Invasion E-Book

Luke Rhinehart

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Super-intelligent hairy beach balls suddenly appear from another universe. Billy Morton's family come quickly to love the playful alien 'Louie'. But when Louie starts using their computer to hack into government and corporate accounts, learn all that NSA knows, and steal millions from banks, the Government decides that all these aliens, even though most of them seem interested in only harmless play, are terrorists.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter Outline

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Item in the News

Ten

Eleven

Item in the News

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Item in the News

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Item in the News

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Item in the News

Twenty-Six

Item in the News

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Item in the News

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Item in the News

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Item in the News

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Item in the News

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Item in the News

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Item in the News

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Item in the News

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Item in the News

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Note on Book Two

Acknowledgments

InvasionPrint edition ISBN: 9781785651755E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651762

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: September 20161 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2016 by George Cockcroft. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To my wife Ann, who despite my continual complaints that I wasdead, kept insisting that I was still breathing.

“IF GOD CREATED MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE,THEN WHO THE HELL CREATED THE FFS?”

Anonymous Human

“HUMAN BEINGS ARE THE PLANET’SWAY OF COMMITTING SUICIDE.”

Anonymous FF

CHAPTER OUTLINE

  1. BILLY. Billy brings home a funny fish.

  2. OFFICIAL HISTORY. Unit A looks for alien terrorists.

  3. BILLY. Louie cripples an innocent child.

  4. BILLY. The Arctic superdog is not at home.

  5. LUKE’S REPORT. Louie’s hacking of NSA is not appreciated.

  6. BILLY. Billy just can’t get rid of his friend Louie.

  7. BILLY. Billy admits he’s not a good red-blooded American.

  8. BILLY. Agent Johnson tells Billy he’s in big trouble.

  9. LUKE’S REPORT. President told of the danger of hairy balls.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Some Protean definitions.

10. BILLY. Billy finds that half a million dollars doesn’t last long.

11. LUKE’S REPORT. Media finds FFs amusing and murderous.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Polar bears in Central Park.

12. BILLY. Billy reluctantly agrees to become a TV star.

13. BILLY. The Mortons help Louie try to pretend to be a human.

14. BILLY. Louie makes a guest appearance on TV, as do the Feds.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Six Basic Republican Principles.

15. BILLY. Lita claims her Arctic dog can’t be a terrorist.

16. BILLY. Louie, pregnant, needs Billy’s help.

17. BILLY. A talk with the CEO of APE.

18. OFFICIAL HISTORY. Grandma Moses, Mother Teresa on no-fly list.

19. BILLY. Billy gets raped when going through security.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: NRA All Americans must be armed!

20. BILLY. Louie gives birth to Louie-Twoie.

21. LUKE’S REPORT. The Feds’ secret weapon nabs an FF.

22. OFFICIAL HISTORY. Feds chainsaw and carve up Louie.

23. LUKE’S REPORT. Louie-Twoie and Chubby to the rescue.

24. BILLY. Good guys escape to sea with an acrobatic first mate.

25. BILLY. Coast Guard finds nothing. Fears everything.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: A few more Protean definitions.

26. OFFICIAL HISTORY. New law to make FFs humans. Sort of.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Louie’s op-ed piece for the Times.

27. BILLY. First inter-universe sex.

28. BILLY. Billy runs the boat aground and is happy to do so.

29. LUKE’S REPORT. Molière on writing a play.

30. BILLY. Louie wants to blow up Billy and his family.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Tsongalese move to Wali Wali.

31. BILLY. Molière’s play opens. And closes.

32. LUKE’S REPORT. Billy and family blown to smithereens.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: New girls’ sports cheer goes viral.

33. BILLY. They’re alive, they’re alive!

34. BILLY. Billy visits ruins in Iraq.

35. LUKE’S REPORT. Lita prefers dirt.

36. BILLY. Billy parties with an unusual CIA agent.

37. OFFICIAL HISTORY. Agent Johnson thinks Billy is alive.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Democrats want to outlaw thinking.

