THEY ARE COMING
Teshana Wright
Gizmodo.com
Darlene McKinnon saw aliens long before the rest of us did.
Fifteen years ago she was serving as a helicopter mechanic at Nellis AFB, making regular flights back and forth to the Creech UAV base. On one of those trips, she and the flight crew saw something flying alongside them. They reported that it “looked like a fish, darting back and forth in the sky.” Their superiors sent them for psych evaluations and told them it was nothing but an experimental drone.
Darlene thinks different. Darlene thinks she was lied to. She thinks the Air Force is covering up something much bigger than a secret drone program, and she wants to tell you all about it. It only costs $35 for a ticket to see her live, or $9.99 to buy her self-published book on Amazon. Or, if you’re cheap (like me), you can watch most of it on YouTube. And she sure sounds like a standard-issue UFO crank.
Except that she’s also a state representative in the Arizona Legislature.
Interesting.
She was speaking at a UFO convention in upstate New York on the same weekend I was stuck in Albany without much else to do, so I indulged my curiosity and arranged an interview. I met her in the hotel bar, shortly before she was due to deliver her talk. She was the classic dressed-down politician in mom jeans and Arizona tan, greeting me in the kind of warm, folksy style you’d expect from a woman who sells herself as the salt of the earth, all packaged up for the supermarket shelf. I wanted to ask her: how did she end up here, among the UFO enthusiasts, abductees, cosplayers, whistleblowers, grifters, and merch-sellers?
But I never had the chance. Because that’s when we got the news. That’s when everyone got the news.
A UFO convention was either the best or the worst place to be on that day. Damn near every phone bleeped an alert. People read them with sudden fear in their eyes. Screens switched to news channels with chyrons reading ALIEN SHIPS SEEN BEYOND PLUTO. Gasps spread around the bar.
Then the screaming began.
I checked my own phone and found that first low-res black and white image that came back from the New Horizons probe. The one that makes them look like a school of monstrous deep-sea fish with too many eyes.
I showed it to the state representative. All she said was: “Huh.” And this while we were surrounded by people freaking the hell out, running back and forth as though there were anywhere to run to.
Then her own phone went off. It was WNBC, wanting a quote. She said “yes,” and went live on air while I was still sitting there—which is, excuse me, rude.
I’ve been back over the recording since. The anchor was barely able to control a chuckle as he began: “On the line now from Albany’s Clear Skies UFO convention is Arizona State Representative Darlene McKinnon. She claims she saw an alien spaceship over Nevada fifteen years ago. So, Representative—you’ve seen aliens. Is that what we’re seeing in these pictures from New Horizons?”
And she paused for a moment. Pursed her lips. Thought about it. As though she wasn’t even hearing the chaos all around us.
“Representative?” said the anchor. “Can you hear us? Sounds like things are a little crazy there . . .”
And I swear there was a moment when she made her mind up.
“I can hear you, Chuck. And yes, those are aliens.”
“The same ones you saw?”
“The same ones I saw.” She must have seen my jaw drop, because she raised a finger to stop me from interrupting. “Well, no, I can’t tell you why they’re here. All we have is one fuzzy image, and that ain’t a whole lot. But if this is real then we need to get ready because they’re coming. They’re coming to Earth. No, I can’t tell you any more than that. Well, you’ll have to ask the federal government. They have information about aliens they’re not willing to disclose, and they owe it to the people to explain why that is.”
The call ended, and she smiled at me as if I hadn’t seen the whole thing. As if I hadn’t seen her make up a ton of bullshit in a heartbeat. She apologized and hurried away, phone back at her ear again. The next call came from Fox News.
It didn’t take her long to hone her message. The aliens she saw fifteen years ago soon became scouts, sent ahead of their fleet to spy on us. But now the recon was over, and the main force was coming.
She repeated that, over and over again on channel after channel:
They are coming.
They are coming.
They. Are. Coming.
The attendees at the UFO convention loved it, once they’d stopped panicking. They took it up as a slogan almost as soon as they heard her say it. “They Are Coming” T-shirts were on sale online within hours.
Darlene McKinnon was long gone by then. She was too busy turning herself into a real celebrity to pay much attention to the folks in Albany. Last I heard they didn’t even refund the tickets for her talk. Not that anyone in the UFO community cares. She’s one of them, she’s famous, and that’s all that matters. After all, she’s right.
They are coming.
PROFILE: DARLENE MCKINNON
By Teshana Wright
Washington Post Magazine
Darlene McKinnon wants you to know just one thing. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard it by now. It’s on the homepage of her website. It’s on the cover of her book. It’s the first thing she says when she addresses a crowd. She’s said it on TV, she’s said it on Twitter, she said it on the floor of Congress when she made her first speech as junior senator from Arizona.
