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Some say that T-day was the ultimate goodbye. But how do you say goodbye to a world that you never knew? T-day was never goodbye. Goodbye is too simple an idea. T-day was a lifetime of beginnings and ends packed into the blink of an eye. Most minds went away after that.

    Afternoon in Shanghai.

    Evening in a corporate office in San Francisco.

    The moniker man that called himself Hashtag had been unavailable for response when the call had gone out. Not all of the Moniker Men could respond when needed. The concept of a desk job was wholly beyond Gatekeeper. He threw himself completely into this work, liking nothing more than a good brawl in the name of justice. However, there were more cerebral members of the team. They preferred to come at the Moniker Men scenarios with more finesse, a more precise touch. That was Hashtag all over. He preferred to think of himself as a laser-guided tool rather than a blunt instrument. And that’s where Hashtag was when this all went down: working at Flutter in his civilian identity. When he was done with this event, that’s where he would return again, no doubt to a new string of threads in support of the victims of this catastrophe. But it wasn’t his job to judge, it was his job to organize and to filter trends. And that’s what he would be doing tomorrow morning. But today, he had to see the damage for himself.

    He’d seen footage.

    White Knight had been transmitting all of his visor footage on the Moniker Men encrypted channel, all the way up until Gatekeeper had separated his head from the rest of his body. It was a gruesome sight, but Hashtag had made himself watch it over thirty times, looking for patterns. The video was less helpful than he’d hoped. What he’d really have liked to see was more of the feed running in the alien craft. The Moniker Men needed intel. Something was drastically wrong about Shanghai.

    Following that, he’d been stunned to see Audrey Snow’s stream. Hourglass had gone off protocol and dropped the status effect, leaving the world to see the alien attack for what it was: blood and death and senselessness.

    This could be the big one, he thought grimly. Or, Hourglass could just need some therapy and mandatory time off.

    Either way, he had to be sure. The world might depend on it.

     “What am I looking for?” muttered Hashtag, as he perused user information. It was a scrolling list of Flutter user feeds. Each of them was centered in Shanghai, and for the moment, thanks to the intervention of Hourglass, each was free of information about the disaster. He was cross-referencing the locations of phones that were paused at the beginning of “flitting” about the disaster, in order to find the ones closest to ground zero. He wanted to know what was happening right now, a play-by-play. And he, unlike most of the world, knew better than to watch the news footage. When Hourglass showed up on the scene just behind White Knight and Gatekeeper, there would be a gap in everyone’s recollection. He needed something a little more current. And Audrey Snow was the best place to get it. And then, in answer to his own question, he added, “It doesn’t match the pattern. They’re coming back for more. Of course they are. They aren’t going to send a bunch of automatons. Such a mess. Such a mess. It’s incomplete.”

    The person he would have really liked to talk to wouldn’t be found, of course. She’d gone radio silent as soon as she’d left the city. And the Moniker Men didn’t carry their phones into the field. Team rule. The closest to that, however…

    “Who is this?”

    The voice on the other end rattled Hashtag. It had none of the hallmarks of Hourglass’ particular brand of magic: there was no fear, no disorientation, no panic. Hashtag didn’t usually get an answer on the first call either. Usually, he had to keep calling around inside the time bubble until he found someone who wasn’t glued to the news or else running for their lives from whatever. But this voice was neither. This voice was lucid, calm, in command of her full faculties. More than that, this voice was suspicious.

    Maybe she was a better reporter than they gave her credit for.

    On some level he knew it would be like this, because in order to film Hourglass’s confession, Snow would have had to have been unaffected by the time bubble. But hearing it was different than knowing it in his head.

     “Miss Snow,” Hashtag replied, “This is Hashtag, of the Moniker Men. Please, don’t be alarmed. I’m calling for-”

    “Leave me alone!” barked Audrey, surprising Hashtag again.

    “I caught your show,” Hashtag said, as though she weren’t livid. “We need to talk.”

