Paranormals (Book 2): We Are Not Alone (2 page)

The White House Press Secretary rolled her eyes theatrically (a little
too
theatrically, many later said, suggesting that the gesture had been preplanned and over-rehearsed) and said, “Sir, we are here to discuss serious, real-world problems, not ludicrous rumors about a bunch of paranormals.”

But the reporters wouldn’t let it drop, not for the Press Secretary nor the President, and from that point onward, the official term for those who changed was not “mutants” or “metahumans” or even “superhumans,” but
paranormals
.

Paranormals and
rogues
, unfortunately.

So Charles, Justin, and Zeek were, like everyone else, glued to the television set, watching history unfold ... and as luck would have it, Charles was the first to notice
another
 history in the making not twelve feet from where they sat.

“Guys ...” he said in a low voice, his eyes now locked onto the computer monitor. His partners didn’t react, so he repeated, louder, “Guys.”

This time he earned a “Hmm?” from Justin; Zeek did not respond at all. Neither of them looked away from the television.

“
Guys
,” Charles said once again in a quivering voice, rising from his chair and crossing to their work equipment. His heart was pounding in his ears, so intense that he no longer heard the television.

Zeek remained oblivious, but Justin finally registered his tone. “Charles, what—?”

“Guys! Get over here!”

Charles stood before the monitor, hunched over it, his trembling arms the only thing keeping him from collapsing to his knees. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. After all these years ... could this really be
it
?

“Oh, my God,” Zeek whispered near his right ear, as both men now stood on either side of him.

“Charles,” Justin said, “please tell me I’m not dreaming.”

“You’re not dreaming ...”

A signal. A transmission. Coming down from the heavens.

From
outer space
.

Then the stupor lifted, and all three men launched into action. Measuring, triangulating, calculating. And recording — oh, God, yes, recording everything! On the television, the President’s oft-interrupted speech went unheard by these three men as their life’s work and lifelong wishes came true beyond their wildest hopes. For unlike that scene in the Robert Zemeckis movie, this wasn’t just some random pulse, some loud tone that thrummed into prime numbers (although that, too, would’ve been cause for excitement). No, this was no code ... this was a
verbal transmission
, an all-out conversation involving two distinct voices in a language that had never been spoken anywhere on Earth.

Once they had determined, to the best of their ability, that this was neither a glitch nor a hoax, they knew it was time to start making some earth-shattering phone calls. Being nominally in charge, Charles stood and placed his hand on the phone, but before picking it up, he turned to his partners and proclaimed in a melodramatic tone that was both giddy and somber, “Gentlemen ... we are not alone.”

Now, five years later, Charles Foster smiled with fondness and nostalgia (and a touch of embarrassment over his own grandiosity) at the memory — the crowning moment of his career, and his life. It was later determined, thanks to the acquisition of UT’s blessed paranormal ability, that those first two voices from beyond the sky had not been saying anything to
them
at all. Charles and his team had merely tapped into the conversation as a third-party, overhearing, funny enough, their discussing the results of some kind of outer-space sporting event. A little bit of a letdown in the immediacy of things, but not so much in the big picture — proof that we are not alone, as Charles had put it, could hardly be considered “disappointing” by any stretch of the imagination.

And it hadn’t stopped there. Within a week they had picked up another signal; this one
was
in code, and they spent the rest of the day verifying that it was nothing known to humanity. Two days after that, they picked up yet another signal, and although this one smacked of being another verbal transmission, the language — hell, the vocalization itself — was so exotic they didn’t know whether to assign it to the original transmission’s category or create something altogether new. By the end of that first month, they had received and recorded almost a dozen different signals of extraterrestrial origin.

At any other point in history, this would have been
the
news. Every journalist in the world would have been clambering to interview them, every scientific institution begging to get in on the action.

