Ch 13: Stereophonic

The Futureness Part Two

Jan 26, 2025

“Reporting live for WYUV, Samantha Dean at Petey’s Bait Shop, the legendary sports bar of downtown Dayton, New Mexico, and this is a truly unique place, Kurt. Did you know they have over seventy-five television screens here on this level alone, along with the games, so we should be able to find at least one showing The Francesca test.”

Eric’s mother sits sleeping on the couch, mouth breathing as the news runs on her phone. Sports and video games blare behind Samantha as she and her cameraperson wind between bar tables and move deeper into the bar.

“And there’s one,” Samantha says just as three touristy-looking women in white T-shirts bearing an overwrought artist’s rendition of The Francesca hovering over its launch pad grab her arms. “Okay, I’m being brought over to a table here with some folks I’m told have been doing the Francesca test together every week since the day of the takeoff. And they’re not all in agreement, okay? Much like the rest of the world. All right, everyone, good evening to you, I’m Samantha and we’re on WYUV live right now. Now, some of you are wearing T-shirts depicting The Francesca, and over there, I see you, so would, one would assume that everyone on this side of the table can see The Francesca. Okay, yes, true, and you’re raising your hand, sir.”

A ragged man in his late sixties crouches beneath the television, his hands on his hips, peering up at it like he’s there to fix it. There’s a split-screen view of The Francesca, glittering, crystalline and moth-like, hovering over the pad on the left side, and a live shot of the launch site on the right side without the ship. The banner headline below reads, WHAT DO YOU SEE? The man stands and turns to Samantha.

“She’s gone, hon,” he says.

“You don’t see The Francesca on the right side of the screen there, sir?”

“No one does, if they’re being honest with themselves,” he says. Then, in a stage whisper, “You can tell who they are by their highly visible clothing line.”

“Stubborn man,” says one of the three who rushed Samantha over. “The Francesca is in both pictures.”

“My eyes are wide open, ma’am,” he says. “That’s the miracle.”

“What makes you certain it’s not there?” Samantha asks the man, angling her microphone toward him. “The site is closed to the public, so we only have drone footage—”

“It’s my kid up there. I know.”

“Richard?”

“Yeah, right. That’s my kid that’s up there.”

“Woah, yes,” Eric says. “Good timing, overhearing that.”

Methyl and Eric have been eavesdropping on the news playing in his sleeping mother’s lap while nothing but static has flowed from the ancient radio since those first words came—something about a radio kill report. Nothing for several minutes now.

“Why?” Methyl says.

“They’re connected,” Eric says. “I think he’s kind of scragged or something.”

“He’s what?”

“Straggled and like, never shaves.”

“Is he one of the people you’ve dreamed about, like the people dead underwater?”

“Sort of,” Eric says. “He goes on a long time, like you, so he shows up a lot. But I don’t mean like you literally, because you go on for a really long time.”

“What does that mean?”

A bulging wave of static hisses from the radio.

“How come it worked and then stopped?” Eric says.

“They changed us, Eric. What are we doing? Look at us in your nanna’s old bedroom listening to her dead radio. Ha.”

“Big ha,” Eric says.

“It’s like we believe we can talk to a spaceship a billion miles away.”

“Yeah, and one that people still can still see on Earth.”

Something in Eric’s voice stops Methyl.

“Wait… you don’t see it, do you?”

“I see it. It’s right there in every picture and on video all the time.”

Methyl is stunned.

“Kid, that’s why we’re trying to find them is that they left. They are gone. Bye-bye to The Francesca. You heard his dad. This is a mass delusion.”

“He was interesting, but I see it. That’s all I know.”

“But you heard that voice on the radio. There’s something out there.”

“Maybe it was just a walkie-talkie band we picked up, short-wave radio, ham radio.”

“What’s that? We need to find them. Would that help us?”

“Where have you been all this time? Don’t you watch the news?” Eric’s voice softens, as though he is expecting an angry rebuke from Methyl. “The Francesca test is everywhere.”

“I’ve been up north,” Methyl says. She could tell Eric the story of squirming out of her tent in the middle of the night and seeing The Francesca gone. Let him know everything. But Methyl isn’t sure, even though the kid’s little, whether whatever hijacked her taxi to take her into the desert alone doesn’t have its hooks in him, too. Had they gotten to Angela? Is that why she…? It feels like a month ago that she took a nap in Eric’s room, under his aquarium.

“Let’s go back to your room,” Methyl says. She needs Eric on her side, Richard and Francesca’s side. They wouldn’t have taken off without warning if they were in control, she’d tell Eric. She’d use logic to show him that they are gone unwillingly.

“Okay,” Eric says, visibly brightening.

“Unplug the radio, let’s take it with us and try again later.”

“It’s not plugged in,” Eric says.

“What?” Methyl crouches by the bedside table and pulls out a disconnected power cord.

“Then how did I turn it on? How did I get shocked?”

“I think you shocked the radio,” Eric says. “With the way you can, the way you shocked Xavier’s robot, you know?”

Eric’s mother’s voice comes down the hall to his bedroom: “Eric, what time is it?”

“I don’t know, mom.”

“Well, look.”

Methyl notes a rise of red in Eric’s cheeks. Embarrassment from mom. It’s cute. It also reminds her of feeling that same way just a few months ago, before her life and her body and the world changed.

“Look on your phone, mom.”

“I’m too tired to look on my phone.”

Eric glances at a digital clock hanging on the wall. “It’s almost eight.”

“Your mom’s too tired?” Methyl says.

“I experience past lives, I have waking dreams sometimes, so she doesn’t sleep. Except, then you came over. Why did you come over, anyway?”

“I was trying to tell you. We’re different since the wall. It changed me, and I know it changed you, and I know that you know it.”

“Okay… get to the picture,” Eric says, his voice soft once again. Methyl senses that he’s bracing himself for ugly news.

“It’s okay, it’s just that… it’s not some spaceship that, like, anyone invented. That little shock I just had—multiply that by a million and you have what I could do to Xavier’s robot and a billion more times to make the ship underground—”

“Underwater?” Eric says, hope in his eyes as he glances back at the door. Methyl knows he’s thinking about his aquarium tank display of a shipwreck, about getting back to it.

“There’s water underground, too, yeah,” Methyl says, trying to keep Eric on track. “Let’s go. I’ll give the radio another shock in a minute.”

This acting like her friends, her last friends in this world, couldn’t be lost anywhere in the universe, this nonchalance in the face of the forces that made the ship, where they’re from, and how they’re inside her, too, buried in crystalline circuits in her neck, it’s not more than she can bear because she’s with a younger kid who needs some protection from the chaos that surrounds her—if he’s not implicated in the taxi plot to desert-murder her.

“It’s overwhelmingly likely,” Methyl starts, then get up and motions for Eric to follow her out of his grandmother’s room and back down the hall to his own. “That an alien force is working on us. I mean, from an alien civilization.”

“Fucking cool!” Eric shouts.

“Eric,” his mother calls down the hall.

“It’s almost eight,” Eric calls back, cheer in his voice.

“Oh, no,” Methyl says as she enters Eric’s bedroom and sees his aquarium. “I’m so sorry, Eric.”

The steamship and all his plastic figurine dead have come unstuck from the bottom of the tank and now float on the surface of the water.