They are coming.
So my first question to her was: how does it feel to be wrong about that?
She smiles in her wood-paneled senate office, echoing the smile in the author photo on the back of her book (copies of which are stacked shoulder high in a display stand beside her desk). “Well, Teshana, I don’t think I’m wrong. They’re still coming. Just because they’re headed for Jupiter right now doesn’t mean they aren’t going to slingshot round and come straight for us. And we are not going to be ready when they do.”
She doesn’t mention that this is impossible, according to current observations. The aliens aren’t traveling at warp speed. They’re subject to the same rules of orbital mechanics as everything else, and they’re slowing down. They’re getting ready to make an extended visit to the Jovian system.
But Darlene has no intention of letting simple things like facts stand in her way.
“And this Jupiter Peace Mission, rebuilding the MarsX ship to go out there? I fear for anyone who sets foot on that vessel. I really do. We’re pouring billions into a deathtrap for our best and brightest when what we need is weapons that can beat those things.”
She readily forgets the billions of tax dollars being spent on the orbital defense network. The reborn nuclear industry stockpiling nuclear weapons. The private space contractors building rockets by the thousand to give the aliens a neat little “fuck you” if they ever come close enough. But none of it is even remotely adequate for the senator from Arizona.
“Have you seen the size of those monsters? They’re big enough to eat a moon. Is it any wonder people call them ‘star-eaters’?”
Well, no. It’s because they look a little like the deep sea fish of the same name and somebody made a funny meme about it once. But why let that stand in the way of a good argument?
“Nukes just aren’t going to do the job against ships of that size. We need a bigger bomb, and the only thing bigger than an H-bomb is antimatter. That’s pure annihilation. We have to be able to annihilate those things. We need a Manhattan Project for antimatter weapons, and I’m not even seeing Staten Island in the current budget proposal.”
Darlene McKinnon doesn’t know a damn thing about science that she didn’t read in the first paragraph of a Wikipedia page. But she has her gut, and her gut knows a thing or two. The other thing it knows is that she’s been lied to by the government, ever since she reported a UFO sighting while on a transport copter over Nevada.
“Folks like me have been seeing aliens for decades now, but what happens when we report it? It gets hushed up. It gets hidden in a vault. They take all those reports and hide them in a sealed vault under the Pentagon. They’ve got secrets down there about alien contact going back damn near a century. Secrets we need to survive, because they are coming. You can believe it or not, but they are coming.”
Funny thing, though. That hasn’t always been her position when it comes to her very own alien sighting.
She first ran for senate seven years before the aliens arrived, and eight years after she saw a UFO. The primary shouldn’t have been any obstacle to her; she was running against a washed-up incumbent who’d been exposed as a fraudster and sexual assaulter. She should have beaten him hands down. She would have, if one of her crewmates on that helicopter ride hadn’t come forward to reveal the UFO report that both of them signed.
Did she confirm it? Did she assert the truth? Did she own it?
Hell, no.
She said, categorically, that she’d seen unexpected aerial phenomena and she’d reported them, as per air force regulations. But no aliens. No sir. Nuh-uh. She was too busy serving her country for that kind of nonsense.
Her crewmate said she was a liar, and the voters chose to believe him.
She lost the primary and went back to the state legislature. But she didn’t give up; she ran for the United States House of Representatives in the next two cycles, losing both times. By then it was obvious she was a busted flush. She was done. No second acts in American politics, yadda yadda yadda. And sometime around then, she changed her tune about aliens. I can’t begin to guess why, unless it was something to do with the speaker fees. And the merchandising revenue. And the Patreon account where you too can spend five bucks a month to help Darlene with the grand cause of UFO disclosure.
But then the real aliens came. And here she is in the United States Senate, right where she was aiming for in the first place, talking about things she was once too embarrassed to mention.
I think she realizes what my angle is when I ask about the failed primary run. Her eyes narrow. Her lips purse. She gives me a hot glare that could have burnt the flesh off a crocodile.
But that’s the only beat she skips.
“Well, all that’s a matter of public record,” she says. “And you know what? I admit it. I admit that I didn’t want to believe what it was I saw that night. Not for the longest time, I didn’t. But I guess the good lord above wanted to teach me a lesson for not trusting my own two eyes, because here we are. Aliens are real. We’ve got star-eaters in this system. Right this minute. There’s no one who can hide that truth. Not anymore.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but she’s given up on listening.
“And I am not the only one who feels this way. There are people all over this great nation who are fed up. Fed up with being lied to. Fed up with being told we’re cranks when the government knew aliens were real all along. I’ve brought a message from all those fine folk to Washington DC and if the federal government thinks it can ignore that message—if it thinks it can keep that archive sealed—then we’re just going to have to assume the worst. And act accordingly.”
