Falling Stars, Rising Hopes

An Unexpected Meeting

                                                                       Chapter 2

    There was nothing noteworthy about the man, slightly taller than average, except his kind face. His dark hair and olive skin were perfectly ordinary, the type Tanya had always wished she had. He didn’t seem surprised at her almost ghostly appearance, which was a good sign. She rose to her feet, still holding the leash remote in one hand.

    “Handful is a great name for a cat,” he said, then looked away, clearly wishing he hadn’t.

    “I got her as a kitten, and she was always getting into everything. I ended every conversation about her with ‘She’s such a handful!’ When I was trying to think of a name for her, one of my searches suggested naming her after her most distinctive feature. I complained about it to one of my friends and she said ‘Sounds like her most distinctive feature is being a handful.’ So, she ended up being Handful, although she’s much less of one now, thankfully.” The full story was much longer and involved many more funny anecdotes, but that would do for a brief explanation. Handful purred at her name and rubbed against the man’s leg, staring up at him hopefully. He smiled.

    "You want a treat, don't you?" he asked, then glanced at Tanya. "Can I give her one?"

    "Sure," she said, smiling. He pulled a treat out of his pocket, and the almost overwhelming smell of fish filled the air. The man held out his hand, and Handful licked up the treat before beginning to wash his fingers thoroughly to remove any bits of treat dust that might have stuck to his hand.

    “What’s your name?” the man asked, grimacing slightly as Handful intensified her washing.

    “Tanya Kerrigan. Yours?”

    “George Whitfield.” A normal name for a mostly normal man. It suited him. They shook their free hands, then discussed how they had come to the shelter. Handful eventually stopped washing his hand and returned to Tanya’s side, purring smugly. After a while, the conversation turned to their hobbies, and Tanya got to give her pet-activist rant.

    “There’s nothing to replace a living animal. Robotic pets are great, but they’re just not the same. Animals can be unpredictable and nonsensical, while robots just follow orders. They’re a lot easier to take care of, but no one has managed to create a robot that looks, feels, and acts just like a real animal. It’s impossible.” After the rant wore down, George told her about his job, where he copied programs into computers to make sure that no mistakes were made.

    “It’s a high-stress job,” he said. “A single mistake on my part and the whole world could be blown to smithereens when the program is activated. It would be nice to have a pet to come home to.”

    “Then why don’t you? Why else would you have cat treats in your pocket?” she asked, curious.

    “Apartment rules. I’m not allowed to. Besides, I’d have to get a permit, and those things are expensive as anything. As for the treats, I met a cat a couple years ago and didn't have anything to give it. I've had treats in my pocket since.” Good for him. Cat lovers made good friends. Maybe there was hope for him, despite how normal he seemed. Normal people were boring, and rarely liked her. But something about George seemed different. Good different.

    “It’s only a hundred dollars for a cat. Dogs are more, especially the big ones. Those can get up to three hundred. Even the little ones are a hundred and ten, because they need more maintenance,” she said. The training had been hard, going into detail on everything you could possibly need to know about taking care of a cat, but it had totally been worth it.

    “Not to mention that I’d be paying at least that much for each vet visit. Now that they’ve gotten specialist rating, they’re twice as expensive and just as useful.”

    “Still. I thought it was worth it. I don’t care if you do, but I’m willing to do it. Besides, my job is sitting and listening to robot voices all day to determine which ones will be the most popular. I need someone or something to talk to who has a wider vocabulary than ‘Acknowledged.’” Tanya replicated the default voice, known for fairly obvious reasons as Cheery Cheryl, almost perfectly. It was a talent of hers, and one of the most useful, or at least, least objectionable.

    “You mean, someone who doesn’t sound like they’re forcing themselves to be perky. I bet she’s the default setting so that people will pay money for less annoying ones. I set mine to Normal Norman as soon as Cheryl explained how. Why are they all alliterative, anyway?”

    “No clue. Been in the industry for three years and haven’t figured it out yet. Something to do with marketing, I think, but that’s not my department.” Although it would probably be more interesting. At the very least, she would be able to talk with other people. But entry-level positions didn’t pay well enough to afford going back to college and she had no interest in getting promoted, so she was stuck.

    “That would make sense. After all, part of making people buy your thing is giving it a catchy name. Do you really hate your job? It doesn’t sound that bad to me.” She wasn’t surprised. It was hard to understand how awful her job was without having it for at least a week.

    “Totally. If I could get almost any other job, I’d take it in a heartbeat. Sometimes I have dreams where I’m back in the 1900’s and the only voices belong to people. There are animals everywhere, and the sound is deafening, but all the voices have a source. And then I wake up and remember when I am and wish with all my heart that no one came up with the idea of making computers talk. That’s why I got Handful. Something to remind me that there are voices that belong to something besides a box. That words can be used for more than reciting directions and instructions. That they can mean something.” Tanya realized she had leaned forwards during the speech and sat back against the wall, sighing.

