually walked into another oval room, thirty feet across at the widest point, larger than the room the ten of them had come from but seemingly just as empty. This quickly changed as Sirius and Vega stepped carefully along the elliptical curves, pulsing psychic energy into the ship's systems, and the ship responded by morphing its interior space.

A judge's seat flowed out of the middle of one of the wider walls, silvery and metallic, a molten material solidifying to form a broad chair with rolled, luxurious arms reflecting the luminescence of the walls. On the left flank of the judge's chair, a witness stand emerged from the floor, gleaming turquoise like mother-of-pearl as it flowed upward and curved with a sinuousness designed to enfold whomever stood there. Jake watched as Vega and Sirius stepped ten feet in front of judge's chair and two smaller seats rose from the floor, more like ergonomic barstools and with a height obviously designed for the two aliens.

"The implications of this are incredible," Dr. Gardener muttered. "They must have discovered some kind of living metal, and how to control it... but all the data on psychic phenomena suggests it can't be real."

"Trust me," Jake said, "it is."

Vega and Sirius weren't finished yet. They walked to the left of the witness box and to the opposite end of the room from where the humans gazed dumbfounded. Now more seats started to grow from the floor. No two were quite the same, each one shaped for both the body and personality of one of the witnesses. It seemed as if the aliens had delved into the witnesses' lives and picked out their favorite chair, recreating it in the organic metals and shimmering surfaces of the ship. In the first of the three seats in the front row, the president of the United States got a high-back office chair, finished in tan brown and looking as though it came straight out of the Oval Office. Next, the president of China was given an elegant cream armchair that would have been at home in Beijing's great hall. The pope received a stately throne with gold embossment, and red velvet-like cushion and arm rests. In the second row, Professor Allen had something reddish brown and broad suggesting a library reading room. Dr. Gardener's lab chair was black and chrome with an adjustable seat, while Amita's chair was humble and finished in opal white. Paige's resembled a garden deckchair, with colorful stripes on its canvaslike surface. Behind the second row, the shaman even got a gossamer hammock, floating in the air with no visible means of support.

A couch waited at the far left, and Jake knew without being told that it had been created for him and Sarah. Sarah knew it too, because she headed straight for it, sitting there with Jake and taking his hand. Despite its appearance, the metallic texture beneath their bodies felt soft and welcoming as they sank into it.

"This is just like my couch from my old apartment," she said. "Just like it. Even the smell is the same."

The others all knew which chairs were theirs. Once seated, they looked more like a jury than witnesses. Jake guessed this was the effect the aliens wanted to achieve. To make this appear as normal as possible to the public viewing on their TVs, phones, and computers.

In the middle of the wide curved wall opposite the judge's seat, a console rose into position with multicolored crystal buttons. It looked similar to the console in the control room. The wall above it transformed into a wide screen. The courtroom flowed and extruded into existence one piece at a time, until finally it looked like a courtroom a futuristic lawyer would feel at home in. Maybe a cyborg Perry Mason.

"Where's the judge?" Sarah asked.

"Everything is in place," Vega pulsed, and Jake heard an echo of the alien's words as the ship sent them out over the airwaves in a form the world could understand. "The judge will arrive soon. Please be ready."

Vega and Sirius stepped over to perch on their narrow seats. Between them, they looked like a strange guard of honor, staring at the judge's chair while they waited for it to appear.

A few seconds later, it did.

## Chapter Twenty

Jake felt the Supreme's arrival before he saw it. It arrived in ripples through the universal consciousness, everywhere and nowhere all at once. It could have been on the other side of the galaxy an instant before, but now it materialized here, and the waves caused by its presence in the room spread out until they became almost unbearable. Even the witnesses winced in response to the pressure at the edges of their minds, as the Supreme slowly coalesced from many different planes of existence into just one.

The pressure only lasted a few seconds. It ebbed as the being pulled back its power to prevent the destruction of everything in the room. It seemed to be remembering the rules of existing in a mere three dimensions, understanding the limits of what it could do without harm as it brought itself into a more comprehensible form.

Visibility followed presence, but only in stages. The space around the judge's chair flickered and shifted, as though the Supreme was testing different possibilities. Briefly, it gave the impression of something humanoid, then of a coiling body, before concentrating down into a dark cube and reducing ever smaller, shrinking until no bigger than an eight-ball.

Jake gazed at it and felt his consciousness sucked into the small black sphere. For a moment, he thought he could see through it, as if it weren't just a patch of emptiness but a hole in the fabric of reality leading to a plane far beyond. Jake thought he could see tiny dots of light, and somehow he knew that those dots were stars, rendered tiny by distance and perspective.

With the same certainty, he knew that if he pushed his hand into that darkness, he would find himself pulled through it, the gap in reality sucking him into some other place with no light, or air, or hope of surviving.

"Jake," Sarah said, putting a hand on his shoulder, "are you all right?"

Jake shook his head. "It's too much," he said. "Something like this... it's too powerful to be in one place."

"Normally we wouldn't be." The words didn't feel the same as Vega's or Sirius's projections. These seemed to have no point of origin or obvious direction to them. They simply were, present in the fabric of the universe for anyone to hear, as much the memory of something having been said as the act of saying it. "The concerns of so few dimensions are... difficult to concentrate on. But it is necessary."

In an instant, the blackness of the sphere collapsed in on itself. Light burst from it in a flash so bright, Jake tore his gaze away. He wasn't alone. All the witnesses averted their eyes, although Dr. Gardener held on the longest.

"It's like seeing the beginnings of the universe," he said with something like awe.

It was. Like looking into the heart of the big bang and seeing the shift from an instant of explosion to expansion on a scale Jake couldn't begin to comprehend. Simultaneously, he saw it occupied a space no more than three feet across to create a sphere.

The sphere appeared to be filled with light, almost a miniature sun but for the way it pulsed in and out, contracting and expanding in a heartbeat formed of energy, gentle white light shifting into every color of the spectrum as Jake watched. Its intensity varied, sometimes so faint Jake thought he could see the chair through it and sometimes so intense he turned away to stop afterimages flickering across his eyes.

It had a cycle, with the movement from faintness to brightness seeming to come so regularly, Jake could have timed it with his watch if it hadn't been so entrancing. It pulsed, and he could sense not just the power but also the vast intelligence at its heart.

The Supreme dimmed its peak brightness and pulsed again, and more words came into being. This time Jake knew everyone watching would have heard them, their weight carrying out across the world.

"We have gathered, and the trial is prepared. We will begin."

Jake saw Sirius stepping to the front, pulsing out words for all in the courtroom to hear telepathically. He knew the ship would be automatically translating the psychic pulses into local languages so those watching and listening around the world could also comprehend. The large screen above the console showed the footage being relayed.

"I am Sirius," the alien explained. "In this proceeding, I will be arguing against humanity. This trial has been convened because an exhaustive analysis of the sum total of human history, by our computer known as the Pyramid, has shown only a 48.9 percent probability of the human species evolving beyond a level representing extreme danger to itself and other life-forms. In the interests of neutrality, at the end of the trial, the Pyramid will again analyze the original data to submit to the Supreme for verification. The Supreme will use this data, along with the evidence given by the witnesses, to then give the ultimate judgment."

Sirius let these words sink in before continuing. "About 3.8 billion of your Earth years ago, my ancestors seeded life on this world as part of the Startoucher project. A quarter of a million years ago, my colleagues and I added a second stage to the experiment, placing traces of engineered DNA into archaic great apes to potentially produce intelligent species similar to our own."

Sirius paused, although it couldn't be for the Supreme's benefit. The Supreme must have understood every nuance of this. No, Jake guessed, the pause would be to ensure the implications could be understood by those watching around the world.

"We performed this experiment in good faith," Sirius pulsed. "We did it as a bulwark against the possibility of destruction, and as a way of spreading what we hoped were beneficial traits throughout the galaxy. We hoped, in essence, to create something more than ourselves."

Another pause, and this one was simply the alien playing to the gallery. Jake shouldn't have minded. He'd done it plenty of times. Yet here, with the future of mankind on the line, he felt the alien should show a little more respect.

"We failed," Sirius continued. "At least when it comes to humans. The aggressive tendencies have not changed. The history of your species, the species we created, is one of violence, greed, and destruction. We have been monitoring your planet closely since the deployment of atomic weapons in 1945.

"While your species has acquired greater and greater technology, it has not developed socially or ethically to nearly the same extent. As such, humanity represents a danger to the world it inhabits, and should it survive, it will represent a danger to every other world possessing life.

"Humanity stands on the cusp of expansion into the stars. It cannot be permitted to do so."

Sirius looked from the Supreme to the witnesses. "In the course of these proceedings, you will hear about the destruction mankind has wrought. You will learn its limitations and its interests. On other worlds, the Startoucher experiment has succeeded. But on this planet, while the results have been interesting, the experiment has failed."

The alien's forehead furrowed as it turned back to the Supreme.

"Not a day goes by without humans killing one another," Sirius sent. "Or without them destroying the natural life of this planet. Our previous experiments have shown that during the evolutionary cycle of a typical self-aware species, a decisive point is reached. Individuals must evolve to encompass the consciousness of the whole. Otherwise, individual actions will eventually prove fatal to survival."

Sirius's large black eyes regarded the witnesses as it pulsed its words quietly.

"Your aggressive tendencies have not changed. If your scientists make the next leap in war technology, a single bomb would be capable of obliterating your planet. What I am asking for is immense, but I would not ask it if I did not believe it would be to the benefit of life as a whole. If we do not act, many more species will suffer."

The alien swung around to face the large screen above the console on the curved wall opposite the Supreme. Sirius made a small motion with its three-fingered hand, and a multitude of different images of Earth as seen from space appeared on the screen.

"I want to be clear that I have considered and understand the implications. I am asking for humanity to be removed from this planet. I am asking for the destruction of a species with more than seven billion representatives."

Images of people flashed across the screen, but too quickly for the eye to fix on. There was a trick in that, Jake felt, letting the Supreme see that Sirius had considered the implications of what it was asking, without giving it enough time to focus on any of the individuals whose lives might be destroyed.

Sirius's face looked grave as it finished its opening statement.

"Under current Galactic Law, established to allow the peaceful flourishing of diverse beings, there exists the provision to remove a self-aware species if that species represents a needless critical threat to other life-forms. Even if, as in the case with humans, that species is unaware of Galactic Law."

Sirius pointed a long finger at the witnesses.

"Their tribe-group governments develop weapons with no thought of future consequences. This impulse, left unchecked, could one day lead to weapons almost on par with wider galactic technology. They poison their planet and strive for power in what remains. Supreme, I submit that humanity is too dangerous to be allowed to exist."

"We will see," the Supreme sent, and these words seemed to reverberate around the room, perhaps around the world.

Smaller, quieter echoes appeared in Jake's mind.

"We will see."

Sirius stepped to its narrow stool and sat down, the alien's thin legs dangling above the floor. Vega got up and walked forward to address the room, and Jake leaned forward expectantly.

"Much of what Sirius has stated is true," Vega sent, which wasn't really the opening Jake would have gone for. You never did the other side's work for them. Still, it could be a powerful opening, used well.

"Like Sirius, I formed part of the original team of scientists sent to seed humanity on this planet. I can understand Sirius's disappointment."

Vega paused, and Jake really hoped this was the moment when the alien would turn the opening statement around.

"Mankind has damaged the world on which it lives. It has warred in a way our people can barely comprehend. It is on the cusp of developing even more powerful weapons, and if it were to expand into the galaxy, it could prove a danger to all the species around it."

Vega just seemed to be continuing in the same vein, and Jake fought to keep from speaking out. He could do a better job. What was he here for if not this?

"It is even true," Vega said, "that our own calculations have not come out in favor of the species, predicting a 48.9 percent chance of decisive change."

OK, he'd heard enough. Jake was going to—

"But percentages can change," Vega went on. "And we do not wish to condemn a species over a percentage point. Thanks to the choices we've made to share our presence and this trial with humanity, if humanity is allowed to continue, it will do so with a much larger understanding of itself, its origins, and its potential. It will—"

"Objection!" Sirius bolted to its feet with the telepathic equivalent of a shout.

"The fact that humanity is watching this trial should have no material bearing on the outcome." The alien gestured toward Vega. "This whole situation has been manipulated by my colleague."

"Overruled," the Supreme pulsed, its sphere of light expanding in a blinding flash to fill the room before shrinking back in size. "Sirius... you and the being known as Vega must live with the consequences of your actions. I will consider all factors before making the final judgment."

"But—"

"Sit... sit... sit," the Supreme's voice echoed into a void.

Sirius's slit mouth twitched as it stared at Vega, then the alien regained its composure and perched on its stool.

Vega pressed the three fingers of each hand lightly together before continuing. "If mankind survives, it will go forward knowing it is but part of a much more important whole. It will know what is expected of it, and why the galaxy requires it to be more than it currently is. Sirius will tell you about what humanity is. I want to speak about what humanity could be."

It was an interesting argument. Vega had steered events around to revealing both the ship and the trial, and now the alien pinned its hopes on the Supreme contemplating the potential effect this would have on a future humanity. However, given human nature, this new knowledge of mankind's origins and place in the pecking order of the galaxy could easily backfire, with governments uniting to develop a global defense capability to rebut outside interference.

The future was not provable and far too unpredictable.

Jake found himself thinking about another part of what the alien had said. About how percentages could be changed. Jake had learned many things as a lawyer. He'd learned the importance of only asking questions he already knew the answers to. He learned exactly how much pressure to put on people when it came to deals and when to accept a settlement.

Above all, he'd learned not to leave the result in the jury's hand. While the jury might reach the right conclusion, they could just as easily get it wrong, no matter how well you presented your case. And Vega was playing a very dangerous game when it came to its case. It was admitting everything in the hope that it could be minimized by focusing on the future.

Why take the risk? You could always improve the odds. You found a procedural error to get the case thrown out, or a piece of evidence in hidden in the files. You took out as much randomness as possible. If you couldn't fight a case with the gloves off, you probably didn't deserve to be called a lawyer.

Jake could think of at least one way to manipulate the outcome if they were relying on the figures the Pyramid had given them...

But he saved that thought for later as Vega finished its opening statement.

"And we must remember that 48.9 percent is still nearly 50 percent." The alien looked toward the witnesses. "Despite my colleague's earlier comments about individual actions, there are many examples of altruistic behavior in the history of human civilization. The founding principles of most societies are fair and just.

"Interesting and diverse cultures have emerged, celebrating the arts in multiple forms, and the average human citizen tries to live peacefully with their neighbors."

Vega turned around and stepped to the large screen above the console. A series of images passed quickly in a slideshow: the Library of Alexandria; the Parthenon in Athens; the Taj Mahal in India; Petra in Jordan; Machu Picchu in Peru; and then modern cities, London, Mumbai, Mexico City, New York.

The alien waved its hand, and the images changed. The _Mona Lisa_ appeared, Van Gogh's _Starry Night_ , _The Kiss_ by Gustav Klimt, paintings by Picasso, Keith Haring, and other modern artists. Classical music could be heard as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra appeared, then the Bolshoi Ballet and Italian opera, followed by snippets of Bhangra, K-pop, and rap.

Vega walked back across the room to directly face the Supreme.

"Humanity deserves the chance to fulfil its potential and become a responsible member of the Galactic community. We created this species, and therefore have a duty to help it evolve beyond its current crisis. Decisive change is possible. Supreme, we must allow humanity to survive."

"We will see," the Supreme again sent, the words echoing throughout courtroom and beyond.

As Vega stepped back to its seat and perched on the edge, Jake looked at Sarah and she smiled.

"What's next?" Sarah whispered in Jake's ear.

"Usually in our court system," he pulsed, "the prosecutor calls their first witness. Although, here all the witnesses are supposed to be neutral."

Sirius walked to the front and stood by the witness stand.

"I call the president of the United States of America."

## Chapter Twenty-One

On the screens around the world, the president of the United States stepped up to the witness box, as the Supreme dimmed the brilliance of its sphere to allow the human to stand in such close proximity. Sirius's slender arms reached up to place a necklet on the president, a pulse of light slowly circling through the ring of clear crystal.

The majority of viewers had seen the president before. His speeches showed up on news channels announcing the latest actions the US would take. Deeply conservative, and a known hawk on defense, the president had a tendency in his speeches to blame the rest of the world for his nation's problems.

For Jake, the experience proved more visceral. The leader of the free world poised on the metallic courtroom stand in front of billions of people. Both as a witness and also as one of the accused.

"Are you going to try to make me swear some kind of oath?" the president demanded once in position, with no sign of his previously calm and collected demeanor.

"No oaths are needed," Sirius pulsed. "The necklet will ensure truth. You are the leader of the world's most powerful nation. Please share your views on the destruction mankind has caused."

"We haven't caused destruction," the president said. "We have..."

He paused, clawing at his throat, no words coming out. It looked very much as though the necklet was choking him. When it released, he gulped for air, and Sirius explained.

"The necklet will sense if you are attempting to deceive and will stop you from speaking. With this device, the court can verify that anything you _do_ say will be what you believe is the truth."

"You might as well be torturing the information out of me," the president said, although his voice sounded more relaxed.

"No lasting harm will come to you," Sirius sent. "And while the experience is unpleasant, it will not occur if you speak what you feel is the truth. I understand this may be difficult for you."

It was the closest Jake had heard Sirius come to a joke.

"But since you are talking of torture, let's start with this subject," Sirius said. "Why do some on your world, including representatives of the government of the United States, resort to torturing one another?"

"Some criminal regimes might," the president agreed. "But most nations have been clear about denouncing such actions. We have statements of rights ensuring that all those in the civilized world are safe from such behavior."

Sirius nodded. "The civilized world, yes. So your country does not use pain or violence to extract information?"

The president straightened his black suit and regarded the strange creature in front of him.

"We use enhanced interrogation but we do not use tort—" The necklet cut him off.

"Please remember, what is important is the intent to deceive," Sirius sent. "Shall we try something else? One of the key criteria the Pyramid analyzes is the management of a planet's resources by the dominant species. This gives an accurate indication of the long-term sustainability of the overall ecosystem."

Sirius glanced at the witnesses and turned back to the president.

"For how long now has it been known that fossil fuels are a finite resource? How long has it been known about the damage to the atmosphere caused by burning them?"

"The evidence is unclea—" The president choked again. He flared up in anger. "Fossil fuels are essential for our economy. They're cheap, and trying to change over to some liberal solar power dream would ruin us all. We need to keep the lights on, damn it!"

"And, of course, you need fuel for your military vehicles," Sirius pulsed. "Is it not true you spend much of your budget on ways to kill other members of your species? It is not also true that you possess weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions at once?"

The president didn't even try to lie. "Yes. But they are necessary." He glanced at his Chinese counterpart. "What do you think would happen if we laid down our arms? Do you think things would be better? Safer? I'll tell you right now, China would run straight over us and conquer our country. If not them, the Russians. Hell, even the _British_ might try to get their empire back."

"And would it matter?" Sirius sent.

"Our people would lose their freedom!" the president sputtered. "They would stop living in a democracy and be ruled by dictators!"

"As opposed to being ruled by people with enough money to invest in their political campaigns?" Sirius asked. "Tell me about the laws you have passed in favor of businessmen that provide you with funds."

The president ran his hand across his full head of hair and clenched his jaw before responding calmly. "OK, I concede that you may have a point." He fixed the alien with a commanding gaze.

"Show me, show _us,_ these examples of other species in your experiments who have societies with no violence and no corruption? So far you've shown us no proof."

Sirius stared at the human for a few seconds and then turned around to face the large screen on the opposite wall. The alien waved a three-fingered hand, and a cloud of pink interstellar dust came into focus on the screen.

"The Merlutians in the Lagoon Nebula. Approximately five thousand light years from Earth."

The viewpoint zoomed into the interstellar cloud and then panned across thousands of stars before rushing toward a blue planet turning slowly on its axis. The image fell through the light-blue clouds of the upper atmosphere and then down into an immense ocean of turquoise water, plunging for miles until reaching the ocean floor.

Vast underground cities of pyramidical and octagonal structures could be seen, built in a crystal-like material and glowing with light. A strange being floated into focus, its octopus-like head pulsing with neurons and firing flickers of light along its numerous limbs. More Merlutians drifted into view, and pulses of energy passed silently from one to the other.

Sirius turned back to an astonished president.

"The Merlutians used to be a very aggressive species, but when they reached the decisive crisis point, an acceleration occurred in their capacity to empathize. This solitary change informed the trajectory of their future evolution."

The alien again faced the screen and gave a small wave of its hand.

Another planet came into view, with enormous mountains of rock and ice towering above green-hued clouds. Huge birds circled around the top of the tallest peak, crying out, and then the image dropped through the clouds to reveal a vast panorama of a multilayered megalopolis.

"The Altairians," Sirius explained, "used to war among themselves all the time. Then a technological breakthrough created an entirely new method of self-governance."

An assembly hall appeared on the screen, not unlike the meeting room of the United Nations. A tall being stood at the front, and the image zoomed in to show a tailless reptilian body with a large head. The Altairian held in its scaly hand a small computer device, and hoisted it up for the thousands in the audience to see as it explained its function in a guttural language.

Sirius pointed at the screen. "An Altairian scientist developed artificial intelligence that helped individual members of a community make decisions to benefit the whole. Initially adopted in small cities, it was eventually rolled out across the entire civilization. All citizens have an equal vote on every decision. This has removed the need for politicians. So far, it's been very successful and has revolutionized their culture."

The courtroom once more appeared on the screen as Sirius faced the president.

"These are just two examples; there are many more. Now let us get back on topic."

The president looked pensive as Sirius fired another barrage of questions.

"Can you name one system of governance in humanity's history that has not resulted in corruption and abuses of power? Democracy, monarchy, ideology, oligarchy, and autocracy all have failed, have they not?

