Thank you all so much for the comments you've been leaving! Your feedback is really helpful to me, and I'm glad so many people have been enjoying the journey so far. I hope you enjoy part three as well!
I stared at the text on my phone for more than an hour before the battery died. Then I sat with the blank screen and remembered it. Justine had left. She'd told me to my face that she'd see me at the apartment, then packed up her stuff and driven home to her parents.
The text hurt to read. She'd apologized. She'd explained, I guess, although none of it made much sense to me. We'd been warned about the end of the world, she was treating it as a real prediction, and yet... she ran. Justine had decided that, if the world really were ending, she'd like to spend it being happy.
And, somehow, that meant leaving me behind.
That was the thought that broke through the numbness. I set my phone on the charger without really thinking about it, went into the kitchen, and got myself a drink of water. And I started to think.
I was still there a fair while later, holding an empty glass, when Evan came back in. He was quiet about it, closing the door so gingerly behind him that I barely heard the lock click. Somewhere past all my racing thoughts I realized he was trying not to disturb me.
"Hey," I said.
He poked his head into the kitchen. "Hey man," he said quietly. "I didn't know you were out here."
I nodded. I realized I was still thirsty and started to fill my glass again.
Evan stepped into the kitchen. It occurred to me that he was looking very closely at my face. "How are you doing?"
I chuckled. "It sucks." I tossed back half the water at once, wishing it was something stronger.
He nodded, too hard. "Really sucks."
Evan paused, but when I didn't have anything to add he continued. "You can... totally sit out the alien stuff. For now, or as long as you want. We've got it covered."
I finished the water. "I was thinking about that."
"Yeah," he said. "The way..." he gestured vaguely. It seemed like he was afraid to mention Justine too directly, in case it was still too painful for me to think about. It was, but it wasn't. I wish I knew how to explain that.
"Yeah," I said instead. "Yeah."
I filled up the glass again, filled a different one and handed it to Evan.
"I'm still in, though," I said. It was what I'd decided, standing over the sink.
"It's really okay," he assured me.
I shook my head. "No. No, I don't think so. If all of this is true, if it's the last gasp of humanity, if an alien flower and its tiny pet construction team are the only thing we have on our side --" I laughed a little. Not because it was funny, but because I was saying all these things so seriously. And because the fact that it wasn't funny was hilarious.
I wasn't even making sense to myself. Probably I needed to catch up on sleep. Or at least drink more coffee.
"If it's all true," I went on, "then there's no point in making excuses. Even if shit sucks, even if Justine's --" my throat tightened, but I went on, "even if Justine's out, I gotta stay. Because it's about as important as anything could be. I don't really get what's going on, I dunno what I can do, but I'm in. I think we all have to be in this all the way."
Evan patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. "Nice speech, general."
I laughed, and this time it was a real one. It felt good. It felt very good. "Shut up, man."
He grinned. "All right. If you're in this, want me to catch you up on what we talked about just now?"
"Only over a beer," I said, grabbing a pair from the fridge.
"So," Evan said, once we had settled into the living room chairs, "our little space invader can't decide if the apocalypse is nigh, or if there's hope for us yet."
I frowned. Did Justine leave for nothing? "It sounded pretty sure before," I said.
He shrugged. "Yeah, but it searched its memory banks or whatever and dug up some more detailed protocols. Stuff it didn't need to make contact, but that we can use now that we've accepted its help."
Evan sipped his beer, some hoppy craft ale that Rosemary had bought in bulk before the weekend. She always refused to get cheap, staple college beers, but she also picked up most of the price difference. It wasn't like she couldn't afford it, so we all mostly went with it. Maybe the rest of us couldn't taste the difference, but none of us had a problem with how much stronger they tended to be.
"Basically," Evan went on, "it wants to do as little as it possibly can. Remember how it was talking about low impact intervention, or whatever?"
"Mmm."
"And how it couldn't make a detailed prediction of what our problems were, that it didn't have the info?"
I frowned. "Did it say that while I was gone, or this morning?"
"Both." Evan pursed his lips, taking on a quavering, schoolteacher tone. "Were you not taking notes, young man?"
I waved a hand at him, almost spilling my beer. I hadn't eaten, and it was some kind of imperial, double, strong-ale something-or-other. It was going straight to my head.
Evan laughed. "Yeah, it took us a while to really get into what the flower meant. It knew
about
the predictions that said we were in trouble, but not what any of those predictions
were
. Forecasting the end of the world needs a bit more detail than the weather, I guess."
"Imagine that."
"Imagine that," Evan agreed. "Anyway, we could maybe plug Cybeline into a few supercomputers and let her crunch some numbers --"
"Uh --" I started to say.
"I know, I know, nobody wants Skynet, but it doesn't matter anyway. She said it's not even about the data, or the processing power, she doesn't have anything to compare it to. She can't crunch the numbers without the algorithms, or databases or something. Not without studying Earth for a couple decades to build up her own models."
"Which is kind of a long time."
"When the apocalypse might be coming, yeah. Kind of." He drank.
"So... is that it? We know even less than we thought we did?"
"I'm getting there," Evan complained. "Jesus. So. Cybeline can't remember what her makers said was going to happen, and she can't figure it out on her own.
But,
when she unpacked her memory, she found a way that she --"
"...can ask the makers," I guessed. There was something warm in my chest. Hope? I hadn't even realized how worried I had been. Somehow, without my noticing, it had started to sink in that we, and just about everyone out there, really might be in danger.
Evan nodded. "ET phone home."
"So... that's good, right? We pull up a zoom call with the squid people and they tell us what we need to do."
"Sadly, not that simple."
"Why, are they still using Skype? I'm pretty sure my old laptop still has it installed."
Evan grinned. "Let me make the jokes," he said. "You're too pretty to be funny."
"I'm funny," I protested. "Why did the... Irishman go to the convent?"
Evan gestured,
go on
.
I frowned. "It's... wait. Something about potatoes? Or sheep?"
Evan nodded. "Natural born comedian."
"Damn straight." I drank. "So why isn't it as simple as calling up the aliens?"
"Sounds like the mothership's probably out of range," Evan said, "past the orbit of Pluto and headed away from us already. Apparently they haven't cracked the whole speed of light thing, or at least they didn't let Cybeline know if they did."
"So 'not simple' actually means impossible?"
"Impossible to call the
mothership
," Evan said, "as far as Cybeline can guess. But we don't need to go that far. Their whole deal is minimum intervention, right? And they make it work by complicated predictions, all the data and algorithms that Cybeline didn't bring with. So they'll be watching us, trying to learn as much as they can from us whether we make it or not."
"Maybe letting us go down in flames," I said, "but doing better next time."
Evan shrugged.
"Helps us a hell of a lot," I griped.
"It actually might," Evan said. "This thing's not built compact like Cybeline. It's got storage space, it can remember all the predictions about what's going to happen with us. One option that she's meant to give us, one way we can try and save ourselves, is asking her big brother what he sees in his crystal ball."
He drank. "But Cybeline says big brother's not going to be hanging out anywhere near earth, since humanity's advanced to the point of launching satellites and probes. He's the shy, retiring type. At the distance he'll be keeping, Cybeline can't just call him up, especially since she doesn't know where he actually is. To actually make contact, we gotta make some kind of communicator."
"Can we do that? Build a space radio, or whatever?"
Evan shrugged. "Cybeline can. Apparently most of it's complicated, but not that big. We could hide it in a backpack, or one of our apartments. But... to actually send the message, we need an antenna."