The Kiss From the Bright Place.

The Decision

I should tell you who I am before this gets worse.

My name is Marcus Deel. I'm forty-four years old. I review music for a living — or I did, for a website that paid me in exposure and, on a good month, the price of a sandwich. I had a small apartment in a city that doesn't matter anymore and a routine I loved more than I ever admitted out loud: coffee, headphones, the slow careful morning work of deciding whether something was good.

I want you to know I was happy. People don't believe me when I say that, because of how it all turned out, because of where I'm writing this from and what they make me take in order to write it. But I was happy, in my narrow way. I had it figured out. I knew what I liked and I knew what I didn't, and the line between those two things was the only border I had ever needed and the only one I had ever felt qualified to defend.

That's the thing the Vael took first. Not the cities. Not the governments. The line.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and the order matters. The order is the only thing I still own.

The Vael did not arrive in ships, because the Vael did not believe in ships. A ship is an admission that the body matters, that distance is real, that you must drag your meat from one place to another — and the Vael had given up on bodies and distance both, a million years before they ever heard of us. So the Vael arrived the way weather arrives. They arrived as a frequency — a single sustained tone that slid into Earth's upper atmosphere on an ordinary Tuesday and then simply stayed, settling over the whole turning planet like a season nobody had forecast.

For the first full day, the tone did nothing a human could point at. Observatories called it an anomaly. Astronomers went on television and argued with each other in the gentle, excited way astronomers argue when they think they've found something harmless. Religious broadcasters had opinions. Most people, told there was a strange noise too low to hear, did the sensible thing and got on with their lives.

The tone, meanwhile, was listening. That is what I understand now and could not have understood then. The Vael were doing to all eight billion of us at once what Oolu had done to that one stranger with the hairbrush: learning the song before attempting to sing it. The tone learned our languages in an afternoon. It learned our faces. It learned, with the bottomless and patient affection of a civilization that had crossed the galaxy specifically to help, exactly what each individual human being looked like in the precise instant they let themselves want to be more than they were.

It learned the want. It catalogued eight billion wants. And on the second day, the kissing started.