"Your government has known about the existence of life from other worlds since two of our colleagues crashed their craft and died here in 1947, yet this information has only been shared with the military. Why?"

It went on and on, and it didn't get any better. Sirius asked about the divisions between the rich and poor. About the number of people starving, and the role of bankers in the recent financial meltdown. The president wasn't a stupid man, but he clearly floundered when faced with the wide-ranging scope of the accusations. All the small inequalities people lived with from day to day, the alien brought out into the open. All the things they saw on the news and then forgot about, it wouldn't let go.

At last, Sirius finished. "We have heard Vega claim mankind can become more than it is. This witness is the leader of the most advanced and most powerful nation state on Earth, yet his testimony only proves how difficult it would be for humanity to avoid destroying itself and the planet. This world leader refuses to acknowledge climate change and admits that his government is corrupt.

"Humanity has not fundamentally changed during the last few thousand years. It still retains the same basic instincts, but now possesses far more dangerous technology. I have no further questions."

Sirius gave a small nod to Vega as it stepped back to its narrow seat and sat down. A few of the witnesses stretched and got comfortable in their assorted chairs as Vega walked slowly toward the president. The Supreme pulsed a range of colors across its expanding and contracting sphere and then returned to white light.

"My colleague has stated that humans do not focus enough on the needs of the whole," Vega sent, "but in fact the evidence often shows the opposite. Can you tell the court the total federal budget for the last fiscal year?"

The president relaxed and his face regained its authoritative composure.

"Certainly, 4.3 trillion dollars, give or take a cent."

"Can you also tell the court the percentage of that amount spent on Medicare in addition to Social Security and unemployment?"

"Around 60 percent, nearly 2.6 trillion dollars."

"That's a very large percentage. So all that money goes toward helping those over sixty-five, those with disabilities, and the needy to have access to heavily subsidized medical treatment, and to help people who are having difficulty finding work, plus other social care programs?"

"Yes. That's right," the president said, warming to his theme. "We are a caring society, and these figures prove that. We like to look after the vulnerable and needy. There is a strong tradition of charity and giving in our culture."

"Would you like to provide some further examples?" the alien pulsed, and spread its three-fingered hands in invitation.

The president drew himself taller and cracked his neck, his strong jaw becoming even more defined.

"Well, take education, for instance. With most universities, including Ivy League schools, full scholarships are available to those who are talented but lack funds. There are also a wide range of grants and awards. And let's not forget private philanthropy; some of our most successful businessmen have donated the majority of their wealth to foundations set up to pioneer new medicines and reduce poverty."

"You mentioned philanthropy," Vega pulsed. "The Pyramid analysis revealed this rising over 4 percent during the last twelve months in all nine categories of recipient organizations, including religion, the environment, animals, the arts, and international affairs. Why do you think this is?"

The president smiled. "More and more people want to do their best to help, even if just with a few dollars. The collective will is there. Your figures again demonstrate the charitable nature of our society and prove that, as a nation, we do care about each other."

Vega turned to face the bright pulsing sphere of the Supreme.

"Despite difficult economic conditions, donations from the citizens of the United States to help the wider community increased over 4 percent last year." The alien gestured toward the president.

"This man's government spends more than 60 percent of its annual budget on projects that directly help the old, infirm, and needy. These two figures of 4 percent and 60 percent provide concrete and irrefutable proof that individuals do care about the needs of the collective. I have no further questions."

"What?" Jake shouted aloud. Where were the questions about the ability to work together, the need to strive to understand the universe? What about the money put into medical research, the ideals of the Founding Fathers, or even perhaps a follow-up to the alien's opening remarks about the flourishing of the arts?

After the alien's telepathic communication and the President's civilized replies, Jake's outburst seemed impossibly loud. He was abruptly aware of the attention of everyone in the room shifting to him. Possibly everyone around the world.

"You have no place in these proceedings. Please remain silent," Sirius pulsed.

"Humanity is on trial, and I'm a human," Jake sent back. "Besides, I wouldn't accept this from a public defender working on a misdemeanor, let alone a trial of this scale."

"Even so."

The Supreme's authoritative voice cut through it all. "Sirius, do you have any further questions for this witness?"

"No," the alien replied.

"The witness is dismissed," sent the Supreme. "There will be a break now before the next witness. The being 'Jake' may wish to speak with the being 'Vega' during this time."

Not exactly a rebuke, but certainly a reminder to follow court protocol. Jake wouldn't have tried what he'd just done in a human court because of a guaranteed slap down from the judge.

The president looked weary as he walked back to his stately brown chair still wearing the crystal necklet. The large screen above the console went blank, and while the other witnesses broke apart for a few minutes, Jake glanced at Sarah and then stepped over to Vega.

"You cannot interrupt the trial, Jake," Vega sent. "Sirius will argue it is not a fair proceeding, which could prejudice our case."

"Why didn't you question him further?" Jake pulsed. "I can think of a dozen more questions you could have asked."

"And those would have worked," Vega sent back. "If he were able to lie or tell half-truths. If Sirius hadn't been able to come back and question him again."

"I don't agree. For instance, what about the flourishing of the arts?"

The alien frowned. "The current government spends nearly one thousand times more money on the military than it does on the arts. And the current president wanted to abolish the National Endowments for the Arts, the main arts organization."

Jake threw his hands up in the air. "OK, freedom of speech, then?

"According to the Pyramid, six corporations control over 90 percent of American media. How would that have looked when Sirius confronted the president with the facts?"

The alien had a point, but even so, Jake felt it should have questioned the president more.

"You're not fighting your corner hard enough," Jake insisted.

Vega spread its hands in surrender. "It isn't about fighting, Jake. The aim of our trial is to establish the truth."

"Even if the truth means the death of everyone on the planet?" Jake pulsed.

"I need to prove to the Supreme that hope exists for your species," Vega sent. "I found two key indicators from the Pyramid data that supported this, and that the president could talk about truthfully."

Again, Jake could see the alien's point, but it still didn't feel like enough. He couldn't remain a helpless observer while Sirius built up its case. He couldn't let the trial run its course while his whole species teetered on the brink of extinction. As soon as this last thought entered his head, Jake knew he must act and do whatever he needed to ensure that humanity survived.

Vega had spoken before about the odds not being in mankind's favor. Jake was going to change those odds, and he knew exactly where to begin.

The courtroom flickered to life on the large screen, and Sirius called Dr. Gardener, the world's leading particle physicist. He got up still wearing his lab coat, and adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses as he stepped toward the witness stand. Sirius handed him the crystal necklet, and he examined it carefully before putting it on, the open ends of the circle fusing behind his neck. Unlike the president, he seemed intrigued by the experience, and his relaxed expression revealed no fear about telling the truth.

"Tell me, Dr. Gardener," Sirius pulsed, the flat tone of its words broadcast across the world in nearly seven thousand languages, as well as appearing directly in the minds of those in the courtroom. "What would you say is humanity's most important trait?"

Dr. Gardener didn't hesitate. "That would be our curiosity. We have a need to know about the universe around us, often simply for its own sake. Most animals will not give up resources or food to learn more about the world, but we will."

"This curiosity has led to many technological advances, hasn't it?" Sirius continued, its eyes narrowing slightly.

Jake could guess where this line of questioning was leading. He was more concerned with how he could set his plan in motion. He couldn't do it here, but would he be able to simply wander around the ship? He'd taken chances in other places, other trials, but never in a situation with so much at stake.

"Our technology doesn't seem like much compared to yours," Dr. Gardener said.

"But you have reached space, and are looking for ways to expand into your solar system. Within a few generations of your species, it is possible you will do so successfully. Once this is achieved, the next step will be to travel to the galaxy beyond."

"You must have a much clearer idea about our potential progress," Dr. Gardener said, taking off his glasses and wiping them with his lab coat, "since you know what is involved. But if I had to guess, then yes, I would say it is likely to happen eventually. Especially now that we know intelligent life exists on other worlds."

"You have also achieved significant advances in other areas," Sirius sent, glancing at the witnesses. "The gas engine, power stations, intensive farming. You are familiar with the research on your planet's changing climate, Doctor?"

Dr. Gardener nodded. "I am."

"Isn't it true that humanity has done untold damage to this planet? That it has already caused the extinction of many other life-forms? That its actions threaten to permanently alter the environment?"

"That is true," Dr. Gardener admitted, peering at the alien.

"So the research that arises from your curiosity is often put to selfish and violent use," Sirius continued. "For example, many of your species' scientific advances have been turned into weapons."

"Only a few," Dr. Gardener corrected.

"Your own field of physics," Sirius insisted, its slit mouth twitching, "was used in this. Mankind found out about the subatomic universe and immediately used it to craft bombs to destroy cities. You learned about bacteriology and used it to make biological weapons. Computational power increased, and now there are people trying to work out how to shut down the infrastructure of enemy nations. Would you not agree that mankind's defining trait isn't curiosity but rather its inclination to destroy?"

It was a compelling point, powerfully made, and despite himself, Jake found it difficult to disagree.

"I guess there's a case for saying that," Dr. Gardener said, frowning slightly.

"There is a case for saying much more," Sirius insisted. "The evidence suggests that mankind has gone beyond the point of no return. It is heading toward its own destruction, and the only question is how much of the galaxy it takes with it."

Sirius stepped back to its seat and glanced at the two presidents, while Vega got up to walk slowly to the front.

"Sirius spoke about climate change. Dr. Gardener, is this change inevitable?"

Dr. Gardener considered the question for a moment. "At this stage, some degree of change is almost certain."

"Almost?"

"It is already occurring," Dr. Gardener said. "But the worst-case scenarios might not come to pass."

"What would it take to avoid them?" Vega sent, the long fingers on its right hand rising up and down.

Dr. Gardener pursed his lips. "Probably the near-total cessation of the use of fossil fuels for industry, along with changes to farming methods, the common diet of large parts of the world, and approaches to transport."

"So radical changes to the way you live," Vega sent. "But not impossible."

"No, not impossible."

"And the technologies Sirius mentioned. Is it not also true that, in recent years, more and more focus has been put on technologies relating to the climate and the environment? On both renewable energy and climate science?"

"Yes, that's true," Dr. Gardener said, unbuttoning the top of his lab coat. "It's taken a threat of this scale to motivate us, but we are beginning to learn more about the planet and ways to protect it."

"Is it possible for mankind to reverse the damage it has done?" Vega asked.

Dr. Gardener took his time before answering. It was what Jake would have wanted from an expert witness, a sense of considered authority, with each question being taken seriously.

"It's possible," he said. "We would need to find a way to reverse the damage to the atmosphere; although, in the long term, the ecosystem of the planet may be self-correcting. And we'd need to find ways to bind more carbon. We already have the means to bring back some species. So yes.

"It wouldn't be easy. It might even be unlikely, if you think about the problems of doing it while meeting the needs of an expanding population, but it's at least theoretically possible."

The alien waved a thin translucent arm in the air. "And over the course of human civilization, surely technology and scientific discovery have more often than not had a beneficial impact?"

"That's correct," said Dr. Gardener. "For instance, take medical care and its effect on life expectancy. I think I'm right in saying this has doubled over the last century. Many dangerous diseases have been eradicated, and our understanding of sanitation has completely transformed."

Vega nodded. "Yes, a hundred years ago, the global average life expectancy was just thirty-one. Now it's over seventy. Some countries in that time frame, like South Korea, have gone from just twenty-three to more than eighty.

"Finally, may I ask, why did you decide to become a particle physicist?"

Dr. Gardener adjusted his glasses and sighed.

"I wanted to understand the universe and share those discoveries with the world."

"Thank you, Dr. Gardener," pulsed the alien before turning to the Supreme. "No further questions."

Sirius made no move to leave its narrow chair.

"The witness is dismissed," sent the Supreme, a range of colors flickering across its brilliant sphere of light.

## Chapter Twenty-Two

Jake knew this witness break would be the ideal time to sneak out of the courtroom. Vega and Sirius were working side by side at the console, pressing crystal buttons. Each crystal released a ribbon of colored light that spiraled upward toward the ceiling. The two presidents and the pope chatted amiably, and Amita and Paige continued to fill up their borrowed notebook. Professor Allen was congratulating Dr. Gardener on his performance in the stand and studying his crystal necklet. The shaman swayed quietly in his hammock, and the sphere of the Supreme pulsed dimly, expanding and contracting in muted shades of light.

"It's now or never," Jake sent to Sarah.

"What do you mean?"

"I'll explain later. Follow me."

Jake pushed himself off the couch and, keeping his gaze down, stepped quickly across the middle of courtroom floor. Sarah followed in his footsteps, and as they reached the entrance, the door glided open. Jake turned left into the corridor and put his finger on his lips to indicate no talking. They walked along the crystalline tube until the telepathic presence of the two aliens and the Supreme faded completely from his mind.

Sarah hugged him. "How do you think things are going back there?"

She looked concerned and obviously needed reassurance, but he wanted to be honest. "This... I don't think this is going our way," Jake said aloud.

"You don't know that for certain," she said, running her hand through her hair.

Her voice carried a note of defiance, of wanting it to be true, and Jake could feel this mirrored in himself. But wanting it wasn't enough. He couldn't just be a passenger on the sidelines while Sirius sliced its way through the witnesses and Vega failed to muster a robust defense. He reached out psychically toward the courtroom again, but he didn't feel any telepathic sense of the aliens or the Supreme.

"I can see the way things are going," Jake said, his voice quieter. "I know how trials work, and it's obvious who's gaining the upper hand. Sirius is just a better lawyer than Vega."

"You're being a little harsh," Sarah said, but without much conviction.

"And then there's the business of balancing our chances with the Pyramid," Jake said.

"That's going to be hard to ignore, unless..."

"Unless what?" Sarah asked, putting her hands on her hips.

"Unless there were a way to affect it."

"You mean those hackers you met, don't you? Jake, even if it were possible, think about what you're saying. You're planning to interfere with a trial where billions of lives are at stake."

"It's nowhere near a fair trial anyway," Jake insisted. "We haven't been given time to prepare, we've had no choice about our lawyer, and the witnesses have all been selected by the prosecution. We're the equivalent of the petty criminal who gets the worst public defender because they can't afford better, and who then ends up against some hotshot junior DA looking to make a name."

She crossed her arms. "What happens if we get caught?"

"It won't matter," Jake said. "We know the actions of humanity during the trial have no bearing on the Supreme's judgment."

"We don't know that for sure."

"When Vega insisted on revealing the craft, Sirius made it clear that only the Pyramid data and witnesses would impact the trial."

"But later on," Sarah added, "the Supreme told Sirius its judgment would take into account humanity discovering its origins."

"That's the whole point. Vega's case rests on a future potential that can't be proven. The existing proof from the Pyramid goes against us, and the witness statements are making things far worse."

"OK, OK, you've convinced me." Sarah said. "But is it even possible to hack the Pyramid?" Her eyes sparkled as she spoke.

"I don't know," Jake admitted, "but we have to try."

"How are you going to contact those guys?"

"The same way I contacted you when you were hidden behind the trees."

Jake tried to sound as confident, but when he'd contacted Sarah telepathically for the first time, Jake had known exactly where she'd been, and they'd shared a strong connection.

In the silence of the tubed corridor, he began to concentrate. He sought out the feeling of the universal consciousness, sinking down into it, letting it wash over him. Sarah's presence helped, providing a sense of calm and oneness, making it easier for him to relax and let go of his normal state of mind. He began to stretch out psychically, and he could see swirling clouds of dark brown in his inner eye. Jake breathed slowly and tried to peer through them.

In the aftermath of his peak experience with the universal consciousness, distance seemed irrelevant and he could connect almost at will to whomever he wanted. Now he found the process harder. As he peered at the churning brown clouds, they began to slow down and then drift across his inner field of vision. His focal point of awareness became drawn backward and to the right, and he swung around in the clouds and then zoomed forward into a smoky mist that parted to reveal an x-ray-type image of the courtroom. Jake could see the bright sphere of the Supreme pulsing gently and then the faint outlines of the two aliens. The outlines of the eight witnesses were barely visible, but he could make out the strong jaw of the president and the form of Paige sitting in her deck chair.

The Supreme had a massive presence, and Jake found himself drawn irresistibly toward it. He concentrated and managed to skirt his focal point of awareness around the pulsing sphere and zoom back out of the courtroom. Jake experimented and discovered that by focusing awareness on a particular spot of his inner landscape, he could navigate toward it. Rather like a psychic GPS.

The clouds continued to drift across his field of vision as he zoomed forward again. In the far left, he could make out the glowing triangle of the Pyramid, but he ignored it and allowed himself to be drawn upward. Suddenly, the clouds vanished, and Jake was outside the spaceship. In front of him were the ghostly outlines of hundreds of human bodies, clustered together in small groups.

How to find Marina? Surely it couldn't be too hard... just the tricky part of making the initial telepathic link. Jake had settled on Marina rather than Adam or Billy. She was the psychically receptive one.

Jake tried to visualize her face, but nothing happened, so he scanned left and right across the ghostly bodies in the desert. One started to glow, and as he zoomed in, he could see tiny pixels of light dancing inside it. Marina's head coalesced into view, and suddenly he was staring at her electric-blue hair and catlike eyes.

He stretched his consciousness toward her, touching her mind the way he did when he communicated with Vega or Sirius, pulsing the words along the strands of the universe.

"Marina, can you hear me?"

With almost anyone else, there would have been a long pause of disbelief. Possibly as they worried about going mad. Instead, her words came back straightaway.

"Yes, I can hear you. Is this some kind of telepathic communication the aliens taught you? Oh my god, this is so incredible." Her voice sounded clear, but it was much fainter than when the aliens spoke in his mind.

Briefly, Jake found himself wondering if trusting his plan to three virtual strangers was such a good idea. But what other choice did he have?

"Listen, Marina, there's something I need you to do," Jake sent.

"And now I'm going to be taking instructions from voices in my head?"

"Not so much you as the other two," Jake sent. "Tell me, how do you think they'd react to the chance to hack an alien supercomputer?"

"I think they'd love it," Marina sent back. "But why?"

"To try to save us all. And they have to do it before the trial finishes. We're outside the courtroom now, and not far from the Pyramid. Ask Gemini how we can alter the percentages, and we'll wait for your reply."

In the courtroom of the ship, Sirius called the pope to the stand. The pontiff accepted the crystal necklet and put it on as though being invested with a chain of office. He cut a dignified figure, comfortable with speaking in front of huge crowds and having his words broadcast and published across the world.

"You are the leader of one of the largest religious groups on this planet, yes?" Sirius began.

"Its earthly leader, yes."

"As such, many on this planet take notice of what you say?"

"Possibly not as many of the college of cardinals as I would like, but broadly speaking, yes."

"Is it fair to say that religion has a large influence over the lives of those on this planet?"

"To their benefit, I would hope," the pope replied.

"What makes you so sure?" Sirius asked with a look back toward the witnesses. "There have been many religions in human history, all claiming to possess the truth about existence, yes?"

"All claiming to have touched something divine," the pope corrected gently.

"And because of this claimed access to the divine, each religion is given the authority to make rules for its followers that cannot be challenged," Sirius went on. "Even when those rules cause harm?"

"People sometimes interpret religious texts in flawed ways," the pope said. He'd obviously had this argument before. "But the whole cannot be held responsible for the actions of a few extremists."

"Ah, extremists, of course. Tell me, are you an extremist?" Sirius pulsed, its forehead furrowing.

"Certainly not."

"But you and your office have routinely condemned measures taken to slow the world's overwhelming population growth and stop the spread of deadly diseases, haven't you? You have reinforced opposition to those whom your religion perceives as different, yes? Where societies around the world are run by religious leaders, do they not seek to strictly enforce their own religious rules and code of ethics?"

"Religion has been more of a force for good than for evil," the pope insisted, clutching his white robe. "It has provided hope and moral guidance—"

"You are not answering my question," Sirius sent. "Shall we try something simpler? You believe that religion has been a force for good?"

"I do," the pope said.

"Can you tell me, then, how many people have died in the name of religion since mankind first came into existence?" Sirius asked. "How many have been killed for holding views antagonistic to a religious authority? How many have been sacrificed to gods to ensure the next harvest or killed in wars over who is right? How many have died in pogroms and crusades?"

"I don't really know," the pope said, less confident now.

"The Pyramid analysis was not able to provide a precise figure," Sirius sent, "but would it surprise you that it estimated at least sixty-five million?"

The pope hesitated, but Sirius prompted him. "Please answer the question."

"No, it wouldn't surprise me. But violence is not the sole province of religion. There have been causes antithetical to religions that are responsible for killing at least as many, if not more, than the worst holy war."

"So humans will commit violence in the name of any cause?" Sirius asked.

It turned to address the Supreme. "Plainly, humans have a capacity for believing in systems that are actively harmful to both themselves and the world around them. They are dangerous, because they are easily led to believe that anyone who is not like them is evil, to be either persuaded or destroyed. Just as their response to our arrival demonstrates."

For a moment, the wide screen showed what happened with the six jets again as the feed from Captain Oliver's cockpit replayed.

" _Base, I'm also seeing military vehicles down there. Friendlies close. I repeat, friendlies close_."

" _We're aware. Location is correct. Continue with the strike_."

The six planes vanished into the cloudless desert sky.

"I have no further questions," Sirius sent and then stepped toward the console below the screen.

Vega got up from its narrow seat and walked to the front of the courtroom. The pope took off his skullcap and wiped his head with the wide sleeve of his robe before replacing it. His hunched frame looked humble against the sinuous metal of the witness stand.

"In a previous statement, you mentioned how all religions have touched the divine. Can you explain further?" Vega sent.

The pope nodded. "I strongly believe we possess an urge toward the divine. Religions seek to express this urge, to help us lead better lives. We know there's more to life than the material world, and occasionally we glimpse it."