I ask her for clarification, because that sounds like a threat. She tells me I’ve got my quote. Interview over. I’m ushered out of the office so fast my heels don’t touch the carpet.
And as the alien fleet makes its slow, ponderous way towards Jupiter, I have to worry. Because me and most other people are content to guess about the aliens’ motives until the evidence comes in. But Darlene McKinnon knows in her gut what they’re here for. She has certainty on her side. And if reality ever coincides with that certainty, even for just a moment?
Then we might have something worse than aliens to worry about.
TESH. IS. TALKING.
(Episode 16, Season 3)
[Audience applause]
Okay, everyone. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Sir, if you can restrain your enthusiasm. Or take your medication, I don’t care which.
[Audience laugh]
Okay, so I guess you already know what I’m about to say. You all got your cellphones. You all read your Twitter. So here it is: while I was coming into this studio, I was attacked. Physically attacked.
[Silence]
By dumbasses.
[Nervous laughter]
Because what else you going to call them? Alien Truthers? Disclosure Campaigners? Great Red Spot Mourners? They’re a bunch of UFO wingnuts. They always were and they always will be.
[Applause]
So. They been protesting outside the studio the last couple of weeks, all because I got a habit of saying mean words about their bitch queen goddess, Darlene herself.
[Ooooooooh]
And one of these assholes hit me over the head with a protest sign, like I haven’t heard what Darlene’s been saying now for years. That’s right. I got hit with the three words. You know what three words I mean. Right on the noggin. Right here. [Points] So I guess we’re getting into this segment a little early this week . . .
[Cheers]
It’s time for day five hundred seventy-two of . . . Crazy VP Watch!
[Logo sting, audience applause]
Now, I’ve been on the crazy VP beat since back in the days when it was the crazy state representative beat. But this crazy right here, this crazy is off the charts. ‘Cause Darlene’s fanbase are back at it. They’re outside this studio. They’re outside Congress and the White House. They’re outside the goddamn Pentagon with their banners! Like they think the military’s scared of a placard—can you imagine that? “Lay down your arms, soldier! There’s nothing we can do! The enemy have protest signs!”
[Laughter]
“And they wrote them on cardboard! With six colors of sharpie! Six, God damn it!”
[Laughter]
But maybe I ain’t being fair. Maybe “crazy” ain’t fair, least where it applies to the VP. Because how can you call Darlene crazy when all her crazy keeps getting rewarded? With super PAC donations, with high political office, with photo ops of her and the president whenever POTUS and VPOTUS are on the same continent . . .
[Laughter]
Incidentally, there’s a theory going round that the reason the two of them never meet is because one of them is antimatter and they’ll both—
[Laughter]
Yeah, you knew where that one was going. But this week, the impossible happened. They did meet. In the Oval Office. For what, the second, third time since they were sworn in? And it did not go well. Now, I’m not calling it annihilation but damn, girl. You and the prez done burst each other’s eardrums with all the yelling.
[Laughter]
And what was that fight about? You guessed it! It’s about all of her crazy fans parked outside the president’s front door. He was trying to remind her about how the whole point of putting her on the ticket was so her whackjob base could support the administration—you know, back when the aliens ate up the Great Red Spot and freaked us all out? She was supposed to be keeping her crazies under control, but she ain’t been doing that lately. I got a bump on my skull says she ain’t.
[Nervous laughter]
So why’s she so keen on firing up her base all of a sudden? Why is she demanding Rodriguez open up that alien archive that don’t exist, when she’s been silent about it the last eighteen months? What happened to make her so desperate? Do you think it might be something . . . [points] out there? Let’s find out, in day I-don’t-even-know-how-many of . . . Crazy Alien Watch!
[Music sting starts, but runs down to nothing. Audience laughter]
Yeah, we didn’t do a logo. We couldn’t be bothered. Because nothing’s changed in, what, nearly two years now? Sure, we got aliens. Star-eaters. Whatever. They’re in orbit round Jupiter, and they just doing their thing. Sucking up gas from the big stripey beachball. They sucked up so much, they broke up the Great Red Spot. But ehh, that thing was on its way out anyway.
Nothing else is happening. Nada. Zilch. For all we know, they’re just great big moon-sized animals going system to system, chowing down on gas giants. Wake me up when the Jupiter Peace Mission gets there and tries to make contact. Maybe something’ll happen then.
But that’s it. Everything’s quiet on the high frontier. So what sent Darlene off the deep end? Why’s her crazy fanbase making with all the hooting and hollering? Why now? What’s changed?
Except, oh yeah. Midterms! Remember those? And there’s a lotta crazy going through the primary stage right now. Lotta would be senators and representatives looking to follow in Darlene’s footsteps. And next up, we’re gonna take a closer look at some of that crazy . . .