    “I said too much, didn’t I?” she asked dejectedly. She usually did. Spoke too much, defended the wrong topic, and got shoved out of the conversation. She was an expert at being an outsider, even with her own family. Her opinions were too wild and crazy for many people to like her. And the people who weren't bothered by how crazy they were thought they were too tame. She couldn't satisfy anyone, and had long since decided there was nothing she could do about it. But that didn't mean it didn't bother her.

    “No, no you didn’t. You were great. I’ve never heard anything like that. How can anyone disagree with someone who can put words together that beautifully? You’re like a magician, casting spells with your words, spells that catch anyone who listens and binds them to you. If you hate your job so much, why haven’t you left?” George asked. Maybe he wouldn’t stalk off quite yet. His enthusiasm was almost contagious, and she felt marginally better. He seemed to be pretty good at making speeches. With a bit of training, he could pass for a professional.

    “Because all the other jobs are just as bad or worse, or they aren’t hiring. I tried for a while, but never found anybody I liked that wanted me.” It had been hard enough to get the job she had. In six months of desperate searching, it had been the only one that played out.

    “You could be a reporter.” Tanya shook her head slowly.

    “Not enough training. Besides, I’m not breathtakingly beautiful, so they wouldn’t want me anyway.” “Not breathtakingly beautiful” was a bit of an understatement, but she was sure George didn’t want to hear all about what she thought of the way she looked. Guys usually didn’t. “I thought about it for a while, but the college guide convinced me it would be a waste of my talents, and I was silly enough to believe it. What do computer programs know about jobs, anyway?”

    “Nothing but statistics, and if statistics were everything about someone, I'd be in a lot of trouble. Besides, isn’t the ability to come up with impressive speeches on the spot a talent?” George seemed legitimately confused. She smiled at him, grateful for the compliment and curious about his statement. What about him was so unusual as to defy statistics?

    “Not enough of one to counteract my ear for voices and knowledge of the general public’s opinion. It got me on a human resources track, and that was that.” She sighed, and Handful rubbed against her leg in support. Tanya petted her for a few seconds before continuing.

    “It’s a pity. Twenty-eight years old and I already hate my job.”

    “It’s my dad that hates my job,” George said. “When I come home for Thanksgiving, he always asks me when I’m going to get a real job. He thinks I must have some friend high in the government who gave me this job, since computers can copy information to other computers and run diagnostics on it to make sure it’s right. In his opinion, I’m going to get replaced as soon as someone starts trying to cut the budget and realizes the computers can do it themselves.” Tanya knew the feeling. Her family had been trying to “tone her down” for years. They thought if she could just blend in, she could have a normal life, and if she could have a normal life, she would be happy without causing so much “trouble”.

    They hadn’t always, though. At one time, they had even supported her. When she was seven, some of the kids at school teased her mercilessly about her hair, so pale it was almost white. She’d spent weeks pleading with her mother to let her dye it. Finally, Mom sat down and talked to her about being “normal.” She said that no one could ever be completely normal, and that Tanya’s oddities were just more visible than most. And Tanya had been satisfied with the answer. She leaned back against the wall, trying to remember when their attitude had changed.

   “Tanya?” George asked, jerking her mind back to the present.

   “Sorry. Mind wandered there for a bit. You were talking about how your father hates your job, right? And how he thinks it’ll be obsolete soon?”

    “Yes.”

    “Is he right?”

    “Not precisely. I got picked for the job because I can remember something I’ve seen very accurately for about two minutes, and then it goes on to the next level of memory and I forget most of it. Basically, I’m very good at copying something down, but forget the string of information partway through. I do have a friend in the government, though. He was impressed by how well I could keep up with this one professor who always spoke at a hundred miles an hour. We weren’t close friends, but after the Program fiasco, the government realized they needed people to check the computers’ programs before they were entered. He remembered me, got me an audition, and that was that.” In the Program fiasco, three years before, a computer had transferred a missile launch program incorrectly. Only the master shut down had kept the northern West Coast from becoming as much a desert as the southern part had been two hundred years before.

    “I see.”  The conversation moved on to less important topics, and they talked until the security guard came down to give them the all clear.

    They followed the crowd up the two flights of stairs and outside, where the stars twinkled merrily like nothing had happened. The moon shone placidly overhead, and a few meteors still streaked across the sky. It looked like a perfectly normal night, except for the people milling around a spot surrounded by a caution fence, pseudoglass shattered by the sonic booms, and the lack of working city lights. The things must have torn through the network of wires that powered the lights. Tanya groaned to herself when she saw the glints in the grass. There was no way at all her car windows had survived.

    “I wonder what’s in there,” George mused, watching the growing crowd.

