How to Save the Planet 01

I've been working on this one for a while, and I finally decided that it's past time to get it out there. I have a fair bit built up by now, so I should be able to submit two parts a week for the immediate future. This story's heavy on the plot, which may end up being a little on the rambling side, but that doesn't mean there won't be plenty of sex as well. I hope you all enjoy!

"Hurry up," Evan called over his shoulder to the rest of us. "It's like we're walking through a freezer."

"Why didn't you wear a jacket?" Rosemary called back. She had one, hugely oversized and flannel. She was sharing it with Kate, who was shorter than her by most of a foot and almost disappeared below the collar. The contrast was striking, Rosemary tall and slender where Kate was short and quite curvy. I wasn't sure if they were actually dating yet, but I didn't think it would be long.

"I didn't think we'd be staying at the party so late!" Evan jogged in place, hands jammed in his armpits. Evan was average height, which actually made Rosemary a little taller than him, and he was pretty thin. Not much of a surprise he felt cold.

"Sorry!" said Justine, lifting her head off my shoulder for a moment. "Nobody said they were going to have actual music there."

I smiled to myself. The music had been good. Someone had huge speakers, and although the house was too close to its neighbors to get away with a good pounding bass line, it was way better than the usual bluetooth speaker hooked up to someone's phone.

There had been room to dance, too, and Justine had dragged us into the thick of it right away. I tried to keep up for a while, to limited success. If it wasn't for a few slow jams in the mix, I wouldn't have made it through the first hour, but Justine was something else. It was like dancing, even the wild, high-effort dancing she did most of the time, gave her more energy instead of wearing her out. Even now, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright from the combination of exercise and cheap whiskey.

She caught me looking at her. "Did you have fun, Alex?"

I pulled her in close. "Of course."

Justine smiled a little. "But you're glad we're going back?"

I smiled too. It hadn't even been a year since we started dating, but she knew me well. "I couldn't hear myself think there, much less catch what anyone was saying."

"I know," she said, squeezing my hand. "Wasn't it great?"

I laughed, and Evan looked up from where he was trying to hurry Kate and Rosemary along. "Fun for a bit," I admitted. "But I start to miss playing cards in the apartment."

"The night's still young," Lace said. I hadn't realized she'd caught up with us, though it wasn't surprising. She was in terrific shape, and could probably have run the distance from the party faster than I would have driven it.

"It's after midnight," Kate moaned from the depths of Rosemary's jacket. "The night's not old, it's geriatric."

"Come on, you nerd," said Lace brightly. "We're young. We're in college. We're free. There'll be time to sleep when we're dead."

"Or when we've graduated," I added.

"Same thing," said Justine.

"Don't tell me we're waiting for Marcus and Stephanie," Evan said. "If I have to spend one more second in this blizzard --"

"It's not snowing," I said.

"-- in this arctic disaster," he continued, "it's going to kill me."

Lace shrugged. "Maybe you should have worn a jacket."

Evan threw his hands up. "I was wearing shorts this morning! It was hot out! How could I have known?"

"Anyway," Lace went on, "we're not waiting for them. They got a ride with someone, said they'd see us tomorrow."

"Thank God," Evan said.

"Someone sober?" Rosemary asked.

Lace nodded. "DD for their friends, but one of those friends hooked up with the host. They had space."

"We should start designating a driver," Justine said. "We wouldn't have to walk so far."

I nudged her. "Are you volunteering?"

Justine gave me a dirty look. "You don't even like parties," she muttered venomously. I laughed.

"Hey guys!" Evan shouted up ahead. "Let's cut through this alleyway!"

Rosemary sighed. "Evan, how much did you drink?"

"Not enough," he said, "or I wouldn't be feeling so cold. Come on, it's barely even an alleyway. It has a streetlight."

Technically, that was true. One flickering bulb set in a lopsided metal shade lit the alleyway, all along its narrow winding length. There were shadows everywhere, and despite the light it was almost darker than the neighborhoods behind us. The buildings around it blocked the moonlight completely.

"You're insane," I said. "Six college kids taking a shortcut through an alleyway? That's how horror movies start."

"What, in Kearny, Wyoming?" Evan scoffed. "The college is like half the town. If there's gonna be a horror movie around here, it'd be up in the mountains."

