5 - Sam
T HE BLOCK WAS ANONYMOUS—INTENTIONALLY SO . The mirrored glass office building that meant you couldn’t see inside was indistinguishable from its neighbors. This early, the lobby had just a few people in it. Sam avoided any eye contact and timed it to get on the elevator alone.
All the button lights turned off, and the elevator started to move up.
It felt very Bond.
A minute later, the elevator doors opened on the thirteenth floor of a building that didn’t have a thirteenth floor…
Except it did.
Sam stepped out and into his new role: spy.
“And… the Knitter decides to join us,” Noble One said, all sarcastic. He was leaning against a wall of dark blue glass in the closed-off elevator lobby.
The attitude put Sam on edge. “If you’d told me before I got to school it would have made everything a lot easier.
” He’d had to fake getting sick in the middle of Dr. Frye telling them about the role of potatoes in eliminating widespread scurvy in 1600s Europe, helping fuel a population boom that in turn set the stage for colonization.
Frida had totally known he was faking it—he was going to have to come up with a convincing lie.
“Just so you know, I think you are a waste of everyone’s time.” Noble One pushed off the wall. “We have AI that can do what Director and Keahilani think you can do. For sure better than you. We have all the best tech.” He licked his thumbprint and set it on the entry’s waist-high scanner.
Sam was not going to be baited, but he couldn’t help being snarky. “Fingerprint scan: very high-tech.”
“It is not reading thumbprint. It is analyzing DNA.” The door slid open.
Sam had to admit that was cool.
As he followed Noble One down the opaque glass corridor, Sam glanced at his phone to see if there was anything from Nico. It might as well have been turned off. “What’s up with no signal? You don’t even have Wi-Fi here?”
“This whole floor is inside a Faraday cage,” Noble One explained. “Copper all around makes this a SCIF. Makes sure the only signals in or out are ones we control.”
Sam hated asking, but he couldn’t look it up without Wi-Fi or cell reception. “SCIF?”
Noble One snorted like Sam was the world’s biggest idiot. “Sensitive and compartmented information facility. But we just call it thirteenth floor.”
The entrance corridor came to a T and they went left, passing a small kitchen area . Everyone must eat at their desks. Or they go out to eat?
Near the next turn in the corridor they went into an office. “The Knitter is here,” Noble One said through the door leading to another office beyond.
Keahilani looked up from her computer. “Good, let’s get you settled.” She took a drink from a giant metal thermos covered with stickers. Sam spotted the Provincetown lighthouse, a cartoon narwhal, and a bunch of female-fronted bands he’d heard of but didn’t really listen to.
She stood, and Sam followed her down a new corridor. “Can we change my code name?” Sam asked.
Keahilani waved her hand to dismiss his concern. “It’s a compliment. You find plot holes and unravel the strands… like a knitter.”
Sam made a face. He wanted something more Bond-like.
“We could always do Penelope,” Noble One said with a smirk, like he’d love to give Sam a girly name to mock him.
But Sam remembered the story from Greek myth.
How Odysseus’s wife stalled by secretly un-knitting the thing she was working on every night, buying time for her husband to get home. She was pretty badass.
Still, he didn’t want to be called Penelope.
“Even ‘Un-Knitter’ would be better,” Sam suggested.
“We’re not changing your code name.” Keahilani’s tone didn’t leave any room for negotiating.
“Do I at least get a cool alias?” Sam asked.
Keahilani sighed in the way some of Sam’s teachers did, like working with a teenager was exhausting. But she couldn’t have been much older than twenty-two herself. “That’s only for field agents. You’re an analyst—you’re not allowed to talk to anyone outside this floor about any of this anyway.”
Brigadoon appeared ahead of them, making the turn into their corridor. As he passed them he looked like he wanted to punch Sam. Sam wished that didn’t bother him, but it did. Now that they were on the same side, shouldn’t this hulk of a guy be friendlier?
Noble One stopped at a door that looked identical to all the others, and Keahilani motioned Sam in.
The interior was like a study room in the St. Bacchus library. Opaque blue-tinted glass wall to the corridor, with a door of the same material. Inside the small whiteboard cube there was a large wall-mounted monitor and a metal desk with whiteboard markers and eraser, keyboard, mouse, one chair.
So he’d be working alone.
