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Chapter Text

February 17th, 1998

It is no surprise that interest in aliens and UFOs have become paradoxically a less popular topic and a significantly more studied one, when our every-day world has been upset by parahumans performing feats previously unparalleled excepting science fiction penny-dreadfuls.

Where parahumans come from is a topic of study and parahumans are fairly well understood to not be extra-terrestrials, perhaps, but the source of their powers is still widely debated. Many theories range from virus to intelligent intervention, but nothing has yet supported such claims. Leading academics such as Dr. Manton have yet to comment, only focused on empirical evidence - general trends like that of the Manton effect being the bulk of published literature.

The organ that gives parahumans their powers also is biological in organ, though its sudden presence in the population is curious. The development of parahuman powers is also evidently not the result of alien abductions, since several high-profile crisis events have resulted in recordings of the acquisition of powers.

So why think about aliens?

If the theories of intelligent intervention are true, the how and the why are both equally fascinating. Who wants to grant powers to people? For what purpose? Are they simply testing how people will respond when presented with powers above their peers? Perhaps the plot is to prevaricate, but that presupposes a perfidious nature.

Sorry for all the una-P-ling consonance, I’m just having fun.

But it’s tempting to think that there really could be something out there! Even with all the new and incredible scientific leaps proposed by the technology made by so-known ‘Tinkers’, there’s plenty of things that still don’t make sense. Many parahumans with sensory powers report being watched, though by whom is unknown. Strange signals from outside our Earth are recorded and are blips larger than statistical noise, as reported in regular reports from NASA. Plus, the Kilimanjaro etchings - currently assumed to be a prank or a hoax - still have no source or credible actor, and they’re far from the only strange things going on these days.

When we’re already living in a science-fiction novel, what’s a little belief in something else out there?

Jacob Hoffstater,
Columnist for The eXtraordinary Times

Chapter Text

They came as falling stars, an unusual meteor shower that was barely visible in the daylight, seeming like lightning spreading from the Sun extending into comets, a neat synchronized formation too deliberate to be natural phenomena.

It was the Tinkers who noticed them first, and then the natural scientists – unusual gamma emissions and deviances in sunlight critical to building, and then mild blinking across telescopes and monitoring. It wasn’t long before alarms had sounded; surely this was the work of the Simurgh, her dark cherubim and nephellim to assist in her schemes of madness.

An hour passed, and then their ships arrived. They slipped through the atmosphere carelessly, silver fish in shoals against the white-blue, and split, each one darting to each major landmass and canvassing it.

They were flat and eel-like, flexible in ways metal should not be, and for their speed they didn’t even disrupt fallen leaves or ripple water in their passage. By the time the parahumans had bothered to take a shot or reach out, they had all slipped out of the atmosphere and back into the beyond, their glimmer fading.

The trouble was, nine had arrived and only seven had left.

Chapter Text

WEDGDG was aflutter in the wake of the aliens, a held breath. With no one having sights on the missing vessels, all governments were on high alert - and then there was nothing for hours, days, weeks.

Marshal paused, flipping between several reports, cross-referencing information to find the common thread. “Here, look - I need more of these etchings, and I need… Compass! Argot!”
“Marshal?” Compass said.

“Here, can you use your power to find more of these etchings? Argot, analysis?”

Compass stood still, entering a waking dream associated with her precognitive sorting power - whatever she’d seen, she could track similar varieties, filtering through a wide scope of locations. Unconsciously, she mumbled coordinates, who were quickly recorded and pulled up on Collimate’s tech, a projections tinker with a knack for light analysis.

Argot looked at the etchings pulled up on the holo-screens and projected through the meeting space. The same etchings appeared on rocks, on mountains, in crop circles that had popped up recently.

“Where are we?” he asked.

Marshal’s heart sank. In his hands he held the reports from Collimate on previous gamma sensor readings, from seismic reports, from long-term current and atmospheric pattern deviations. Some as old as the 80’s.

It was the same pattern reflected, over and over, and he didn’t even need confirmation from Parse to know it was the same question.

Not only had the aliens made a request that had no clear answer, they had been watching Earth for a long time.

Chapter Text

Legend was uneasy.

The strange being they had captured in the silver ship sparkled in his sight, like mica in a glittering sidewalk. It was currently unresponsive, though difficult to tell if it was unconscious.

He hoped it was.

The Doctor stepped next to him at the observational panel, her bodyguard conspicuously absent.

“Strange, to think that we have visitors from elsewhere,” she said in a placid voice, as if the alien, the literal being from another world was no more interesting than the weather or a lunch option off a cafe menu.