"But those who practice religion do not have the facility to connect with the universal consciousness fully?" Vega offered, staring at the pope with its mysterious ink-black eyes.

"God has different names, depending on the culture," the pope said. "Humanity has been blessed with glimpses of truth many times. At the heart of all religions is the need to be more, to find good, to discover a balanced way of living in the world. We do not always succeed. Perhaps our interpretation is too... rigid at times. But this yearning for the divine is not wrong. It is, instead, the purest faith."

Vega nodded. "So faith is at the heart of what it means to be human? An intrinsic part of its nature?"

"Yes," the pope said. "The most essential part."

In the desert night, Gemini sat at a picnic table on folding chairs in Marina's festival tent with the flap open. Laptops and lighting were plugged into a generator taken from the RV, and a small crowd had gathered outside. A satellite dish rested on the sand pointing at the stars.

Marina felt anxious as she stood by the table and thought about what to tell Gemini. How much would the aliens be able to spot them doing? She also didn't know if they would have enough time before the end of the trial, as no one really knew how long it would last. And, of course, she was more than a little unnerved by her psychic communication with Jake. So despite the presence of so many computer geeks and alien buffs, she just blurted it out.

"Billy, Adam, I need you to find a way to hack the Pyramid and alter the percentages."

The arguments started almost at once. There were those among the UFO spotters who declared it would be impossible, given the vastly superior technology the aliens possessed. There were others who thought it would be unethical to even try. Both groups were immediately shouted down by the larger numbers who wanted to work out exactly what might be involved. Suggestions ranged from worms to denial of service attacks, Trojans to simply brute forcing the passwords.

"There's no point in a frontal assault," Adam said, and the silence was almost instant.

Billy nodded. "Too much processing power to overcome. Plus, we have no idea what kind of code it uses, or even if it uses code in the first place."

Marina felt like a proud sister. Most of the time, it was easy to think of Gemini as a little awkward, a little short on friends, a little weird. Exactly the sort of people who might want to hang out with her. Yet here, with the few people who really understood what they did, it was as though they were rock stars. Maybe not good-looking rock stars. Possibly even drummers. But rock stars nonetheless.

"We need to think differently," Adam said, taking off his baseball cap and uncovering his Afro. "At the end of the trial, this computer is going to run the analysis on the original bunch of data, right?"

"Bound to get the same result," Billy said, crossing his arms in his gray tracksuit. "It's just being done for the sake of this Supreme thingy."

"But what happens if we give it fresh evidence?" Adam grinned.

"I like it," Billy said.

Marina looked at them. "Do you want to explain that for those of us who aren't you?"

Billy frowned as though it should have been obvious. Adam did the actual explaining.

"The computer downloaded all the data we've produced as a species, so let's get it to replace this with a fresh download. Except this time, we change things a little, delete enough damaging evidence to tip the balance. The dark net alone should do it if we manage to take it out."

Billy tapped his middle finger slowly on the picnic table, and his pi tattoo bounced up and down. "We don't know exactly what algorithms the aliens are using; they'd probably make Google's look like child's play."

His finger tapped faster and faster until the pi symbol became an oscillating blur.

"But let's assume they rate the worst actions of humanity at minus one hundred, and the best at plus one hundred. Probably, there's enough minus-one-hundred stuff lurking on the dark net that, if removed, would tip the overall percentages in our favor."

"Easy peasy," Adam said, punching Billy lightly in the arm.

For the few remaining puzzled faces, Billy carried on.

"The normal internet we look at with search engines is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath is the deep web, around five hundred times bigger than the surface web. Most of this deep web is legit, like online banking, or e-mails, but a portion of it is called the dark net."

"Where a lot of the really dodgy stuff goes on," Adam said. "So we target the nasty stuff you can't see."

"And the nasty stuff you can, in case we need to delete more to tip the odds."

"Assuming we can clean up the web," Marina said, "we still have a big problem. How do we get the alien computer to do another download?"

"It's a computer, designed to be interfaced with," Adam said, putting his hands behind his head.

"Which just leaves one issue."

"Access," Gemini said in unison.

Again, Marina gave them a blank look and waited for the translation.

Billy obliged. "The easier a system is for users, the easier it is for us to get into."

"And with a system designed to only work for aliens?" Marina asked.

"It only works for aliens with psychic powers, right?" Adam said. "Which means it's probably not password protected. They'll assume if you have the right capacity, if you can, I don't know, _feel_ right to it, you're meant to be able to work it."

Marina caught it. "And we have Jake. But from what you're saying, he'd need to be there to work it. And we don't know if he has any idea how to."

"He'd need to be there anyway," Adam said. "If we want to influence it, we'd need feedback on what's working and what isn't. Then we can talk him through it."

"You mean _I_ can talk him through it?" Marina guessed. She was the best placed to handle that side of things but probably the least qualified to explain the technical details. It would be a kind of technological game of telephone, with dreadful results if it went wrong.

"Don't worry," Adam said. "We'll explain it to you."

"And you know all about making alien supercomputers work properly?" Marina asked.

Billy smiled. "Even as kids we could make Vista do what we wanted. How hard can it be?"

It wasn't an answer that made a lot of sense to Marina, but the other computer geeks there displayed every confidence in Gemini, and... well, this was their territory. So she nodded and let them get on with it. For now, this appeared to involve e-mailing fellow hackers across the world.

Marina only had one job left. She needed to wait for Jake to connect again and then explain his part in all this.

In the upstairs private bar of the Red Lion English pub in the Arbat District of Moscow, Vladimir Smyslov and his cohorts were knocking back vodka, shooting pool, and occasionally glancing up at the large screen on the wall. Ten glasses had recently been raised to toast the pope as he left the stand.

"Nice job!" Vladimir's voice boomed across the room. A bear-like man with expert skills in martial arts, he liked to think of himself as cuddly-yet-ferocious when required. When Gemini's encrypted e-mail arrived on his phone, he lifted his hand to silence his young team of elite hackers. He read the e-mail and smiled at the scale of the challenge.

Gemini had helped him out with a small problem connected with the American election, and he was glad they'd turned to him in the world's hour of need.

"Gentleman, we have work to do. To your stations please." He stepped to the right of the bar and unlocked a heavily fortified metal door, turning to the barman before entering.

"Boris, a jug of coffee, black as you can, and a double round of caviar blinis."

Inside the hidden chamber, ten chairs were in position around a bank of sophisticated technology, including the latest military toys from friends in the Kremlin, customized servers and laptops, and direct satellite links to use them on.

"Gents, listen carefully. This is our biggest test yet, don't let me down!"

As Boris walked in carrying a large jug of coffee and the tray of blinis, each member of the team sent encrypted e-mails to at least three hacker associates. These three also contacted at least another three, and on it went, the numbers multiplying rapidly.

Thirty, ninety, three hundred, nine hundred, and in addition to the other networks Gemini had tapped into it, within twenty-five minutes, ten thousand hackers were hard at work putting their plan into action.

Professor Allen took the witness stand in her navy jacket and silk neck scarf, the crystal necklet partially hidden. The preeminent ethical philosopher looked distinguished with her gray hair and blue eyes that shone with a keen intelligence as she glanced around the court.

"You're here to ask me about my books," she guessed before Sirius could ask its questions.

"Yes," Sirius sent. "Perceptive."

"The world is full of philosophers," Professor Allen said, "and you don't appear to be picking witnesses at random. If you picked me, it must be because of my particular specialty."

"Indeed," Sirius agreed. "Will you tell us the title of your last book, please?"

Professor Allen nodded. "It's called _Testosterone: The Hormone That Destroyed the World_. Although I should probably point out that my publisher had more say in the title than I did."

"The title is not important," Sirius sent. "What matters is the content. Will you please describe the elements of your work?"

"My book explores the ways in which testosterone, and the aggression it promotes in mankind, has helped to fuel harm throughout much of human history," Professor Allen explained. "My basic finding suggests a fundamental conflict between the moral and ethical standards put forward by almost every society and the aggressive tendencies resulting from testosterone. Indeed, in most societies, those standards are necessary precisely to counter those tendencies. In societies without sufficient internal standards, externally imposed moral structures might be needed, as societies giving in to those tendencies completely have usually been those who caused the greatest misery to the world."

Sirius nodded. "Can you give some specific examples?

"Certainly. Take the British. Over the centuries, this one aggressive nation has invaded nearly 90 percent of the world's 195 countries. An astonishing figure. Now, of course, both internal and external moral standards would prevent this from happening." The Professor clasped her hands before continuing.

"And currently around the globe, there are over forty armed conflicts. War crimes are a common feature of these conflicts, where the most aggressive and ugly instincts of mankind are given free rein. In these situations, externally imposed moral and ethical standards are necessary to stop further atrocities."

"Would you agree that testosterone encourages selfishness?"

"A certain degree of selfishness and competitive behavior is necessary for survival, but too much damages the community that individuals depend on."

Sirius nodded. "Go on, Professor Allen, did you find a solution to this problem?"

"I explored the ethics of potentially reducing the testosterone levels of the species," Professor Allen said. "There is an issue of freedom of choice and 'naturalness' to set against the need to do it. Although this type of eugenics is morally questionable, I did conclude that unless we deal with this physical element, nothing is likely to change in practical terms."

"So in your expert opinion, you're saying that mankind is incapable of living in harmony with both itself and the wider environment?" Sirius sent.

Professor Allen took a few moments to reply. "Yes, I suppose I am."

"Tell me, Professor, would you say humans are a moral species?"

Again, the academic paused. "It would depend upon which moral standards you use, and which members of our species you then apply them to." She sighed. "In general, though, no. Almost every approach to morality argues against the killing of other people, but there are still murders. There are also many arguments against the destruction of the world around us, the exploitation of others, and the manipulation of the weak, but humans have done that to each other throughout history and are doing so still."

"Thank you," Sirius pulsed before addressing the court. "So you see, humanity represents a danger to all around it. It does not live up to its own moral standards, and indeed it cannot. To do so would require fundamental changes in the species."

Sirius stepped back to its narrow perch and edged onto it as Vega walked to the witness box to take over the questioning. Professor Allen loosened her neck scarf.

"Tell me, Professor Allen, can the destruction of an entire intelligent species be justified? Even if that species potentially represents a threat to everything around it?"

Professor Allen gave Vega's words as much serious thought as she had the previous questions. It didn't seem to touch her that she was discussing whether she and everyone around her could be morally killed.

"If 'utilitarian' is stretched to include other life-forms on this planet and beyond, there is certainly an argument in favor of what you ask," Professor Allen said. "But we must also remember that utilitarian arguments can be used to justify acts we know to be evil. Why should I not murder a stranger to give away his organs to save more lives?"

"If we were to decide to remove humanity from this planet, would this action be considered moral?" Vega asked, the translucent fingers on its right hand rising and falling.

"An argument could be made, but I would think of it as a fundamentally immoral act with an untenable justification." Professor Allen paused. "Which in turn brings up questions about the moral authority of a trial such as this. Essentially, you have declared your authority to convene this trial based on the social contract of Galactic Law, and have failed to demonstrate humanity's implied consent."

Vega nodded. "Thank you, Professor."

Above the judge's chair, the bright sphere of the Supreme pulsed like a heartbeat. No one there could guess what effect, if any, the philosopher's arguments had had on it.

## Chapter Twenty-Three

Jake and Sarah had been waiting in the circular control room for well over an hour. After first talking to Marina, they'd walked farther up the corridor and in less than thirty seconds had arrived at the sealed aperture. Jake had pulsed the door open to reveal the coruscating energy of the Pyramid on the pedestal in the center of the room.

It felt odd to be able to roam freely around the ship, but the aliens didn't seem to care about their absence from the trial. They were just the insurance, the moral sop in the event of total genocide.

"Do you think we can actually pull this off?" Sarah asked.

That was the question. When Jake had contacted Marina again and she'd outlined Gemini's plan to do another download, it seemed vaguely plausible. But that had changed when she'd started going into the details. How was he supposed to force an alien computer with his mind to delete the existing data and download a fresh batch? Let alone do all this and not be caught by the aliens. Still, he did his best to project confidence.

"What other choice do we have?" he asked.

"We could wait for the outcome of the trial," Sarah suggested, her eyes widening.

Jake stopped and looked at her. "Could we really risk it, knowing what it would mean if we lost?"

Sarah shook her head. "No, I guess not."

"Let me check in again." Jake shut his eyes and concentrated.

Marina's blue hair and porcelain face shimmered into his mindscape. Each time they communicated, the telepathic connection strengthened, although her voice remained faint.

"Jake," she sent, "it's time to try and interface with the computer. The guys think it should activate just through your psychic connection, but try to feel as much like an alien as you can."

"That's it?" Jake asked, incredulous.

"Yes," Marina sent. "Then once you're in, you can work out how to wipe the data it already has and, when we're ready, to start downloading again."

It didn't sound easy. How would he even connect with the Pyramid in the first place? He took a deep breath and tried to extend his mind toward it as he did when communicating telepathically.

Nothing. The Pyramid flickered with light but gave no indication that Jake had affected it. He focused and sent a pulse of energy, the way he'd done to open the sealed aperture, and then tried forming a welcome and directing it across, but the alien computer remained untouched by his mind.

"Maybe there's a password after all," Jake said aloud. He decided to ask Marina, who quickly came back to him.

"The guys say to try 'password,' '123456,' and the names of the likely users. Yes, I know it sounds silly."

Jake tried them, one by one. He tried to think of anything he'd heard about the aliens. He tried "Pleiades." He tried "Startoucher."

"None of it's working," he complained to Sarah.

Sarah took his hand in hers, and the sensation of her skin on his reminded Jake of why they were doing this. She lifted his palm and pressed it flat against the Pyramid.

"Now try."

Jake wanted to argue that it couldn't be so simple, but maybe it could. After all, the aliens touched the Pyramid sometimes when they operated it. He pulsed energy through his hand into the alien machine. The Pyramid flickered more rapidly and then began to glow.

Jake entered a pristine sapphire-blue dimension. His visionary space filled with thousands of grids of light stacked upon each other, each one containing an infinity of points.

He reached out again for Marina's consciousness.

"I'm in."

When Sirius called the president of China to the stand, the world held its breath. Even the one million people amassed in Tiananmen Square were silenced by the solemn expression on his face. The president stepped into the witness box and held the necklet in his hands but made no move to put it on.

"I do not recognize the authority of this court," he said, shrewd eyes peering at the alien. "The only authority is the collective will of the people, expressed through the Party."

"And do you truly believe that?" Sirius sent. "This is an opportunity to demonstrate it to your people. Say it with the necklet in place, and they will know you are serious."

The president grimaced and put the necklet on, the blip of light circling above his red cashmere sweater and white shirt collar.

"You are the president of the most populous country on this planet?" Sirius pulsed.

"I am."

"And you act for the benefit of all of those people?"

The president paused. "For as many as possible."

"Including those who dissent?"

"There will always be those who act to undermine the most appropriate forms of government. Our form of communism represents the best—" the president fell silent as the words were choked off.

"And with this communism, is it not true that your country no longer clings to the ideals it once held?" Sirius asked.

The president looked around, then nodded. "Yes."

"Because with your nation, and all others, the system put in place to try to overcome social inequality is changed by those with the greatest thirst for power." Sirius turned to the pulsing sphere of the Supreme. "The same pattern has repeated itself throughout their history. A desire for a better way of living, followed by new groups assuming control and oppressing those controlled."

He returned his attention to the president of China. "True or false, your cities are massively overpopulated?"

The president seemed to be regretting his decision to put the necklet on. "Yes."

"And as a result, your pollution levels are among the highest in the world?"

"Our people have the right to advance," the president said. "Why should Western countries go through the process of industrialization unchecked but then try and prevent us from following them?"

"What about the well-being of the environment?" Sirius asked, staring directly at the president without blinking. "Do you believe the type of rapid growth your country has experienced will be sustainable in the longer term?"

Another pause. "No."

"Isn't it also true that many other countries around the world face similar problems?" Sirius asked. "That many other places exist with cities growing out of control, where the water is poisoned, where the air itself is ruined by factories and unscrupulous businessmen?"

The president of China stood even more stiffly. "It is."

Sirius addressed the court again. "Humans are a danger to this world. As a self-aware species incapable of evolving beyond their current stasis, humans are a danger simply by existing in such large numbers. Simply by wanting to be, and to have."

Sirius walked slowly back to its narrow seat, its body stooped as though fatigued. The alien edged fully onto its narrow perch, and its thin legs once again dangled above the floor.

Vega got up and stepped to the front as the president of China tucked the loose collar of his shirt back underneath his red sweater.

"You've admitted that some of world's cities have problems," Vega sent. "Is it true that many countries, including your own, are investing heavily in trying to find solutions for those problems?"

"We are," the president said, for once happy to answer.

"Is it also true there are now whole cities being designed to fit in much better with their environments?"

"It is."

Vega went on. "You will, of course, acknowledge the significant challenges in building such cities when there are so many people on this planet?"

"I do," the president said. He pinched the bridge of his nose and gave a wan smile. "Believe me, no one understands the difficulties associated with such a large population as I do. Yes, I have both the responsibility and the privileges of power, but I am also interested in helping those in my country. I do not want poisoned rivers for my people."

He looked Vega in the eye. "And now I have a question for you. Why have you not given us the means to overcome these problems? It is obvious from the way you dealt with the attacking planes, and from your presence here, that you have vastly superior technology. And, if what you say is true, you are also responsible for placing us here. So why have you done nothing to help your creation?"

Sirius cut in, not giving Vega a chance to answer. "This proceeding is not about us but about the potential threat mankind poses. Please confine your answers to this matter and nothing more."

But the president had made his point, and he received no further questions from Vega.

Gemini had hacked many computers over the years. Government systems, obviously. The Pentagon's e-mail was easy. But they'd done much more, partly to uncover everything they could about aliens, but mostly to test their skills and see what was possible.

They'd hacked research institutes and universities with supposedly secure encryption networks. They'd made a major retailer's delivery drones play pass the parcel with fragile boxes, and hacked a GPS app to see just how far out of his way they could take the CEO who'd produced it before he resorted to using a map.

But hacking an alien supercomputer was new, and Marina could feel the guys' excitement as their hands flew across the keys of their laptops like frenzied concert pianists. A small group of hardcore hackers worked alongside them, spread on the floor of the tent amid a tangle of cables. Connected to Jake, Marina had squeezed herself into a corner while she relayed the guy's latest thoughts about how to perform the miracle required.

"I'm in," Jake pulsed, the words loud and crisp in her mind.

"He's gained access!" Marina exclaimed. "What should he do now?"

The assembled throng looked up as Billy swiped the hair from his eyes.

"He needs to delete the previous download."

"The guys say try and find the old data and delete it," Marina sent.

"I'm staring at layers and layers of grids, each one with thousands of tiny points of light. Any ideas?"

Marina passed on his message, and Gemini crossed their arms in unison.

"Nice," Adam grinned. "So that's the future of computing. One of those points must be the download, the alien equivalent of a file or folder."

"It's just a question of working out which," Billy explained, blinking rapidly.

Marina sent across Gemini's comments and then added. "Jake, this is a computer controlled by psychic aliens, so maybe you just have to tell it what you want it to do."

Billy and Adam uncrossed their arms and adjusted their baseball caps before tapping again furiously at their laptops. Jake would get in touch once he'd found the needle in the aliens' haystack.

The army of hackers across the planet continued to attack the unsavory sections of the web, those dark pockets hidden away from an unsuspecting public. File by file, server by server, white hat hackers, black hat, blue hat, gray hat, and any other color you could think of, scrubbing out terabytes of dirty digital footprints.

Marina gazed through the front of the tent at the majestic alien ship perfectly still in the air and then scanned the groups of people clustered in the desert night. She started to worry. At first, the sheer excitement of Jake and Gemini's plan had carried her away, but now her instincts told her that they should be doing nothing. Just being there for each other and waiting for the outcome of the trial would be enough.

Jake scanned the vast grids of light stretching across his mindscape as Sarah's voice cut into his consciousness.

"Jake, are you OK?"

"I'm fine, but I need to find the download."

"Try navigating in the way that you did to locate Marina."

Sarah's spoken voice was soothing, and her idea seemed like a good place to start. Jake put the focal point of his awareness on the top grid, and immediately he rose upward and started to fly high above it. He was looking down over a vast sapphire field with brilliant gridlines and intersecting points stretching in all directions. Jake focused on the horizon, and the grid moved slowly beneath him, and as he pushed his mind forward, the luminous lines began to race past, and he felt like an eagle streaking across the pristine landscape of the Pyramid.

He slowed down to look at the points of light. As he swooped lower, he could see that each had a tiny pulse, millions of points beating in unison, an immense living network of unfathomable beauty and complexity.

Jake tried to think of a way to locate the download, and remembered the images cascading across the ethereal screens in the control room. There had been stock market data from New York and a time lapse of orchids flowering. He selected the orchids and began to visualize their delicate purple petals and long stamens.

The luminous grid swirled, and he dropped through it, skydiving into a sapphire mist lit by blanket lightning as his consciousness plunged downward. He raced down the stack of grids until without warning, he flew high above a grid identical to the first. To the far right, he could see a tiny point of light pulsing more brightly than the rest.

Jake navigated to it and then moved downward until directly above it. The point of light enlarged, and he could see the purple orchid opening within it.

He reached out for Sarah and Marina.

"I think I've found it," he sent.

"Great," Marina replied, "but... are you sure this is such a good idea?"

"You're asking now?"

"I'm worried. Your messing with a machine you don't understand, and Billy and Adam and god knows who else are doctoring the net. Then there are those psychic aliens who must be aware something is going on. There's a real chance of messing this up. Certainly of getting caught."

"There's no time to explain, but we can't make anything worse than it already is. We're doing this. Ask Gemini about deleting the file."

"What does the file look like?" Sarah asked.