But ... during all of these events, the Paranormal Effect had grown undeniable, and whether Charles agreed with it or not, superhumans among us trumped voices from light-years away. The scientific community was abuzz, of course, and astronomers were doing cartwheels over the seven new stars that shown brightly in the night sky (astrologists were still arguing amongst themselves over what the stars meant, if anything). But the general public was far more interested in the fact that their neighbors might be able to read their minds or see through their walls or who knew what else.

The only direct, undeniable connection SETI could draw between the Night of the White Flash and all of these new signals was the
timing
. The appearance of the Seven Stars and the sudden commencement of our finally receiving extraterrestrial signals was too fantastic to dismiss as coincidence. It was as though a veil had been lifted, a barrier of some kind removed to allow Earth in on some galactic secret.

Not that we’re any closer to figuring out what that secret might be
, Charles mused. Then he mentally shook himself and said to Ken, “Okay. So if you’re not here to fill me in on the latest pair of signals, why did you want to talk to me?”

“Well, ” Ken said, scratching the side of his neck, “we’re not entirely sure what to make of this. I mean we can’t agree. You see, we picked up a new set of transmissions from our cousins last night—”

Charles nodded. “Yes, I got the email on that this morning.” The “cousins” to which Ken was referring were the
Arthians
— so dubbed because their spoken language, of all the transmissions SETI had recorded, was the closest match to an Earth equivalent; it sounded a hell of a lot like Russian, and they had spent a fair amount of effort at the beginning verifying that it was not just that. As near as Sam the Universal Translator could tell, this race actually called themselves the
Taalu
, but the idea that a similar language meant other similarities was an appealing one. And so it was jokingly decided that these strangers were from the planet
Arth
(as in one-letter-off), and their nicknames shifted from “Arthlings” to “Arthians,” and the latter stuck. Charles asked Ken, “What about them?”

“Well, you know that little trailer code that UT’s been using kind of like a date stamp ...?”

Again Ken hesitated. Charles found himself growing both a little curious and slightly annoyed. “Spit it out, Ken.”

In response, Ken leaned forward and offered his tablet. “Um, it might be easier, Doctor Foster, if you just take a look at this and, you know, form your own opinion first.”

Charles accepted the tablet and read the information on the screen. A crease formed between his eyebrows as he tried to make sense of it. He thumbed the screen a few times, reading more before saying, “At first glance, Ken, I’d wager our paranormal translator’s made his first mistake since he joined us. This data is contradictory. It doesn’t make sense.”

“That was my first guess, too,” Ken acknowledged. “But take a look at the footnotes back on the first page.” He watched, his eyes gleaming with anticipation, as Charles did so. “Do you see what I’m talking about?”

Charles sat forward in his chair, the tablet gripped with both hands. His heart was beating faster, his face flushing with professional excitement as it hadn’t in a few years. “That’s ... that’s got to be speculation. I mean—”

Ken nodded. “Yeah. But he seems pretty sure, Doctor Foster. And Sam’s never made a mistake yet, you know? With a track record like his— I mean, as near as we can tell, he’s been one-hundred percent across the board.” He shrugged. “So, what do
you
think?”

Charles remained still for a moment longer, then shoved his chair back and rose to his feet, his eyes never wavering from the tablet as he thumbed the screen forward and back. He couldn’t hide his eager grin as he said, “I think I need to talk to Sam. Right now.”

PCA

When he noticed he was in danger of leaving Ken behind, Charles made a conscious effort to keep his pace cool and even, to keep a stranglehold on his enthusiasm. First and foremost, UT really might be wrong — a first, but stranger things had happened for certain. But he also wanted to maintain a semblance of professional decorum; after receiving hundreds of extraterrestrial signals from dozens of different sources, half of his staff was even more inured to the exhilaration of new data than he was.

But this ... this could be different, very different. If Sam was
right
...

Opening the doors to the transcription pool, Charles scanned the room to see who else was present. A couple of the other interns were across the room, hard at work on the new transceiver algorithm UT had suggested and Charles had commissioned. Zeek was smoking a cigarette out on the patio and talking on his cell phone. The others, as Charles had hoped, did not yet appear to be back from lunch — by lucky coincidence, Charles had given them approval to take an extra hour today for Matthew’s birthday.

