Transmission

It was, in ways that made even school seem interesting by comparison. Kevin might never have been one of those kids who went to a different activity every night, and camp in the summer, but he’d never spent his time in one room either, doing nothing but acting as a kind of human satellite dish for alien messages.

He’d been around the facility before, but it was good to spend some time being something other than the kid who heard the messages. Phil led the way, using his security access. Despite effectively living there now, Kevin didn’t have any. Apparently, they could trust him enough to receive alien signals, but not to be able to come and go as he wanted.

“We’re working on producing plants that can survive in extreme environments,” Phil said, pointing to a room full of what appeared to be tomato plants. “Maybe if all of this leads to humanity meeting aliens, we’ll be able to offer them a nice plant to take home.”

Kevin smiled at that thought. “The aliens are dead, remember? They said that their planet was destroyed.”

“But someone must have sent that signal,” Phil said. “So they must have survived to do it.”

“I guess,” Kevin said, but even so, he wasn’t hopeful. What if they’d just survived long enough to send out their messages? What if they’d lived out lives of a few more years, only to die on some far-off world? The contact with the aliens felt almost as doomed in the long run as everything else about his life.

“And this elevator leads down to the bunker,” Phil said, gesturing to a set of doors.

“A bunker?” Kevin said. “Like, a nuclear bunker?”

“Nuclear, chemical, biological,” Phil said. “The idea is to have one close by in the event that there ever is some kind of war, or attack, or something. There are bunkers all over the place, and they give some senior people keys to save the ‘best and the brightest’ if it looks as though the world will end.”

He didn’t sound particularly happy about the idea. Maybe he suspected that he wouldn’t be on the list.

“So these bunkers are everywhere?” Kevin said.

Phil nodded, then took out his phone. “There’s a whole map of them,” he said. “Although Professor Brewster doesn’t know I have this.”

He showed Kevin the map, covered in small red dots. There was one right under them, and another tucked away to the east in the state park under Mount Diablo.

“That seems like a strange place for a bunker,” Kevin said.

“It’s because it’s away from the city,” Phil replied. “It means it’s more likely to survive an attack. Besides, no one talks about it, but they used to do military testing up there.”

It sounded like the kind of secret Kevin wasn’t supposed to know, but then, he suspected that aliens were the kind of secret he wasn’t supposed to know right then.

“I guess I wouldn’t make it into one of the bunkers anyway,” Kevin said. He couldn’t help a note of resentment there.

“Still angry that the professor decided to keep you a secret here?” Phil asked.

Kevin was about to say no, say the thing he was supposed to say, but the truth was that he was angry.

“He can’t just do that,” Kevin said. “The aliens are sending a message to the whole world. Shouldn’t everyone get to hear it?”

Phil shrugged. “The trouble is, he can. Especially if his bosses want to keep anything you do for military applications. This is a facility that engages in confidential research, and it has plenty of security. Keeping people out is easy. Keeping secrets in, though…”

“What do you mean?” Kevin asked.

The researcher gestured for him to follow, and he led the way to a broad window near the front entrance to the building, looking out over the research facility’s front lot. Out beyond the fence, where the public part of the NASA facility stood, Kevin could see a large crowd of people all looking toward the building. Several of them had cameras.

“Who are they?” Kevin asked.

“Someone must have let it slip that we were working on something to do with aliens,” Phil said, in a tone that suggested exactly who that someone might be. “Probably a scientist who decided that you shouldn’t keep things like this quiet.”

“Or you,” Kevin suggested, because he’d never really understood it when adults tried to say things without actually saying them, like that.

“It could have been your mother,” Phil pointed out, “and Dr. Levin would love to be able to tell the public about extraterrestrial life being real. I mean, it’s literally her job. Or—”

“But it wasn’t them,” Kevin said. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Shh,” Phil said. “Do you want to cost me my job? Now, it occurs to me that, if you were to go out there and talk to those people, old Brewster wouldn’t be able to keep you locked away. I’m just talking hypothetically, you understand.”

Kevin looked over at the doors. They were solid things, with a card lock for which he didn’t have a card. They seemed like an impossible barrier. Even the glass beside them was toughened.

“I can’t get outside,” he said.