38. BILLY. The earth’s second Resurrection is planned.

39. BILLY. The dead Mortons are a sensation when they talk.

40. BILLY. Louie-Twoie corrupts Lucas and Jimmy.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Declining Xmas sales investigated.

41. LUKE’S REPORT. The Morton boys go swimming in February.

42. BILLY. Billy gets arrested for child neglect and two hundred other things.

43. LUKE’S REPORT. Louis surrenders in Alice in Wonderland.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Republican candidate endorses money.

44. BILLY. The FFs are beginning to lose.

45. LUKE’S REPORT: Why Gibberish didn’t become president.

46. OFFICIAL HISTORY. All Proteans are guilty until proven innocent.

47. OFFICIAL HISTORY. Louie and Johnson don’t see eye to beach ball.

48. OFFICIAL HISTORY. Molière and the President don’t hit it off.

49. LUKE’S REPORT. CI Rabb makes a despicable speech at NSA.

50. LUKE’S REPORT. CI Rabb claims “I’m me!”

51. BILLY. At his trial, it seems Louie may not be Louie.

52. LUKE’S REPORT. CI Rabb announces: “We all may be FFs!”

53. LUKE’S REPORT. Louie finds a hole in the wall.

54. BILLY. How the FFs pulled off the Great Disappearing Act.

55. BILLY. Louie suggests zapping FFs back to Ickieland.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: A few more Protean definitions.

56. OFFICIAL HISTORY: “We are doomed, doomed, unless we…”

57. BILLY. The planning of the largest Forthehelluvit event in human history.

58. BILLY. Billy enjoys a ride on a mountain.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: Panicky tweets indicate a problem.

59. LUKE’S REPORT: Feds try to explain why they nuked Bermuda.

60. BILLY. In the midst of death the play goes on.

61. LUKE’S REPORT. Manhattan Fun-In, part one.

ITEM IN THE NEWS: LT’s thoughts about humans.

62. BILLY. Billy and the boys meet cops and the NRA stands firm.

63. LUKE’S REPORT. Organized chaos at the first national Fun-In.

64. BILLY. On life in Central Park with almost a million friends.

65. LUKE’S REPORT: Central Park Nation manifesto.

66. BILLY. Can Billy and the FFs save the Central Park Nation from massacre?

NOTE ON BOOK TWO

ONE

(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 3–17)

My name’s Billy Morton. When I met Louie I was captain of my own small fishing boat that runs out of Greenport on the North Fork of Long Island. I’d take her out into the Long Island Sound or over east of Montauk, and me and my crew of two happy-go-lucky nobodies would run out our nets and see what we could pull in. Might be out there three days, but now that my health isn’t all it should be, usually only two. I used to own two boats and actually make a bit of money, but a lot of the fish got tired of getting dragged up out of the water and chopped up into cat food, and they sort of began to go extinct. Had to sell half my fleet and settle for running just Vagabond, a thirty-five-footer whose diesel engine had been built during the Civil War, and the wood that went into her frame was so old the trees that provided it are extinct. But at least she was mine.

I run a tight ship but a relaxed ship. I’m the boss and the guys know it. But they also know they can hack around a bit or take a ten-minute break without getting shouted at. In fact if they didn’t hack around a bit I’d never have hired them. Don’t like fellows who are too serious. As long as the work gets done, how it gets done don’t worry me much.

So when Marty Beck said to me that some swell-belly fish had “climbed up on the coach roof,” I assumed Marty was having some fun and thought he was being clever. Marty’s a good man but cleverness isn’t one of his strengths. I knew, and he knew, that fish didn’t get from the working deck to the coach roof unless they were thrown there.

But when I saw Sam Potter listening soberly as Marty reported the climbing fish, I thought either the whole crew was trying to pull my leg or that Marty was serious.

“Fish got onto the coach roof, huh?” I said.

“Yep,” replied Marty, scratching the inside of his right thigh through his rubberized overalls. “Bounced there.”

“Bounced onto the coach roof,” says I.

“After rolling away from us when we tried to throw him overboard again,” says Sam, nodding seriously, intent on getting the story straight.

“Again.”