    “That’s exactly why I’m not going to talk to you,” replied Snow. “Hourglass spoiled your little secret. I’m going to expose the Moniker Men, Hashtag. You’re going to be front page news tomorrow.”

    “Bigger than Shanghai?” asked Hashtag, darkly. “Somehow I doubt that.”

    “I’d settle for page two,” Snow muttered, with a touch of guilt.

    “I told you, I caught your show,” repeated Hashtag. “I figured that The Skeptic would be all over the Moniker Men tomorrow morning. That’s why I called. I want to set the record straight. Would you like to play 20 questions, Miss Snow?”

    “Hourglass just told me that your people constantly lie to the world,” spat Snow, “And knowingly induce seizures to effect their memory. Why would I trust your side of the story?”

    “I could have removed your video myself,” Hashtag offered. “I’ve chosen not to do that.”

    Lie number one, he thought.

    “But you’ve already got the story out there, in front of millions of viewers now,” he continued. “And millions more tomorrow, when you’ve had a chance to write down your thoughts and order them into a Pulitzer-earning article. And I’m absent one time-stopper. So I’ve decided to come clean. One in, all in. The Moniker Men stand together. And if Hourglass is going to rip down the curtain, then we’re going to answer for our sins together.”

    Lie number two, he added.

    He looked up front his computer screen to watch footage of the alien attack. No one had filmed Gatekeeper’s attack. No one except Snow, that was. And none of them were on the scene now. He had a few minutes, a precious few minutes. They would close in on the ship soon. Soon, footage of the aliens would be on every screen in the world. He needed to get there first. He needed that information, before it got out all over the globe. The news was covering the devastation, getting a dead toll and reporting on the lack of emergency responders.

    Good, he thought. That’s what the news is for. Field agents, on the other hand…

    “And it wouldn’t have anything to do with tracing this call?” Snow wanted to know. “In order to find me and silence me before I finish off your organization?”

    “Hourglass has given you a very brutal picture of this world,” replied Hashtag. “We don’t do that sort of thing. This isn’t a mob movie. And at any rate, if I wanted to trace your location, I can only get as close as the nearest cell tower. Quite an area to search, in the middle of ground zero. There are endless possibilities for you to escape before I or any of the Moniker Men got anywhere close to you. We wouldn’t know that we’d missed you for a week.”

    That actually wasn’t a lie.

    Which is why he was calling her instead.

    “You called me at ground zero to grant me an interview,” summed Snow. “Are you serious?”

    “Can you think of a better time?” Hashtag countered. “Everything’s still fresh.”

    “Or I can choose not to listen to liars,” replied Snow, “And do something useful. Like get the full scoop on the very first contact with aliens. Starting with the ship that your people just left laying here, splattered in their blood.”

    Hashtag paused a beat. His mind’s eye replayed the footage of poor White Knight’s head disappearing. He shook his head and continued his call. This was too important to linger on such details.

    Thank you! He crowed. Move, you silly girl.

    “Or both?” he suggested. “You can walk and talk, can’t you?

    There was a pause on the line.

    “Pictures of the ship, words from me,” Hashtag said, spelling it out. “Even if all of my words are a complete lie, the other reporters will be green with envy.”

    He heard the echo as Snow’s phone went to speaker. That was fine. There was no one else close enough to hear it that could tear themselves away from the tragedy long enough to listen. And if he was lucky, she would connect it to a wireless headphone, so there was nothing to hear at all, from her side.

    “Fine,” came Snow’s answer. “Let’s hear it.”

    Greed, Hashtag sighed, shaking his head. Useful thing, sin.

    “What would you like to know, Miss Snow?” he asked. He kept one eye on the screen and waited for her to start taking photos that he could steal. If he was lucky, she would take a comprehensive video. And why wouldn’t she? She was alone with the world’s first alien invaders, with no one around for miles.

    “Let’s start at the beginning then,” Snow said. “Who created the Moniker Men?”

    Hashtag couldn’t resist.

    “You did,” he told her. “I have the article, to prove it. It was one of Gatekeeper’s favorites. I understand he wanted to get its words tattooed on his back at some point, but no one could figure out the logistics of breaking his skin.”

