Visitors

“Looks like de Luca is making a new movie,” Brent said, face buried in his phone.

Renee stared up at the moonroof and sighed. She put the car into park and leaned back. Not like traffic was going anywhere.

“There’s a name I haven’t heard in years,” she said. “Is he really still directing?”

“Ooh!” said Brent. “Looks like Adriana Mendoza’s in it.”

Renee ran her hands over her face. Somewhere along the highway someone honked, which got a chorus going for a while before petering out. “You and your Mexican girls.”

“Hey, she’s on my list.” Brent grinned at Renee, but she was frowning at the cars ahead.

“Why aren’t we moving?”

“It’s probably just an accident,” he said. Maybe a little too fast, maybe a little too wishful. No need to say what other thing it might be. It didn’t reassure Renee any though. She grabbed the steering wheel and squeezed it until her knuckles whitened.

Brent decided she needed a distraction. “Hey, look! It’s a sequel to Ares Horizon.”

Renee turned to him, scowling where he was grinning. “What?”

“Ares Horizon. You know, the one about–”

“–Yeah, no, I know what it is. But why the hell would anyone want to make a sequel to it?”

“It was really popular. Redefined sci-fi.”

“Yeah,” Renee said, “before. What kind of an idiot wants to watch an alien invasion movie now?”

“C’mon, it’s just a fun distraction.”

“Is it?” she said.

“Yeah,” Brent said, scrolling on his phone to look for anything that could defuse this. “You know, just a cool action romp. The Xalo Federation is occupying Earth, and there’s a last desperate alliance of soldiers and scientists…”

She stared at him. It wasn’t even a glare, just a cold, tired, intensity. A soldier back home from the war. A nurse in the middle of the sixth split shift that week. A mother surveying the aftermath of her eight year old’s birthday party.

“It’s just for fun,” Brent whispered, slinking back to his phone.

“What’s fun about aliens,” she said, flat. Up ahead more brake lights went off as other cars went into park. Gridlock on the Trans-Canada Highway. Great.

She huffed. “I don’t get why anyone would want to watch those movies. They’re so dumb, so fake. So depressing. It’s like if they made a historical movie about King Arthur, only everyone rode around on dinosaurs instead of horses.”

Brent chortled. “I’d watch that.” He looked at her, grinning his grin and doing that thing where he was trying to hide a chuckle and it made his whole body shake. That stupid thing that was always so infectious, and a moment later Renee also snorted.

“It would be super historically accurate,” he said. “Maybe the story of how they conquered America.”

“Or the moon,” she added, and they both laughed.

“You should write a script,” Brent said. “Tell your parents about it. I’m sure they’d get a kick out of it.”

“Yeah, as if we’ll ever see them at this rate.” Traffic was dead. Even the honking had subsided.

“Hey, come on, it’s just a couple more hours. We’re almost at Sudbury, and then Thunder Bay’s right around the corner. We could swing by a Timmies.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Yeah right. It’s not even a couple hours on a good day.”

“A couple days then, tops. It’ll give us time to work on that script.” They chuckled again. Brent took Renee’s hand, she squeezed his. He always knew what to say. After ten years of marriage he still found ways to make it feel like a new adventure every day.

A distant chopping sound broke her reverie and she withdrew her hand. Brent’s face tightened and they both looked to the sky. Mid-sunset, it was dark out and the tree line along the highway obscured things further. She spotted something in the air, flying parallel to the long line of cars and headed their way. A helicopter. It shined an intense spotlight on the cars, but it was too big to be news or weather. And when it passed over the moonroof, she caught a glimpse of all the missiles, rockets, bombs, guns – whatever else – flanking it on either side. So, military, and probably American.

“Oh, no,” Brent said.

“Why,” Renee said. It wasn’t directed at him. It wasn’t directed at anyone. “Why, why, why!” She slammed her fists on the steering wheel.

“Calm down, honey.” Brent was back at his phone, now checking the Encounter Tracker app. “It’s probably nothing. Just a patrol, something like that.”

She saw some people exit their cars and stare up at the sky, following the helicopter’s path. A moment later another two came flying the same way.

“Just a patrol?” she said. “Right when traffic is stuck?”

“Well…”

“Why! This isn’t fair! They’re not supposed to be here! It’s not the pattern!”

They were silent a moment, and then Brent just barely whispered, “Oh.”

“What is it?” Renee turned to him, watching his eyes move as he read his phone.

“So, yeah,” he said. “It looks like we have an Aberration Event.”

Renee felt her skin crawl, felt the chill of ice-sweat.

“Something maybe happening up at Sudbury.”

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“Government’s not saying much,” he drew out, scrolling and clicking, “just a general advisory. And–oh! Looks like the Trans-Can is closed. Shit. But–wait, hold on, someone posted something.”

“What is it?”

“Yeah, a couple people confirmed it. Something happened in the Toronto Exclusion Zone. Oh… one of them moved. It just suddenly started going north. Towards Sudbury.”