“I threw him overboard,” Sam says. “Damnedest looking blowfish I ever seen. Big fella, like a basketball, but he looked useless. Tossed him off the stern and went back to work.”

I was at the wheel at the time facing my two guys and waiting patiently for them to finish the story, still not sure if it was an elaborate joke or what.

“Fish came back,” says Marty. “Popped up over the coaming and plopped right back onto the deck.”

“Fish jumps up into the boat,” says I, still waiting for the punch line.

“He did,” says Sam.

“And then, when you tried to throw it overboard again, it hopped up onto the coach roof.”

“Right. Bounced there with one bounce.”

“Did it say anything?” I ask.

The two men looked at me. They knew I was a kidder but were sometimes a little slow to pick it up. Sometimes wish there were brighter guys who wanted to work sixteen hours a day for peanuts, but then of course they wouldn’t be bright.

“Let’s take a look,” says I.

I turned the wheel over to Marty and went out of the cabin with Sam.

When I looked up to the coach roof what I saw was a hairy basketball. Larger than a basketball, more like a beach ball. Covered with short silver-gray hairs. No blowfish.

I reached up to take hold of the… thing, and it rolled away from me to the right. It had no mouth or fins or limbs or eyes, so how he saw me reach for him was a puzzle.

So I moved myself a couple of steps to my right and reached up again. The thing rolled back to where it had been before.

“Doesn’t want to get thrown overboard again, I guess,” says Sam.

“What the fuck is it?” asks Marty from the helm.

What the fuck indeed. I’d seen a lot of strange things dragged up from the deep but never a bouncing fish without fins, scales, eyes, or anything else that was fish-like. Just a stupid beach ball with a lot of smooth, fine hair.

After staring at it a long time and trying to come up with something brilliant to say, I sighed and moved away.

“It’s probably just another creature from outer space,” says I, and went back to the wheel.

My two guys looked at me, then up at the beach ball on the coach roof. Then they went back to work.

* * *

Dockside, Marty and Sam unloaded the crates of iced fish into Sam’s big truck, cleaned the decks as well as it could be done, and then, it already getting dark, headed off to deliver the fish and then to their homes. Before they left, they each took a peek at the thing on the roof, and at me, and then went off trying to look cool and unconcerned.

Cool and unconcerned is always a good strategy for a man, especially when he hasn’t the foggiest idea about what’s going on. I stood on the deck and looked up at it.

“I’m heading home,” says I aloud. “You gonna hang out here?”

The thing seemed to expand upwards a half foot, making itself look like a big hairy egg three-feet tall standing on end, then settled back down into a sphere.

“Well, suit yourself,” says I.

I went and got my duffel bag, walked aft to the ladder that led up to the dock, and climbed ashore. It was late, and my boat was docked off in a corner of the marina where most of the other boats seldom saw any more action than an occasional marina drinking session. And in late September, most boats had retired for the year. So there wasn’t anyone around when I got up on the pier and looked back.

The thing fell or leapt or slid off the roof, hit the deck, and bounced neatly up onto the dock six feet from my boots.

I nodded, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to have a fish bounce twelve feet off a boat as if it wanted to follow me home.

After looking around to see if anyone else had seen the fishy acrobatics, I began to move off. As I walked to my pickup truck, the thing rolled along behind me.

“Want to hang out a little longer, huh,” says I.

At the truck I threw my duffel in the back, unlocked the passenger-side door, and then held it open. The thing, five feet behind me, stayed still a moment then rolled forward and bounced into the cab.

Off to my right I noticed another guy opening his car door staring over at what had happened, but when I casually closed the passenger-side door and gave him a little wave, he nodded and got into his car. Guess he figured that if a self-hopping beach ball didn’t bother me, it wouldn’t bother him.

I got into my pickup and started the engine, then I turned and stared at the furry fish sitting beside me.

“Yep,” says I.

And drove home.

* * *

Our home is a mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse that has seen better days but is still breathing. When we bought it, it was one of the last surviving farmhouses on the North Road, most having long been torn down to make way for the wineries that for more than thirty years had spread across Eastern Long Island like the plague. Good plague, I guess, especially if you like wine, but it meant the death of the potato farms and the old farmhouses.

