Becca woke to a quiet beeping, pleasant and melodic-like. She blinked sleep from her eyes and sat up looking over to her laptop, which sat on the small table beside her bed. Her eyes widened despite the glare of the screen in the otherwise dark room.

A reply.

She looked over at the screen. She had set up the same program which converted her keystrokes into tones, to convert the tones into keystrokes, or rather letters. A message was typing out slowly onto her screen.

IS THIS EARTH

Becca waited a moment to make sure nothing else was coming, but then the same tones came once more and the same question was listed again on her screen. She answered.

YES

She waited. This time, it didn’t take hours. She wondered how close whoever she was talking to was. It seemed as though they were now speaking without delay, as though she was just texting a friend who lived in the same neighborhood.

THANK YOU I REQUIRE ASSISTANCE

She typed.

WHAT KIND OF ASSISTANCE

I AM THE LAST OF MY KIND I AM RUNNING OUT OF TIME

Becca’s breath caught in her chest. The last of its kind? An alien. This could all be some sort of ridiculous prank, Becca knew, but she shoved that thought to the back of her mind. She glanced at the clock in the corner of her screen. It was two-thirty-four in the morning. She didn’t feel tired.

WHO ARE YOU

As she waited, she realized she was shaking, but not in a frightened way, but out of pure excitement. She was conversing with an alien. Somehow, she knew it was true. This was no prank. This was real; she could feel it inside her. She was as sure of it as she was sure of anything.

IN YOUR LANGUAGE YOU MAY CALL ME KEY YOU CANNOT SPEAK MY LANGUAGE

Becca typed furiously now, ignoring the chance for mistakes, sure she would type perfectly. There was too much riding on this not to. She didn’t want to confuse Key.

HOW DO YOU KNOW ENGLISH

A moment, and then the tones came through, and the words appeared on her screen.

WE KNOW ALL ABOUT EARTH WE HAVE BEEN WATCHING FOR A LONG TIME NOW MY HOME IS GONE AND I AM THE LAST

Becca felt as though she was in a daze. She was speaking with an alien, one who was the last of their kind. A thought came quickly to her.

HAS ANYONE ELSE CONTACTED YOU

A moment, and then:

NO WHO ARE YOU

Becca typed her name.

BECCA

The pauses were no so slight, the young woman felt sure the alien was close.

CAN YOU ASSIST ME

Becca typed.

WHAT DO YOU NEED

The answer came more quickly than any other had, so far.

BRING ME TO YOU

Becca was confused. Bring him to her?

HOW

A slight pause. Then:

WORM HOLE IT IS HOW WE ARE TALKING BUT THIS IS TO UNSTABLE FOR ME TO TRAVEL THROUGH

Becca took a moment to process what Key had said. A wormhole? That explained how her messages were getting to them so quickly, though it meant they were further away than she had thought. She realized that the alien needed a wormhole to bring them to Earth, and she had no way of doing that. She couldn’t create a wormhole. No one on Earth could. They were hundreds, if not thousands of years from that sort of technology.

WHY DO YOU NEED TO COME HERE

They replied quickly:

MY PLANET IS GONE EARTH IS ONLY ONE I CAN LIVE ON

She understood immediately. Key (what a strange name, though she remembered that it was not their actual name) was telling her that their planet had somehow been destroyed, and that Earth was the only planet they knew of with an atmosphere that they could exist in. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie.

I CANT MAKE A WORMHOLE

She sat on her bed for a moment, waiting for the reply, chewing softly on her bottom lip. She hunched over the laptop, which she had pulled over and set on her bed. She stretched, feeling a stiffening in her neck. The tones came then, and she hunched back over quickly.

I CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO STRENGTHEN THIS ONE

Becca put her fingers to the keys of her laptop, planning on replying, but then the tones changed and a new message appeared on her screen.

I MUST GO I WILL CONTACT LATER

Becca’s eyes widened. She typed quickly, and her own words flashed across her screen.

NO DONT GO I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO

She waited, but there was no answer. Again she found herself waiting, as the minutes stretched on. She knew that, at least for now, Key was gone.

Becca was left with plenty of things to consider, as the night wore on and became morning. She didn’t sleep any more that night, and instead she thought about Key, and the conversation she had with the alien. Were they an alien? Was it a ‘he’? For some reason she felt sure that the answer to both of those questions was yes. She decided ‘he’ was a real alien.

The thing that she hadn’t realized, at the time, however, and which took up the majority of her thoughts after Key cut off their correspondence was that Key must have made a corresponding tone for every letter, because her software had translated every sentence either of them had written perfectly. He truly knew English. He truly knew Earth. Becca was still up, looking at her laptop, hoping against hope that Key would send another message when the alarm on her cell phone went off. She gripped her phone from her bedside table and silenced the alarm. She got up them, suddenly remembering Tom and her job, and wanting to rush in and tell him everything.

Becca hopped into the shower and was clean, dressed, and breakfasted before Gia even came out of her room.

“Rushing off, huh?” Gia asked.