It was kind of like a high-tech prison cell. Sam wished there was a window.
But he had his own office, and that felt pretty adult. Shame he couldn’t take a selfie to show off to his friends…
Noble One closed the door behind the three of them and punched a button on the keyboard.
On the monitor, a five-day countdown showed Earth slamming into a rectangle in space. Impact was shown with a red X.
“What is that?” Sam pointed to the rectangle as the countdown reset to 0 5 DAYS 04 HRS 03 MIN and they watched it again. “Is it big?”
“Almost size of asteroid that finished all dinosaurs,” Noble One said.
Sam resisted the urge to point out that birds were kind of descendants of dinosaurs.
“It’s not an asteroid,” Keahilani snapped. “Natural phenomena follow Newton’s laws of motion. This doesn’t. Making the question not what but who .”
Noble One frowned. “No one on our planet has this level technology.”
And suddenly it all felt deadly serious. No one on our planet?
“Aliens,” Sam breathed. It was the only possible answer.
“Here’s your task,” Keahilani said. “If this is aliens, what are the possible contingencies the government should be considering? We need a list. Fast.”
Oh shit.
1118
Sam was staring at the whiteboard wall, where he’d written “What do aliens want?” at the top, and then made two columns: NOT FRIENDLY and FRIENDLY. He’d been thinking through all the movies he’d seen, and a bunch of the cool plot-adjacent things he’d considered.
Under NOT FRIENDLY he had:
HUMANS AS BATTERIES
HUMANS AS INCUBATORS
HUMANS AS WORKERS
HUMANS AS FOOD
RESOURCES—LIKE WATER (WE COULD SHARE?)
OUR LAND/EARTH (WE’RE NOT GOOD AT SHARING)
QUIET (MAYBE OUR RADIO SIGNALS ARE TOO LOUD?)
Under FRIENDLY he had:
TO BE FRIENDS?
TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO ALIEN HAS GONE BEFORE?
TO
He had no idea.
Five days. Sam pulled out his phone, hoping the calendar would still work in this Faraday cage dead zone. It did. Sunday, February17.
Not a lot of time to get ready.
He needed to get something to eat. He needed a break.
Heading to the elevator lobby, Sam wondered what everyone in the other offices on the thirteenth floor were up to. Were they also exploring the possibilities of alien first contact?
1123
When Sam stepped out of the lobby onto the sidewalk his phone lit up with texts that had been waiting for him to get reception.
Frida: Are you cutting school? What’s up?
Ari: Let me know if I can help with your Valentine’s plans
Nico: Thinking about you -- Watched Diamonds are Forever last night (Bond riding on top of the outdoor elevator and then shooting mountain-climbing anchors into the building to sneak into the penthouse floor of that casino was a good sequence) There was some weird plot stuff too
Nice. Insult Sam’s favorite movies. But honestly, Sam hadn’t seen Diamonds Are Forever in, like, forever, so if he wanted to defend it he should probably refresh on it first. He scrolled to the next text.
Nico: Also watched Die Another Day (The duel between Bond and Graves in the London club had some great stunts) Can’t wait to talk about them!
That was cool. At least Nico was trying. Much as Sam wished he were here. And Sam remembered that fight sequence—it was awesome.
Nico: Have a great day!
And it hit Sam that he couldn’t tell anyone the truth, that maybe they only had five more great days left. Not Ari or Frida. Not even Nico.
Adulting was harder than it looked.
But the alien thing couldn’t possibly be real. Maybe it was all a test, a mental exercise to prove he could do better than their AI. Prove they could trust him. Prove he could be Bond-like. Keep a secret. Help them save the world someday when there was a real threat.
The thought made him feel better. Like he could do this. He texted back.
To Frida: I’m fine, just needed some Sam time
To Nico: Really sweet that you watched both movies! The invisible car in Die Another Day was the coolest, right?
He typed when are you back but deleted it letter by letter.
He didn’t want to be a nagging spouse. Instead he texted Nico:
Love you
Sam waited a minute, but Nico must not have been looking at his phone.
Another minute passed.
He really needed to step up his husband game. He called Ari.
Ari answered instantly. “Hi.”
“I was thinking about making some fancy chocolates by hand. For Nico, for Valentine’s Day. Wanna help?”