Okay. I’ll be back after these sponsor messages. Click and subscribe, folks. Click and subscribe.
[Music, applause, ad break]
OUR NEW PRESIDENT MUST STILL BE HELD TO ACCOUNT
Guest Opinion
By Teshana Wright
Washington Post
I was wrong.
Sometimes you have to admit that. Sometimes you have to own it.
I was wrong. And she was right.
I watched our new president’s first address with my hands shaking around a glass of bourbon. She did not disappoint me. The first words she said to that little gathering of reporters and officials on the lawn in front of the White House—not truly an inaugural address, there in the full bloom of summer, so far from the chill of January to which we’re accustomed—those first three words were exactly the ones I expected.
They are coming.
She’s been saying that since the aliens first appeared. And I’ve spent exactly that long telling everyone the truth about our new president’s lies and hypocrisy. I’ve mocked her. I’ve ridiculed her. I’ve even tried sober and serious commentary a few times.
None of it worked. None of it made a single goddamn difference.
Because they are coming.
Any hope of peaceful co-existence died when the Jupiter Peace Mission was destroyed. Any hope the aliens were harmless vanished when they ripped the ice moon Europa to shreds. And maybe they’re animals and maybe they just wanted the ice, but if that’s the case then they’re sloppy eaters. Because there’s chunks of a dead moon flying all round the system and some of that’s going to hit us with all the force of a Tunguska strike aimed God knows where and God knows when. It’ll be a long while before the debris gets to us, but our children and grandchildren are going to have to live with the terror of knowing that any city on Earth could be wiped out in an instant.
And it doesn’t end there. We’ve been calling these aliens “star-eaters” but it seems like they have a taste for planets and moons. They haven’t moved on from Jupiter yet. But one day they will, and they may well come for us. So we have to be ready. We need every weapon we can possibly get. We need leadership ready to do what must be done.
Would I have preferred it if President Rodriguez was the one to lead us? If he hadn’t taken office with a known heart condition? If he hadn’t been crushed by the stress of dealing with the alien threat on one side, our fractious allies on the other, and Darlene biting at his heels from below? If he hadn’t signed that letter invoking the Twenty-fifth amendment, handing power to her from his hospital bed in Bethesda?
You’re damn right I’d have preferred that.
But for now we have to make do with the president we have, and that president is Darlene McKinnon.
We all hope she will choose to lead the whole nation in these dark times. Not just the protesters who are still shouting slogans outside the Pentagon and Congress. Not just the coalition of conservatives and extremists that put her so close to the presidency in the first place. Not just the arms manufacturers and space entrepreneurs who were so quick to meet with her, even before the ink was dry on the letter that made her president.
We all hope that. I for one do not expect it.
The first test of a McKinnon administration will be her relationship with the Alien Disclosure movement. They’re already salivating at the prospect of the Pentagon archive being opened up. They will be enraged when the truth of its absence emerges. Will she treat them with the contempt they deserve, when that happens? Or will she turn that rage towards other ends?
She must put those past associations aside if she is to lead this country. She must instead turn towards the rest of us, who want only to survive humanity’s greatest test. The whole nation needs her. The whole world needs her.
Please, Madam President: Lead all of us. Because you were right.
They are coming.
Teshana Wright is a journalist and the host of the award-winning streamshow “Tesh. Is. Talking.”
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Teshana Wright @Teshistalking
Okay people here we go MEGATHREAD on all the shit going down this weekend. Be aware that I am NOT here for debate, I am NOT here for abuse this is just a list of the absolute facts
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First person I knew got arrested was me. For the sixth time this year on bullshit charges so thank you again @NYPD for making my weekend.
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They didn’t question me. They didn’t threaten to investigate my husband or suspend his license. They didn’t even pretend like my dog was fouling the sidewalk. They just kept me in lockup without a phone call or a lawyer as long as they damn well could.
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Because they wanted me silent. Me and the other voices of resistance. So they could hit us with so much all at once that no one could keep up with it over the noise of all the bots retweeting each other.
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But guess what. I’m out. And here’s what they did while I was gone:
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First off, the resignations. The Secretaries of Defense, Treasury, and State, plus the Attorney General, all on the same day. All of them Rodriguez appointments.
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They didn’t resign in protest. All their resignation letters were about spending more time with family and greatest respect for the work our president is doing and yadda yadda yadda.
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Best guess—they were keeping their families out of jail. Or worse. But who knows?
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Then the arrests in the military. Most senior one was the Air Force Chief of Staff, and that’s because he told the truth in front of the Senate about there being no goddamn alien archive.
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Whole air force getting turned upside down looking for that bullshit. Might even turn everything over to Space Force.