"Don't jinx it," Lace warned him. "I'm camping up there next weekend."

Evan nodded solemnly. "I'll say something nice at your funeral."

"I hate to say it," Justine interrupted, "but I'm getting cold too. Can't we just cut through the alley? It's basically empty, and even if it wasn't there's six of us."

I shrugged. "Is it even going to save us that much time?"

"Come on," Evan said, "back your girl up!"

"Yeah Alex," Justine said, leaning in close. She breathed in my ear, "I'll show you how grateful I am later."

Evan laughed. There was no way he could have heard what she said, but my face must have given the general direction of her words away. "Fine," I grumbled, as much to stop the teasing as anything else. "Let's just go."

Lace shrugged, and although Kate looked apprehensive, she didn't object.

"Shouldn't Evan lead the way?" Rosemary asked sweetly. "Since it was his idea and all."

"Little old me? We should put Alex in front. In case there's a crazy homeless guy lurking in the shadows."

"What am I going to do about a homeless guy?"

Evan shrugged. "Flex for him? Scare him off with those big, bulging muscles?"

I snorted. "Terrific. Those three hours a month I spend at the gym are finally going to pay off."

"Don't sell yourself short," he said. He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. "Take off the shirt, it'll work better that way."

We never really talked about it, and I hadn't known Evan to ever go on dates, but I always kind of assumed he was gay. It might have been the incredibly subtle jokes about muscular men. It might have been the way he joined the theater program his first week at High Plains U. It might have been the time back in middle school when he checked out every issue of Sports Illustrated from the library except the swimsuit editions.

Really, who can say?

I certainly couldn't blame him for keeping it quiet. We'd grown up together in Casper, just a few hours from Kearny. Things are better than they used to be, but a Wyoming public school sure isn't the place I'd want to come out of the closet.

Lace rolled her eyes at the both of us, and lead the way down the dimly lit alley. She probably was the best equipped for a mugger, to be honest. I was taller than average and sturdy enough, but I wasn't really athletic. Lace was in amazing shape, and where I got whatever muscle I had from lifting boxes in a warehouse over the summer, she got hers from more sports than I could really keep track of. I wouldn't have been surprised at all if she was some kind of black belt, too.

The rest of us followed, the couples still huddling for warmth. It really was a better shortcut than it had seemed. As alleyways go, it was clean, clear of stuff, and thankfully empty. I didn't see a rat hiding among the scattered trash cans, much less a lurking killer.

"What the hell is that?" Kate asked. She was about halfway through the alley, Lace a little further ahead.

"What the hell is what?"

She pointed. The building to her left looked abandoned, the windows boarded up, but when I followed her finger I saw a faint light creeping out from between two sheets of plywood. If the light above had been any steadier, the glow might not have been visible, but we could see it clearly when the bulb flickered dark.

"Come on," Rosemary whispered. Her shoulders looked suddenly tense. "Probably squatters."

Kate pulled away. "No, I don't think --"

She leaned in, peeking through a gap in the boards, and gasped.

"What?" Justine asked. Her hand was gripping harder on my arm. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Kate said, "but it's beautiful."

She shoved, and one big piece of plywood came right away from the frame. Then we could all see.

The light was coming from something strange, unsettling, and as Kate had said, beautiful. It was like a flower, almost a foot across and sprouting on a short bristly stem from an exposed metal beam in one of the walls. The petals were strange, glimmering oddly in the light that came from the flower's center. They looked as though they might have been made of metal, something bright and silvery if it had been seen in daylight. They were long and thin, and curved back and forth, wavelike. They overlapped each other, two or three layers spiraling outward.

At the center of the flower was a screen. A phone, maybe, but it was round, and playing some kind of screensaver that looked like abstract art. It shifted constantly, colors blending into each other, shapes appearing and vanishing with perfect, dancelike timing. One moment the screen would be filled with softly colored geometric shapes, like a mandala or kaleidoscope. The next, after a short and undramatic shift, it would be thin lines racing across the screen on a background black as night, tracing out lightning in bold shades of red and gold and blue.

It was entrancing, and I was so fascinated by the view that I hardly noticed Kate ducking through the window.