Until they nailed this down, Charles wanted to keep things as quiet as possible. Just to be sure.

As they approached Sam, Charles steeled himself for what he was likely to see: Sam had his professional-grade headphones on, which meant he was translating a transmission right now, which meant his eyes were going to have that creepy look that Charles found so unnerving.

“Good afternoon, Sam,” he said as he reached his destination, speaking up so that Sam would be able to hear him.

Sam Bassett — who Charles had always thought looked like a fair-skinned, hazel-eyed version of the actor Stanley Tucci — glanced up from his monitor ... but his eyes weren’t “hazel” right now, not while he was using his paranormal ability. When he was working, the hazel of Sam’s irises and the white of his sclera inverted.

Charles bit the inside of his cheek and refused to flinch.

Sam flicked only a brief glance at his boss before closing his white-on-hazel eyes as he removed his headphones. Setting them on the desk beside his keyboard, he opened his eyes to reveal they were once more completely normal — the Universal Translator had closed them, but now they belonged to Sam Bassett.

 “Good afternoon, Doctor Foster.” He also nodded to Ken, who nodded back with a big goofy grin. “I’m guessing you’re here about the latest transmission from the Arthians?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “I’m— well, I’m intrigued, to say the least, about the conclusions you’ve drawn.”

Sam smiled. “I’ll bet.”

Charles grabbed a nearby chair and rolled it over to sit alongside Sam’s worktable. Ken stepped over to his own desk and leaned against it, not even pretending to do other work as he watched to see how this was going to play out. “Before I get too excited, why don’t you take me through this from the beginning, step by step. I want to understand how you reached the conclusions you did. Because if you’re right, UT ...”

Sam nodded. “I know,” he agreed, still smiling. “Okay, first let me pull up one of the Arthian transmissions from last month.” He turned back to his computer and searched for the appropriate folder. “I’ve gotten so far behind on their transmissions, I’ve started spot-checking them and making note of their approximate age—”

“From their ‘date stamp,’ correct?”

“Yes, all the Arthian transmissions — except for the one, but I’ll get to that in a minute — have an ending footnote, sort of like an auto-signature at the end of an email. I’ve seen the same thing on a few of the others, like the Daluvanians.”

Charles stifled the urge to rush Sam on the parts he already knew; experience had taught him to let Sam talk things through at his own pace.

“It’s based off the center of the Milky Way,” Sam continued, “spreading outward at a speed-of-light ratio to indicate ... well, the best way to express it verbally escapes me, and I know you guys would prefer a mathematical equation anyway. But still, thank God for my paranormal talent,” he said without an ounce of ego, “because without having their galactic knowledge as reference, I don’t think mankind ever would’ve been able to translate and understand it well enough to use it.”

Charles chuckled. “You should’ve seen what a train wreck our translation efforts were before you joined us, Sam.”

Sam gave a humble bow of his head, then perked up when he found what he was looking for. “Okay, take this transmission for example ...”

Sam clicked his mouse, and a scratchy but audible voice played from his speakers. As always, Charles marveled at how much the language sounded like Russian — not speaking the language himself, if someone had played it for him and told him that it
was
Russian, he would’ve believed them.

“Based on degradation, bandwidth, background spill, background wash, and the date stamp,” Sam explained, “I’m putting this one just a few weeks after the previous Arthian transmission. There’s still a lot of speculation and circumstantial extrapolation involved, but all of those factors put together suggest that this signal originated approximately two-thousand-seven-hundred light-years from here.”

Charles smiled like a little kid glimpsing his first sight of Santa Claus. “The voice we’re hearing is from twenty-seven-hundred years ago.”
My, my ... maybe I haven’t lost that old sense of wonder after all.

“Conventional wisdom and the laws of physics as we understand them dictate that conclusion, yes. But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”