"Like a circle of light pulsing brightly, on an impossibly large grid of what must be millions of other points."

"Jake," Marina eventually sent, "we all agree that the only way must be with some kind of psychic command to the Pyramid."

He looked at the pulsing point of light below him, focused, and sent a clear instruction to the alien computer to delete it. Nothing happened. He tried again, concentrating for longer before pulsing the instruction as strongly as he could. The circle of light continued to pulse unaltered.

"It's not deleting," he said aloud.

"Maybe," Sarah suggested, "you could visualize it, make it happen in your mind, and then the Pyramid might respond."

Jake studied the point of light and then imagined its diameter receding. Immediately minuscule flares of phosphorescence shot out from the circle as it reduced in size. Encouraged, Jake kept visualizing the circle reducing, until with a final fizz of phosphorescence, it vanished completely.

The entire grid shimmered and rearranged itself, and a new point of light took its place. He visualized the orchid again as well as the stock market chart, and received no indication that the data those images represented were anywhere within the alien machine.

Jake lifted his hand from the Pyramid and blinked open his eyes to see Sarah waiting for him. He collapsed into her arms.

"Not your average day in the office," she said, smiling.

After a minute or so, Jake stepped back and stroked her hair. "Let me update Marina, and then we just need to wait for Gemini to green light the download."

For the next witness in the courtroom, Vega eased its body off its narrow seat to step forward and call Amita. She got up from her simple chair and walked gracefully to the front in her purple sari and bangles. Amita took the crystal necklet from the three-fingered hand of the alien, and hesitated before placing it around her neck. She glanced at Paige, who gave her a reassuring smile, and then stepped onto the stand.

"Amita," Vega sent. "So far we have heard from experts and leaders. You come from a small village in rural India, and are a mother with two children. There are many mothers in your country and beyond who share the same concerns and challenges. Can you tell us what you think of the world, please?"

Amita tried to figure out what she should say but then realized it would be better to just be honest.

"Mostly, I do not think of the world," she said. Her words immediately relayed in English on the feed from the wide screen. "I know that perhaps I should, but there is no time to do so. Mostly, I must think of my sons, my husband, and the people around me. I must find a way to make a living, when life is hard. I think... I think perhaps governments, those with power, spend so much time thinking about big solutions, they sometimes forget about people."

Vega nodded. "You live in what the developed countries might consider very poor conditions, don't you?"

Amita knew in absolute terms this was probably true. Her family possessed no land, and her husband worked as a laborer. Certainly, her youngest child, Sanjay, talked a lot about money. "It is all I have ever known. Sometimes, you just have to try to do the best you can."

"But you must be angry about the conditions you live in? That sometimes there is not enough money to buy food or medicines," Vega sent. "You must hate the people responsible, or those who are rich enough to buy everything they need?"

"Who should I hate?" Amita asked. "Should I hate all the people who have more than I do? Should I hate anyone who comes from a different background?"

"But some of your politicians blame the rich and privileged for widespread inequality," the alien sent, its large black eyes narrowing.

Amita smiled and shook her head. "Politicians, mostly they are looking for someone to blame because they can't make things better. It's easier to make people angry than to help them. Generosity and meanness are found in all castes and in all parts of our society."

"You have heard the evidence presented here about the damage to the environment. Do you believe you should be doing more to save the planet?" Vega asked.

Amita spread her hands as her bangles jingled. "How much do I take from the planet? Perhaps it is too much, but no one has shown me a better way."

"But what about mankind as a whole, should your species be doing more to look after its environment?" Vega asked.

"Yes, we should care for nature as she cares for us. The problem is that we take more than we need and don't give enough back."

The short alien paused and then pulsed its next question softly.

"You have heard the story of humanity's origins and of its place in the greater galaxy, and you have seen the evidence presented against it. Given all the facts, do you think humanity should be saved?"

Amita took a breath. "I think it is easy to talk about humanity as if we are all one entity. It is easy to cluster us together and forget about the individual. But even when you have billions of people, each one of those still counts. Each life is precious, a gift to be cherished and nurtured. Having lost two young daughters to illness, I know that only too well."

Amita rested her hands on the top of the metallic witness stand. "Before this trial came along, my fears were not about what would happen to the world a hundred years from now. Perhaps they should have been, but instead, I worried about my sons, and how they would turn out. I worried about what kind of lives they would have and if they would be happy."

"And how did you think their lives would go?" Vega asked.

Amita smiled. "I had hope. That is all a mother can do sometimes. It is all anyone can do. We have to believe the past is only a record, and not a prison, because if we do not, what is the point of even breathing?"

"So you believe humanity can change?" Vega sent.

"I believe people are always changing," Amita said. "If you give them hope, they can achieve great things. I think that, every day, often in difficult conditions, people do what they can to lead a good life. Many want to change, they just need to have direction to know how."

She kept going. "The question is not whether they can do it but whether you will help them, whether you will even give them the opportunity."

"Thank you, Amita." The alien turned to the Supreme. "I have no further questions for this witness." Vega walked back to its seat as Sirius stepped forward to stand in front of the witness box. Amita frowned slightly as she watched the alien approach.

Sirius gave a small nod. "You have talked to my colleague about the past being just a record, and about how life can change. You have hope for the future, despite the evidence from the past demonstrating that nothing has changed."

The alien glanced at the other witnesses before turning back to Amita.

"Is it not true that your family comes from a farming community?"

"Yes, we do."

"Can you tell the court what happened to your uncle two years ago?"

Amita's eyes watered and she gazed downward.

"You may take your time," the alien sent.

"Well... he committed suicide." She wiped her eyes with a fold of her purple sari.

"And why was that?"

"The debts had piled up, and his harvests failed."

"What crop was he growing?"

Amita sighed. "Cotton."

"Do you know why his debts had piled up?"

"Not all the details, but everyone knows the seeds are more expensive now, and unlike before, you can't save them. You have to buy them every year."

"Yes, that's right. A world bank structural adjustment forced your country to allow foreign seed producers to sell their products. These seeds are genetically engineered to produce plants with nonrenewable traits. In many places, yields have fallen. In addition, wealthier countries have given billions of dollars in subsidies to their own cotton farmers, undercutting global prices."

The alien turned toward the Supreme. "During the last twenty years, over two hundred thousand farmers have taken their own lives in this witness's country due to the exploitative behavior of other humans. Although this witness has hope for the future, the data argues against her. I have no further questions."

The sphere of the Supreme glowed gently as a rainbow of colors flickered across its surface. "The witness may stand down."

Amita walked back to her chair, the blip of light circling around her necklet. The president of the USA looked uncomfortable, and Paige stood up to greet her with a hug.

As midnight approached, the feeling of pressure inside Gemini's tent began to lessen as they received encouraging updates on the massed attempt to doctor the web. Coupled with Marina telling them sometime earlier that Jake had managed to delete the previous download, the mood of their small camp had become increasingly buoyant.

Still, she wondered if the impossible really was achievable.

"How can we delete enough information to make a difference?" she asked Adam while standing and combing her fingers through her short hair. "There must be so much out there."

"Think of it this way," Adam said. "Many of the guys working on this have links to all sorts of organizations and—"

"Like who?" Marina asked.

Billy coughed. "Mafia and stuff. Triads, drug cartels. Even terrorists. These days everyone's online."

"And these organizations use the net to run their businesses and store info."

"Which means," Billy went on, "right now in the USA, Mexico, China, Russia, or wherever, zillions of techies are finishing deleting files. Many had already put viruses in place to wipe out evidence in case of a raid by the police, which only needed to be activated. Some machines were just turned off."

"Too true," Adam said, smiling. "Whole server farms in the Ukraine have been completely shut down."

Billy blinked from underneath his messy helmet of hair and looked up. "We're trying to sway things by just over 1 percentage point."

On the floor under the picnic table, Marina saw a cable connection blow in a shower of sparks. A small horde of geeks descended on it, duct tape in hand. As they finished and got up from the floor, Adam and Billy studied the screens of their laptops before turning to each other and slapping a high five.

"We're nearly in position," Adam said. "Just give us thirty minutes."

## Chapter Twenty-Four

The shaman slipped out of his gossamer hammock a few seconds before Vega edged from its seat and stepped to the front of the courtroom. The shaman walked slowly toward the alien and accepted the crystal necklet willingly. He put it around his neck with the grace he might have used in one of his ceremonies and then waited calmly in the sinuous metallic stand.

"You are the leader, both religious and temporal, of your village in Brazil, are you not?"

The shaman nodded, the horizontal lines of black paint on his face nodding with him.

"Our analysis of your tribe's ancestral territories shows many changes during your lifetime. Can you give us your views on the world and of humanity's place within it?" Vega sent.

The shaman waited for several seconds, but if the strangeness of the situation affected him, he did not show it.

"What shall I say?" he said, the words translated automatically. "Shall I tell you how there is less jungle every day? I go into it to connect with the spirits, and every time there is pain. I find fields of tree stumps cleared by fire or by machines. _Every time_."

He made those final words sound like a curse as he spoke, but if there was anger, it passed quickly. He crossed his bare arms over his muscled torso.

"I have seen army ants hunting, running in a sea of red and pulling apart anything in their path. The ants know nothing of the destruction they cause, but they must feed the colony. Humans are like this too often today. Once, the jungle was vibrant, but people need to eat. They need to make _money_." Another word that somehow became a curse when the shaman said it. "And so the wild spaces die."

The shaman looked around. "For as long as there have been people, they have tried to control nature. A man from a palm oil company tried to explain this to me once, just before they burned a section of the jungle useless to them if they could not plant it in neat rows.

"It is how we are, as surely as the ants are ants. But saying they are ants and must live is no consolation to the creatures caught in their path."

The shaman's hands balled into fists. "Humanity is shape-shifting toward an uncertain future. I have talked with the forest and received visions of a barren world. Already, many animals of the world have started to die off. They have died from the poisons we have put out, from our voracious appetites, or simply because we need their space."

"But is it really necessary to remove mankind from this planet?" Vega asked, frowning.

"People talk as if it would be some disaster," the shaman said. "But our myths tell of a great cleansing that will lead to new life. I have also seen this possible future."

"What else have you seen?" Vega asked, its obsidian eyes widening.

"I have seen life," the shaman explained. "I have seen life flourishing on this planet. I have seen life on other worlds in visions and dreams. So much life, growing in ways most of us could not begin to comprehend."

"But humanity—" Vega began.

"Is just one facet of the whole," the shaman said. "If a part of a plant is diseased, then we cut it off to save the rest. Our biggest flaw is that we think we are something special. We act as though the universe is there for us. Yet it should be we who are there for the universe. We should be contributing to it, not only taking from it."

The shaman looked around. "If the world is to be cleansed, there is nothing to be scared of. I have glimpsed the greater spirit behind the universe. If it is necessary for us to return to it so that the whole may live on, this is simply what must happen."

He stopped then while the rest of the witnesses stared at him with a mixture of betrayal and understanding. Around the world people watched in silence, many feeling discomfort as they acknowledged that at least some of the shaman's accusations might be true.

"We must stop," the shaman said. "We must find a way, and if we cannot, then perhaps we must _be_ stopped."

He stepped down without waiting to be dismissed, and neither Vega or Sirius moved to halt him. It appeared they had no further questions.

Vega cut a lonely and dejected figure as it walked back to its narrow perch.

In the circular control room of the ship, Jake and Sarah were watching the shaman finish his testimony on a single gossamer screen. After recuperating from deleting the downloaded file, Jake had managed to pulse a screen into being in midair and then search psychically within the room for a feed from the trial. It was a lot easier than entering the Pyramid.

Jake could feel Marina trying to contact him, and he wiped the screen away with a flick of his fingers.

"Jake," Marina sent, her voice faint. "We're ready. Start the fresh download."

"It's time," he said to Sarah and then stepped forward to press his hand flat against the surface of the Pyramid. It felt like a living structure pulsing beneath it, shifting around the edges of his mind, existing in dimensions only his unlocked talents could touch.

"I understand it," he said. "I can set this in motion. I know it."

Sarah placed her hand on his arm, and again, her touch anchored him. She held a small fragment of his being safe simply through her point of contact, while the rest of him was free to flow through the alien machine.

The Pyramid blazed into life, and the sapphire-blue dimension filled his mind. He gazed at the thousands of stacked grids of light and then rose up to the top and flew as before, racing across the vast network of intersecting points. He swooped down through grid after grid, free-falling in azure mist and flashes of light, and then raced upward again, enjoying the exhilarating freedom of the pristine landscape.

Jake floated above the top grid of points and visualized beams of light flowing out of the Pyramid and through the pearly walls of the alien spaceship. He visualized streamers of energy exploding into the world, connecting to the networks in the desert camp, shooting beyond to telephone towers, and farther still, to the satellites high above.

His awareness was sucked back into the Pyramid as the grid of light points curved upward to envelop him in a tube of luminous intersecting lines. He raced through the tunnel, and it split into two, one curving to the right, the other to the left, and his consciousness streamed along both. The two tunnels became four, then eight, sixteen... and each time his mind split with them as it continued to fragment.

Jake felt his consciousness being pulled in a hundred different directions, too many to hold together. It felt as though his brain was being pushed through a thin wire mesh. In that instant, he felt he might be pulled to shreds, left as wreckage by his attempts to control a force he had no training in dealing with.

"The guys say it's working!" Marina sent.

Her voice was enough to stop him from passing out. Jake tore his hand from the alien machine and staggered backward. His eyelids felt stuck together, and when he did finally open them, the control room swirled around and around.

"Jake!" Sarah said. "Look at me."

"I'm OK. I think." He blinked a few times before managing to focus on the circular prints of Sarah's green dress. He looked at her concerned face and smiled.

"Marina says it's working."

It _was_ working. Now, they just had to hope it would be enough.

Vega summoned Paige to the witness stand next. She'd been thinking about what to say during the time the other witnesses were speaking. She'd listened to them as they'd given their evidence, and they all sounded far more expert than she could ever aspire to be. The presidents of China and the United States, the shaman and the pope... The kinds of people she'd only ever seen on TV! Even Amita had a life and a family and years of living behind her. Paige... who was she really?

Paige readjusted the hairband on her blonde ponytail before climbing out of her deckchair and walking forward to take the crystal necklet from the alien's translucent hand. She put it on, and the blip of light circled lazily above the large exclamation mark on her graphic white T-shirt. She wondered how her freckles would look on the numerous screens of the world.

"Do you have anything you wish to say?" Vega asked her.

"I don't... I don't really know," Paige said.

"Let's start like this," Vega sent. "What do you think about the world you have been born into it?"

"I think it's getting pretty bad," Paige said, and she knew it sounded too vague. Like she didn't know what she was talking about. But she _did_. Hadn't she spent plenty of time researching her causes to enable her to protest about them? Hadn't she written letters and e-mails to everyone who mattered?

"I think a lot of other people know how bad things are getting," Paige said. "We all hear about the damage we're doing to the environment, about wars and the terrible ways we treat one another." She looked over at the president. "I sent a letter to your office once about the dangers of fracking. I didn't get a reply."

She paused. "We protest because we feel like that's the only thing we can do. We tell someone, and we hope they know what they're doing. It's like with your parents. You think, 'they're adults, they must know what they're doing,' and half the time they're making it up as they go along. You do your best to make a difference, but really, most people are too busy living their lives."

She looked down at her feet, then back up toward Vega. "People need to change."

"Do you think they _can_ change?" Vega asked.

Paige thought about it, and nodded. "I hope so. I mean, why have I spent my time protesting if I don't think people can change? What good would it do? We protest about things because we figure that if enough people realize we want them to change, then they might.

"I mean, I know it's asking a lot. I'm not a kid. I know we need to take some pretty drastic action to deal with climate change, and we need a better way for us all to get along. We probably also have to change society to make sure life isn't so materialistic. So it's not just about stuff."

"And you think that's possible?" Sirius interjected. The alien managed to convey plenty of doubt. Vega didn't object to the unexpected question.

"When it comes to changing the world, the big problem for most people is that their reason to do something is never bigger than their reason not to," Paige said, and threw her hands up in the air.

"They never feel like they're going to achieve anything, or if they do, it's going to cost them too much to do it. They might lose their job, or hurt their friends, or something.

"But now," she went on, "we've had this wake-up call. We know the things we need to do, and we know the consequences of not doing so. It's not a case of making changes because something could happen in a hundred years' time. It's a case of our life on this planet literally coming to an end.

"I think people want to be better," Paige said. "I think if you give them a chance, most people are basically honest and good and helpful. We can be better than we are."

With that, she realized, she'd run out of words.

"No further questions," Vega sent, and stepped back.

Even Sirius looked content. Maybe because Paige had started off by highlighting the problems, and the alien believed its case was as good as proven. It waved her down from the witness stand, and she returned to sit with others.

Jake's connection to the Pyramid persisted even after taking his hand off and staggering back. He could sense the alien computer begin to shift and search. It powered up, stretching outward with a crystalline awareness along dimensions Jake had only just learned existed. Its intangible circuits fired up through the world's wider networks, rapidly flowing through satellites and cell towers, speeding through cables and nodes, splitting into millions of separate lines until it had permeated the whole internet and turned it into one facet of its immense power.

Perhaps the lingering connection to the alien machine would fade completely once he'd moved out of the control room.

"We should get back to the trial," Jake said to Sarah.

She nodded. "Are you sure this is working?"

Jake stretched his mind into the Pyramid. Unimaginably fast torrents of information cascaded into the machine faster than the speed of light.

"It's working," he assured Sarah.

They walked out of the control room and along the tubed corridor, the tiny neurons beneath the crystalline surface of the walls fizzing softly as they passed. Sarah stopped Jake, her eyes flashing as she threw her hands around his neck and kissed him.

"What was that for?" Jake asked.

"Just because I want you to know that whatever happens, I'm here," Sarah said.

Jake felt the connection to the Pyramid dissipate as he held her in his arms. He stepped back and could see the chunky stone of her turquoise pendant hanging just below the neckline of her dress and the ends of her wavy hair falling across bare shoulders.

"It will work," Jake said. "It has to."

Sarah kissed him again.

"And this one?" he asked.

"Does it have to be for anything?" Sarah replied.

"No," Jake admitted. "I guess not."

As they walked slowly back to the courtroom, Jake thought about the lack of interference from the aliens. It had almost been too easy, and the fresh download should finish soon. But if the aliens had been aware of any aspect of their plan, surely they could, and would, have stopped it?

They returned during a break, and Jake was grateful because it meant they weren't interrupting the proceedings. Vega and Sirius were working quietly at the console and looked over as if to ask where they had been for the last few hours. Even the pulsing focus of the Supreme seemed to shift a little. The witnesses talked quietly among themselves, and only the American president glared at them.

Did it matter that he and Sarah looked guilty? No. It didn't.

After ten minutes or so, the two aliens stepped away from the console. It appeared this trial would follow the traditional route of summing up. Jake hoped Vega was about to up its game, because from what he'd seen of the witnesses earlier, the case in favor of humanity lagged far behind. Even with doctoring the internet, they were going to need every available edge to turn this around.

Vega sat down on its seat, and Sirius walked to the front of the courtroom to speak first. Its thin body suddenly seemed burdened with the weight of what it had to say. In a normal court case, this would have been a moment of triumph for the prosecution, perhaps even for gloating, but Sirius's demeanor became even graver than normal.

Jake wondered why. A sudden thought flashed through his mind. Was this trial being broadcast beyond Earth? Did Sirius and Vega's species need to demonstrate to others in the galaxy just how seriously they were taking this?

"We have heard only a small amount of evidence in this trial," Sirius began. "But in addition, with everything we have learned about humanity from its own records, our conclusions must be clear. Humanity is a danger to both itself, and to the wider universe."

Sirius pointed to the witnesses. "The president of their most powerful nation has admitted that, throughout history, all forms of government have failed. The president of their most populous nation has admitted that their addiction to fossil fuels is poisoning the planet. Earth's leading particle physicist has even agreed that mankind's defining trait could be its inclination to destroy."

Jake could feel the alien building up momentum as it pulsed its words more forcefully.

"Their most prominent religious leader was not surprised that sixty-five million people have been killed in the name of religion. Their preeminent ethical philosopher admits a utilitarian argument can be made for removing humanity. And then we have the voice of one who has received visions from the universal consciousness. He feels mankind might be beyond saving."

Jake could spot the parts Sirius had carefully left out. He wondered who else could. Hopefully, the Supreme. Jake looked at the brilliant sphere of light pulsing above the judge's chair as Sirius continued.

"Despite our best intentions, humanity has proved both a mistake and a threat. If it is allowed to survive, many life-forms on this planet will die. If it is allowed to expand into the wider galaxy, it will bring with it the attitudes it has held for thousands of Earth years. It will continue to believe everything exists for its benefit. That its advantage and comfort are sufficient justifications for destruction elsewhere. That, ultimately, it can impose itself on everything around it through force."

Sirius's messages took on a somber note. "I do not seek the removal of a species from a world lightly. I know what it entails. But not to do it would be to commit a grave error. Vega and I are responsible for the creation of this menace. We must undo what we have done before the species develops the technology to prevent us."

Sirius returned to its seat, and Vega stepped forward to take over.

"Sirius wishes to correct its mistakes. Perhaps it feels it is the only one capable of doing so, since it does not wish to offer humanity the opportunity." Vega paused. "I will not pretend to be proud of our experiment. It has not achieved a tenth of what it could have. But if this is true, then as Sirius has stated, we must share at least some of the blame."

It was a more downbeat start to its closing argument than Jake would have gone for, but perhaps it was the right approach.

"Sirius has summed up part of what we have heard," Vega sent. "But not all of it. We also heard from witnesses who believe that mankind could learn from what is happening here. There are those who felt we should help humanity rather than remove it from this planet. Perhaps we should."

Vega looked over to where the witnesses were sitting, intently watching.

