20 - Nico
Nico
Upper East Side Manhattan NY
N ICO WAS LEAVING THE BATHROOM when Ari slipped inside, closing the door behind them both. Nico motioned to the door but Ari was in the way. “I can give you privacy…”
Ari ignored that, making a point of adjusting their tiny UFO saucer hat. It was a shiny peach color and Nico flashed on his dream… Then told himself that was stupid. Ari was no giant.
“You didn’t rat me out,” Ari said.
Nico knew Ari meant about setting Nico up to fail with Sam for Valentine’s Day. “No,” he agreed.
“Why?” Ari applied peach lipstick in the mirror. Pressed their lips together. “I’ve been nothing but terrible to you.”
“He needs every friend he has right now,” Nico said, looking pastthebathroom door like he could see Sam with X-ray vision. “We all do.”
“Détente then.” Ari held out their matching peach-manicured fingers to shake.
“Sure.” Nico had no idea what détente meant, but he knew people well enough to see the sincerity in Ari’s eyes.
He knew Ari loved Sam. And Sam had chosen Nico. That must have been brutal for Ari, and still they were here. With an extended hand.
They weren’t the enemy.
Nico clasped Ari’s hand in his own. “Détente,” he repeated. He’d look it up later just to be sure.
1415
As soon as Nico let him into the apartment, Byron got to work. He used his new gray-and-yellow hummingbird drone to position all the mini cameras around the building without anyone noticing.
Ari got the cameras online on three screens of computers in Sam’s dad’s studio.
One was divided into four security camera windows, cycling through views of the building lobby entrance, both elevator lobbies, the interior of the two elevators that just went up to thirty-five, the interior of the two elevators that went above the thirty-fifth floor, and the corridor outside Sam’s apartment door.
“Is all this really necessary?” Sam asked.
“It’s just insurance,” Ari responded.
“Situational awareness,” Byron agreed.
But Nico could tell it put Sam on edge. They all knew it was prep in case the thirteenth floor attacked.
2213
With a fresh pot of matcha tea, Ari was in Sam’s dad’s studio, working bit by bit through the data Nico had swiped from Goddard Space Flight Center.
Byron had set up the drone assembly line on the kitchen island. As it whirred and clicked and made its high-pitched whine, he chatted softly with his AI butler.
The rest of them were trying to get some rest; the plan was to gather at 6 AM to launch the operation. Frida and Bec had taken the living room couch foldout and were under the covers, whispering. Peter was conked out on an inflatable mattress in Sam’s mom’s home office.
Every space besides Sam’s parents’ bedroom and bathroom was taken. Nico headed into Sam’s bedroom— their bedroom, he guessed—and like always was soothed by the heat from the wood flooring coming up through his socks.
Nico lowered the bed from the wall, and Sam fired up the TV.
A reporter stood in front of the darkened US Capitol.
”The president, vice president, top cabinet officers, and members of Congress have left DC.
All we’ve been told is that they are in separate secure locations.
Government is functioning, if you can call it that, at a bare minimum, as all nonessential federal employees join the millions of other Americans staring at the sky in anxious anticipation of alien contact in less than fourteen hours.
Noon eastern time on Sunday. We’ve heard rumors of the military alert reaching DEFCON 2, one step before all-out nuclear war. ”
“I can’t do any more news!” Nico groaned as he pulled their pillows out of the wall cabinet. “Can we just watch something stupid, please?”
Sam was game. “Bond movie, or something else?” He hopped onto the bed next to Nico, and opened the app. For S ELECT P ROFILE , after D ANICA , M ICHAEL , and S AM& N ICO , there was a new one: G ODEANE .
Nico hadn’t added that. “Did you put that there?”
Sam looked at the screen and his eyes widened. “She’s trying to get a message to us!” Sam clicked it.
The next screen read:
G ODEANE’S P LAYLIST
F IRST W IVES C LUB F IRST B LOOD F IRST S HIFT
and
D EPARTMENT G ONE WITH THE W IND R OGUE O NE
And on the row below that
S TOP M AKING S ENSE T HEM N OW AND T HEN
“What the hell?” Nico ran a hand through his hair. “What’s the message? Those movies have nothing to do with each other.”
“First, First, First,” Sam read across the top three. “Maybe that’s instructions on how to read the code. First. Maybe we only read the first words of the other movie names.”
Nico read the first words of the next three: “Department Gone Rogue.”
“That could mean she’s lost control of Keahilani and Noble One,” Sam said. “Which means Godeane isn’t in on it. Or…”
Nico could see where Sam was going. “Or she doesn’t want us to think she is.”