“Yeah,” he replied.

Its multiple grasping limbs and near-rubber snake-like skin barely moved, the usual signs he’d come to associate with living beings absent.

“What are we doing?” he asked.

“Gathering information,” she said.

“...Just that?”

“We were alerted on short notice and have no modelling or plans for its kin,” she said. “We are unable to yet determine their goals, their rationale for their visit, be it subjugation or peace. Given all our current troubles, it seemed prudent to detain one and strike some manner of conversation.”

“Can we even have a conversation with it?” he asked, turning to her.

Her lips turned upward, but it wasn’t a smile.

Creepy, Legend thought.

“The other one is still out there,” he said. “Aren’t you worried about retaliation? They’ve clearly noticed one of their number is missing.”

“It will be handled,” she said, and turned to walk away. “The others are here.”

Legend took another look at the being and felt a little pity for it. If it was awake - and he hoped that it wasn’t - the white walls would surely be torture to it. Solitary confinement was known to be psychological torture.

But he couldn’t free it, at least not without serious complications.

He turned away and fell in step behind the Doctor, hoping that freedom was still in the cards for the being.

Chapter Text

Deviation.

The typical safeguards were encoded with the hosts’ capabilities planned out and accounted for the progression of the cycle, to ensure security and to prevent early termination. Many significant problems were to be handled by it and its counterpart, as it had already intervened for the thermokinetic weapons that led to several simulations struggling to complete the cycle due to near extinction.

The safeguards have not failed.

The hosts had been visited by something beyond the planet and outside the sphere of influence, a threaded needle overlooked.

Error.

Beyond that of the counterpart’s death, there is further interference. One of the life-forms is altering the host species in its vessel, an exploration not unfamiliar. Crude intelligence and information-gathering, relative to itself.

This host that Scion floats before has been deformed for its experience, altered from its template encoded by its biological template, and its shard expresses differently to its inception.

Similar occurrences are not unusual, accounting from accumulated damage or interference from other hosts. This occurrence is unusual, a consequence of the interlocutors.

Variance.

The entity looks out for the rogue agent. Other hosts of this planet have been abducted, altered, released. Several are dead and several more will be abducted.

The interlocutor's technology is significantly more advanced than the host species, but is well understood by the entity. Their source is too far to detect in its current form. Capture is not an unfamiliar process, as it is responsible for several of the connections it had modelled during its arrival.

Immediate confrontation will not yield useful information.

Delay may introduce variables that cannot be determined until they are proximate.

No current risks are identified with its shards. The safeguards will not fail.

A presence unlike that from itself and unlike that of its counterpart, and yet not dead, is responsible for the capture of the other. Its strategy is confinement, a hostage, inferred through that living shard.

It considers.

Improbability.

Chapter Text

“You alright?” I said.

Victoria was sitting, legs hanging over the edge of the cliff that used to be the Brockton Bay shoreline. The waters had long evaporated, here at least.

“Yeah,” she lied. She didn’t turn around.

She got like this, sometimes, when everything got too much for her and the losses they carried with them weighed heavy on their hearts.

I let it be quiet for a moment. The sky was an ash grey from several Tinker weapons in the war for our worlds, and if it wasn’t for our splicing with the visitors we’d have long keeled over from the radioactive dust Scion had left behind in his fight against the invasion.

I flexed my six arms, noting a patch of rot I’d have to get looked at when we returned to the habitable bubbles.

The weakness of the flesh, I thought. Biblical and transhumanist.

I sat down next to Victoria, who was as beautiful as ever even in the grey mica-speckled pallor and compound eyes she now had, and I laid my hand over hers.

“I just wish… Mom and Amy were here.”

“I know,” I said, nudging her shoulder, and let her lean on me for comfort.

Mrs. Dallon had refused any of the grafting, even if she had come about to the alliance with our visitors, the resistance faction. Amy had been a real hero, if she never saw it that way, releasing super-plagues that targeted the visitors’ predators, incomprehensible world-eating things that tore rifts through the fabric of space. She’d just rejected every graft, some unfortunate aspect of her power.

She’d died quietly about a year ago, away from everyone.

“C’mon Victoria. They’re making good progress on the terraforming projects - soon we’ll be synthesizing our shorelines again.”

She said nothing.

“Plus, we’ve got ice cream.”

She heaved a huge sigh and stood up.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s get back to the city.”

“Don’t you mean Tomorrow?” I cracked playfully. It was wan, but I’d won a small smile.

To Tomorrow, indeed.