"Our youngest witness spoke about the possibility of change. Nobody is pretending it would be easy. But it is possible. There is almost a 50 percent chance of success, and this could have increased during the trial. The Supreme will assess all the variables. Humanity is now aware of its origins and will have a much broader perspective.

"Taking this into account with the witness statements, I strongly believe humanity should be given the opportunity to change."

The room fell into silence as Vega stepped back. In this deep silence, the Supreme pulsated, its energies growing and fading. Its consciousness became palpable, Jake felt it washing over him in waves and throughout the alien ship.

_"Enough has happened. Enough has been said. Now, we will decide."_

## Chapter Twenty-Five

Around the world, people waited.

In a remote valley in Bali, a farmer turned off the radio, and walked with his wife and two young daughters out of their thatched house and along the jungle paths to their rice fields. The rain before lunch had soaked into the earth and freshened the plants, and now in the late-afternoon sun, the valley shone with lush greens and browns as the moisture evaporated into the air.

The two girls skipped ahead, while their parents followed behind. When the family reached their plot of land, the farmer took out a pouch of tobacco and a long thin pipe and packed its small bowl tightly. The girls laughed and jumped up and down by his side, while his wife hitched up her skirt and waded out into the middle of the ripening sheaths of rice. A thin curl of smoke rose from his pipe as the farmer rested on his heels, scanning the mountains in the horizon and the local villages dotted in the valleys below. His wife waded farther out into the field, and began to sing, her clear, mournful voice calling to the ancient gods. The farmer listened and thought about all the people in the world waiting right now to see what would happen next. Those old and alone, scared and with no one to comfort them. Families huddled around their televisions, larger groups gathered in village halls, meeting places, cinemas, and schools. And then the mass of people in the great cities, immense crowds he could barely imagine, waiting and watching their giant screens.

He dragged deeply on his pipe, and as he exhaled, his wife's beautiful voice seemed to carry him up to the sky.

In Central Park in New York, people lit candles, passing the flame from one hand to the next until thousands lit up the night with an ancient kind of light, proclaiming nothing more than the holders' existence, and their hope of it continuing. In Rome, the city reeled from the pope's testimony, some seeking solace in churches, others contemplating the menu of a possible final meal.

In the desert night, Marina left the tent and walked over to the edge of the shields around the ship. Many others had the same idea and gazed silently at the majestic toroidal disk suspended in the air, the brilliant white column of light passing through its middle. She pressed her face into the shields, the static charge prickling her skin, and wondered about the world the ship was from. She could feel the consciousness of the Supreme, pulsing beyond the ship in waves, sweeping out across the empty spaces of the desert.

Had they done the right thing? Gemini certainly thought so, but she was worried now, anxious about what might happen. How could they even begin to guess the outcome when the being making the decision verged so completely on the impossible?

Jake studied the Supreme as it pulsed bright and then dark again, and around it, holographic images started to coalesce, shimmering into existence and then vanishing, too fast for the eye to pick out, except where the being of energy paused for no reason that Jake could understand.

"The Supreme is considering its judgment," Vega sent over to him. "There will be a little time before it concludes."

"So, what?" Jake sent back. "It's only thinking?"

Vega shook its head just perceptibly as it worked the controls of the console. "The Supreme is running the analysis of the data gathered before the trial and will then scan the witnesses, learning what it can from their memories and collected consciousness."

Jake thought about what the Supreme might find. It would hopefully find the fresh download, a hastily edited version of the internet designed to show mankind in a better light. When it scanned the witnesses, it would get confirmation of what they'd said in their testimonies. After all, they hadn't been able to lie. And whatever the questioning didn't reveal, the Supreme would uncover.

Surprisingly, Jake felt more confident by the moment. Only one doubt remained in his mind. Would the Supreme see through their manipulation of the aliens' computer? As it verified the available data, would it notice something odd in the pattern? If nothing could be found to compare it to, it shouldn't be a problem.

The holographic images around the Supreme stabilized, slowing here and there with entirely random topics. There were visions of a minor war and then the humanitarian efforts to help those affected. A design for a water filtration system. A recipe for gluten-free cupcakes.

The Supreme's consciousness swept across the room, and Jake could feel the wake of it as it shifted. Tendrils of consciousness reached out in wisps and probing fingers, touching the minds of the witnesses one by one. Somehow, Jake knew the hardest part for the Supreme was interfacing with the human mind without causing harm, toning down its immense power to the point where it could merely whisper through memories, examining without damage.

Jake felt one of the wisps reaching toward him, and he pushed out his own psychic energy in a shield. He did this as an instinctive reflex to protect himself but immediately realized his shield wouldn't hold for a moment against the magnitude of the Supreme.

"You need not worry," the Supreme sent. "You are not one of the witnesses here. Your role is... different."

The wisps moved on, filtering through the witnesses' minds. The holographic images around the Supreme continued to cycle and pause, cycle and pause. Was it working? Jake suspected that if the Supreme was going to spot their ploy, it would have done so by now. Jake would have expected it to denounce them as soon as it uncovered the doctored evidence, or as soon as the wisp had brushed past his mind.

Instead, it continued to work on the evidence, and now bright-white lines formed around it, intersecting and diverging, tangling with one another in ways Jake couldn't begin to make sense of.

"What's going on?" Sarah asked aloud.

Vega answered. "The Supreme is exploring possibilities, tracking the possible outcomes of the events arising from this proceeding. Each line represents a strand of possible future action."

The pattern became more complex, growing denser, and more like a solid wall of light than strings of separate lines as the fragmentations of a being composed of pure energy began to meld. The witnesses watched, mesmerized.

On screens around the world, the only sight was of the Supreme as it analyzed and sifted information, filtering and recombining it in every possible way. It pulsed, making lines of light appear in the air, shifting holographic images around it. If someone had turned their TV on then—and there were still a few people yet to get the message—it would have looked like a weird graphics package put together by TV producers, to document, well... the history of the human race.

Billions watched the lines of possibilities and the shimmering holograms. They saw the witnesses in their assorted chairs, entranced and silent, the blip of light still tracing round their necklets. The shaman swaying in his gossamer hammock. Sirius and Vega working at the console touching buttons as ribbons of colored light spiraled upward in columns to be absorbed by the ceiling.

Around the Supreme, the flickering images and bright lines began to freeze and then slowly fade into the air, leaving a simple pulse of light emanating from the being in the judge's chair. It pulsed up to brightness, then back down to an emptiness like a hole in space.

Across the globe, the religious vigils continued, and more and more people prayed. During the trial, plenty of religious leaders had asked for this, but not all of their followers had responded. As the Supreme continued its deliberations, people started to realize there was nothing else they could do. Their fate was out of their hands, and so they tried to talk to a god or higher power in the hope of making a difference.

Most prayed because they wanted to win the trial. Others were worried about losing and wanted to be ready for what might come next. With the pope's absence, the next most senior cardinal led prayers in the Vatican. Buddhist monks made a last grab for enlightenment, and people talked to deities they hadn't been sure they believed in. Some confessed their sins to the air and sought salvation, because it felt like the right thing to do. Some tried meditating, while others danced or sang in the open air. In temples across India, Hindu priests chanted prayers to Shiva, because who else was appropriate at a time of such potential destruction and change?

Many who weren't religious sought comfort from one another. With calls to relatives, talks with friends, and declarations of love. They shared old memories and future dreams, held hands or sat close, each moment precious and poignant. Sometimes kissing, sometimes tenderly making love. Old slights were forgiven, because it all seemed too fleeting now, but a few unloaded their long-held grudges—the way partners snored in their sleep, the fact they'd both been hanging on because they were afraid of change.

There were end-of-the-world raves in England, Utah, and Singapore. Everywhere a sense of urgency encouraged people to shed their inhibitions. They lined up to base jump and bungee, grabbing the final adrenaline hit before the end. They burst into music stores because they'd always wanted to learn the drums, spreading cacophony. People lived out their fantasies, gathering together in blurs of music, sex, and drugs, determined to obliterate the world in their own way. People joined in a thousand different ways, freaking out quietly, or freaking out in mass disorder.

And somewhere through it all, a rumor started to form, fast as only a rumor could. It passed by word of mouth, by internet, by phone. It would be all right. Someone had done something to help. It became a prayer, a source of hope and comfort. People who didn't believe there might be salvation from above spread the message and latched onto the prospect of a more earthly kind. They didn't like being helpless and wanted to feel like someone had taken control.

In front of the giant screens in New York and Beijing, the silence became absolute. Time slowed to eternity until suddenly the Supreme flickered on the screen and burst into light.

In the courtroom, Jake felt the build-up of energy around the Supreme, saturating the air, thick as honey. His vision started to pixelate like thousands of tiny fireflies swimming in front of his eyes.

He turned to Vega to ask why, but before he could begin to send the question, the energy from the Supreme burst out in a flood of euphoria and connection and overwhelmed him.

He felt utter, instant unity and peace. The only way he kept himself together was because he'd felt this before, the sense of total connectedness to something more than himself. Of the universe stretching out over incomprehensible distances, and of being able to touch any of the points in between. Jake could feel the complete joy of being one with everything, and tears of bliss rolled down his cheeks.

He managed to focus long enough to look across at Sarah, and she shone with energy and possibility. He could see her, both as she was and might be, moments stretching around her in a cloud of potential and movement. He could see the bright beauty of her aura, wrapped around her, flowing in and out as naturally as breath. Jake tried to focus again but quickly became swept up as the waves of euphoria expanded outward.

He felt connected to everyone in the room. To the alien presences of Sirius and Vega. To the unfathomable otherness of the Supreme. Jake could sense the energies of the witnesses, from the bright hope of Paige to the hard determination of the US president.

He could feel the people the Supreme's energy touched, the burst of power across the world flooding their hearts with bliss and connecting them to the universal consciousness in a moment of pure understanding. Within the illuminated tapestry spread out before him, he could feel the reactions of individuals around the world as their beings opened up. An older couple in France melting together in a wave of ecstasy they hadn't felt in years. Monks in a Zen monastery sighing in understanding. He saw people wandering the wild areas of the Earth pausing as events they knew nothing about started to overtake them, tears streaming down their faces as they found themselves saturated with love and connection to vibrant nature around them. He saw people caught up in the middle of raves and parties, calming momentarily as something greater than themselves washed through their minds, bodies and spirits.

Jake surrendered to the experience, feeling Sarah doing the same beside him. Their closeness and emotional connection kept them floating together on what seemed like an infinite ocean of light. Other presences were swimming in this ocean—alien beings so different, so incomprehensible—yet now the waves of connection dissolved all barriers, and for a moment, Jake had a total awareness of other species, other ways of thinking, other ways of existing.

Drifting gently through the ocean of light with Sarah, he saw worlds as far from Earth as anything he could have imagined. Visions of what looked like cities, except these cities were intelligent and self-organizing. Ice fields made from methane, over which creatures moved in boneless locomotion. Beings living in the coronas of stars, light-years of distance away.

The power kept coming, not so much forging connections between them as simply opening up the connections already there. The walls of awareness tumbled down, revealing themselves as simply illusion. Jake forced himself to concentrate on Sarah, looking over to her with a mixture of joy and relief.

She obviously felt the same way. "It has to be good news, doesn't it?" she asked. "They wouldn't give us something this... this _beautiful_ if they were going to destroy us, would they?"

Jake had to agree. This was too amazing to be anything but proof of mankind's innocence.

They'd done it. They'd managed to save the world.

Jake was deep in the connection when the Supreme cut it. It felt like being dropped from an immense height, falling back to reality. Flat and empty, impossibly so, after the sheer level of connectedness and bliss that had flooded through humanity and beyond.

After a taste of such bliss, normal consciousness was almost painful.

An icy chill descended, and the Supreme became empty and dark, a hole in the world from which no light escaped. Everyone in the courtroom stared at it as they tried to work out what it meant. Certainty sat in Jake's chest, heavy as lead, and he knew what it foretold.

"We've lost," he whispered, then turned to Sarah as if hoping she could tell him he was wrong.

She looked far too pale as she whispered back, "Yes, we've lost."

Jake rushed from the sofa to face the black void above the judge's seat. If the Supreme had possessed a physical form, he would have tried to wring answers from it.

"Why?" he insisted. When no answer came, he gathered whatever psychic energy he could, flinging it into the darkness in front of him. " _Why_?"

The emptiness of the Supreme swallowed the energy. It pulled it in with a dense gravity capable of moving worlds. It certainly moved Jake. He felt his conscious mind slipping, falling into the darkness, and once again, the room around him gave way to something... else. Jake stood in emptiness, except the area around him wasn't truly empty, it was the Supreme itself. The whole space enveloped Jake in something totally unknown.

Light flared into being, forming a roughly humanoid shape. Part of Jake knew this was just to give him something to focus on, while the Supreme still remained everywhere else. Even so, he addressed his question to the being of light.

"Why?" he demanded again.

"You did this, Jake," the Supreme replied. For once, the words didn't seem to simply come into being as reality. Instead, they echoed in all directions.

"Me?"

"You and thousands of others. The beings known as Sirius and Vega informed you of the close balance of evidence, and you tried to manipulate that evidence."

His legs buckled. "You knew?"

"I am aware of everything taking place within this ship, including your messages to your friends," the Supreme answered. "You were under observation the whole time."

Jake thought he'd succeeded in shielding himself, but he'd fatally misjudged the Supreme.

"We had no choice," he insisted. "We couldn't just let you make decisions about the future of our whole species without acting. I had to try to save people."

" _You_ had to," the Supreme answered. "You were given an understanding of the universal consciousness, a glimpse of your true identity. But you misused the abilities you'd gained."

"So, what?" Jake said. "You're condemning us all because _I_ cheated?" He thought of all the people who might die. "You're doing all of this because of me?"

"A decision would have been made anyway," the Supreme replied. "Probably mankind would not have survived. This is just more data, more variables, and it's not just you, Jake. But your species tried to subvert the trial, and this act must be taken into account."

Jake swallowed as he realized what the Supreme was telling him.

"You're saying _this_ lost the trial?"

"We will never know what would have happened if your species hadn't acted in the way that it did." The Supreme briefly paused. "However, although the evidence appeared to be finely balanced, a difference of over 1 percent is significant and would have proved difficult to overcome."

Jake wanted to argue. He needed to argue. But the Supreme gave him no opportunity. Instead, reality flickered, and he dropped back into the courtroom, just in time for the lights to go out.

Around the world, darkness fell. Where daylight shone, it was like the moon passing in front of the sun. Where night already reigned, streetlights failed. All light failed. Banks of LEDs flicked off. Computer screens shut off dead. Even fires guttered low, making only the barest impression on the night around them.

In the darkness, billions froze in place for long seconds, trying to work out what was happening. Many of them shivered, as the darkness brought with it cold so sharp it chilled them to the bone. The implications of the darkness sank in quickly. They'd prayed, they'd hoped. They'd heard the whispers of reassurance that everything would be OK.

They'd been wrong.

The panic started, in a cacophony of noise growing ever louder, feeding into itself as people cried out, or begged, or howled in anger. In the total eclipse of light, people jostled one another and lashed out, shouting and arguing as they tried to find someone to blame. Others stood numbed in shock, some ran, screaming about the end of the world. People found themselves crushed as the crowds broke apart like startled shoals, bursting in a hundred different directions.

In the spaceship, Jake found Sarah by looking for the shape of her energy. She clung to him, and Jake could feel her tension.

"It was a trick," he whispered to her. "They tricked us. We would have lost anyway."

"We tested you," Sirius sent in the dark. If Jake could have seen the alien, he might have lashed out then. The Supreme would probably have viewed an attack on Sirius as simply more proof of mankind's violent nature. "When we knew of your intentions, we set the Pyramid to learner's mode, a safe replica of the most basic elements, to evaluate the progress of your capabilities with the cosmic plasma."

"It was all a test?" Sarah asked. Jake couldn't see her face, but he could feel the shock and anger running in tremors through her body as she spoke.

"Yes," Sirius sent, and Jake could see the flat energy of the alien even through the darkness. "But you can think about your actions on the way to the Pleiades. You will still be taken to ensure the preservation of humanity's DNA, and to monitor the effects of the cosmic plasma."

He would still be saved. That just made it worse. Jake had been the deciding factor, the one who had given the Supreme no choice but to condemn humanity. And now he was supposed to watch while the aliens destroyed his entire species. Sarah seemed to be thinking the same thing.

"We did this," she whispered. "No one else. If we hadn't intervened..."

"This is about the actions of your species over many thousands of years," Vega sent. "Do not blame yourselves for this one moment."

"How can we not?" Jake sent, crushed by the sense of responsibility.

"What happens now?" Sarah asked, her voice almost pleading for the chance to appeal, to find a way out.

Sirius quickly squashed that. "We carry out the verdict of the Supreme. Humanity will be removed from this planet."

"Vega?" Jake pulsed.

Jake could feel its discomfort. "I'm sorry, Jake. There is nothing I can do. The Supreme has delivered this judgment, and we must follow it."

"When?" Jake asked. Maybe with more time, they could prevent it from happening.

Sirius pulsed into him. "The Supreme has spoken. There will be no delay. The procedure will be implemented now."

As the pall of darkness slowly lifted, a tribal chief drummed from the top of a sacred mountain in Ethiopia. The rays of the sun began to illuminate the vast tableland below, and the old man pounded the taut goatskin in a blur of hands, the ancient drum held secure between his knees as he perched on a rock at the edge of the precipice. When day had turned into night, he remembered the myths of his forefathers and lit a torch and climbed up the steep path holding the heavy drum. The dim flames of the torch spluttered in the dark, and he struggled to see, but the voices of his ancestors urged him on, and he could sense their spirits in the wood of the drum, burnished by their hands over many centuries. He planted the torch in the stony ground at the peak and looked out into the void. His right hand struck the drum to release a deep tone, and then his left, to slowly build up a rhythm. One, two. One, two. Faster and faster until he slipped into a trance and it was no longer him striking the drum but the lineage of his tribe playing through him. Sweat ran down his wizened face and the flexing muscles of his arms as he kept up the relentless beat. The sun finally returned and the sky god awoke, and now he pounded even harder. The resonant tones thundered across the tableland and out into the world.

## Chapter Twenty-Six

Within the ship, the walls became luminous again and lit up the courtroom. Sirius flicked its hand, and the necklets the witnesses wore started to glow brighter.

"What's happening?" the president of the USA demanded. "I insist you—"

He slumped back in his seat, face blank, while beside him each of the other witnesses did the same. Jake watched, but he didn't have the words. He'd seen this before when they'd been brought into the ship. He was more concerned with the role he'd played in their downfall.

"You weren't responsible," Vega sent, frowning.

"We were," Jake insisted.

"And now you're going to wipe us out," Sarah said, clutching her pendant. Jake felt completely hollowed out.

"We have no choice," Vega pulsed. "Sirius will play its role, and I must play mine."

Sirius pointed a pen-sized laser at the forehead of each witness, zapping them briefly to put the eight humans into a semiconscious state. The short alien then prompted each zombielike witness to their feet by inserting its fingers under their shoulders and lifting. Once all eight were standing, the alien used their suggestible state to herd them out of the courtroom and down the corridor.

"What's going to happen to them?" Jake asked. A sudden image flashed before him of the witnesses being taken out by Sirius and disintegrated, killed because their usefulness had expired.

"Watch," Vega sent, gesturing to the wide screen above the console. The image showed the desert outside, the night lit by a combination of electric lights and the glow of the ship. Jake could see people milling around, some trying to press forward against the shields and failing, others arguing among themselves. He spotted Marina, Adam, and Billy looking dejected.

Then there was a shimmer of air that left eight figures standing on the sand. The witnesses stayed immobile, the necklets glowing. Their glow brightened until even on the screen it became hard to look at. As the glow slowly faded, the necklets disappeared. Each witness blinked and wandered in a daze among the crowd, which seemed not to care they had world leaders in their midst.

Everyone was just a human now, waiting together in the dark for whatever would happen next.

"We need to go," Vega sent. "Sirius will already be on its way."

The screen displayed a pod streaking into the air, impossibly fast.

"We?" Sarah asked.

"You must come with me," Vega sent. "It is the best way to ensure your safety."

Jake didn't care about being safe, but after the events of the trial, he couldn't muster the energy to do anything but follow Vega as it made its way along a smaller corridor to a pod identical to Sirius's.

The small craft gave the impression of a seed pod sprouting from a central plant. They stepped into the tail end of an oval capsule around fifteen feet long with an interior of opal-white walls three-and-a-half feet high. A large, elongated dome of clear, glass-like material topped the walls.

Vega gestured with its hands as they entered, and two extra seats extruded from the floor in the middle of the room. Jake took one while Sarah took the other. The corridor and pod apertures sealed, and Vega stepped to the pilot's seat at the front of the capsule. In front of the alien were three vertical control levers and a panel of multicolored crystal buttons.

There was a brief sense of acceleration as the pod shot into the air, but nothing anywhere close to the amount one would expect. Jake and Sarah should have found themselves plastered back to their seats, their features distorted by the g-forces involved, or blacked out entirely from the pressure.

Instead, they were almost comfortable as the pod rose lightning fast, and any discomfort Jake felt had very little to do with the speed of their launch. Instead, he continued to agonize about the trial. He hadn't been able to stop himself from trying to manipulate the outcome, and now billions of people were about to face the consequences.

Jake looked through the large clear dome toward the stars, and then the pod shifted direction and started to move horizontally. He gazed downward to catch the dark outlines of the desert and mountains skimming past and then saw the moon setting in the distance.

They were heading in the direction of LA. Jake recognized the landscape between the ship and his home. He'd driven it, following the path of his dreams. Would it have made a difference if he'd never come out to the dunes?

Part of Jake wanted to believe so, however pointless he knew his thoughts to be. He clasped the sides of the metallic chair and tried to dig his nails in.