    He could practically hear her rolling her eyes.

    “I wrote the article that named you in the public eye,” Snow replied. “But I didn’t start the team. How did it happen? Some eccentric millionaire with too much time on his hands?”

    Hashtag thought about that for a moment. It brought back memories. No, the origin story of the Moniker Men was certainly nothing like that. In fact, as of yet, the Moniker Men had yet to see a single millionaire. Certainly some of their armor had come from millionaires: White Knight’s portal gear, Hourglass’ seizure equipment. But to call them “donated” by its rightful owners was generous.

    In fact, he thought to himself, That would be lie number three, wouldn’t it.

    “I started the Moniker Men,” Hashtag confessed. “That was a way back, in my college days. Ten years ago.”

    “Oh really?” asked Snow, skeptically. “What was your major?”

    “Predictive analytics,” Hashtag replied, more to head her off from telling frat boy jokes than anything else. “The two ideas are related. My major is what led me to believe that the world needed Moniker Men. I studied the history of tragedy and did more than my share of recreational drugs and I started to see patterns of many kinds jumping out: for example, the shining stories of heroes through American history. Stories, you know. Who can say if they’re true? But in the 40’s a moniker man might’ve been an alien who came from a doomed star to hide among us and protect us, to inspire us with his example. In the 60’s, a radioactive spider might have bitten a teenager and given him great powers and great responsibility. And now? In the 2020’s, it’ll probably be genetic engineering. At least, assuming there isn’t some new and anxiety-producing scientific advancement between now and then. But there was evidence for all of it, or so I thought.

    I can’t say for sure just how much of that was hallucinogenic speculation. Tragedy is always reliably there. And more often than not, the hero stories. But not always. It makes sense, really. Tragic circumstances being real and consistent, I mean, and people not always really showing up to save us from them. I still have the notebooks I filled. Sometimes I go through them, just for a laugh. So I created an algorithm, to track and ideally, to predict. I had a very eventful sophomore year.”

    It was odd, telling her. The only people who knew this story were the Moniker Men themselves.

    Truth number two, he thought, with a chuckle.

    “You mean like data mining?” asked Snow. Despite herself, she sounded interested. A little. Morbidly interested. Like wanting to know if touching a corpse felt fake, like it did in the movies. “Pattern recognition?”

    “Predictive modeling,” Hashtag added. “Machine learning. The works.”

    “If that’s the case, shouldn’t you have seen this coming?” demanded Snow. “Or are you as bad at pattern recognition as you are at saving the world?”

    “Who said I didn’t?” Hashtag replied. “I’ve tracking 1400 divergence points over the past three years. This had to be coming.”

    “And your plan was what?” demanded Snow, “Wait until it died down and buy cheap real estate here when it was all over?”

    “I created the Moniker Men,” Hashtag snapped impatiently. “Why don’t you do some predictive modeling of your own: if one ship can kill 15,000 earth men and two enhanced moniker men, what do you think the next wave is going to do?”

    Pause.

    “Next wave?”

    Now Snow sounded afraid, disoriented, and panicked.

    “Oh yes, Miss Snow,” Hashtag confirmed. “NASA’s saying it too. Everyone with a satellite in the sky can see them coming. And now the moniker team is down by three. Still feeling flippant?”

    “This isn’t an interview,” whispered Snow. “It’s an obituary.”

    “I want them to know the truth tomorrow,” Hashtag agreed. “If there is anyone left alive to know it.”

    He couldn’t decide if that was another lie, or another truth. Maybe a little of both.

    “What is the team going to do now?” Snow asked.

    Good question, Hashtag thought.

    “I need to find Gatekeeper and Hourglass, to regroup,” he replied. “Pull the team together and send them out again. I need to find them most desperately.”