Except ours, which squatted determinedly on only half an acre. But on one side was a vast field of grape vines, so close I could lean out our living room window and pick grapes whenever I got the urge. On the other side of our farmhouse was a big spread of lawn owned by the rich guy who lived next door—next door being two hundred feet away. And his house was a hundred feet off the road where ours was so close we could eavesdrop on conversations in the cars whizzing past.

That early evening out on the back porch I wondered what I was doing. The beach ball was only five feet away sitting on the top step. Something that had come from the sea had followed me home. It wasn’t close to anything I’d ever experienced or heard of—except in the National Inquirer or a sci-fi novel. But for some reason I wasn’t scared.

So I clomped into the kitchen the way I usually do, letting the screen door bang behind me, and tossing my duffel into a corner. Carlita was at the stove stirring something in a frying pan, and I heard our two kids arguing happily in the living room.

Usually I march over to the fridge and pull out something cold and alcoholic, but this time I stopped in the middle of the kitchen and looked back at the screen door. The thing was sitting just outside it on the porch. I’m tempted to say “staring at me” but since the thing had no eyes, it made it tough for it to stare.

I turned to Carlita.

“We got a visitor,” says I. Lita glanced over at me and waited for me to explain. She’s almost twenty-five years younger than me, bright and a tough cookie who doesn’t put up with much bullshit.

I looked at her and then marched back to the screen door and swung it open. The thing hesitated about a second and then rolled in and stopped ten feet from Carlita. Gotta hand it to her, Lita stood her ground, although I think she did raise her spatula into a defensive position. After giving the thing a long stare she turned to me.

“What’s the joke?”

I moved past her to the fridge.

“No joke,” says I. “The thing jumped into our boat off Fishers Island and then followed me home.”

When the “thing” rolled four feet to stay closer to me, Lita took a step back away from it. She followed it with her eyes, still not decided whether to laugh or scream or start yelling at me to get the damn thing out of her kitchen. She was a lawyer once, so she’s careful not to make quick decisions.

“What is it?” she finally asked.

I took a beer out of the fridge, popped it open, and looked down at the thing.

“Beats me.”

She looked at me, then the thing, and then went back to her frying pan.

“Well, until you figure out what it is, keep it in the basement.”

I nodded. Lita always has been the practical one.

* * *

Actually I’d converted a small part of the dark, damp basement into a sort of rec room for the kids, putting in a couple of windows, a plywood floor covered with wall-to-wall carpeting whose color had originally been an off-white but was now, after a decade of kid use, closer to an off-brown. When I got to the bottom of the steep stairs, the thing bouncing behind me, Lucas was at his computer and Jimmy was feeding his goldfish. Lucas is almost twelve and the serious sort, always reading books and wanting to chat about ecology and karma and things that I sometimes have to look up to find out what he’s talking about. Jimmy’s only eight and is all imagination and impulse. Thinks his brother is dull.

Lucas is built pretty much like me: wide shoulders, strong upper body, a mop of wild, dark hair. His skin is even darker than Lita’s, having a lot of Hispanic genes from Lita’s mom’s Cuban side of the family. Except for coloring, Jimmy’s more like his mom, small, lithe, and cute. Jimmy’s a little darker than me, but not much. So Lucas is the only family member who occasionally gets called “nigger” or “wetback.”

After they’d greeted me with “Hi, Dad” they noticed the hairy ball. At first they were both amazed, especially when it bounced up onto the back of the settee.

“What is it, Dad?” Lucas asks.

“It’s some sort of newfangled pet I picked up today at a tag sale,” says I. Since they were used to my saying things that had no particular relation to reality, neither of the boys believed this for a second. They just stared at it up there on the back of the settee.

“It looks yucky,” says Lucas.

But then the thing rolled off the back of the couch onto the cushions and then to the floor and finally up close to Jimmy. The kid stood his ground. The thing stopped right up against his legs and, after only a brief pause, Jimmy reached down and petted it. Gotta hand it to the kid: he was a lot cooler about it than I’d been.