The pod flew on. Below, Jake could see the lights of the small towns and clusters by the roadside leading to LA, and to their sides, the dark masses of the San Gabriel Mountains and the San Bernardino National Forest.

The pod descended rapidly to fly lower in its approach to the metropolis, and now he could make out people looking up under streetlights. Nothing seemed to happen to them as the pod passed over, but Jake guessed it would only be a matter of time.

He checked his watch—ten minutes past three.

"You're heading for the center of LA, aren't you?" Sarah asked beside him.

"Southwest of the center is where it must begin," Vega answered, and now there seemed to be none of the warmth or emotion previously shown in the alien's earlier communications. Perhaps this cold, distant demeanor was the real Vega, and the version Jake had seen before was just a façade to gain his confidence.

No. Even in the depths of what felt like ultimate despair, Jake couldn't believe that. From the beginnings of his time on the ship, Vega had helped him.

A tiny ray of comfort came with the thought of Sarah being with him. As for the rest of it, all he could do was watch as skyscrapers appeared on the horizon, a testament to both the sheer number of people in LA and the reach mankind claimed. The towering structures thrust into the sky as though to take possession of it, stating human power, the progress of civilization. A cruel joke now, so fragile in the face of the technology wielded by the aliens.

Vega flicked the levers of the console, and the pod banked to the right and headed toward the coast.

Marina found it hard to deal with so many people expecting answers. When the witnesses suddenly appeared, shimmering into existence before them, she was the one people looked to. Then a pod launched in a beam of light, and she could feel everyone's eyes upon her.

She told them the truth, that she had no idea what was happening, but they didn't seem to believe her.

She had to admit the pod was beautiful as it rose silent and bright against the night sky. A minute later, a second one launched, streaking across the heavens in a similar direction. There were small differences between them when she looked closely: a slightly bluish shimmer to the first pod, a stronger reflection of light from the second.

After the glowing dots vanished into the sky, Marina turned to face the throng. She guessed some of them must have noticed her active role in organizing whatever was going on in Gemini's tent during the trial; plus, she'd also been a figurehead for the convoy, so of course people looked to her now.

A CNN news crew stepped forward, the short reporter flanked by a cameraman and another man holding a powerful light. Marina shielded her eyes from the glare, and the reporter thrust a microphone under her face.

"Where are the pods going?"

She was just about to answer that she didn't know when a burly soldier barged to the front and lifted the nonplussed reporter to one side.

"What happened to your secret plan?" the soldier growled. "The CIA wants to debrief you."

"Wait!" shouted the US president as the crowd parted to allow him through.

"I'll take it from here, Sergeant."

"Have you any idea what's going on?" the president asked Marina calmly.

"Where are the pods going?" repeated the reporter.

"I don't know," Marina said, her blue hair gleaming under the bright lights.

"How will they attack us?" growled the sergeant.

"You must know something," called out a voice at the back.

"I don't _know_."

"Come on, tell us!"

"Yeah, tell us what you know!"

"She doesn't know anything, so back off," Billy yelled, thrusting his body between Marina and the crowd on her left.

Adam wedged himself in on her right. "Don't you all have homes to go to? People you want to see? We don't have any answers for you. It went wrong. We lost. You're on your own."

They came to her defense in a way that caught Marina by surprise. She normally looked out for them, yet here with their fellow hackers shoving their way through to assist, Gemini faced down the whole crowd. Adam crossed his arms and glared at the sergeant, while Billy gave the reporter the benefit of his middle finger complete with its pi tattoo.

"The end is coming," Marina said to the president. "Don't you have somewhere to go? Loved ones to be with?"

The president gazed into her eyes before nodding and turning around. The sergeant followed him, and then the news crew also turned to leave. The whole crowd began to back off. It was crazy, all those people backing away from Marina and Gemini, but they did.

The crowd slowly dispersed. Some of the soldiers walked to their vehicles and drove off, presumably heading back to whichever base they'd come from. Or perhaps just fleeing as far from the desert as possible. The presidents and the pope were bundled into a Humvee and driven at speed over the desert toward the dirt road in the distance.

The TV people left too. Those with four-wheel drive vehicles near the camp lugged boxes, lights, and tripods across the sand. Most, however, abandoned their equipment in their haste to leave. Then the rest of the onlookers followed, first in ones and twos, and finally in a rush that emptied the small patch of desert much faster than it had filled up.

Those who had been forced to walk to the spaceship from the dirt road grabbed rides back to their vehicles in trucks and jeeps and anything desertworthy. Some unfortunate individuals had to trudge the whole way across the sand as panic began to spread amid the blaring horns.

Even the shaman left, patting Marina gently on the shoulder and smiling before he wandered off deeper into the dunes in a direction only he understood.

Eventually, Marina, Billy, and Adam were practically the only ones left amongst the detritus of the desert camp.

"Do you two want to go anywhere?" Marina asked.

Billy shrugged.

"Where would we go that's cooler than outside a spaceship?" Adam asked.

They had a point. Besides, it wasn't like there was much for them anywhere else.

"I guess we stay and wait it out here, then," Marina said.

The pod flew over Los Angeles, its light shimmering off the glass and steel of the buildings as it drifted across the night sky. The skyscrapers directly below might as well have been merely squares, lit by landing lights and neon signs.

High above the streets, those who could were fleeing in private helicopters or ones stolen from their work. Jake found himself wondering if the owners were on most of them, or if the pilots were stealing off alone, trying to get as far away as possible.

"Will it make any difference?" he asked. "Will they escape?"

"No," Vega replied. "Even if people stay out of the cities, nowhere on Earth will remain beyond the reach of our technology."

Again, the alien's telepathic tone carried less warmth.

The pod headed up until the buildings of the city blurred together into blocks, and then into clusters and districts. From up here, the city seemed vast and so widely spread out, with points of light running in all directions. To some people, it would look like an alien landscape. Outside the pod, clouds passed by, and then the sky darkened as they flew higher into the atmosphere.

"What happens now?" Jake asked.

"Mankind will be released," Vega explained. "It has already experienced the connection to the universal consciousness and has nothing to fear. This craft, along with Sirius's, carries a device to intensify the connection and allow the individual beings of humanity to be drawn back into the universal stream."

"So it will just suck up their souls like some giant vacuum cleaner?" Sarah asked.

"It is a freeing transformation," Vega assured her. "It is painless. You both know how blissful the connection to the universal consciousness can be. No one will suffer."

No, they would just die. Genocide on a grander scale than anything their species had managed to do to itself. All in the name of protecting the galaxy. And maybe the galaxy did need protecting. Maybe humanity was some kind of cancer, incapable of doing anything but destroying or devouring everything around it. Even so, it was hard to comprehend the idea of the whole human species just... ceasing to be.

Jake thought about the millions of people below.

"Why are you starting with LA?" he pulsed.

"To complete the process in the shortest time frame," Vega explained. "Sirius has been assigned its own starting point. After finishing here, we will progress to other major centers, and the effects will spread quickly."

" _How_ quickly?" Jake asked.

Vega considered for a few seconds. "The process requires constant assessment and monitoring but should be complete in seven Earth days. The two of you will then be the only humans left alive, ready for transportation to the Pleiades."

The space pod moved toward the west of the city, star bright and impossibly high. Jake looked down and tried to imagine the megalopolis below devoid of human life just a few hours from now.

Sirius flew out over the Pacific Ocean toward Asia, reflecting as the pod raced across the Earth. It was a being three hundred millennia old, yet its distant ancestors, the originators of the Startoucher project, had died billions of years ago, leaving the evolutionary results of their experiments for future generations to deal with. Sirius had at first argued against introducing new genetic material into the forerunners of the human species, but its superiors at the time had dismissed its objections and ordered the procedure to go ahead.

As a scientist, Sirius couldn't help experiencing disappointment. But more than that, because of a decision taken by others so long ago, it and Vega were left with the unenviable task of removing 7.5 billion life-forms from a planet. Although other Startoucher experiments had failed, this scale of extinction of a species at such a relatively advanced stage of maturity was nearly unprecedented. It had happened just once before in the whole history of the project, with an experiment assigned to a different team of scientists.

Although the alien did not show it, the burden of this responsibility weighed very heavily upon its conscience. Sirius had been assigned to develop and foster the species, and now it would have to destroy it.

As the pod traveled west, it crossed over the international date line and the time zones began to unwind Monday night.

The scanners of Sirius's pod picked up life below teeming beneath the waves. There were fish, of course, and whales, and other, stranger creatures. The alien flew over islands so tiny that humanity ignored them, and these also brimmed with life. Even where there were no humans present, the life of this world still suffered. There were side effects to the pollutants humanity had created and to long years of overfishing and warming waters. Distributions would have changed, species adapted. Even with mankind removed from the world, the eco system would not simply revert to its prehuman state.

The pod flew over a slightly larger island, and there were humans living below. Some looked up, and Sirius could imagine their worry upon seeing the craft, but it had no intention of starting the process of removal here. It had to be done with care, efficiency, and precision. Sirius would wait for the allotted destination before deploying the device.

A few more of this world's days, and it would be over, although the world would never be the same again. An opportunity occurred to Sirius. In fact, there were two. The first option: the reversion of the natural environment to what it would have been if mankind had never existed. The scientific work involved to make that happen would be extensive. Whole habitats would have to be redesigned. The DNA of extinct species would have to be recovered, and Sirius wasn't sure enough genetic evidence remained to achieve a complete reconstruction.

The second option appeared a far better prospect. The opportunity to observe the natural development of life on a planet in the wake of the Startoucher project's withdrawal. It would serve as useful data for the future, and might even show beneficial effects in the long term. For instance, in a hundred thousand years or more. It could even be considered as stage two of the project, allowing them to salvage something from the destruction.

For now, the original mistake still required undoing. Vega would be in position very soon, and Sirius also needed to begin. Its pod shot on toward Asia, climbing higher as it flew, the surface below receding by the second.

## Chapter Twenty-Seven

No one had left the war room of the Pentagon since the crisis had begun. Partly because it was the best place from which to try to manage events, secured against attack and one of the safest locations on the planet. And partly because they were all soldiers or long-serving members of the security agencies with a sense of duty that made them committed to seeing through America's darkest hour. Mainly, however, because General Miles O'Shea had locked the door and wouldn't hand over the key.

"We need to act!" he bellowed. He'd been bellowing a lot in the last few hours. He'd called out his opinions of the trial like an armchair fan deploring his football team's choice of play. "Our radar tells us the enemy vehicle is on its way to LA. We need to do something!"

"POTUS is on his way back to us," the chairman of joint chiefs of staff pointed out.

"But he won't be here before the enemy vehicle—"

"The alien spacecraft, O'Shea," the deputy director of the CIA said. "We've been through this."

"Before that _thing_ gets to its destination!" General O'Shea stood with his hands on his hips. "We need to act now to destroy it."

"What did you have in mind?" the secretary of state asked. "Scramble more jets to disappear?"

"That was an assault on the main craft," the general pointed out. "We have no way of knowing if these smaller ones have the same defenses. For all we know, we may be able to end this here and now, while the enemy combatants—"

"The aliens," the CIA man said wearily.

"—are in transit. A quick, surgical strike!"

The four-star admiral frowned in disgust. "Following the well-known strategy of doing the same thing over and over again until it works?"

The general rounded on him. "What's the alternative? Sit here until we are all wiped out by these... by these _aliens_?" He spat the word out with obvious reluctance even now.

"We were just going to discuss that," the CIA man said.

So they did. The secretary of state suggested waiting for the president, but he wouldn't arrive for hours. The four-star admiral wanted to talk about the possibility of reinforcing buildings and creating shelters, but it would take too much time, plus no one knew exactly what measures would be necessary to protect people from whatever the aliens had planned. The head of the CDC suggested implementing evacuation protocols, but no one was quite sure where so many people could be evacuated to. The head of the NSA put forward the idea of infecting the alien craft with a virus, until someone pointed out he'd just stolen the idea from a movie.

Eventually, inevitably, it circled back to the idea of trying to shoot down the pod.

"What approach do you want to take?" the air force chief asked. "Portable ground to air might be feasible. Air to air again, using bunker busters?"

"Both," General O'Shea insisted. "I want a full squadron of fighter jets up there. I'll pull in SAMs and antiair artillery too."

The secretary of state rolled his eyes. "Over a civilian area? Perhaps you'd like to throw in a cruise missile or two? Maybe a nuke?"

General O'Shea leaned his not inconsiderable frame forward over the war room's table. " _If that's what it takes_. People are going to die anyway if this thing gets to do whatever it's up there to do. We have to stop it, and if that means civilian casualties, it's just the price we have to pay."

They argued for another minute or two, but everyone knew which way this was going. General O'Shea was glowering at everyone, and no time remained for anything more subtle.

"Scramble the jets," he ordered.

"It seems we are being followed," Vega sent as they reached position over the west of the city. The alien flicked a finger and a wide screen rose up from the command console to show the shimmer of the approaching aircraft behind them. Vega's pod was more or less stationary by now, and Jake knew the terrestrial planes would never have caught up if the alien craft had been moving with its normal speed. The fighter jets bristled with weaponry, and there was a darker shape in their midst. The strange angles of a stealth bomber lurked in the middle, hinting at armaments too powerful for the jets on each flank to carry.

"They're going to try to attack again?" Jake asked.

"It is possible," Vega sent back. "Your commanders may view this as war with our species."

"And you don't?" Sarah asked.

"War is not something our species engage in," Vega explained. "We do not perpetrate violence on one another, or on the universe around us."

"And this doesn't count?" Jake asked.

"This is not war," Vega insisted. "It is simply carrying out the Supreme's verdict. There will be no violence involved, as you understand it. No pain or cruelty."

Jake could easily have argued. The difference... was, well, so tiny it didn't really exist except as a justification. He might have pointed that out, if he'd felt his words would have any chance of stopping what was about to happen.

The US military was doing its utmost to prevent the impending disaster. In addition to the fighter jets closing in rapidly on the pod, the console screen began to show vehicles massing on the ground below, rolling down the streets to maneuver into a position to attack.

"They're going to attempt to destroy us," Jake said aloud with a mixture of fear and hope. He didn't want to be reduced to a smear in the air and die there with Sarah, but this would surely be far better than the rest of humanity perishing.

"Jake, we should be doing something," Sarah said. "We can't let this happen."

Jake shook his head. "What can we do? Overpower Vega?"

"That is not permissible," Vega sent, and even though Jake was physically much bigger than the short alien, and Vega's species supposedly knew nothing about violence, he suspected it had a way to stop a sudden lunge for the controls.

"We must to do something," Sarah insisted. "We have to try!"

"There isn't anything," Jake replied aloud. "Look at what happened the last time we interfered. We only made things worse."

"I don't think we can make things worse now," Sarah pointed out. "Please, Jake!"

Jake felt at a loss. They'd tried. They'd failed. In failing, they'd contributed to the very situation humanity now faced.

"We can't stop it," Jake said. "There is nothing we can do."

Sarah grabbed his hands, making him look her in the eye. "Jake, yes, we made a mistake interfering in the trial, but the mistake was cheating. But this is different, and others shouldn't have to pay for what we did."

Jake slumped back into his seat, struggling to overcome his sense of powerlessness. Meanwhile, the combined might of the military advanced on the pod, little by little. When he turned around to look through the clear glass-like material of the pod's elongated dome, some of the fighters were close enough to make out the fat missiles attached to their sides. The planes flew in formation, shifting their positions slightly as they closed in.

"Please turn back," Vega sent, and Jake felt the pod transmitting the alien's message into the communication systems of the military aircraft. "There is nothing you can do here. Your weapons will not be permitted to engage to succeed."

The crackle of a radio came through into the pod. "This is Captain Luke Hanson of the United States Air Force. You are ordered to turn around and return to your main craft."

"I will not turn back," Vega sent. "And if you attack, it will prove dangerous for all of you."

"We aren't afraid to die, if it will save our own kind."

That might have sounded like bravado, but the pilot's voice carried a note of quiet certainty. Did he know what he was getting into? He had to, didn't he? The pilots would have seen the footage of their colleagues disappearing in the desert near the main craft. From their perspective, this must be a suicide mission, but they were doing it anyway.

Doing it anyway. A foreign concept for Jake. Almost the opposite of what he'd built his career upon as a lawyer. He went the extra mile for his clients only if a win was possible. If he couldn't win, he did nothing.

The pod hung over the city but obviously wouldn't remain idle forever. They'd come here for a reason. So had the fighter jets, but they didn't attack yet. Instead, they circled like sharks around their prey, escorting the pod and cutting it off at the same time. They had clearly been told to hold back for now, perhaps in the slim hope of not needing to fire, a miracle where everything worked out without aggressive action. Or perhaps their superiors were just worried about the superior technology of the aliens.

What could Jake do? _Probably_ nothing. He'd proved he couldn't just expect to solve things, but maybe there was a difference between arrogantly expecting to be in control and trying to help others with no thought of your own safety.

He looked toward Vega. He knew something about how it thought and reacted. Long fingers worked the three levers of the command console as it monitored the images of the military craft on the vertical screen. Maybe he could use his connection to the universal consciousness to distract the alien for long enough to grab the levers. That would crash the pod, though, and while Jake felt prepared to give up his life to stop this, he couldn't risk Sarah's.

No, he needed another way, and quickly, because now Vega was pressing the multicolored crystals buttons of the console.

Vega made the last few gestures in the launch sequence and hesitated before touching the final button. It didn't want to have to do this, but the results of the trial were absolute. It had tried to argue its case for humanity's survival, but if it now rejected the verdict, then its species might as well descend into the same conflict and warmongering as humanity. It needed to accept its role in undoing the damage of this Startoucher project, even if it didn't agree with the method of adjustment.

Vega sensed Jake and Sarah's attention as it pressed the last button and pulsed in the command. It could feel the complexity of their emotions flowing out, including betrayal. Vega regretted the impossibility of persuading them, but the lack of time didn't help. The alien stepped back from the controls.

The device was the width of a hand when it rose from the console, crystalline and with a multitude of facets to form an almost perfect sphere. It glowed from within with the power of cosmic plasma, so concentrated, it began to warp the space inside the pod. Sound accompanied it, like a chord composed of the thrumming of an entire consciousness. The sound extended impossibly, neither building nor fading but continuing, as fresh seconds later as in the instant it had begun.

"What is that?" Jake asked.

"It is the crystal sphere," Vega replied. "This is the device that will free humanity from its physical existence. The sphere will latch on to the specific biometric signature of your species and leave all other forms of life unaffected. It will act as a bridge to the universal consciousness."

The sphere hung in the air in front of Vega, then plunged toward the floor of the pod, passing through it as if it weren't there. The sphere floated down through the atmosphere, slower than the pull of gravity would have dictated. Almost languidly. It glowed as it dropped, and the pod's monitors picked up the burst of chatter from the aircraft stalking them, decoding it almost instantly despite the humans' cryptographic efforts.

"The alien craft has deployed some kind of device. No, sir, it's not dropping fast enough to be a bomb; we're not sure what it is. Should we engage?"

Vega wasn't worried about the humans trying to destroy the sphere. Nothing short of a concentrated burst of dark matter would eliminate it now, and the humans clearly didn't possess such advanced technology. They could do nothing to stop or even slow the sphere as it continued to fall.

It descended until it was half as high as a passenger plane might have flown and then stopped, spinning in place as it hovered, the glow from the plasma within intensifying with every rotation. The sphere grew as it spun, not so much expanding as unfolding, facet by facet. After a few seconds, it became the size of a human, then of the pod Vega sat in. It grew bigger still, becoming the size of a small building, then something that could have swallowed a football field. Its rotation slowed as it increased in size, until finally it hung like a crystal version of the terrestrial sun high above the city.

It glowed brightly as it pulsed concentric waves of light. The darkness over the city gave way to a strange, vibrating daylight as the sphere shone down. People who had retreated into their houses stepped back outside to shield their eyes and gaze at the sky. The sphere turned, emitting an even brighter light, but it wasn't the only kind of energy it expelled. Psychic power flooded down, washing over the population as surely as the false dawn. It hit people, and everywhere it touched, the changes started.

## Chapter Twenty-Eight

More and more people began to stare upward, irresistibly drawn by the siren sounds and brilliant white light, trying to comprehend what was happening. A few ran, realizing this must be part of whatever plan the aliens had to get rid of their species, although they didn't know where to escape to. Before long, most of city stood transfixed as the light poured down on them, marveling at the power of the technology being deployed and at the transformation of the darkness into a fierce artificial daylight.

They'd felt something similar in the touch of the Supreme, but where the experience after the trial had been a feather brush of connection with the universal consciousness, this was a sledgehammer, slamming into them unstoppably while the celestial ringing of the sphere grew ever louder in the air.

The intense waves passed through buildings, through cement, metal, and deep into the earth, no terrestrial element capable of halting the flow. People fell to the ground in the hundreds, the thousands. They were blissfully unaware as they hit the floor, collapsing as though the strings of a puppet had suddenly been cut, while the trance induced by the sphere's energies subsumed their minds. Visions flooded into them, filling each individual with scenes from their lives. A musician in the middle of a guitar solo saw images of the parents who'd walked away when he was a child. A judge saw the faces of everyone he'd sentenced. Adults became children again and danced innocently in the landscapes of their childhood. Children were mostly asleep but found themselves swept into dreams more vivid than waking life.

Everyone dreamed. Their dreams began with images from their own lives, fragments remembered, or half remembered, or only ever imagined. Gradually, though, these dreams started to fuse together into something bigger, purer, an ongoing bliss stretching into infinity. Everyone surrendered to this bliss, saturated with the celestial music of the crystal sphere, and, one by one, they were released. Their physical bodies remained on the ground as their beings flowed up into the sphere, as surely as the light poured down.