“And the next three, that’s a message for us.” Sam read the next coded message: “Stop them now.”
“She still doesn’t know it’s all fake,” Nico said. “The aliens. She might suspect, but we know.”
“Let’s send her a message back,” Sam said. “Add movies to her playlist.” Sam’s fingers flew on the remote. He made sure to add the movies in order:
A LIENS H OAX P ROOF
“We’re sure, but we don’t really have proof, not that the general public will believe,” Nico said.
“That’s what Ari’s working on.” Sam tossed the TV remote to their feet. “If we can expose the code that made all those scientists think there were aliens, that’ll convince everyone.”
“What do we do until then?” Nico asked. “The world’s spinning into chaos, thinking these fake aliens are going to kill everyone.”
They were quiet for a minute, until Sam said, “What if we made them seem peaceful?”
Which meant they couldn’t sleep after all. There was too much to prepare.
Sun17Feb
0831
Time toImpact: 03hrs28min17sec
The seven of them were in Sam’s dad’s studio, which Ari had set up as temporary tech center.
Nico finally got one of Ari’s black stone bracelets that made you just a blur of color to cameras.
Ari handed out earpieces so they could stay in touch on an encrypted channel and not have their movements tracked like with their cell phones.
“Once they’re in, you don’t need to touch your ear,” Sam said as they all put them in.
“They always do that in the movies, like that idiot agent Daniel Craig is working with in the big parkour opening to Casino Royale , and Bond’s telling him to stop touching his ear, and the guy keeps doing it, and falls in the middle of the cobra and mongoose gambling pit fight, sets off his gun, and that’s when the whole chase scene starts! ”
“Got it,” Frida said drily, and walked to the other room. They could all hear her through their earpieces: “Don’t touch the ear.”
Bec’s face lit up. “It works!”
Frida ran back in. “I heard you say it works!”
Ari looked slightly offended. “Of course it works.”
0921
Upper East Side Manhattan NY
Time toImpact: 02hrs38min11sec
It was a cold, dry day, and the air puffed from Nico’s mouth like he was a smoker.
The others had gone ahead on the bicycle pedicab Byron had fitted out, but he’d decided to walk.
Take a few minutes alone. But he wasn’t alone.
As he made his way southeast the streets were streaming with terrified people—everyone walking, running, doing whatever they could to get out of the city.
Nearly every intersection was gridlocked with abandoned cars and the aftermath of nasty accidents.
Crossing Sixty-Second, Nico watched a Hummer push through driverless cars only to get trapped in the wedge between two empty buses—tourist and metro.
Metal on metal shrieked. The Hummer backed up and slammed forward.
The tourist bus lifted up on its side a whole two feet, but Nico could tell it was going to take more than that to knock it out of their way.
Helicopters thuwmp-thuwmp-thuwmp ed the air overhead.
At Fifty-Ninth Street a women shouted into a megaphone, pointing at a helicopter as it crossed above them. “Those are rich people escaping, leaving the rest of us to die!”
Someone threw a trash can through a plate glass storefront, and a mass of people rushed into the jewelry store, grabbing what they could.
Nico knew one guy shouting Calm down, the aliens aren’t real! wouldn’t do anything. He had to stick to the plan.
0954
Columbus Circle Manhattan NY
Time toImpact: 02hrs05min46sec
Nico scanned the ninth-floor rooftop of the Museum of Arts and Design as he walked out of the stairway exit.
It was perfect, overlooking Central Park and the south side of Columbus Circle.
An orange extension cord ran past him and across the flat roof to a twenty-foot-wide inflatable red heart that hung over the edge, advertising the museum’s Iconography of Love exhibit.
Nico stood by one of the anchor ropes holding the inflatable heart steady and took a second to get oriented.
In the center of the swirl of jammed-up traffic and pedestrians below was the sculpture of Christopher Columbus on a column, one hand on his hip and an entitled expression Nico had seen on a lot of rich people.
Like they owned it all and were going to take more anyway.
Columbus was also wearing a hat that made him look like he had Vulcan ears.
On top of that hat was a pigeon—but not just any pigeon.
It was one of Byron’s drones, patched in to give them another camera angle.
Byron was just a hundred yards away past the entrance to the park, his customized bicycle pedicab the only one in a row that wouldn’t be taking any customers.
Bec was one of the skateboarders doing tricks on the concrete benches around Columbus’s fountain, ready to live-stream.
Peter was set up in front of the glass-fronted mall atrium on the west side of the circle.