Chapter 7
The Sun rose into a golden red sky. Quinn heard Nisha making strange noises.
"Neesh," he whispered. "You're having a nightmare. Wake up!"
"Oh," Nisha whispered in a sleepy voice.
She woke up fast.
"Something is different. The voices came back in my dreams and I think Pree spoke. I couldn't understand her words. It didn't sound like Pree because it was electronic, but somehow I know the voice belonged to her. I'll think more about this. The voice lasted for a few brief seconds. The alien voices came back after that."
"Wow, that's good news Neesh. She's alive!" Quinn said.
"I don't want to make any assumptions. I might be imagining things. I want hard evidence before I believe in something. I still have my hunches though and I think she's alive. I'm much better now. I'll tell people about this."
She tweeted, "My daughter spoke in the #alien sphere. If you hear your #abducted children, tell us!"
She waited for a minute and she read the replies.
"@NishaAstro My baby spoke too. I'm positive!"
"Thanks @NishaAstro My child also!"
"My heart goes out to you @NishaAstro and to the victims."
The tweets scrolled down the page.
Quinn walked into the room and leaned against her.
"Check this out," Nisha said. "Many others have the same experience as me. I must find a way to get our children back."
"I know you can get her back," Quinn said. "Wow, are 30 million people following you?"
"Yes," she said. "I still haven't adjusted to having 250,000 astronomy fans follow me before this all began. Now this has taken on a life of its own."
"I'm reading this story," Nisha said. "The UN met to decide what to do about the aliens and abductions. They decided nothing should be done for fear of provoking them. The UN declaired they're so advanced that nothing can stop them. However, China and Russia said they'll defend their territory at all costs. Everyone agreed that in the face of danger, each country could defend itself."
"The Russians and Chinese won't be able to defend themselves," Quinn said. "Violence will make the aliens angry, right?"
"There's no way to know," Nisha said. "I doubt whether there's anything we can do to stop them, assuming actual living beings are aboard the sphere. Whatever they want they can have. We might find another, less militarily oriented way of stopping them. However they're interested in engineering and are socially savvy about humans. They're tracking our every move and they understand our languages. They know they can paralyze us and take our kids. They know what they're doing."
Tears streamed down Nisha's face. Quinn held her.
"I can't get over the fact she may be gone forever," she said.
Quinn looked into her eyes, trying to be strong again.
"I think she's okay and we'll find her somehow and get her back."
Nisha wiped her tears and said nothing for a minute.
"Yes, I think she's okay. I'm still hopeful. Oh, now this is strange."
"What's so strange Neesh?"
"The voices intensified right now."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't describe what happened, but the pace quickened. They're not louder but they're faster. More information is being transmitted. And there's this hollow sound, like echoes happening. Let me find out if anyone else has noticed this."
Nisha tweeted, "I noticed a change in the #WeirdVoices a few minutes ago. Anyone else notice? Reply to me."
Within seconds the replies began.
"@NishaAstro Yes, the #WeirdVoices are back, faster than before."
"@NishaAstro, the conversation became more animated."
"@NishaAstro The #WeirdVoices change is making me anxious."
Nisha watched the Twitter data.
"Just as I suspected," Nisha said. "This effect is occurring all around the world at the same time. More tweets are originating on the side of the Earth facing the moon, but 30% of the tweets are from half of the Earth facing away from the moon. Something is happening but I can't tell what."
Nisha alerted the DHS. Then they ate lunch. She raised an eyebrow as she read the news.
"Wow, the US stock markets are down another 7%. They're down 30% since the voices began a week ago."
"Whoa, I'm glad you sold everything!" Quinn said.
"So am I. The reporter who wrote the story blamed my last tweet for triggering the decline. People are taking this seriously and the fear is intensifying. I can't believe only a week has passed since I first noticed the voices. I thought I would be teaching my class and helping Pree with her home. ..."
Tears streamed down Nisha's face again. Quinn handed her a tissue. He needed a few for himself too.
They held each other and said nothing for a few minutes. She put on a brave smile.
"This might still turn out well," Nisha said. "Pree might be learning about a new alien culture. This might be the most important event in her entire life!"
"I hope you're right Neesh. This is getting to me now."
"Me too, so we'll take this one moment at a time."