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Might as well turn it over to Raytheon and Boeing and SpaceX and all the rest looking to get the dollars for Darlene’s crazy antimatter bullshit but then I guess that’s been the point all along huh
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Then it gets real dark: Justice Millerson is dead. They say it was a stroke. Well excuse me but that was one hell of a well-timed stroke. Because now the liberal end of SCOTUS is gone.
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We had two resignations in the last year and now the last holdout is dead. No word yet on whether Darlene will bother to replace her. She doesn’t have to. There’s no law says there has to be nine justices.
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She got her fingers burnt with Justice Yang doing his job and upholding the law when she expected him to roll over and play fetch. So why take a risk when she can leave a rump SCOTUS that’ll do whatever the hell she wants?
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And just in case you’re in any doubt over what this is about, Bethesda Naval Hospital is on lockdown. There’s a whole bunch of new military uniforms out there and they ain’t doctors and nurses.
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How sick is that? President Rodriguez ain’t been conscious for months and they gotta send in the army to arrest him. Or maybe just make sure nobody else gets to him.
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And it goes way beyond DC. They been going after astronomers, too. Observatories and colleges raided all over. I guess some people been a little too loud about saying the aliens ain’t actually making a move, huh? We ain’t allowed to watch the skies for ourselves no more.
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The networks are siding with Darlene. CNN says all the arrests are for treason. Fox saying they need trials like yesterday. NBC anchors just look scared. Like someone pointing a gun at them.
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International news is the only place to get coverage. That and Twitter if you ignore the assholes. CBC is on the money for now. BBC has some of it. Azteca and Estrella are good if you know Español, but don’t bother with Telemundo (owned by NBC).
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This is a coup. We’ve known it was coming two years now. Ever since Darlene said she’d been down to the Pentagon and found out they’d burned the alien archive that never existed in the first place.
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She’s been finding people to blame it on, taking them out and tightening her grip along the way.
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Don’t expect elections any time soon. We already got a state of emergency but now it’s gonna be PERMANENT. With a PERMANENT president (or whatever she calls herself if Russia and China and Europe agree to this World Council bullshit).
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Lotta folks in the mentions panicking and getting ready to bug out. I understand that. Especially if you got family. Me and my husband are in the same position. We might have to do it ourselves. But stay put and fight this bullshit if you can.
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And we got trolls saying they gonna report me for abusing the president. Won’t be the first time I been in Twitter jail but I don’t know if I’ll get out this time. Screenshot alla this NOW. Get the word out NOW.
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THIS IS A COUP
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THIS IS A GODDAMN FUCKING COUP
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Teshana Wright @Teshistalking
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THAT’S NO MOON
By Teshana Wright
Three weeks ago, Edmonton, Alberta, vanished in a burst of light. A million people died in the blast. Debris came down all over Western Canada, some of it setting fire to oil sands and forests in the north. The fires are still burning. The smoke is blotting out the sun over half of North America. Canada is in mourning. Aid is speeding in from across the planet via the World Council. Humanity is coming together in its hour of need.
Excuse me, but this is bullshit. In fact, two kinds of bullshit. There’s the official bullshit story and then there’s the truth we’ve been able to piece together, which is another kind of bullshit altogether—the horrifying reality of what’s been inflicted upon our planet. Not by the aliens, but by people we ought to be able to trust.
The official story runs that a hundred meter wide chunk of space ice blew the city off the face of the Earth. Exactly the kind of thing we’ve been expecting since the aliens turned Europa into rubble and then started on all the other shit out there. Because, as Darlene has been saying for nigh-on two decades now, they are coming. And this is just the vanguard of their attack.
Except that it’s too soon. Those astronomers not in prison or working for the government calculate that we’re at least a decade away from any significant pieces of the dead moon reaching us.
So what was it?
The crazy thing is that the best place to find out is employment agencies. Because the kind of facility that can explode with no warning and this much devastation still needs janitors. And canteen staff. And receptionists. And drivers. And warehouse operatives. There’s not a whole lot of industries taking people on in those kind of numbers these days, so when job listings pop up out of nowhere all clustered in the same place, it becomes kind of obvious:
A new particle collider is nearing completion.
You might have heard (if you’ve been subscribed to this feed) that Darlene’s antimatter obsession has borne fruit in the shape of particle colliders all over the planet. Dozens in the United States alone, all working diligently in secret to make and store the antiparticles that she’s decided will be the secret weapon that will stop the aliens. Which is, of course, insanely risky. Far more so than with nuclear weapons. The design of an antimatter bomb is inherently dangerous when compared to a nuke; it takes a lot of energy to make a fission or fusion bomb go off, so the worst they do when they break or decay is release some radioactive material. Which isn’t fun at all, but it’s hardly a nuclear explosion. Antimatter bombs, on the other hand, have to be constantly prevented from going off. Antimatter goes boom at the slightest excuse. The slightest mistake in the calibration of the magnetic containment field. The slightest jiggle.