Well, in the next few minutes something happened that changed our lives forever. Damned if it didn’t turn out both our kids liked the thing. Within minutes of my bringing it down to the rec room, they were acting as if it was a toy. They played with it like with a puppy, the thing rolling and bouncing as they chased it, the boys laughing away until, after ten minutes, they began to get frustrated. The next thing I knew—I’d been sitting at the foot of the basement stairs watching all this—the thing abruptly let itself be captured and rested without fuss in the arms of Jimmy, as Lucas patted and petted it. I think it was then that I realized that this thing might be pretty smart.

When the boys got tired of playing with the “Funny Fish” as they called it, Lucas went back to his computer and Jimmy turned on the TV to watch some documentary about seals in the Antarctic. For reasons I suppose I’ll have to get into later, Carlita didn’t let the kids watch much regular television, so for Jimmy and Lucas, documentaries were their sitcoms and thrillers. The Funny Fish sat on the sofa next to Jimmy and seemed to be “watching” too—although how a creature watched with no eyes, I hadn’t figured out. But I felt the thing was no threat to the kids, so I clomped back up the stairs to have some supper.

* * *

In the den that first night after the boys had been sent to bed, I sat on the couch with the thing watching some boring TV program about the benefits of nuclear energy, when I decided it was time to try to find a few answers.

“Mind if I touch you?” says I, knowing that the thing had no ears that I could see but figuring he must be absorbing info from some source in his hairy body.

Naturally the thing didn’t answer.

So I slowly reached out with my right hand and touched it with my four fingers. The hair was very soft and fine, and there seemed to be more hairs per square inch than on any animal I’d ever seen or felt. The hairs were only about a half-inch long.

I pressed my hand against the thing a little harder and damned if my hand didn’t sink into its body as if it were made of tapioca pudding—hairy tapioca pudding—something soft that partially swallowed up my hand when I pressed it in.

I had thought the thing would be hard, so this softness was a bit unnerving. Still, I didn’t say anything but pressed my hand in further. The next thing I knew my whole right arm was buried right up to the armpit. Scared the bejesus out of me—thought I was going to be the first human eaten by a beach ball. I tried to pull my arm out, but the thing seemed to have me in an iron grip. I stood up and the thing lifted off the couch still wrapped around my arm. It had lost its beach-ball shape and was now a sort of oval, about three foot long, with more than half of its body wrapped around my arm. It felt like a furry, eyeless alligator was swallowing my limb—no pain but the whole arm felt squeezed.

I wanted to scream and shake my arm and run the hell out of there, but screaming and running is not cool, and running is something that at my age I try to avoid, so I just stood there and let my arm and the thing fall to my side.

Then this “Funny Fish” let go of my arm and, resuming a spherical shape, bounced twice away from me, then up against the brick façade above the fireplace, then back to the floor and then off the opposite wall and then, before I’d absorbed much of any of this, back to wrap itself again around my arm exactly as before.

I plopped back down on the couch and laughed. This thing was a real card. What it seemed to be telling me was “Hey, old man, don’t worry about my grabbing your arm ’cause it doesn’t mean any more than my bouncing off walls. It’s just one of the fun things I can do.”

Next, the thing let go of my arm and again became a beach ball sitting on the couch beside me watching television. After a few seconds I reached out and put my arm around it the way I’d seen the kids do once or twice. Damned if the thing didn’t snuggle closer to me.

I just sat there for about half a minute and then gave it a little squeeze.

“Louie,” says I, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

I hoped Louie would laugh, but I guess he’d never seen Casablanca, so my joke went right past him.

Which is where most of my jokes go.

* * *

The boys called the thing “FF” for “Funny Fish,” and my wife called it, “that interesting something,” and me, I didn’t call it anything at first but began to think of it as “Louie.” I knew it wasn’t a fish and was a lot more than a beach ball, and a lot more than anything I’d ever known. I would have thought it was a creature from outer space, but they all had big ping-pong-ball eyes and big heads and skinny arms and legs, and didn’t look at all like Louie.