“Yeah. I promise I’ll fill you in when I can. Really.”

“It’s big though?”

“It’s so fucking big,” Becca said, her sudden cursing making Gia laugh, and then she was out the door, hurrying to her car.

 

The office was almost empty when Becca arrived. She was an hour early, but Tom was in his office, and she hurried to it. She was only ten steps away when she glanced through the frosted glass and saw that Tom wasn’t alone. There was someone else there, sitting across the desk from her boss. The glass door was closed, and Becca considered barging in, but she resisted the urge and sat down at a nearby desk, not her own, to wait, although rather impatiently.

It took only five minutes for the door to open and Tom and the other man to appear, but it felt like much longer to Becca. The stranger glanced in her direction and then shook her boss’s hand. He was tall; a white man with a bald head, dressed in a black suit. He nodded to Becca and walked past, pulling a pair of sunglasses from inside his suit jacket and slipping them on. Becca stood and looked at Tom.

“Wow, it’s like I’m in a ‘Men in Black’ movie,” she said quietly, so the retreating man couldn’t hear her. Tom managed a small smile, but something in it made Becca take note. “Oh my gosh, is that what he is?”

Tom waved his hand away. “No, of course not,” he said, but when he didn’t go on to explain who the man was, Becca had to wonder if she was close to the truth. Tom seemed content with moving on, and so Becca did so, as her boss leaned against the doorway, folding his arms over his chest. “Did you ... get anywhere?” She asked him.

Tom sighed and shook his head, surprising Becca a bit. Really, the tone hadn’t been that tough to crack. She figured he would at least be on his way towards uncovering the same thing she had.

“No,” he said. “Did you?”

Becca didn’t even hesitate. The man in the suit had made her uncomfortable. Was he from the government? She didn’t want to play her hand just yet. She could feel as though there was something Tom wasn’t telling her.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

“You’re here awfully early just to give me bad news,” Tom said with a laugh.

“I was hoping you had something,” Becca said.

“Yeah,” Tom said with a shrug. “Well, nothing to report. You think it’s time we get everyone on it?”

Becca did pause at that. If the whole office was in on it, someone would crack the tone, and would do it quickly. It had only taken Becca fifteen or so hours. There were a lot of smart people in her office, many smarter than she was, or at least she humbly thought so. However, if she didn’t agree, it would make her look suspicious. She didn’t know why she wanted to keep her correspondence from Tom. It was only since she had seen the mysterious man come out of his office, but she was sure of her course of action. She would keep Key to herself, for now.

The problem was now she needed to warn him. Luckily she had quickly downloaded an app which would forward her laptop correspondence to her phone, and as the office began to fill up with co-workers, she sent a tone message to her laptop, and from there, up to Key. Hopefully, he would get it before anyone else sent him something.

OTHERS WILL CONTACT SOON DO NOT REPLY NOT SURE IF SAFE ONLY ME BECCA

She hoped he would understand.

When everyone was there, Tom called a meeting, and the office filed into the conference room, sitting around a long rectangular table. Tom filled everyone in quickly, and played the tone for everyone. He didn’t mention that Becca already knew, and she didn’t offer up the information herself. The room was quiet as they listened to the tone; once, twice, and then three times.

“I’ll email you all copies,” Tom said, looking around the room. “That’s it. That’s what we’re working on. Go figure it out.”

Everyone left the room, leaving Becca and her boss. “Keep at it I guess,” he said, and she rose and nodded before leaving.

The office was a hubbub of excitement, and Becca found it hard to feign that same excitement. She had solved the problem; she knew that Key was up there, and she knew what he wanted her to do.

With nearly an hour to go before the end of the day, her phone buzzed.

I UNDERSTAND I HAVE PINPOINTED YOUR SYSTEM MY REPLIES WILL GO ONLY TO YOU

So; that helped matters. Becca glanced around from her desk, saw no one was paying any attention to her, and she texted.

GREAT I AM READY TO HELP YOU

She waited for a reply. It came shortly.

I WILL SEND YOU SCHEMATICS I REQUIRE A MACHINE TO STRENGTHEN THAT END OF THE WORMHOLE

Becca began to text, but she yelped and jumped when Tom spoke from beside her.

“What’s so interesting that you’re already moving on from a possible alien message?” He asked, glancing at her phone.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly, putting the phone away.”

“No, it’s fine,” Tom said. “I was just kidding. I wanted to come here and tell you I’m sorry for not including you this morning. I just thought ... I don’t know, I didn’t want to piss of anyone who’s been here a while. I brought this to you, and not them. I should have backed you up, or myself up I guess, and told them.”

“It’s fine,” Becca said truthfully. If anything, she was glad he had not told everyone that she had been working on the sound all weekend.

“Someone will get it,” Tom said, looking around the room. “Sometime soon.”

“I think so too,” Becca said with a forced smile, and Tom nodded and moved back towards his office. Becca pulled her cell out and typed.

PLEASE DO I WILL DO WHAT I CAN

A beat, and then Key’s response:

THANK YOU