Again, silence. Renee and Brent looked at each other, each processing the information. An Aberration Event. Among the worst news most people could hear on any given day. For the most part, the visitors – the current going name in the media – were dangerous, but not malicious, and they were very predictable. A whole ecosystem of apps and studies existed plotting their movements and sharing their patterns, so that people could avoid them. They followed the same paths like clockwork, and if you wanted to travel or live somewhere, you just had to account for the visitor schedule. Easy enough.

Except then there were the aberrations, when the pattern changed. Or maybe they disproved the existence of the pattern entirely.

They heard a siren, and when they looked around they saw the distant reflections of red-and-blue lights strobing against the trees.

“What now?” Brent asked.

Renee rolled down her window. A police cruiser rolled along the shoulder, an officer barking a warning at the stuck drivers through a megaphone.

“Attention! An Aberration Event has been detected in the vicinity. Please exit your vehicles in an orderly fashion, and step away from them. Take only what you can carry. Your vehicles will be safe. This is only a precaution. Attention!”

“Oh my god!” Renee said, unbuckling herself. “Is it coming this way?”

“I got a report here,” Brent said, nose in phone again, “that it never got to Sudbury. Some guy saw it bank east. Oh my god…”

They got out of their car along with the countless other travelers and stood on the shoulder. People bundling up against the chill of the night. Some were lone travelers, others families that spanned three generations. Some with pets, others with musical instruments. Some were excited, all were worried. One old woman in a shawl bragged she’d seen them before, and that there was nothing to worry about. “Just mind your feet! Just mind your feet! And don’t take your eyes off them.”

“I wish they just nuked them,” Renee said.

“They did,” Brent said. “Don’t you remember Riyadh?”

Renee didn’t answer. Of course she remembered it. Everyone did. It was only eight years ago, shortly after Arrival Day. It was about as close as Earth came to one of de Luca’s Ares Horizon movies. What was meant to be some kind of victory day ended up being… just a day. At least as far as the visitors were concerned. They weathered Earth’s weapons just fine, and either didn’t care or didn’t even notice.

Something rippled through the stranded travelers. A shift in the general mood, a wave of excitement, everyone holding their breaths. A moment later the sky was filled with more helicopters. A whole fleet of them bathing the dark woods in false daylight.

And then people screamed, despite the authorities’ pleas for calm. Through the woods there was another light, a more intense yellow one. Everyone had seen it on TV before, or on the Internet, and they all knew what it meant. One of them was close, and getting closer.

Brent grabbed Renee’s hand and pulled her away from the light. They huddled in the ditch by the highway along with some other people, but both of them knew if it came to it, they probably couldn’t outrun it. No matter how much they minded their feet.

Then they heard trees cracking and suddenly everything was flooded with yellow light. And they saw it.

Five metres tall, hovering above the ground, what looked like two silver pyramids placed base-to-base, each one rotating in a different direction. The yellow light poured forth from every seam, but there was no warmth in it. It was the light between the stars.

Some people screamed and scrambled away from it, others like Renee and Brent stood frozen, staring at the visitor. It emerged from the woods, moving through no discernable mechanism, a thousand spotlights tracing its path. It hovered over the ditch, mere metres from Renee, and Renee marveled at how absolutely dead silent the thing was.

If she tried, she could have reached out to it, touched it. All it would take is a couple steps and stretching her hand out. But that would have been fatal. The talking heads on the media argued back and forth about the visitors, saying they could manipulate gravity or control inertia, or any other number of unprovable hypotheses, but the facts were simple. They did not tolerate being touched, and nothing on Earth had the power to resist them. They were an unstoppable force, and there were no immovable objects to put in their path.

The visitor hovered for little more than a second, but it felt a lot longer to Renee. Then it lurched forward again. It didn’t so much start moving as it just resumed its previous speed and trajectory, skipping any pretense at acceleration. Plowing right through the traffic jam.

Like a beach bully kicking over a sandcastle, dozens of vehicles were suddenly airborne, grains of sand caught in the wind. Renee and Brent’s car among them. Helicopters scrambled out of the way of the sudden barrage, and the flaming cars crashed into the distant woodlands like artillery fire. The visitor, oblivious to the chaos it caused, crossed the highway and continued on its inscrutable path.

Emergency services arrived, but it turned out to be a pretty good night as nobody was hurt. Almost a decade of this and people had gotten used to the worst of it. The drills, what to do during, how to handle the aftermath. Most of them chattered excitedly, others – who had lost their vehicles – shook their heads at the unfairness of it all. There wasn’t an insurance company on Earth that covered contact with visitors.

“Why,” Renee said, shaking her head.

Brent hugged her. “It’s all right, hon. We’ll get a new car. We’re fine, that’s what matters.” He was trembling.

“Yeah,” she said, absently. Maybe she should have been afraid. Maybe she should have been upset. Mostly, she was tired. “But why?”

He looked at her, quizzically.

“Why this?” she said, indicating the aftermath. “Why come to our home? All they do is fly around being a menace. Why don’t they tell us what they want? Whatever happened to ‘take us to your leader’?”

Brent remained silent. Eight years of those questions being asked. Eight years, and no answer in sight. Long enough for kids to have been born in this world, to be aware of the visitors, and to have never known anything else.

“I just want things to be normal again.”

Brent sighed. “This is normal. Now.”