It watched television most of the first day in the house—my wife even let him watch the junk TV on the networks—but late in the evening of the second day I caught it reading Penthouse. I was a bit surprised and disappointed and wondered how he planned to get his end into one of those sexy gals when he didn’t have any end to get in with, but a couple of hours later I found him reading one of the volumes of an old encyclopedia set we had down there. And later I caught him leafing through an old Progressive Magazine Lita had left lying around.

I say “reading” but of course what I actually saw was the thing on the couch, the magazine or book lying in front of it, and every couple of seconds it somehow configured its belly into a limb which reached out to turn a page. Then another.

I wasn’t scheduled to take the boat out again until the following week so had a lot of free time, but it wasn’t until noon the next day that I figured maybe I ought to Google this strange creature.

You might wonder what an old geezer is doing knowing anything about Googling, but that’s the advantage both of marrying a young wife who’s brainy and educated, and having two kids in the house. Both my boys can Google circles around me, but still I think I’m pretty good for someone who wasn’t brought up suckling on an iMac, didn’t have a computer in my teens to watch porno, don’t use one in my business to do spreadsheets, and don’t have an iPhone or iPad attached permanently to my hand so I can communicate with anyone in the universe whenever I get an impulse.

So I went into my study (our bedroom) and Googled “hairy beach ball.” Well, I’m proud to report that that request pretty much gagged Google. Top on its list was this:

“A larger woman’s hair-covered pubic area bulges outwards creating a spherical shape. Add the vaginal slit and that area looks like hairy wedges tha…”

You gotta hand it to Google: they’ll give you something even if it has nothing to do with what you said you wanted to look for. I browsed through a lot of irrelevant things like a “woman’s hair-covered pubic area” but didn’t get anything that had anything to do with FF. They came up with a lot of links that wanted to discuss “hairy balls” but that was a subject that didn’t catch my fancy so I moved on.

I tried: “round hairy fish”—although I was pretty sure Louie was no fish.

Google struck out again. There was one link to a site that said “avoid hairy fish” that I thought I ought to check out, but it didn’t really tell me why I should avoid hairy fish.

So I began to retreat and Googled “strange-shaped fish.” No big hairy round fish. Got a nice picture of a big blowfish that looked exactly like FF except it had eyes, a mouth, a tail, fins and no hair. And I bet it didn’t cuddle nice either.

So I figured that our creature was a one-off.

And I liked that.

I told Lita and the kids that I was pretty sure that our new friend wasn’t a fish so we couldn’t call him FF anymore. We agreed we couldn’t call him “beach ball” because that really didn’t capture what we knew about him or the way we were beginning to feel about him. My wife suggested we call him “the hairy computer,” but the boys still wanted to call him FF ’cause they were used to it, so I surrendered and told them FF could stand for other things besides “Funny Fish.” They asked for an example, and I says “Well, ‘Fat Friend,’” and Lita says “How about ‘Fun Friend,’” and Jimmy says “‘Fantastic Friend!’” which we all liked, and then Lucas suggests “How about ‘Fucking Funny Friend,’” but Jimmy pointed out that would mean FFF and be too big a mouthful.

We finally agreed that our new buddy was FF, which, depending on what mood we were in, could mean anything from “Fun Friend” to “Fucking Fascist,” to “Fierce Foreigner,” to “Furry Flip-flopper.” We came up with more than fifty possible meanings of FF before we got bored and realized we weren’t making much sense.

* * *

That night lying in bed with Carlita, I realized that both of us were wide awake, and sure enough, soon as I had that thought, Lita spoke up.

“I think FF is a lot smarter than he looks,” she says.

I looked over at her in the dim light and, thinking of how FF looked, we both laughed.

“I think FF is a very special being,” she says. “Really, it’s something of a miracle creature.”

“Yep,” says I.

“But I think it might be dangerous,” she says.

“Hasn’t been so far,” says I.

She was quiet for a bit and then says, “Not so far. But when I went down to pick up the kids’ dirty clothes, he was working the computer, and unless he was just randomly hitting buttons he was surfing that computer faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

“Yep.”

“I think he understands us much better than we understand him.”