"Hey!" Evan called after her. Lace said nothing, but followed, reaching for her shoulder.

"Guys," Kate said, shaking off Lace's hand, "look at this. Don't you want to know what it is?"

"An art project," Rosemary said dismissively. She was in the college's art program herself. "Looks like they did okay."

"Don't be stupid," Kate said. I winced. Rosemary was very confident in her opinions on art, and disagreeing with her was a good way to kick off an argument.

Sure enough, she followed the other women through the window, back stiff and offended. "Maybe it's well made, but these kinds of moving color displays haven't been fresh since--"

"Not that," Kate interrupted. "I mean it's not an art project at all."

We were all following them in, by then. I think Evan came along mostly to get out of the cold. It was a big building, and while I couldn't even guess what had been there before, it looked like it was going to be a trendy bar when it was done. The lights, the ductwork, and the half-done walls had that kind of carefully unrefined, faux-industrial air to them.

"What do you mean?" Rosemary asked. She knelt beside Kate, looking closely at the shifting screen. Now it showed something that looked like a plant, shooting out vines and flowers in dizzying fractal patterns, the shapes recurring downwards in constantly changing colors.

"Look," Kate said, pointing. "The way this stem connects to the wall. There's no attachment point, it's just... growing there. And does this screen look like anything you've seen before?"

I bent over Rosemary's shoulder, following Kate's finger. She was right -- there were no weld marks or rivets at the base of the stem. It really did look like it was growing straight out of the metal. And the screen was odd as well. Not only had I never seen a round phone, or anything with a display like that, but it was joined seamlessly to the rest of the flower. It was thin, too, with no sign of any circuitry behind it, and nowhere in the sculpture that it could have been hidden.

"Guys," Justine said, "I think we should go."

"Look at this," Rosemary murmured, pointing at the screen. It was showing something like a snowstorm, little lights in soft blue and green falling through a background of gray. When one light collided with another, they stopped falling and began to drift sideways, rise upwards, or circle slowly in place.

"Guys?" Nobody was listening to Justine. I turned and smiled, trying to reassure her. I couldn't quite figure out what was bothering her so much. The building was empty, after all.

"What...?" Kate was leaning close to the screen, almost blocking my view of the flower. I caught a glimpse, and the little falling lights seemed like they were merging, growing, and forming vague shapes that could almost have been silhouettes. "Is that us?"

She lifted a hand, and brushed lightly against one of the thin petals.

There was a pulse through the air that felt like wind or maybe a static charge. My hair moved, my skin crawled, and Kate yelped in surprise.

The metal flower was twisting, the petals turning and opening wider and flexing until the whole surface had reshaped itself into a new and less familiar form. It looked more like some underwater plant or anemone than it did a normal flower, now. The petals continued to move slowly, contributing to the illusion.

And the screen was swirling with colors. Intense, varied, and rapidly changing, the patterns on the screen struck me with an instant wave of dizziness. I couldn't look away. I thought I saw something taking shape in the middle.

The screen flared, and another pulse ran through the air, and I think all of us shouted or cried out at about the same time. And then there was a face looking out of the flower at us.

"Hello, and please don't be alarmed." The voice sounded a little unnatural, a little processed, like a text-to-speech program. At the same time, it somehow sounded like a person was there in the room with us, the way you don't get from speakers without spending tens of thousands of dollars. And the face on the screen looked like a real person, not a computer graphic.

"Who the fuck are you?" Evan asked.

The figure on the screen paused. "I am Cybeline."

"Whoa," Evan said, stepping backwards. "This isn't a recording? Did you just answer me?"

"Yes," Cybeline said. "I did."

"But how?" Kate peered around at the back of the flower, looked at the floor beneath it. "I can't even see how this thing is powered, much less how it could be running a video call, or connect to the internet, or..."

The voice, Cybeline, was silent.

"Let's just fucking go." Justine's voice cracked on the last word.

I looked down. She was shivering, eyes darting back and forth. I put my arms around her. "Babe, what's wrong? It's just some weird computer, a phone jammed into --"

"What's this flower thing?" Kate asked.

"It is a message and a tool. I have been sent here to offer it to you, along with my assistance."

"Sent by who?" I asked. 'Sent here.' It was a strange way to talk about a video call.

