“And after twenty-four hours we can post our video and you won’t want to review it or stop us from posting it?”
“April, I’m not a fool. I’ve seen the internet, you can’t contain information anymore. Plus there’s the whole First Amendment. It’s one of the bigger rules.”
“I’ll get you the files right away,” I said. “Where should they be delivered?”
“Here,” she said.
“Right here?”
“I would rather not leave without them.”
I took out my phone and called Robin.
“Robin, I need you to make a copy of Andy’s footage from today and bring it to me in the hospital.”
“Are you sure?”
“The president is here. We made—” I looked her right in the eyes as I said it. “We made a deal.” She smiled at me.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.
I hung up.
“We have twenty minutes,” I said to the president of the United States of America.
“Well, we have some other things to discuss. I’ve talked to your doctors and they said you could go home, but I was wondering if you could stay an extra day so that I could come by with the press tomorrow? They’ll ask you a few questions, mostly they’ll take pictures and video of me walking in and talking to you. I have to be shown being active right now or everyone will say, ‘Where is the president at this Time of Need! Probably playing shuffleboard or having her period!’ It’s not my fault I like shuffleboard so much. I always say, add up all the time every other president has spent golfing and tell me that my shuffleboard habit is bad for America.”
I laughed.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You’re”—I felt dumb as I said it—“really a person, aren’t you.”
“Oh, April, of all people I thought you would know what this is like. But I understand. The charisma of office, they call it. It’s hard to see past it. Indeed, I work to cultivate it. It’s part of the job.”
It struck me then how very much she was indeed quite like me. As if, maybe, there was real kinship that I might have with this person who was more a symbol than a human.
“So what do you say?” she said.
“Yeah, so you’re coming by again tomorrow?”
“I’m doing a number of things in the city.” She meant New York. “Because it’s where you were attacked, it makes more sense for me to be doing events here.” Then, without even pausing for breath, she changed the subject. “April, I’m going to debrief you personally. This would normally be done by someone else, but since we have a little time and I used to be in intelligence, I’m happy to do it myself.
“Your attacker’s name was Martin Bellacourt. He was acting alone in the sense that he did not have financial or logistical support, but he was part of the coordinated attack and was in contact with the other terrorists. If you’re looking for a motive, which I applaud you if you aren’t but it will be hard not to, I don’t know that I can help you. He had criminal convictions for domestic violence and had been living alone for years. Initial reports are that his online rants weren’t very coherent, but he was clearly an angry person who felt he had no control over what he saw as a decaying world.
“We don’t know much about Carl, but we do know that he is able to do things that are far beyond human ability. The wholesale chemical conversion of Bellacourt’s body definitely falls into that category, and so legally this will be classified as a homicide by Carl. It does seem a very odd thing to do, but when a person is killed in our society, we have a process, even when that homicide is clearly justified. We will have to do that here. We have decided to act as if New York Carl is a person with free will, and the law will treat him as such.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that there will be a hearing and a judge will decide whether the state will bring charges against Carl. If he is indicted, that means that there will be a trial. Anytime a person is killed by another person, it is a homicide, but it is not murder unless it was intentional and inexcusable. This seems like a clear case of justified homicide and we expect any judge in America would rule that way.
“I want you to understand that this is simply the process, and not an attempt by us to make New York Carl some kind of scapegoat.”
“Is it just that?”
“It is mostly that”—she paused—“but also, April, I apologize but I have to ask, are you in communication with the Carls?”
“What?”
“Do you have a way to communicate with them? Or, less specifically, do you know anything about them that is not broadly known?”
“So you don’t know either,” I said.
“Know what?”
“Why he saved me and not all those other people.”
“No, I don’t, April. I’m sorry.”
“Neither do I,” I said, honestly, avoiding the earlier question that might lead to an awkward conversation about the giant robot hand /roommate I had recently acquired, and the slice of the Dream that I had but no one else did.
“Please, April, don’t hold anything back here, we need to know.”
So whom do you side with in a situation like this, your new best friend, the most powerful person in the world? Or the space alien who saved your life yesterday?
After a lengthy pause I decided to split the difference, “I have a different dream.”
She did the thing where she didn’t say anything so I would say more.
“In every other dream, no object ever moves unless it is moved by someone in the Dream. But in my dream, there’s an airplane, a 767, that lands in the city. We think it’s the final clue, the way to unlock the whole thing. I’m the only one, as far as we can tell, that has access to it. So we’ve kept it a complete secret.”
She looked spellbound. “You did the right thing,” she finally said. “Are you actively working to solve this sequence?” I was almost surprised to hear her using the correct nomenclature.
“We are, but we haven’t gotten very far. Many of the sequences are very hard to solve if you don’t have very specific knowledge.”
“We have code breakers who may be able to help. But, April, when this sequence is solved—I have to say this very clearly—do not take action on what you discover without consulting us first.”
“I think I have learned that lesson by now.”
“I would also think that, but please promise.”
“I will not take action if we solve the sequence without first talking to you,” I said. That seemed like a safe promise to make. As much as I liked the idea of being an important piece of this, I recognized that I wasn’t trained to be the emissary of my species. “But,” I added, “can I come along in whatever journey this ends up being?”
“Yes, April, I would love to have you there. Now, is there anything else you know that you have not told us?”
“No.” And then quite surprisingly I started to cry. “I feel like I should know, but I don’t. How did I get in the middle of all this?”
“I’m sorry, this is going to be a difficult thing to live with. Whenever you’re blaming yourself for being alive, for being the only one who was saved, please remember how deeply, deeply thankful I am that you are alive. I have seen you as an ally from day one, and I honestly am upset that this had to be the circumstance of our first meeting. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
It felt like a neon sign spelling the word “LIAR” was glowing beneath my skin of my face.
“Thank you for your visit and for being so kind,” I said, my voice quivering.
“Well, if you think of anything, you have my number.”
Remarkably enough, that was true.
She continued. “You have a tremendous future in front of you, and it’s going to be a joy to watch it.”
Tremendous future, eh? Well, she wasn’t wrong.
Robin came in just after the president left. He had been held back by Secret Service, who had taken the flash drive he’d brought for them.
“Andy is on his way to pick this up.” He held up the memory card.
“Tell him to edit now, but that we can’t upload until tomorrow.”
“How are you?” Robin asked.