It’s not hard to put it together. Edmonton had a sudden burst of job vacancies six months ago. All of them were filled. All of them signed NDAs and the Canadian Security of Information Act, even the mop jockeys. Super-steady electric trucks started rolling in and out of town, the kind with military plates that get you arrested if you mention them online.
Then one night, Edmonton vanished in a blaze of light. Nobody reported seeing shooting stars. No burning streaks of fire splitting the sky. Just the sudden unexplained explosion that can be only one thing: antimatter annihilation.
So I guess we can report one positive outcome.
That shit works.
It’s just a pity about the million people who died. It’s a pity about the fires raging across Alberta and Saskatchewan. A pity about the refugees heading south and east and west. A pity about poor, dear Canada, taking the first hit for all the rest of us.
Just not the first hit from the aliens.
Teshana Wright has been covering Darlene McKinnon since the day the aliens were first detected, and she’s damn well sick of it. She’s wanted by the US Government for speaking her mind and lives in hiding with her husband and a big scary dog somewhere on Planet Earth.
VOICEr 4.1 build 13762
Save to: /Transcript.rtf
Unknown Vocal (female)
Testing. Testing. Recognize voice. Recognize my voice. Come on phone, what do you need, more hamsters in the wheel?
Unknown Vocal (canine)
(Barking)
Unknown Vocal (female)
Shh. Shh. Quiet down, baby. There ain’t nobody here. Just us. Just you and me.
[Voice recognized: Wright, T.]
Okay. Finally. So here we go.
If you’re reading the unedited transcript of this, then I’m either dead or in detention. If you’re listening in from the government then I guess I’m gonna be dead or in detention pretty soon anyway.
I ain’t being melodramatic. I got an invitation. Someone close to the administration. A whistleblower. Remember them? Remember when people did that? I do. Used to be the kind of thing you’d dream of, getting that inside scoop. These days the first question you gotta ask yourself is: is this a trap?
But this is too big to ignore. This is someone says they got evidence the star-eaters are on the move. You’d need an observatory telescope to see out that far and they’re all military now so I guess this is someone from the U.S. Space Force. Maybe Darlene was right after all. Sorry, Director General Darlene of the World Council. Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know how the Chinese and the Russians put up with that shit—
Oh crap. Here it comes. Call coming in.
Unknown Vocal (male)
Is that Teshana Wright?
Wright, T.
Yeah. You my contact?
Unknown Vocal (male)
No. Please hold for the Director General.
Wright, T.
Wait, what did you just say? Shit, I’m on hold . . .
Unknown Vocal (female)
Is that Teshana Wright?
Wright, T.
Oh, you are fucking kidding me.
Unknown Vocal (female)
It’s her. I’d know that voice anywhere. Colonel, you can proceed.
[Voice recognized: McKinnon, D.]
Wright, T.
Darlene? Is that you?
McKinnon, D.
I recommend you kneel down and put your hands on your head, Teshana. You’re about to be taken into custody.
Wright, T.
Oh shit.
[Unrecognized sound input]
Oh shit. Oh shit they here. Boots on the stairs. Soldiers. Gotta be the fucking army come to get me.
Unknown Vocal (canine)
(Barking)
McKinnon, D.
I’ll be seeing you soon.
Wright, T.
What the hell—
[Unrecognized sound input]
Unknown Vocal (male)
On your knees! Hands on head! On your fucking knees!
Unknown Vocal (canine)
(Barking)
Wright, T.
I am complying. I am not resisting arrest. I am complying!
Unknown Vocal (male)
Eyes closed! Do not look at me! Do not look at me!
Unknown Vocal (canine)
(Growling)
Unknown Vocal (male)
Deal with that fucking dog.
Wright, T.
No no please don’t—
[Gunshot]
Wright, T.
No! No!
Unknown Vocal (male)
I said hands on your head! Do not look at me! Hands on your head!
Wright, T.
No, no, baby, no . . .
[vocalization not in database]
TRANSCRIPT CONCLUDES
THEY CAME AT LAST
By Teshana Wright
They arrested me. They set a trap and I fell for it. All these years in hiding and I walked right into their hands. Then they took me God knows where. It was a long helicopter flight, judging by the motion and vibration. Maybe Cheyenne Mountain, where they used to have NORAD back in the Cold War? But it could have been anywhere on the continent. I couldn’t tell.
They only took the cuffs and blindfold and noise cancellation headphones off me once I was in some kind of conference room. Not an interrogation room. Not a cell. I thought I must be going crazy.