"I agree," Quinn said.
They finished lunch. Quinn continued to work on his new sculpture. Nisha walked back into her computer room to monitor her Twitter stream. In addition to her astronomy friends and associates, she also followed people in business, the arts and other scientific specialties. She re-tweeted some of the more interesting tweets she read.
"Market off 9% today, 30% in a week. Business is soft everywhere. People aren't buying durable goods."
"Church attendance is up 20-40% in many areas of the world. In some places it's down."
"Why bother saving for retirement? The aliens will probably destroy us or at least abduct us into slavery or something."
"Automobile and mass transit traffic has been unusually light for the past week, in some cases as much as 50%."
"This whole alien thing is a ruse to increase defense spending so they can increase profits to the weapons manufacturers."
"The 1% of humans, who experience the #WeirdVoices speak for the #aliens. Don't trust them!"
Nisha received no new reports of abductions. She spent some time on that late summer afternoon searching for new abduction reports but couldn't find any.
She tweeted, "No new abductions in three hours? What's happening? Total: 250 cities, 25,000 children gone."
Nisha watched the replies scroll down her screen. They confirmed that nobody had been abducted in the past three hours. She reported her observations to the DHS and ate a late dinner with Quinn and Sanjay as the Sun set.
Tears welled up in Nisha's eyes as she stared at the empty chairs.
"If I had been paying more attention and kept the girls in, they would be with us now. I wish I had never let Sophie stay here. She would be safe and her parents wouldn't hate me. They sent me angry messages. I recognized the patterns in the abductions and I didn't keep them inside. I'm stupid. I killed my own daughter."
She sensed heart palpitations again and clutched her chest.
Quinn walked around the dinner table and held her.
"Sophie's parents forgive you. They told you that. None of this is your fault Nisha. Nobody could anticipate this happening. Even if you had kept the kids inside, the aliens would have abducted them. I understand people tried to keep their kids inside, but they were frozen, and the kids walked out of the house anyway. We were helpless to stop this. Are you okay?"
"My heart is beating fast and weakly again," Nisha said. "I'm going to die. The life is draining out of me. I can't live without my baby. I can't live with the guilt of knowing I killed her."
"You didn't kill her," Sanjay said. "Stop that. She's still alive."
He slammed his fork onto his plate and ran upstairs to his room. She got up to follow him but Quinn held her back.
"He's right you know," Quinn said. "She's still alive. You're in a unique position to do something about this situation. You've got the power to fi
nd her and bring her back."
"How do you know that? What evidence do you have?"
"I have a sense Neesh, trust me. Keep looking for her. You'll find her."
"A sense? What good is that? That's not logical."
She smiled weakly. He took her hand and they walked back into her computer room to monitor the latest events. She felt the voices getting more numerous and rapid.
Nisha pulled herself together and noticed a few tweets.
"We detected an electromagnetic pulse about three minutes ago which originated from the sphere in lunar orbit."
"A single EMP, 0.03 sec. four minutes ago, from lunar orbit, then silence. Nothing else detected."
Nisha alerted the DHS and continued to monitor the situation
A few hours later that evening, trucker Joe Calderon drove north for 90 minutes after leaving LA. He stopped in the desert town of Mojave for a very late dinner. After that, he set out onto a lonely stretch of highway 14, for the long haul north to Bishop on 395. A few minutes up the road, he noticed a headlight ahead of him. He knew the highway turned slowly to the right but a headlight appeared off the left side of the road.
He slowed down a little, unsure if he knew where he was. He drove on at a slower speed. The headlight appeared to get brighter, but the light continued moving off to the left of the road. The light also seemed elevated off the road, but the mountains were miles away. He felt disoriented so he pulled off to the shoulder. The headlights stopped their movement.
He shook his head and turned off his lights in an attempt to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The headlights disappeared. He turned on his headlights and the headlights in the distance reappeared.
"What the ??" he said out loud.
He turned his headlights off again and the remote headlight disappeared again. Stillness hung in the warm September desert air under a moonless sky.
"It's me," he said out loud to himself. "Those are my reflected headlights. Uh, reflected off what?"
As his eyes adjusted to the heavy darkness, another pair of headlights appeared and moved in front of him. A few seconds later, behind him, the headlights of a car came into view over a slight rise in the highway.