    There was another long pause. For a second, Hashtag wondered why. He could hear Audrey breathing. It sounded like she was trying not to cry. He considered asking her another question, but decided that it was inappropriate. He would let her wait, let her grieve. Even if she hadn’t had a connection to Shanghai before the alien attack, she had one now. But she wasn’t panicking, or freezing up. Or at least, she wasn’t just panicking or freezing up. She was also taking pictures. He watched them pop up, saving them online, with layers of redundancy just in case. Phone, e-mail, Flutter. She backed them up everywhere.

    It was very fortunate for him that he had access to all of that, thanks to her uploading to Flutter, and the backdoor he installed in Flutter’s system. It was also very fortunate that as careful as Audrey was, she like most of Flutter’s users, downloaded updates to the app without figuring out what it was before she did it. He activated the newly installed app and located her phone in seconds. She was standing inside the ship, or at least as close as the GPS could reasonably position her. Then he entered her password, freshly stolen from her Flutter user information, and waited.

    He waited until she was done, thanking the fates that Audrey Snow was an excellent reporter and her data was going to give him all of the intel that he needed.

    Just imagine, he thought, If the woman that Hourglass had stopped to talk to had been one of those vapid internet models that had nothing to say between selfies.

    He collected it all carefully and prepared to delete the rest. Snow was still on the line, but he couldn’t have told for sure what she was thinking.

    At some point, he realized that she was speaking again, and he decided to allow her one more question.

    “Hashtag,” Snow began slowly, from some place in deep thought. “If the Moniker Men are liars and killers…if we can’t trust anything that you tell the media…if there really is another wave of aliens coming for us…can you save us? Even if all of that is true, there’s only one planet Earth, and presumably, you all do still want to see it keep spinning, even if you don’t care how many humans are standing on it to see the sun come back around. But if tragedy is consistent and you created a response team anyway…can you save us?”

    “Yes,” replied Hashtag. “We can.”

    Now then, Hashtag, he thought, as his fingers hovered over his computer mouse. Was that a lie or the truth?

    Then he remotely wiped her phone and everything on it.

    6,000 miles away, Audrey Snow was holding a very fancy paperweight, and only slowly realizing why.

    Hashtag, meanwhile, had to get to back to work. Neither Gatekeeper nor Hourglass were very active on Flutter. And he had intel to analyze.



*                      *                      *

            In an isolated outpost in a far-off galaxy, screens played the live feed of an alien force’s first landing party on a planet that had produced many beings of unimaginable power. However, no aliens were watching it. They had gotten bored and gone instead to their own personal devices. Maybe the next wave of the landing party would produce something interesting.

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

Some say that T-day was the ultimate goodbye. But how do you say goodbye to a world that you never knew? T-day was never goodbye. Goodbye is too simple an idea. T-day was a lifetime of beginnings and ends packed into the blink of an eye. Most minds went away after that.

    Afternoon in Shanghai.

    Evening in a corporate office in San Francisco.

    The moniker man that called himself Hashtag had been unavailable for response when the call had gone out. Not all of the Moniker Men could respond when needed. The concept of a desk job was wholly beyond Gatekeeper. He threw himself completely into this work, liking nothing more than a good brawl in the name of justice. However, there were more cerebral members of the team. They preferred to come at the Moniker Men scenarios with more finesse, a more precise touch. That was Hashtag all over. He preferred to think of himself as a laser-guided tool rather than a blunt instrument. And that’s where Hashtag was when this all went down: working at Flutter in his civilian identity. When he was done with this event, that’s where he would return again, no doubt to a new string of threads in support of the victims of this catastrophe. But it wasn’t his job to judge, it was his job to organize and to filter trends. And that’s what he would be doing tomorrow morning. But today, he had to see the damage for himself.

    He’d seen footage.

    White Knight had been transmitting all of his visor footage on the Moniker Men encrypted channel, all the way up until Gatekeeper had separated his head from the rest of his body. It was a gruesome sight, but Hashtag had made himself watch it over thirty times, looking for patterns. The video was less helpful than he’d hoped. What he’d really have liked to see was more of the feed running in the alien craft. The Moniker Men needed intel. Something was drastically wrong about Shanghai.