The door opened. Guards came in. Like a dozen of them. I shuddered and shook as they lined up all around me.
Then Darlene came through the door.
I gasped when I saw her. She was in a wheelchair. She’s barely in her sixties, but she looked more like eighty going on ninety. I guess they’ve been making her look younger onscreen.
But she was still sharp. Eyes like talons.
She threw a notepad and a sharpie across the table.
“Do you know shorthand?” she asked.
“What, you want a secretary?”
“I’ll take that as a no. I’ll talk slowly, then.”
“You want to give me an interview?“
“That’s right.”
I stared at her. In was out. Up was down. Left was right. I mean, what the fuck? After all these years?
“Why?” I asked.
She smiled. Contemptuous and bitter. “Because they’re coming, Teshana. They’re coming now. Within days. And there’s just the very slightest chance that we’ll survive. If we do, I want you to tell the people of this world how we defended them. So they’ll know it was worth it. So they’ll join in when it comes to the rebuilding.”
“. . . ain’t you got a press secretary?”
“That I do. But I need to reach a wider audience. And you have credibility with that audience. They’ll listen to you when you tell them how we saved humanity.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Even if it was just nervous bravado. “Let me get this straight. You want me cheerleading your bullshit so everyone fighting against you signs up for what? Peace corps? Reconstruction duty? First wave of colonists on the high frontier?”
“Something like that.”
And it was so obvious. So fucking obvious.
“Bullshit. You just don’t want to go down in history as the biggest monster humanity ever had.”
She looked back at me. She didn’t deny it.
“Are you going to use those?” she asked, nodding at the pad and pen.
I picked them up and threw them in her face. Might have been the only time I landed a good one on her.
“Go fuck yourse—”
One of the guards slammed my face on the table and dragged my arm behind my back to make me gasp in pain.
“Listen to me, Teshana,” she said. Another guard pulled my head up by the hair. “You’re going to write this story because you won’t be able to help yourself. You’re a journalist. It’s in your nature.” She looked at her guards. “Find her some accommodation. Then, when it starts, take her to the observation room. Make sure she sees everything.”
They blindfolded and shackled and put the headphones on me again, and this time they threw me into a cold concrete cell. They slammed the door shut, opened up a slot, and threw in the pad and pen.
I let them lie on the floor for a while. I cried.
And then I just couldn’t stop myself.
I started writing.
Three days later, they came for me. I don’t know if it was that long exactly. The lights never went out. I’m just guessing based on how often they put MREs through the slot in the door.
They took me to another room and locked the door behind me. It was bigger than the conference room I’d been in before. It had a gigantic window on one side, like it was a corporate box at a sports stadium. Except when I went over to look down, I didn’t see a football field. I saw the command and control center for the defense of humanity.
It looked like a cross between a NASA control center and Kubrick’s War Room. A gigantic hall with a circular table to one side, and the rest filled with rows of desks facing a gigantic wall display. There were people in uniforms from all over the world, from every country that joined the World Council—although it was only Russia, China, and Europe at the big table with the Americans and Darlene.
Because there she was, right at the head of it all. She glanced up at me for a moment. And then up at the wall display, as though she meant me to follow her look.
It was massive: one big screen across the width of the hall, taken up with dozens of windows. There was a world map, live video feeds from all over, tactical displays, orbital paths, everything. Including one marked HUBBLE that was fixed on the star-eaters.
Jesus. I’d seen them before but I’d never seen them like this. Images with no grain and no blur. Those awful jaws that sucked down Jupiter’s atmosphere and chewed Europa into pieces clamped shut for now. Eyes on every side, swiveling in all directions, but some of them locked on us as they shot through space towards their goal.
The wall display had a countdown at the center.
They were only hours away.
Darlene wanted me to watch her save the world. She wanted to be proven right. But not just me, as it turned out. They dragged in other journalists. Dissidents. Political enemies. Scientists. Astronomers, especially. There were tearful reunions. But I won’t give names. I don’t know who survived. I don’t know if anyone other than me got out.
We looked down on the World Council as the aliens grew closer and closer. They were headed right for us. Not quite dead center, though. They didn’t do that when they approached Jupiter—they braked hard and went into orbit. So maybe that was what they were doing as they approached Earth, said an astronomer who hadn’t seen daylight for a decade (or any kind of healthcare, by the look of it).
If they did go into orbit, they’d run into the antimatter bombs. There were layers of them, waiting to go off if the star-eaters came too close. Or maybe they had rockets so they could go after the aliens? I couldn’t tell from the display screen. But there were so goddamn many of them. No wonder we’ve been starving these last years and months. The whole world put everything into those things.