    “Probably the thing that rolled off the roof,” Tanya answered, setting the leash remote to ten feet as Handful wandered away.

    “Oh, yeah. Probably.” George looked away, studying the landscape around them. A beep from his watch startled them both.

    “Access restored,” Normal Norman informed him. Smooth, cultured, and utterly normal, the voice suited George perfectly. “Is there anything you want to do right now?”

    “No. Shut down.”

    “Shutting down.”

    Tanya’s watch gave her the same message, although Soprano Serena’s voice gave it a different tone.  The four singing voices, Serena, Alto Alice, Tenor Terrence, and Bass Barry, came the closest to imitating natural human voices, so they were her favorites.

    As they walked back to their hovercars, they exchanged watch numbers and addresses. Apparently, George only lived three streets away. She was surprised to learn he already had a tan apartment. Apartment colors indicated their renter’s rank. Red was the lowest, then purple, blue, green, tan, gray, and white for the politicians when they weren’t in their mansions. Getting to tan at twenty-seven was rare. Most jobs started at blue, but part of working in the government was an automatic green, and George had worked up a level since. Tanya was still blue, finding an improved apartment no reason to excel at a job she hated. Although given how much she was going to have to pay for fixing her car, the improved paycheck was looking tempting.

    On the way home, Tanya saw a four-foot-long by two-foot-wide oval on a sidewalk. Carefully parking the hovercar on the side of the road, she studied the area closely, wondering if it was one of the objects that had pretended to be meteors. The whole scene seemed perfectly normal and innocent, an apartment building casting a dark shadow in the newly restored city lights. If only pseudoglass could be repaired as quickly. Slowly and carefully, Tanya opened the hovercar door and climbed out. She left the leash remote in the car to make sure Handful couldn’t follow her. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, she advanced slowly towards the alien thing.

    The object was dark, but she couldn’t tell the exact color. The orange lights glinted off the rough, pitted surface, the only indication so far that the thing wasn’t a rock. Tanya could tell which end had been down, because rivulets ran back from one end, filling in the pits before turning back on themselves and ending with tiny spheres of whatever they were made of. 

    She stood with her hands behind her back, bent over the thing but strangely hesitant to touch it. Whoever had made it had made sure that it looked just like any other meteorite, and she wondered why they had gone to so much work to make this thing look innocent, and whether she should believe them. She shouldn’t.

    The longer Tanya examined it, the more details she saw. Some of the bubbles of melted metal were tiny domes, probably sensors. There were fingernail-sized openings in several places around the widest point. A tendril of smoke trickled out of some of them, and she wondered if the thing were about to explode. She hoped not. If they were bombs, even small ones, the Earth was about to be in really big trouble. It sounded like most of them had landed in cities.

    Ever so slowly, she moved her hands out to her sides. Even more tentatively, as if it were an animal terrified of humans that she needed to catch, she extended her left hand towards the object. Some part of her was screaming that this thing was dangerous and she needed to get as far away as possible. It’s smoking, for goodness’ sake. What if it catches on fire, or explodes? You'll die, that's what, and then who'll take care of Handful? But she did her best to ignore it and slowly brushed the surface with one fingertip. She almost jerked her hand away immediately. The metal was like nothing she’d ever felt, cool despite the tendrils of smoke that waved gently in the air.

    The texture was wrong, almost woven, like a piece of metal velvet. Tiny bumps and ridges formed a pattern visible only with touch. Tanya ran her finger along one line and was surprised when it slipped into a deep groove that seemed to draw it along. Cursive letters emerged, glowing a malicious yellow behind her finger. The_New_Reality. The final curve of the y released her finger, and she jerked her hand away. She suspected the underlined parts were there to lead her to the next word, but that was overwhelmed by a very important question. How did these aliens know to write in English?

    She shuddered, then climbed back in the hovercar and drove away, wishing the trip back to her apartment were longer. She wanted nothing to do with these horrible, horrible things. But her wish would not come true. As a matter of fact, she was about to become infinitely familiar with the meteorites’ aftermath, in a way no one could ever have predicted.

    “Mrrk?” Handful asked, c*****g her head to one side, clearly curious about why her human had wandered off.

    “Stay far, far, away from those things, girl. They’re evil and dangerous, and should never, ever, be trusted.” To her surprise, Handful nodded, as if she could actually understand what she’d said. But that was silly. Cats weren’t people, and they certainly couldn’t talk. She wasn’t that kind of crazy cat lady.

    Nothing she tried got the feel of the alien thing off her hands. The coarse, woven, texture of it, the eerily smooth groove that formed the letters. Finally, she sat next to Handful and petted her with both hands while going through a display of her pictures. There was something about petting a cat that made the feel of their fur stick to your hands afterwards, and she wanted to feel it, wanted to make her hands vibrate with the feel of cat, even when they were in mid-air. The two activities calmed her enough that she could go to bed.