“Yep.”

For a while the two of us stared up at the ceiling.

“I think it means trouble, Billy,” she finally says.

“Yep.”

And we turned to each other and went into a big hug.

TWO

(From THE OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE ALIEN INVASION, Volume 1, pp. 66–69)

(BEING AGENT MICHAEL JOHNSON’S INFORMAL NOTES ON THE FORMATION OF UNIT A.)

The National Security Agency didn’t develop a special unit to investigate alien terrorists until 2015. Were they asleep at the switch? I don’t think so. The idea that visitors from outer space might work secretly against the United States was not a common train of thought, so when the idea of a special unit to investigate such a possibility was first raised there was much healthy skepticism. But the desire to leave no stone unturned and no bureaucracy unexpanded in our War on Terror was too great. A unit was formed.

At first the primary task of the unit was to determine the right name for itself. This was three weeks before I was assigned to the unit, so I plead “not guilty” to all the wasted time. After two weeks they finally settled on a brilliant compromise: they named themselves Investigations Unit A.

Notice how much is achieved with this title: there is no mention of aliens. The “A” of the Investigations Unit would appear to be a simple letter to indicate primacy. Moreover, as the unit evolved, it became clear that their initial investigations were into anomalies: patterns, usually patterns involving violence that could not be explained by normal human activity and motivations. So the “A” could stand for anomalies and did so until the discovery of actual alien terrorists justified coming out of the closet.

Initially, Unit A combed the internet and worldwide media for stories that were so strange that the possibility of alien interference had to be considered. For a while they investigated all the reported abductions by aliens, interviewing many of the abductees to see if previous questioners had overlooked something.

In the first two years there were two “anomalies” that garnered our time and analysis. The first was the death of almost one hundred tribesmen in Bongulu, a remote village in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Since only three of the villagers had survived whatever had killed their kinsmen, the United Nations Health Organization sent a small team of specialists to investigate. The specialists were unable to determine what had killed the tribesmen. “Unknown causes” concluded the report. Now this particular tribe was not involved on any side in any civil war. The people had lived in peace and poverty for almost two centuries—since the last slavers had retired. They were Muslims, and thus unlikely to be the victims of ISIS terrorists or their brethren.

So the question naturally arises: could this be aliens trying out lethal methods on some obscure tribe in some obscure location in order not to attract attention to their experiments? Unit A looked into it. But found nothing.

The second anomaly occurred in Siberia. In a remote village in the Sredinny Hrebet Peninsula, a strange creature suddenly appeared in the village that neither the villagers nor anyone else could make head nor tail of. This creature was brought to the attention of the more civilized world when a Russian health worker went to the village on his semi-annual visit to see if he could improve public health. The villagers claimed that the creature continually changed shape, could form a ball and roll at fifty miles per hour, could stretch up like a giraffe and pick fruit from the tops of trees and seemed even to be able to read, although the villagers disagreed on this point. The creature seemed to love to play hide-and-seek, although neither the villagers nor the creature had ever heard of the game. In any case, when the health inspector went to see this strange being, it couldn’t be found. Or rather, it could be seen by a villager, but the moment he pointed it out to the health inspector, the being would disappear. He reported that once he saw a silver-gray beach ball roll very rapidly across the muddy street fifty feet away that the villagers claimed was the thing in question, but he believed they may have been trying to fool him by rolling a big muddy ball for him to see.

After three days of fruitless efforts to see the little bugger, a little bugger that the villagers, especially the children, seemed to see all the time, the health inspector had to leave. In his report on the village’s health he said the most serious new development was a bad case of mass hysteria, with group hallucinations uncommonly common.

His report was picked up by an enterprising reporter for the Ubiskitan Times and News Report Herald with a medium-sized headline reading: “Alien Being Visits Odipac.” The Investigations Unit A Google Sweep Team picked up this article and reported it to unit headquarters.

But nothing much came of our investigations until it was my good fortune to come upon a new development that was to make Investigations Unit A the biggest guy on the block in all of the NSA.

THREE

(From Billy Morton’s , pp. 18–25)