"Assistance?" Lace asked. "Assistance with what?"

"My memory of where I come from is limited," Cybeline said. There was something odd about her expressions, too. She made an apologetic, regretful face, but did it just a little too smoothly, a little out of sync with her words.

Kate tensed. I frowned, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Kate seemed to be a step ahead of me, putting together the pieces in the odd phrasing of the person behind the screen.

"But," the disembodied voice continued, "I know that I was sent from beyond the orbit of your sun. I am what you would call an artificial intelligence, sent by what you would consider an alien civilization."

We all sat in a kind of stunned silence for a moment. As Cybeline spoke, it seemed like her words were coming more naturally. Was I just getting used to the slightly stilted tone? Or was she improving by listening to us?

Even if she was, it still didn't make her an alien robot. Computers were getting so good these days, a student project could process speech like that. Couldn't it?

"I am meant to help in several ways," she continued, answering Lace's question. "I offer information that may be useful, and advice if you should want it. I also have some tools and devices I can offer to you, though these are limited."

Evan snorted. "Yeah, alien technology. Straight out of a movie."

Cybeline said nothing.

"It's an art project," Rosemary insisted. "It's clever, but it's just... running off a watch battery, or something. You could fit a cord through that stem, I'm sure."

"Maybe," Kate said doubtfully. "But do you see a camera?"

"Why isn't Cybeline reacting to any of this?" Lace asked. "She's only answering direct questions."

We all paused for a moment. Sure enough, the supposed AI had nothing to say.

"Cybeline," Lace said, "why aren't you saying anything when we talk about you?"

There was a pause. "I am not allowed to coerce or persuade you. I am only permitted to offer my help."

"So this isn't an alien invasion?" Evan asked. It was actually less sarcastic than I would have expected. Maybe a little of his concern was genuine.

"Correct," Cybeline said. Human or AI, she acted like the question was sincere. "I have been sent alone, and will not act unless you ask for my help."

"Don't do it," Justine said. "Guys, come on. This is really weird."

"Sure, it's weird, but what's wrong with that?" I gave her a little hug, but she didn't relax. "Come on, babe, it's harmless. I'm pretty sure it's some game thing. Or maybe advertising for a movie."

"No," she said. She was watching the flower. "I don't think it is."

"Cybeline," Kate said, "can you prove to us that this is real?"

"I can. There is an object on the ground over there. Do you see it?"

"See --"

Rosemary touched Kate's shoulder. Kate looked where she was pointing, and gasped. A power drill, apparently left here during construction of the space, was beginning to glow.

After a moment, I realized the light was coming from the flower, a perfect directed beam. I'd never seen a screen that could act as a flashlight like that. It was unsettling, and for the first time I wondered if this thing was for real.

"Okay," Kate said, "I see it. Is there more to the demonstration than the light?"

"Yes," Cybeline said. "Could you bring it closer?"

"What, you can't make it levitate?" Evan asked.

"I cannot. That would require a larger and more elaborate device than this one."

"Evan," Kate warned. She grabbed the drill and held it in front of the flower. "Here."

For a moment, there was silence. I think all of us there were holding our breaths. Then there was an odd little twist of the flower's petals, a change in their texture, and perhaps just the hint of something passing through the air.

Then the drill came apart.

The plastic case unfolded, opening like a peeled orange. Wires unspooled from inside, gears rolled and tumbled to either side, and the metal block of the motor began to flay itself into writhing sheets and filaments. It was surreal, unbelievable, and impossible to deny.

Kate shrieked and dropped the drill. "It touched my arm," she said, rubbing her wrist. "That was..."

"How did you do that?" Lace was looking at the flower like she was trying to stare down a dangerous dog.

"By use of the tools I mentioned earlier."

"Nanomachines," Kate breathed. There was just a little doubt in her voice.

Cybeline paused. "A term used in fiction. The tools are real, but the word is otherwise appropriate."

"Hang on," I said, "are you looking up the things we're saying on the internet?"

There was another pause. "I am," Cybeline confirmed. Her little avatar on the screen nodded, a second later. "A region of your internet called Wikipedia has been especially helpful."

"Hmm," Kate said. "I'm not sure I trust this thing anymore. It's treating first contact the same way I treat my history papers."