Jake felt it happening. With the connection the aliens had stabilized in him, he couldn't help but feel it. He sensed the intense bands of psychic energy emanating from the sphere, much stronger below the sphere than above, yet he knew if they hadn't been protected by the shields of the pod, he and Sarah would still have been swept up in its power.

"Vega," he pulsed, "you have to stop this."

He felt people yielding to the sphere and their connection intensifying second by second. If he reached out and relaxed, he could see some of the visions overwhelming people, with promises of something brighter and better and just... _more._ All tantalizingly out of reach, all there if they just went with the vision into the crystal sphere...

"You're killing them," Jake spoke aloud. "I don't care what you're pretending to call it, or how painless you think it is. You're killing them."

He could feel tears in his eyes as he sensed the lives below start to wink out. One by one, they went from bright, vibrant engagement with the visions consuming them to being consumed. They were pulled into the sphere, and in the space where their life force had been, only emptiness remained. Each separate dot of individual life became a void. The dots then formed clusters, spread to become holes, turned into overwhelming blankness.

"Their energy will live on," Vega sent. "Joined to the universal stream, they will—"

"That doesn't matter, and you know it!" Sarah shouted. "There are children down there, Vega. Children. You've deployed a weapon that is now killing a whole city full of people."

"And soon it will release the rest of humanity to the universal consciousness," Vega sent. "That is its purpose."

The alien wasn't listening, didn't understand, or didn't care. But Jake refused to give up. He had to find a way to stop it. Below, the sphere began to drift toward the city center. From this height it seemed slow, but its speed was deceptive given how much of the ground beneath it covered. It floated along, and destruction flowed in its wake.

"They're killing civilians!" the lead pilot's voice declared over his radio, loud and clear in the closed atmosphere of the pod. "Don't know how this thing works, but up here we're all feeling rather strange..."

Another voice joined it. "Team leader, all fire units, you have permission to engage with all available armaments. I say again, smoke those alien scum."

Jake flinched at the order, if only because he and Sarah were right there in the middle of the pod along with Vega. Vega seemed as quietly confident as ever, making small gestures to control the craft as it continued to oversee the destruction wrought by the immense crystal sphere.

Munitions burst forth at them and to the sphere, from the steady hail of tracer bullets to the larger flashes of missile engines firing. There were bursts of dust and flame below as tanks and antiaircraft launchers fired their weapons. There was even the dull buzz of a drone flying straight at the pod.

None of it got close. Vega flicked its fingers across the controls, and the pod darted back and forth across wide sections of the sky, attacking weapons with defenses that flashed out in bursts of high energy. Bullets clattered off the side of the pod, flaring into dust where they struck. Missiles flamed out of existence, burned up by high-intensity lasers or tricked into premature detonation.

"They also seem to be trying a computer assault," Vega sent, "but the code is inorganic."

Jake started out of his seat then, thinking he could wrestle Vega away from the controls for long enough to shut all this down. At least he might be able to lower the defenses of the pod to allow one of the missiles to hit them or give the virus a chance to work.

Vega gestured, and Jake's seat reshaped itself, now with a metallic band across his lap to hold him firmly in place. "I'm sorry, Jake, but I can't allow you to interfere." More shells burst around them. "And I can't allow this aggression toward us to continue."

"Wait!" Jake insisted, shouting the word and sending it simultaneously. "You can't just make them disappear. It isn't right."

"Even though they will soon be released by the crystal sphere?" Vega pointed out. "Even if I spare them now, they are in the area covered by the sphere's effects."

The alien's hands flashed over the levers and crystal buttons of the console again as another barrage of munitions came their way. The missiles disappeared and exploded and then Vega went on the counterattack.

Beams of unseen energy burst outward, targeting tanks and artillery, seizing their mechanisms with the power of an EMP and forcing crews to abandon stations in order to get clear of whatever might follow. What did follow were the planes tumbling from the sky as the beams destroyed the pilots' ability to control them. The occupants ejected one by one, spinning up into the sky, then floating down in slow spirals. The approaching drone exploded, which demonstrated exactly how easily Vega could have exploded the rest.

But the alien hadn't, and that meant something.

"You know killing people is wrong," Jake pulsed, "regardless of what's happening, regardless of the provocation. If you didn't, you would have just made the planes and their pilots disappear."

"Your species doesn't believe in war or violence," Sarah reminded Vega. "Not for any reason. You told us, remember?" She clutched her turquoise pendant and her face was streaked with tears.

"Of course I remember," Vega pulsed. The alien paused at the controls, then sent back with a vengeance the computer virus the NSA tried to infect them with. "But the releasing is different."

"It's the same thing," Jake insisted. "You've unleashed a weapon, and instead of shooting a few pilots out of the sky, it's slaughtering the civilians below. How is that different?"

Vega shook its head. "You will not convince me."

Sirius knew what it had to do, in spite of the disappointment it experienced. It was a member of a peaceful species, which had given up on war at such an early stage in its evolution that it barely remained a distant memory.

Sirius crossed from ocean to land, and from late night toward sunset. The dwarf yellow sun on the western horizon looked odd compared to the bluish-white cluster of the Pleiades.

They attacked Sirius on the way, of course. Creatures as primitive as humans were incapable of accepting their fate with good grace. No, they sent aircraft so slow and badly designed it amazed the alien scientist that they could fly at all. They fired crude explosive weapons at Sirius, some tipped with materials the pod's scanners flagged as radioactive or biologically contaminated, or both. The craft's lasers quickly disintegrated the attacking weapons along with the vessels launching them. Sirius collected data on the process as it happened, determined to learn what it could.

It flew into position above the largest of Japan's cities—Tokyo, Sirius's computer informed it. Not that the human name mattered. Soon, all such human concepts would be gone, except in the databanks of the Pyramid, and in the minds of the two they would keep to sustain the species' DNA. Sirius planned to file its reports and request permission to experiment with these living specimens.

It had already performed one procedure successfully on the male; now there would be a female too. With intelligent research, something useful might be salvaged from their DNA. It was an intriguing thought but one to keep for later on.

The pod rose into the upper atmosphere, fending off a few more clumsy assaults. Even when futile, the species appeared determined to attack. Sirius could hardly complain, and it pressed the controls on the console to instigate the deployment of the crystal sphere and, before long, pulsed in the final command.

The device floated out, dropping slowly until reaching the right location above the planet's surface—twenty thousand Earth feet, the control panel showed. It began to turn on its axis, growing exponentially, its glow intensifying by the instant until it shone as bright as the sun that had recently set. Below it, bullet trains slowed to a halt and traffic congealed on the multilevel freeways, the heart of a city teeming with life submerged in vision after vision as it drew ever closer to the universal consciousness.

Humans started to fall. They fell in their thousands, consumed by visions that must have seemed like instant revelation. At least in its final, blissful moments, mankind received the chance to experience what it could have become. As the crystal sphere continued to spin, Sirius's conscience was eased somewhat by this thought.

"You must stop," Jake pulsed, straining against the metallic band.

"I cannot," Vega replied. "The Supreme has judged."

"This verdict is flawed, we corrupted the trial."

"It does not matter."

Sarah gestured down to where the crystal sphere was doing its deadly work. "Maybe the Supreme considered the outcome of doing this, and what it might mean, but have _you_?"

"It is not necessary," Vega sent. But Jake could feel uncertainty there.

He seized on it. It had to be their best chance, perhaps their only chance.

He dug into the universal consciousness, feeling the stream of identities flowing into it as the crystal sphere pulled them clear. He forced himself not to get too close; it felt like the psychic equivalent of a rip tide. One brush against it, and Jake might be sucked away with the mass of people below. Jake pushed in a different direction instead.

In the mothership after his operation, he'd found it easy to direct his visions toward people and locations from his existing life. Now he needed to go much deeper into the substratum of the universal consciousness and allow it to flow through him to show him what the effects of the releasing process on Earth _would_ be like. He opened his inner eye to the strands of the future. Perhaps this was how the Supreme calculated the possible outcomes of different variables. He concentrated so intensely he began to feel the cosmic plasma pulsing softly in his brain—

The visions hit him with the force of a hammer. He saw buildings overgrown with plant life, their doors and windows hanging open. Silence reigned so absolute it seemed to overwhelm any attempt at noise. A half-starved dog scuttled through the streets, chasing after whatever morsels of food it could find. Jake walked into the vision, peering inside houses to see plates still laid out on tables, rats scurrying among the rotted food. A ghostly library gathered dust, humanity's collected efforts shelved and abandoned.

The hospitals were the same, long past being sterile, long past helping anyone. The courts where Jake had spent so much time, empty shells with no meaning. There were no humans, no signs of people hunting through the wreckage for scraps to survive. Only the awful, total silence, permeating throughout to turn the concrete of the city into a desolate wasteland.

And then there were the bones. Bones lay strewn in the street, picked clean and bleached. Millions and millions, more than Jake could have possibly imagined. A city of skeletons, their souls long since fled.

"This is what you're doing," Jake sent, forcing himself to hang on to the vision as he brought his consciousness back to the pod. He mentally balled it up and pulsed it forcefully into Vega. "This is what you're bringing into the world."

He dove back into the vision, dragging Vega with him. His vision showed them the dead, empty city, sitting there like the desiccated corpse of some great beast. The vision stretched out, showing more of the world, the skeletal structures of roads and buildings standing as an epitaph that would never be read. Jake refocused his power, not even sure if this next phase would be possible. He reached into the depths of his vision, and the ghosts of the dead appeared. Or rather, the instant of their absorption surfaced, their faces caught in that last moment before the bliss had come over them, showing their terror as the crystal sphere called with its siren sounds.

"You're doing this," Jake sent to Vega. "You're choosing this. This is what you're helping to create. You want us gone? This is what it _means_."

He broke off and tried to force his third eye shut, but maybe he didn't shut it down fully, because when he looked across to Sarah he saw something unexpected, and he knew Vega did too. He saw the glow emanating from her abdomen. Vega seemed to be seeing much more.

Jake watched Vega grip the console with its three-fingered hands as its oversized head began to tremble. The trembling spread through its torso and limbs, and its thin legs buckled. As if in response, the pod shook violently from side to side as Vega fell hard against the controls and then slumped to the floor.

"The Startoucher prophecy _is_ alive," it pulsed feebly before closing its eyes.

"Vega," Jake sent, "are you all right? What's happened? The sphere has changed course!"

Vega lay crumpled on the floor of the craft, breathing hard as it recovered. The nictitating membranes were closed over its eyes, and Jake noticed a subtle difference in its face. The translucent skin was drawn tighter around the skull, as though the alien had aged. The small nose was slightly more prominent and there were faint hollows in the cheeks.

A thin leg twitched, and membranes uncovered the black pools of its eyes. Vega staggered to its feet, clutching the bulk of the command console, and gazed out of the glass-like dome.

The crystal sphere was moving at a vastly increased speed, leaving the pod behind as it raced toward the mountains northeast of the city.

"Vega!" Sarah cried.

Vega snapped back to life and grabbed the controls.

"The pod and its operator are inextricably linked, and my incident overloaded the communications system. With this malfunction, the sphere is programmed to return to the main ship to be redeployed or decommissioned," Vega explained.

With a sickening wrench, Jake found himself worrying about Marina and Gemini. Had the sphere reached them yet? There was no time to ask, because Vega flicked the levers of the pod to set it in motion.

It moved in a blur through the sky, tracking the huge sphere by the light it put out, racing for the spot where cosmic plasma turned night into day. The crystal sphere appeared to speed up as they approached, almost as if trying to keep ahead of them. Vega proved equal to the task. The alien flew the pod with astonishing agility, ripping across the sky as they closed in on the brightness of the sphere. The intensity of it made it hard for Jake to look at it directly, but he could feel the spot where it spun, sucking in the humans within its orb.

"We must destroy the sphere," Vega pulsed.

Jake and Sarah jerked back with surprise.

" _Why?_ I mean, that's great, but what's changed?" Jake sent.

The short alien swiveled its chair around to face them; its meltdown at the console had definitely aged its face.

"I have glimpsed a different future for humanity."

"What did you see, Vega?" asked Sarah, still clutching her pendant.

"And the Startoucher prophecy is alive?" Jake sent. "What does it—"

"There is no time to explain." Vega cut him off and swiveled back to manipulate the pod's controls again. "The sphere can be stopped by a concentrated burst of dark matter, but we must be directly above it to deliver it."

Darkness seemed to form in front of the pod just beyond the console, folding in on itself multiple times before coalescing into a dense ball blacker than the depths of space.

Jake felt precisely when they were in position above the sphere, even before Vega started to guide the controls. The dark matter packed into a space that could have been cupped in Jake's hands. For a split second, it remained suspended, until the moment Vega released it, blasting it downward into the larger crystal sphere with tremendous velocity. Its darkness disappeared into the brightness of the sphere with an almost liquid ripple, little more than a small stone cast into the ocean.

At first, it looked like nothing would happen, then the light from the crystal sphere started to falter. Jake found he could look at it now without his eyes hurting. Darkness spread across it, moving in lines like a web of cracks across a mirror as one power dripped into another, containing and consuming it. The crystal sphere's spin reduced to a crawl, its seemingly unstoppable momentum giving way to something more tortured as, second by second, it shrunk into itself and reduced in size.

Then it shattered.

The explosion took Jake by surprise. The crystal sphere exploded not in a burst of energy but in its absence. Shards of crystalline material rained down on the desert below, so fine they seemed almost more like powder than the fragments they were.

"We've done it," Sarah said. "We've stopped it!"

"We must not celebrate," Vega sent. "Sirius's sphere is still out there."

"So we find it and destroy it," Jake pulsed as the metallic band across his lap retracted.

"Sirius's current location is not known," Vega sent. "The damage to the communication system will take time to restore. Sirius's starting point was in Tokyo, but by now it could be anywhere in the world. As with the sphere, detection of malfunction from one of us requires the other to change location immediately. Exactly where this location will be is impossible to specify."

"That depends," Jake sent, "on whether there's any chance of Gemini still being alive."

## Chapter Twenty-Nine

Marina ducked as shards of clear crystal fell from the sky. Beside her, Gemini did the same. They crouched against the shields of the alien ship, hoping it would protect them as the sphere's fragments peppered the sand. Thankfully, none of them landed close enough to do them any damage, and Marina wondered if this was pure luck or due to something else.

When the crystal sphere had first appeared high above the desert, she'd felt certain that they were all about to die. Visions had hit her then, so many and so powerful, she'd had to struggle not to succumb. It had been impossible to keep track of them all, but one shone in her mind far brighter than the rest: a vision of a young woman with a special aura, moving through humanity, changing it.

Marina had felt the pull of the sphere, but the shields of the spaceship grounded her like a kind of psychic anchor. She'd pressed her body against them, and she'd reached out to hold onto the guys as well.

When it was all over, she felt different. The guys also felt different. Marina still wasn't sure why, or what had happened to them.

"Marina." Jake's voice came into her thoughts, even clearer than before. She instinctively looked up and saw the pod above, a tiny point of light in the night sky.

"I can hear you, Jake."

"Are you all right?" Jake asked. "Are the others OK?"

"I... don't know," Marina admitted. "I feel a bit weird. As for the guys..."

Billy and Adam were staring at their hands, at each other, at the world, as though they were seeing all of it for the first time.

"The crystal sphere worked by building the connection with the universal consciousness," Vega sent, the alien's telepathic voice appearing alongside Jake's. "Those surviving the effects will have found their latent psychic talents awakened."

Billy and Adam, psychic? Marina didn't know whether to be glad they might finally be able to understand, or slightly terrified.

"Is it over?" she sent back.

"No," Jake replied. "While this sphere has been destroyed, Sirius still has one, and we can't locate it. We need your help to find it."

Marina tried to concentrate. "What do you need us to do?"

"Sirius started in Tokyo," Jake pulsed, "but has changed location and we don't know where. Can you look online and find out where Sirius is? People must be posting updates."

"So you want us to turn on the news for you?" Marina sent.

"I want you to help us save the world," Jake sent back.

"You've asked us to do that before," Marina pointed out. "And it didn't turn out very well."

"This time it will," Jake promised her. "Vega has decided to help us."

And Marina guessed that at least tracking down the sphere wasn't something massively unethical, unlike Jake's last request. Maybe it would also stop Adam and Billy from staring at grains of sand while saying things like "Amazing!" and "That's just... so deep!"

"All right," Marina sent back. "I'll see what I can do. Let's hope some of the computers are still working."

They were, although it took a full minute to explain what was required to the guys. They found it difficult to concentrate at the best of times, and now the connection to the root source of the universe was coursing through their heads. Marina suspected she coped more easily because she'd always had at least some of this affecting her. She couldn't tell exactly how much the sphere had increased her connection, but this wasn't the moment to look into it.

Instead, she more or less dragged the guys back to their computers. The online world was in chaos. How could it not be, with so many people dead and such widespread fear and panic? There were large gaps of information, but people were trying to tell others about what was happening or document it for posterity.

Tasha Baker still broadcast to the world, with her bleached hair and blue eye shadow, doing her utmost to remain calm as the curtain came down on humanity. She sat in the studio alone, the producer and cameramen having left the building as soon as the first effects of the crystal sphere had been reported. At one point, she felt waves of elation and peace sweeping over her, but just as suddenly, they'd stopped.

Now she had a laptop open by her side, trying to keep up with the latest news through a combination of social media and occasional e-mails from the few people who still cared enough to keep her updated.

She kept presenting as best as she could, even if unsure about the number of people who actually watched her big moment. Even if the world was about to end, she finally had the chance to show her true mettle as a professional. Maybe some alien species would even see the footage, eventually. The thought of being famous long after her death brought a tear to Tasha's eye.

"So," she said. "The latest news on the crystal sphere shows it moving northeast from LA, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Except..."

She checked the flurry of activity on the internet. New messages came in, along with video footage obviously shot from phones. Tasha tried to remember how to use the editing suite on her computer, and settled for doing more of a piece to camera to kill time.

"This just in," she said. "The sphere above the United States appears to have been destroyed. There isn't any information on how this happened, if action by the military, malfunction, or outside intervention, but the sphere has been destroyed."

Tasha actually felt pretty bad about having to ask the next question.

"Now, we just need to know—what's happened to the other one?"

Perhaps in years to come, this would be the defining moment of her career. Despite the interviews and the hard-hitting stories, the eventual move into tabloid television, and the brief stint on Dancing with the Stars, she would always be remembered for asking "what's happened to the other one."

Tasha took a breath. "Does anybody know? If you have any information, please e-mail it in. Is this over?"

Normally, she wasn't the one who asked. She reported the news other people had researched, occasionally regardless of whether she had the full facts. Having to wait in limbo like this felt strange.

She did her best. By dredging through her contacts, scouring the internet, and finally just firing up Twitter to ask people to send in updates, Tasha soon discovered the second alien device was still very much alive.

"The second crystal sphere is in Asia," Tasha delivered in her best reporting tones. "It has been active over Japan, and now it looks like it's moving in the direction of Shanghai."

What they really needed right now, of course, was a diagram. Preferably nicely animated, but failing that...

Tasha disappeared for a moment to rummage around in the props cupboard, then came back with a large whiteboard and a couple of colored magnets. She picked up a magic marker and sketched a somewhat discombobulated world map, with LA, Shanghai, and Tokyo highlighted. When finished, it was relatively easy to hold it up to the camera, using the two magnets to provide a running commentary on the latest updates.

"The second sphere is currently closing on Shanghai, being escorted by one of the pods from the alien spacecraft," Tasha said. "From the reports received so far, it looks as though it will reach the city in a few minutes.

"As for what will happen after..." Would it be coming back here? Would the destruction of one sphere achieve anything? Eventually, Tasha had to do one of the hardest things for any anchor to do, and admit the truth. "I really don't know."

After initially making good progress and releasing 6.92 percent of the population of Tokyo, Sirius was alerted by a signal on its console that Vega's pod had suffered a serious malfunction and was now completely out of contact. Even more alarming was the data some minutes later of the other sphere vanishing without trace. Sirius followed protocol, changing course immediately, and it now proceeded rapidly toward its selected location, the large populated land mass nearby—China," as the humans called it. The sphere streaked ahead like a comet in front of the pod.

While they darted west over the water, Sirius analyzed. There were two hypothetical explanations: humans had found a way to destroy Vega and its sphere, or Vega had aborted its mission. Given the level of primitive technology on this planet, the first hypothesis was inconceivable. Therefore, only one conclusion could be reached—Vega must have terminated its mission and cut communication.

More weapons were aimed at Sirius's pod, this time from gleaming black vessels that surfaced from beneath the waves, firing weapons the console informed Sirius were designed to obliterate whole cities. If only they could see the irony, Sirius thought, as it quickly destroyed both the missiles and the submarines they came from.

Sirius flew in the direction of the nearest and largest city. It contained such a high density of population, with so much smog and clumsy technology, it was difficult for Sirius to understand how a species could live there and prosper.

Sirius watched as the crystal sphere moved into position over the nightscape of Shanghai. The psychic dynamo pulsed out blinding white light and celestial sounds, until it must have looked from the ground as though the gray smog was lit from above by a giant flashbulb. Sirius was not given to such flights of fancy, so it merely monitored the situation, keeping track of the pulsing connection to the universal consciousness as it started to overwhelm the minds in its vicinity.

Sirius's pod detected an approaching craft long before Sirius became telepathically aware of Vega's presence. The other alien's craft shone brightly as it rocketed through the atmosphere, closing in from above on a direct route from the desert. As it neared, Vega's voice sounded in Sirius's mind.

"Sirius, you must stop this."

"Why?"

"I have seen visions. Ones that change everything," Vega replied as it pulsed across the whole of its experience. Sirius felt the power of something it had never expected to see.

"You can feel the truth of it," Vega sent. Sirius could. Even so...

"These visions change nothing," Sirius replied. "The judgment has been given. I have a duty to fulfil."