The car slowed down as he had done a minute earlier. It pulled onto the side of the road behind him. The lights turned off, and on, and off again. Each time, the light in front mimicked the lights behind.
He sat in his truck cabin looking into the darkness. The car behind him didn't move. He spotted an odd void out in the desert. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness when another headlight appeared ahead of him. This time he looked in the rear-view mirror for a car to appear over the rise in the highway behind him. Sure enough, one appeared and it also slowed down, pulled over, and turned off the headlights.
He continued to sit in his truck as two more cars pulled in behind the other two cars and turned off their lights.
Joe got out of his truck at the same time as the others exited their cars. They all stared in the direction of the reflected headlights of the left side of the road.
Joe walked over to them and pointed in the direction of the reflections.
"What do you think is happening over there?" Joe whispered to a young guy in a beaten up 4wd pickup truck.
"Beats me," the guy said. "It got me spooked though. I'm getting my gun just in case."
The guy reached in the back of his truck and pulled out his rifle.
"Wow, what's this enormous thing?" Joe said.
"It's an AHR .600 Overkill. This monster can take down anything. And I mean anything!"
"Yeah," Joe said. "I can't disagree. I'm glad you're on my side."
They all peered into the heavy darkness.
"What do you think is happening out there?" the rifle guy said.
Joe's eyes grew used to the dark.
"I don't know, but something big is out there."
"I heard there's a new solar project," the rifle guy said.
"Yeah maybe," Joe said. "The void is huge. There's some light in the background on the mountains from headlights in the far distance. It doesn't seem like a flat solar mirror or one of those concave solar mirrors I've seen out here. This seems convex which makes everything seem further away than it is. It's similar to the side mirror of my truck."
Another car came up from behind and pulled in behind all of them.
Joe became more confused.
"The headlights from the last car seem bent, like they were reflected in a round mirror. See how they move?"
"Yeah, maybe those aliens are out there," the rifle guy said. "I'm not going to let myself get abducted! Let's turn on all of our car lights to see what this thing is."
They all turned on their lights.
"Holy -," the rifle guy began to say.
"Quiet," Joe said. "This is like those alien spheres which abducted those kids, only this must be 1,000 feet tall. I'm calling the sheriff."
Joe called the sheriff's office at around 10pm but the dispatcher answered quickly. Joe described what they were seeing.
"Sir, have you been drinking?" the dispatcher said. "This is some sort of a joke right?"
"No, I'm dead serious," Joe said. "Get everyone you can out here right now. We're all watching this thing. Fortunately, the thing isn't moving."
"Okay," the dispatcher said. "I'll get someone to your location right away."
They turned off their lights.
The dispatch sent to the officers automatically generated a tweet which read; "Huge reflective #sphere reported, HWY 58, N of Mojave. Use caution."
Several cars came into view. Their headlights created a strange reflected pattern on the sphere. The rifle guy panicked and he shot towards the sphere. The enormous caliber weapon created a powerful blast. Everyone felt stunned and lost their hearing for a moment. A ringing in their ears persisted. The sphere remained still and silent. When the echoing noise subsided, they all turned around. The rifle guy was dead.
At that moment, Nisha wanted to sleep. The pace of events seemed to be quieting down. No abductions had been reported in six hours. Her Twitter stream calmed down into some sense of normalcy aside from the electromagnetic pulses. She kept an eye on keywords such as #WeirdVoices, #astronomy, #alien, and #sphere.
She read the sheriff's dispatch.
Nisha's eyes widened.
"Quinn, a dispatcher in Mojave is reporting a huge sphere and is sending officers to the scene."
"Maybe this is some sort of joke," Quinn said.
"No Quinn, this is an official sheriff's Twitter account. I checked it out. Look, here is another tweet in the same area."
"Heading northeast on 14, a few miles northeast of Mojave. There's a huge #sphere out here. Man was killed by them after he fired shots."
"I'm heading up there," Nisha said.
Quinn grabbed hold of her arm.
"No way Neesh, it's too dangerous!"
"I'm going no matter what. Pree might be there," she said.
"I'm going too then," Quinn said. "We'll drop off Sanjay next door so he can get to sleep for the night. I don't think we'll be sleeping."