I couldn’t help but hold my breath. Hold my breath and hope. And then breathe again because everything took so long. It all unfolded over long agonizing hours—virtually nothing in terms of space travel, but to me it was endless slow motion.
It gave me time to write. I damn near filled that whole notepad before it all ended.
The astronomers were the first to guess what was happening. They were running hasty calculations on their own notepads, trying to work out the trajectory from what they could see on the screen. An RAF officer with a sweating face came up to Darlene and tried to tell her something, but she refused to listen. She barked an order, and the bombs were armed.
We were ready for them.
But they didn’t break for orbit. They didn’t even slow down.
“It’s a gravity assist!” said one of the astronomers. “It’s a fucking gravity assist!”
The view of the aliens from the Hubble showed the perspective changing. They weren’t heading for us anymore.
They were heading past us.
Orbital cameras slewed to follow them as they flew past our world. Some of the bombs went off in blinding flashes of light, but nowhere near the aliens. Just containment failures as they were armed. The cameras kept on turning as the star-eaters went, and eventually gave us a view of the planet as they passed by.
So much of the green was gone. So much was ochre and yellow and grey. I could see Edmonton and a black mark where the city once stood, surrounded by grey ash from forest fires. There were other sites just the same, and some still burning from heaven knows what.
This encounter cost us so much. So very much. Even as the aliens went by, I wondered if it hadn’t already cost us the world.
I looked down at Darlene as she looked up at the screen, her mouth hanging open as she realized it had all been for nothing.
The astronomers were whooping with joy. It wasn’t just a slingshot round the Earth; it looked like they’d do the same round the sun as well. The star-eaters had already eaten their fill. They were on their way to somewhere else.
Nobody was cheering on the floor of the control room. Darlene glanced up at the observation room, at me and all the others.
She was tired. Tired and beaten and old. But she still had fire in her eyes when she saw me. She muttered a few words to an aide, with a bitter sneer on her lips. A Chinese official looked up in alarm.
Guards rushed into the observation room. Shouting at us to get on our knees. Get our hands on our heads. Close our eyes.
One of the astronomers wasn’t fast enough. A soldier smashed her in the head with a rifle butt and she didn’t get up again. They dragged her away instead, her limp body bleeding on the carpet.
Then they put hoods over our heads. They didn’t even bother to tie our hands. I still had the notepad clutched in mine. Somehow the hood was more terrifying than the neat little blindfold and headphones they’d used before. I could hardly breathe as they pushed me down corridors that seemed never to end. It could have been a mile or more. The air grew cold. All I could hear was footsteps from the rest of the group and the sounds of roaring machinery.
Then the guards told us to kneel down.
I heard a gun cocked. Then a shot. A body fell.
I think I whimpered.
Another shot. Another body crumpled onto concrete.
And then boots were running up. I heard shouts. I heard soldiers ordering other soldiers to drop their weapons.
Guns fired from every direction. Dozens. Deafening. I screamed and fell forward onto the floor.
Eventually, the shooting stopped.
I must have been surrounded by bodies. I tried to lie still. Very, very still.
Then someone kneeled beside me and said: “I see you breathing. Get up. We will take you to safety.”
It wasn’t one of the guards from before. This one had a Chinese accent.
They helped me to my feet, but didn’t take off the hood. They bundled me down more corridors, then finally outside and into a helicopter.
I don’t know how far they flew me. Not as far as I’d traveled to get there in the first place. Once we got where we were going, they landed, uncuffed me, and threw me out the door. When I pulled the hood from my head, all I could see was a dot flying off into a blue-grey sky.
And, at my feet, the notepad. Spattered with blood where I dropped it on the killing floor, but rescued and thrown out with me.
I didn’t recognize the place. It was the middle of nowhere. But at least there was a road. I started walking, and found a deserted highway rest stop after a few hours. There was a generator out the back with a little gas, and an ancient computer left abandoned in the office of the diner.
I opened up the notepad, and set to work.
And now I’m done.
The aliens leave a devastated world behind them. One that will struggle to survive. Its forests are burnt. Its skies are full of ash. Its people starve while the star-eaters sail away, glutted with a bountiful harvest.
I don’t know what will happen next. Darlene is still in power. Who knows what she’ll do now? Who knows if she even had a plan for this eventuality? I don’t doubt that she’ll claim to have saved the world anyway, scaring the star-eaters off with a few antimatter detonations. Maybe that story will stick. Maybe not.
But maybe I can get the truth out. So people know what really happened, and who they ought to blame. That must be why the Chinese soldiers saved me. I could be cynical about their motives, but I don’t suppose they feel much loyalty to Darlene after everything that’s happened.
We are free of the star-eaters at last.
Now we must free ourselves of the tyranny they inspired.
The resistance goes on.