"We have to make our own decisions," Vega pulsed. "You know what is at stake."

"I will not destroy this sphere," Sirius insisted.

"If you will not, then I must. Do not attempt to stop me, Sirius."

Vega's pod shot up toward the top of the alien orb. Sirius stared for an instant, then worked the controls of its console, setting off in pursuit.

Vega put its pod into position above the sphere and prepared to unleash the necessary burst of dark matter. Jake watched through the glass-like dome as Sirius's craft hurtled toward them and then swung directly underneath their pod.

"Sirius will not permit us to destroy the sphere," Vega sent. "It is blocking the opportunity to fire into it."

"Can we persuade Sirius?" Jake pulsed.

"I do not believe so," Vega sent back. "It is set on this course."

"So we have to find a way through."

They tried. They darted forward and backward, but Sirius always managed to block the way. Whatever position Vega placed its pod in, the other alien swiftly positioned its pod between their pod and the sphere. Every second of delay was costing lives.

"Will Sirius shoot us down if we get too close to stopping the sphere?" Jake sent.

"Of course not!" Vega sent back. "Our species does not act like humans!"

Jake considered the alien's words as a flash of inspiration hit his mind.

"I have an idea," he pulsed. "The shields on this pod keep the sphere from affecting us, yes?"

"The shields and because we are not directly underneath," Vega pulsed back.

"So lower the shields and _put_ us underneath."

Vega didn't hesitate. Jake had to admit, the level of trust was impressive. The alien made an adjustment to the controls of the console, and the space surrounding the pod began to buckle and warp as the shields came down.

"I hope you know what you're doing," Sarah whispered.

Jake forced a smile. "I hope so too."

As Vega maintained the pod's position diagonally above the sphere, Jake felt the increase in the energy around them as it started to push at the edges of his consciousness. He erected his own psychic barriers as best he could, folding them around Sarah even as he felt her attempting to do the same, and they clutched tightly to each other.

"Vega," Sirius sent over, "the action you have just taken is exceptionally dangerous."

"Not as dangerous as this one," Vega sent back, and plunged the pod down thousands of feet before swinging into position underneath the massive crystal orb.

Energy battered against the edges of Jake's mind, vision after vision threatening to burst through. Vega seemed to be having trouble as well, struggling to hold the pod stable as the power flooding down hit them. For a moment, it seemed as though they might spin out of control... then Sirius positioned its pod above them, shielding them like an umbrella.

"Stop this foolishness, Vega," Sirius sent. "You are placing your life at risk for these... for these _creatures_."

"They are worth the risk, Sirius," Vega pulsed and then shifted the position of their pod again, moving out from under Sirius's protection. Another brief burst of power followed, then Sirius adjusted its pod once more. Even with its shields on, the alien's pod wobbled with the waves of energy being emitted by the sphere.

They kept up a kind of cat-and-mouse game, Vega moving its pod down and to one side to lead Sirius away, spiraling out and changing direction so rapidly that even the other alien eventually struggled to keep up, its pod repeatedly battered by the onslaught received from shielding Vega.

Every time Vega moved briefly out from under the umbrella of Sirius's shields, the crystal sphere's power flooded down. Jake held on to his mental shield through each barrage, trying to keep his awareness focused as much as he could, looking for the one moment when Sirius would have followed them far enough from the sphere it was guarding to...

"Now!" Jake yelled, both aloud and mentally. He wasn't sure if Vega heard him, or if it had just spotted the opening for itself, but the alien's hands flashed across the pod's controls.

The pod jumped upward as Vega raced toward the opening, rising so fast that, for a moment, the world blurred. Sirius had been drawn away from the crystal sphere, and now Vega shot quickly into the gap. The pod's shields slammed back into place, blocking out the power of the sphere as they moved into position directly above it before Sirius had a chance to stop them.

It tried to follow. Jake could see the alien's pod rising up, but Vega worked the crystal buttons of the console, and dark matter quickly gathered in front of the pod, shooting down into the orb below and disappearing into its core.

"No," Sirius sent. "What have you done, Vega?"

"What I must," Vega replied.

As with the first sphere, the introduction of the dark matter slowed its spinning, making it list and flicker, wobbling in the air as it struggled to keep pumping out its deadly energy. Then the web of darkness started to spread, looking like a network of capillaries as it rapidly forged to the surface, distributing its imploding power throughout.

This time the crystal sphere darkened fully before shrinking back into itself, hanging still for a moment or two, then exploding in a spray of crystal shards that rained down on the city, clattering off rooftops and glancing away from the sides of buildings.

Sirius's pod floated up in front of them. They saw the incredulous form of the alien, its hands flickering over the controls. "This changes nothing," the alien sent. "I will return to the main ship. With enough time for renewal, my craft can deploy another sphere."

"And mine can destroy it," Vega pulsed back. "You know what I have seen, Sirius. I will not permit you to remove humanity if there is a chance of the vision becoming true."

"You would really destroy any sphere I create?" Sirius demanded, its large black eyes glaring through the front of its pod.

"Unless you are prepared to shoot me down," Vega sent.

It wasn't much of a bluff, Jake thought. After all, Sirius had already shown itself unwilling to let any harm befall Vega. There was no way the other alien would attack another of its species.

"Very well," Sirius sent back, calmer now. "But you will have to live with the consequences of this. Humanity will become everything the Supreme predicted, and you will be the one responsible."

"It is possible. I might become responsible," Vega sent back. "But I will _not_ be the one responsible for this genocide. You have pushed for this from the start."

"Because the species is a mistake," Sirius shot back, and for the first time, Jake could feel real emotion behind the words.

"We gave it a beginning," Vega sent back.

"And we're not done yet," Jake put in.

"Not done with trying to kill one another, along with the world on which you live?" Sirius retorted.

A few hours ago, Jake might have agreed. Now he couldn't help feeling more optimistic. If they could do this, they could do anything. "We might surprise you."

"You are assuming, of course, that you will all be allowed to continue," Sirius sent.

"You've already said you're not going to launch another sphere," Jake pulsed back.

"And you think it stops there?" Sirius pulsed. "Do you really think this is just about you, or me, or any of us?" The alien paused. "Wait, it's coming."

What was coming? What could possibly happen now after they'd managed to stop the destruction? He got his answer a moment later.

## Chapter Thirty

Jake's vision blanked out, and he felt weightless. He floated in a void, everywhere and nowhere at once. It felt familiar, the same dimension he had entered before, when he'd communicated face-to-face with the Supreme after the trial.

Sirius and Vega were there with him, and their faint translucence showed this wasn't a physical space in any conventional sense. This space existed only because of their connection to the universal consciousness, all of them drawn together by the power of the Supreme.

Or Supremes. Jake realized with a start that there were multiple presences. Dimensions within dimensions, shifting planes of light and space, intersecting and overlapping, taking other forms beyond his capacity to perceive. Jake struggled to imagine more than one creature like the Supreme. One being with so much power proved hard enough to fathom, but a group of them, a multitude?

"What is so difficult to understand?" one asked, the words appearing with a sonic ring at the back of Jake's head. "Where one is possible, many are."

A second communicated in words that seemed to burn themselves into the void. "Why has the process that had begun on the planet Earth been halted?"

"This human halted it," Sirius sent, "in conjunction with my colleague, Vega."

"It is understood," a third spoke, its whisper echoing through Jake. "One of our council oversaw the trial. It gave judgment."

"The judgment must be overturned," Vega sent.

"Share with us what you have learned," another Supreme asked, and somehow, Jake knew it was the one who'd given judgment.

He could dimly sense thought waves being transmitted, of Vega sharing its visions, but he didn't have access. Jake concentrated and tried to force a connection. He glimpsed fragments: A young girl practicing martial arts, tumbling and flowing around a luminous dojo. Now as a teenager in a cave full of crystals being taught by a strange priestess. Then as a young woman sitting in full lotus, strands of light emanating from her body and permeating throughout Earth.

"The being known as Vega has seen one who is to come," one of the Supremes sent.

Another paused. "Perhaps this is the Startoucher we have sought for so long."

"Perhaps," a third agreed.

The Supremes fell silent, the shifting levels of light and space becoming perfectly still. Finally, the one who'd pronounced judgment spoke again.

"Perhaps we have been given something else to consider."

"You are reconsidering your judgment?" Sirius demanded. "You are allowing them to remain?"

"This is yet to be decided," one of the others announced. "This outcome is... unprecedented. For now, you will return to the Pleiades. It is requested that the two humans accompany you."

Sirius looked as though it might argue but then bowed its head. "It will be as you say. We will return to the ship, and then to the Pleiades."

"Leave the main craft," the Supreme who had judged commanded. "The Pyramid can continue to observe and transmit."

Abruptly, Jake was back in the pod. Vega blinked; it appeared the alien was also coming around.

"What just happened?" Sarah asked, hands clasped on the lap of her dress.

Vega swiveled around to face them. "We just had an audience with the Supremes. The judgment against humanity has been suspended. Sirius and I have been recalled back to the Pleiades. It is requested that you and Jake return with us."

"Do we have a choice?" Sarah asked.

"A request from the Supremes must be obeyed," Vega sent.

"What is a _Startoucher_?" Jake pulsed. "Is that the girl in your visions?"

Vega frowned and peered at him. "I am not permitted to say. For now."

Jake could sense the alien's resolve not to reveal more. He decided to ask about something else.

"What will happen to the people left here on Earth?"

"The crystal spheres have been destroyed, but there will be many humans who were in the process of transformation when this happened. Those humans will experience a far stronger connection to the universal consciousness."

"So they'll all be like Jake?" Sarah glanced over at him.

Vega paused. "Some will have gained real power and insight yet still retain very selfish tendencies. Others will have powers but be more evolved, with a much greater focus on living peacefully. The results will depend on what people were like before the process, and on how far along they progressed toward releasing."

Jake looked through the glass-like dome at the metropolis below; the smog had cleared, and thousands of lights illuminated the skyscrapers and the roads. He wondered about the changes in the years to come.

"Won't it be difficult for you if we try and stay?" Jake asked.

"Stay?" Sarah said.

Jake turned toward Sarah. "Whatever the Supremes request, I won't go anywhere without you. If you don't want to do this..."

"A chance to see an alien world?" Sarah said, eyes sparking. "Count me in."

"It looks like we're coming," Jake pulsed.

"You have decided well," Vega sent. "Life on Earth will be... complicated. The Supremes were right, this is unprecedented. The trial was rare enough, but no species has ever been reprieved partway through its removal from a world. The results cannot be predicted."

"We'll come back," Jake sent. "But first we want to see the stars."

Even with its analytical intelligence, Sirius couldn't piece together the chain of events since the trial. There were numerous variables to consider, all of them highly unpredictable. Available data indicated the full release of 4.1 million humans. Never before had an extinction process been aborted, and much observation and analysis would be required to verify both the number of humans partially released and the subsequent effects on the species.

Could the female specimen's unborn child possibly be the Startoucher? The visions Vega had transmitted had been persuasive. Still, there had been disappointments in the past, and the Startoucher prophecy remained just that—a prophecy.

Recalled by the Council of the Supremes. It was a precaution. At best, it meant the two scientists would spend an extended period explaining their actions. At worst, it might have consequences for the metaphysical project dominating its life. Despite the new opportunities for research presented by the aborted process, Sirius had been planning to finish the task here on Earth, then return to its work.

Instead, there would be deliberations about what to do next, probably lasting many cycles. The immediate priority would be to ascertain whether this really did represent the success of the Startoucher project.

Sirius knew that bigger threats were coming from both within the galaxy and beyond. The only viable solution to those threats required a huge evolutionary leap from the physical plane to the metaphysical.

This was far from finished, Sirius surmised.

"Sometimes data alone is not sufficient," it sent across to the other pod.

"Yes, greater forces are at work," Vega pulsed back.

"That," Sirius sent, "remains to be seen."

It engaged the pod's traveling mechanisms. Although less efficient than the main ship, it could still make the journey home if needed, jumping in stages rather than all at once. Sirius's hands carefully pressed a sequence of crystal buttons on the console, and energy pulsed into the pod and then through it as it started to form a wormhole for the first stage of the trip. The air in front of the pod swirled, transforming into a gap big enough for Sirius and the pod.

Sirius didn't look back as it pushed the pod forward, slipping into the space opened by the wormhole, then hurtling into the star-studded space beyond.

Jake watched Sirius's pod disappear into the wormhole it had created, vanishing in a point of light as the doorway into the galaxy collapsed behind it. There was the sound of a thunderclap as air rushed in to fill the space the alien pod had occupied, and then the world around them fell silent once more.

Their own pod hung motionless high above Shanghai while Vega repaired the communication system. For some time, Jake could see fighter planes buzzing aimlessly on the horizon, keeping the pod in sight. They didn't seem to want to attack them now. Someone had either realized the futility of it or had spotted the crystal being destroyed.

"Do they know it's over?" Jake asked.

As an answer, Vega was able to raise a screen from the console of the pod, showing news feeds from around the world. The BBC flashed the words _Alien Crisis Apparently Averted_ on a rolling banner across the bottom of the screen while the prime minister gave a speech. KNBC, for some reason, showed the woman who generally did the human-interest stories dancing some kind of jig of celebration. Fox news was already questioning how the destruction of the crystal spheres would affect Republican chances in the next elections.

"They know," Jake pulsed.

"They know, or they think they know," Vega agreed.

"What do you mean?" Sarah asked. She'd obviously caught the note of uncertainty there.

"None of us can truly know what is going to happen next," Vega sent. "I thought I knew what would happen on this world, that Sirius and I would come, see the results of our project, and leave. Then I thought humanity would be removed, with no way of preventing it. Now, I have glimpsed an alternative future."

"Does it have anything to do with our unborn daughter?" Jake pulsed.

_"What?"_ Sarah gasped, placing her hands on her stomach.

Jake turned to her with a smile, and he put his hand on top of hers. "I've been waiting for the right moment to tell you."

"Are you sure?" Sarah asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

"Yes," Jake replied, with a glance toward Vega. "Both of us have seen it."

Sarah was too stunned to speak, her face a mixture of joy and surprise.

Jake gave her a reassuring nod, then turned back to the alien.

"Well?" he pulsed.

"I cannot say," Vega sent. "At least, not yet. The Council of the Supremes is involved, and we will have to see what unfolds in the Pleiades."

"What's it like in the Pleiades?" Jake pulsed.

Vega considered for a moment. "I could show you images of it, if you wish, but I assume this is not what you are asking, Jake."

No, it wasn't. "Will our daughter be safe?"

He'd only known he would be a father for a short while, but already he was filled with happiness and a sense of deep responsibility.

"Your daughter will be safe. I guarantee you will all be protected," Vega sent. "We have well-established protocols for the migration of alien species to our planetary system."

"What will happen when we arrive?" Sarah asked, her eyes wide with a future mother's concern.

"All of us will be required to attend a meeting with the Council of the Supremes." Vega replied. "Beyond that, I have no information."

Perhaps the alien was telling the truth; although, right then, Jake would have liked to have known more. He looked down again through the clear dome at the city below. There would be many people dead, just as there would be in the other cities touched by the crystal sphere. Mostly he sensed stillness, the city seemingly frozen between breaths, aware of the attack stopping but not yet willing to trust it was over. There would be people who had gone partway into the process and been able to come back when the sphere had been destroyed. They would probably be blinking and waking, finding themselves changed in ways that might reimagine humanity's fate.

"We should go," Vega sent. "The Council of the Supremes should not be kept waiting."

Jake looked at Sarah, then at the alien. "There's just one goodbye we need to say first."

In the Mojave Desert at the edge of the Kelso Dunes, Marina tried to decide whether she and the guys should head back to the city. Billy and Adam had snapped out of the new sensations they were feeling long enough to locate Sirius, but now a decision had to be made. They couldn't stay outside the shields of the mothership indefinitely. It was a desert, after all, and those shields didn't provide fundamental things like water or pizzas to bake.

But what was alternative? Drive into LA? Help pick up the pieces among the mayhem and the dead? Marina sighed and plonked herself down on the sand with her back against the shields, waiting for a solution to present itself. After a while, the lanky figures of Billy and Adam walked over to join her, and they all gazed up at the night sky.

"It will be all right, you know," Billy said. "We won."

"Marina's worried about all the things that happen _after_ you've won," Adam said. He was right, Marina realized. Winning was fine. Better than fine, because in this case it meant they'd helped to save billions of people and the entire species, but life didn't stop there. Rebuilding would need to be done, millions of people were dead, and the repercussions of the aliens' visit would be felt far into the future. Whole ways of seeing the world would have to change.

"Things are never going to be the same again," Marina said.

Billy shrugged. "Maybe things have to change sometimes."

Maybe they did, but it was still too hard thinking about what might happen next.

"They're going to expect us to be part of the cleaning up for all this," Marina said. "We were here. So I guess they're going to treat us as if we have all the answers."

She could imagine it now. They'd been the ones coordinating all the hackers. They'd been the ones talking to Jake. She'd been the one on TV in front of everyone. People would expect them to know what to do next.

"I don't like cleaning up," Billy said, grimacing.

"We don't have to be involved in it all," Adam added. "We could just walk back to the RV and drive away."

"Because we'd be so good at living a life on the road?" Marina asked. "You two would never survive anywhere without your moms doing the washing." She sighed. "Besides, I don't think it would be so easy to disappear now that we've been on TV."

As she spoke those words, she realized she didn't want to disappear. There would be people who needed their help. It would just feel wrong to ignore them.

"It must be dawn soon," Adam said, and pushed himself up. "Let's grab our laptops and head back to the van."

Marina and Billy nodded. The three of them walked over to their tent and collected what they could carry. After a lingering glance at the majestic spaceship suspended above the ground, they stepped across the detritus of the abandoned camp. The ambient light of the alien craft faded, and guided by the flashlights on their phones, they trudged across the desert.

Outside the camp, no signs of life could be seen apart from the hundreds of footprints in the sand. Of all those touched by the fatal bliss of the spheres, it was impossible to know how many of them might have died, or how many had been changed irrevocably.

Marina was still thinking about the aftereffects of the spheres when the light appeared in the sky above. She recognized it as a pod instantly. Light shone out as the pod came lower, almost down to the level of the ground. Low enough for Marina to see into it. Jake and Sarah were standing hand in hand, with Vega by their side. They didn't say anything, but they didn't need to.

"They're leaving," Marina said to the others.

Adam stared at the pod. "Will they come back?"

"Maybe."

"Think they'd take us with them?"

Marina did have an answer for that one. "Probably not."

"Shouldn't we be waving?" Billy asked.

He had a point. Sometimes, there were only so many things you could do. So they waved while the pod ascended into the night sky.

Jake and Sarah took their seats while Vega fussed over Sarah, making sure she was securely in place. There were so many other goodbyes they could have said, but really, Sarah had already spoken to her grandmother, and Jake didn't feel any connection to his old life. Gemini and Marina deserved to be the ones to see this part.

Vega touched the crystal buttons of the console, and the air in front of the pod rent as though torn apart by invisible hands. Around the edges of the wormhole, cosmic plasma pulsed, hinting at the power the pod used to make the connection.

They hung there for a moment before the gap, and Jake took a last look toward the desert. From this high above, he could see thousands of stars stretching above the desert and mountains of his home planet. It was breathtaking, but he suspected the rest of the universe would be just as beautiful. Then the pod shot forward into the wormhole, the gateway instantly closing behind them.

The galaxy flashed by as time and space were compressed. The pod appeared static as the stars of the Milky Way streaked past on all sides. Suddenly the rush of space slowed, and the pod's sense of motion returned. They had crossed the threshold.

Vega pointed. Ahead, Jake could make out seven brilliant stars, sparkling like diamonds with a bluish hue.

"Are you ready?" Vega pulsed.

Jake looked at Sarah. She nodded. He turned and gazed toward the Pleiades.

"We're ready," Jake sent.

Another wormhole opened, and they entered. Behind them, space faded into emptiness one last time.

## Acknowledgments

Thanks to my brother David for the original spark twenty years ago that life on Earth was an alien experiment. That spark finally ignited and blazed into life.

My mother Sheena was an enthusiastic beta reader, and helped me through the first edit then made subsequent useful suggestions for the text.

For any book, a great cover is a must. Stephen Youll walked me through the creative process, and skillfully and imaginatively translated my notes into a stunning image.

Due to living in Peru while writing a story set in LA, on the ground research was not possible. As such, Google was an invaluable and much used resource. Some details, however, required expert advice. Thomas S. Bunn, of Lagerlof, Senecal, Gosney, & Kruse, LLP, generously indicated the correct California courthouse for a water rights case.

I also needed reputable insight into the world of hacking, and Sigma gave detailed and relevant examples of hacking strategies.

Technology is transforming many aspects of our lives, and Oleg Gutsol's innovative Consensus.ai project is referenced in the text. This collaborative AI could well be the way communities govern themselves in the future.

Encouraging words from friends can give a much needed boost, and Yuriy Blokhin has provided heartfelt support in the run up to launch.

Over the last two years many people have played their part in helping me develop as a writer. None more so than Jim Thomas, who gave the text a penetrating and transformative edit at a crucial stage. I will always be grateful to Jim for opening my eyes to the craft, and showing (not telling!) just how much further there was (and is) to jump.

Thanks also to Michelle Hope for a precise and well judged copy edit, and to Tamara Beach for proofreading. John Amy formatted the ebook, and deserves praise for his patience in dealing with my questions and revisions.

The greatest thanks must go to my wife, Nori. She shared the journey of Startoucher from inception to publication, as she has shared so many journeys with me since we have been together. Without her guidance and presence, this book would not have been possible.

## About the Author

C.J. Odle is an author and ayahuascero living in a small conservation and healing center in the Peruvian Amazon.

Startoucher is his first novel.

To find out more, please visit cjodle.com

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