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The Wannoshay Cycle
Chapter 2Alissa Trang had made only one attempt to film the aliens at the landing site after their arrival, and that had ended in disaster. For Ally, one of the advantages of working at a satellite outlet for CanTechWorld was that she had access to the best tech a small-town girl could find. Sick of explaining for the thousandth time how to use a Netstream speaker remote to a farmer or a factory worker, she'd decided one night to "borrow" the best eyebrow camera in the store after her late shift. Her plan was to grab as much footage of the landing site as she could the next morning, and get the camera back before her manager knew it was gone. This was what Ally did, what she lived for: making movies of the world around her while her senses were heightened by a couple doses of Blur, and upload her work to the Netstreams for everyone to see. For a small fee, of course. But her rates were low, for now, and she got plenty of hits, especially when she did anything related to the alien ships. That rate would shoot up after today, she knew. She hadn't paid much attention to all the furor about the ships back in January, when the first ship had landed less than fifteen kilometers north of Sanford. The town had enjoyed celebrity status for a brief time as flocks of 'Stream reporters filled the streets and jammed up the roads before the news of the other ships overshadowed Sanford's fame. The reporters had disappeared as fast as they'd arrived, of course, chasing more alien stories to the south in bigger American cities or east to the sites in Ontario. But in the meantime, Ally had gotten hooked on learning more about the aliens. Nothing was getting through the information blockade set up by both governments, and even the most cool-headed Canadian had a fiery theory about the secrecy surround the landing sites. Armed Canadian Forces soldiers patrolled the perimeter of each site, supposedly with orders to warn trespassers once, then to shoot to kill in place of a second warning That was a challenge too big for Ally to pass up. She just had to get her car working and borrow that camera from work, and find those extra capsules of Blur lying around her room. Blur was what made the experience real for her; she didn't want to think about the consequences of her temporary "enhancement" with the drug. Or the long-term effects of prolonged usage. Always grateful for the chance to get out of tiny Sanford, a town of eight hundred blue-collar and farming families south of Winnipeg, Ally woke that morning before the sun had even started coloring the night sky. Her newly repaired beater of a car had started, to her surprise, and she drove away from the quiet town and into the countryside, hoping the heater would soon start kicking out warm air. Just as she'd hoped, the sun was rising by the time she'd gotten to the outermost fringe of frozen earth a few kilos from the landing site. Excellent lighting and atmosphere. As she walked, the camera affixed to her left eyebrow and covering her left eye recorded everything she saw like a third eye. Gazing at the broken trees and scarred earth a kilometer from the site, everything bathed in the reddish-orange light of daybreak, Ally marveled at how not a single living creature had died when the ships hit. No one died, she thought, shaking her head, but it was total chaos to many of her neighbors when Armageddon didn't come like the evangelists had been promising. People had lost their minds for a good month or so, and some people had yet to find them again. Ally figured the alien arrival was inevitable, really. She kept her eyes on the night sky and could see well enough to know the stars were too many to not hold anyone else out there. She zoomed the camera until she could see the huge tent rising up on the horizon, surrounded by smaller tents. Fighting off the urge to squint, which would have thrown off the camera's focus, she got footage of the massive tent that hid the wrecked alien ship along with the six smaller tents surrounding it. "Come on," she whispered in irritation, then caught herself. Only amateurs and wasters mucked up their own audio. After barely five minutes of filming, Ally noticed a dark object moving toward her off in the distance. She blinked into the eyepiece to magnify and saw that the movement was a Canadian Forces Jeep aimed at her, bouncing across the frozen earth of what was once a soybean field. She knew that nobody from the 'Streams had been able to get closer than this, and the airspace around all thirty sites had been restricted since the arrival of the ships after New Year's. "Shit," she whispered under her breath. "Shit shit shit." Keeping her face pointed in the direction of the site, trying to see around the Jeep speeding toward her, Ally froze. Magnifying the camera lens even further, she saw figures off to the right, walking in front of one of the gray Canadian Forces tent. She could see that two of the figures were soldiers, but they were walking on either side of someone quite large. Ally immediately thought of the ancient duped Sasquatch from the vids replayed on the Netstreams and almost laughed out loud, but she kept filming. This was no Bigfoot. The Jeep was less than one hundred meters away when she slipped her sunglasses over her eyes, hiding the lens of the camera. She popped out the mini-DVD in her coat pocket and slid the still-warm disc into the back of her jeans. "Hands where we can see them, girl," a projected voice from the Jeep shouted at her. Ally new the routine all too well. She hoped she had enough credit in her account to make the payoffs necessary to keep these soldiers from strip-searching her out here. At least she had her explosive caplets of Mace packed away in the little pocket inside her sports bra. Just in case. "I guess that's my one warning," Ally muttered, still taping onto the flex-memory left in the camera, which was being streamed to her system back home. It was going to cost her a painful chunk of cash, but she wanted to have some evidence in case the soldiers got any ideas. "Looks like we got us another moviemaker," the soldier climbing down from the passenger side of the truck said. Ally relaxed at the female voice, though this woman was as tall as most men. The driver didn't even bother getting out. "Just grab her disks and show her the way out." Cursing and spluttering, Ally handed over four of her mini-DVDs from her coat pockets. She said nothing about the disc hidden in her jeans. "Jesus H. The least you could do is give me a ride back to my car," she said, but the truck was already pulling away. She gave the truck a one-fingered salute and turned her back on them. Idiots. Half an hour (and two capsules of Blur washed down with iced lime vodka) later, Ally fired up her wallscreen to watch her footage. As she surfed through the footage and came across the shot of the tent and the three figures, she realized she held digital gold in her hands. She had managed to pick up a three-second bit of a pair of soldiers marching single-file, with a tall, swaying alien between them. The creature looked too big—and too skinny—to be a human, and the awkward, lumbering way it walked... "Oh my God," Ally whispered, grabbing for the remote so she could watch the footage again. "Ohmigod!" She knocked the remote to the floor in her Blur-induced mania. After watching the snippet twice, riding one of the best Blur highs she'd ever felt, tears filled her eyes. She kept babbling to herself, nonsense words of utter joy at not just the potential financial windfall she was about to receive, but also at the cosmic shifting sensation she felt looking at that far-off image of the alien. That goofy sense of amazement took her back to her childhood, riding a rollercoaster or watching her first movie made completely on her own. It was almost better than Blur. Almost. She was at the height of her high when she decided to upload her movie to her Netstream. With her vision blurred by tears and each of her fingers operating as its own entity, she hit the wrong button on her remote. Just like that, her twitchy fingers burned over that day's footage. And she hadn't taken the time to make a backup. All she had was her expensive stream that showed nothing but the soldiers driving up to harass her, their big-ass truck blocking any view of the landing site behind it. For the next ten minutes, Ally Trang screamed herself hoarse.
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