    Following that, he’d been stunned to see Audrey Snow’s stream. Hourglass had gone off protocol and dropped the status effect, leaving the world to see the alien attack for what it was: blood and death and senselessness.

    This could be the big one, he thought grimly. Or, Hourglass could just need some therapy and mandatory time off.

    Either way, he had to be sure. The world might depend on it.

     “What am I looking for?” muttered Hashtag, as he perused user information. It was a scrolling list of Flutter user feeds. Each of them was centered in Shanghai, and for the moment, thanks to the intervention of Hourglass, each was free of information about the disaster. He was cross-referencing the locations of phones that were paused at the beginning of “flitting” about the disaster, in order to find the ones closest to ground zero. He wanted to know what was happening right now, a play-by-play. And he, unlike most of the world, knew better than to watch the news footage. When Hourglass showed up on the scene just behind White Knight and Gatekeeper, there would be a gap in everyone’s recollection. He needed something a little more current. And Audrey Snow was the best place to get it. And then, in answer to his own question, he added, “It doesn’t match the pattern. They’re coming back for more. Of course they are. They aren’t going to send a bunch of automatons. Such a mess. Such a mess. It’s incomplete.”

    The person he would have really liked to talk to wouldn’t be found, of course. She’d gone radio silent as soon as she’d left the city. And the Moniker Men didn’t carry their phones into the field. Team rule. The closest to that, however…

    “Who is this?”

    The voice on the other end rattled Hashtag. It had none of the hallmarks of Hourglass’ particular brand of magic: there was no fear, no disorientation, no panic. Hashtag didn’t usually get an answer on the first call either. Usually, he had to keep calling around inside the time bubble until he found someone who wasn’t glued to the news or else running for their lives from whatever. But this voice was neither. This voice was lucid, calm, in command of her full faculties. More than that, this voice was suspicious.

    Maybe she was a better reporter than they gave her credit for.

    On some level he knew it would be like this, because in order to film Hourglass’s confession, Snow would have had to have been unaffected by the time bubble. But hearing it was different than knowing it in his head.

     “Miss Snow,” Hashtag replied, “This is Hashtag, of the Moniker Men. Please, don’t be alarmed. I’m calling for-”

    “Leave me alone!” barked Audrey, surprising Hashtag again.

    “I caught your show,” Hashtag said, as though she weren’t livid. “We need to talk.”

    “That’s exactly why I’m not going to talk to you,” replied Snow. “Hourglass spoiled your little secret. I’m going to expose the Moniker Men, Hashtag. You’re going to be front page news tomorrow.”

    “Bigger than Shanghai?” asked Hashtag, darkly. “Somehow I doubt that.”

    “I’d settle for page two,” Snow muttered, with a touch of guilt.

    “I told you, I caught your show,” repeated Hashtag. “I figured that The Skeptic would be all over the Moniker Men tomorrow morning. That’s why I called. I want to set the record straight. Would you like to play 20 questions, Miss Snow?”

    “Hourglass just told me that your people constantly lie to the world,” spat Snow, “And knowingly induce seizures to effect their memory. Why would I trust your side of the story?”

    “I could have removed your video myself,” Hashtag offered. “I’ve chosen not to do that.”

    Lie number one, he thought.

    “But you’ve already got the story out there, in front of millions of viewers now,” he continued. “And millions more tomorrow, when you’ve had a chance to write down your thoughts and order them into a Pulitzer-earning article. And I’m absent one time-stopper. So I’ve decided to come clean. One in, all in. The Moniker Men stand together. And if Hourglass is going to rip down the curtain, then we’re going to answer for our sins together.”

    Lie number two, he added.

    He looked up front his computer screen to watch footage of the alien attack. No one had filmed Gatekeeper’s attack. No one except Snow, that was. And none of them were on the scene now. He had a few minutes, a precious few minutes. They would close in on the ship soon. Soon, footage of the aliens would be on every screen in the world. He needed to get there first. He needed that information, before it got out all over the globe. The news was covering the devastation, getting a dead toll and reporting on the lack of emergency responders.

    Good, he thought. That’s what the news is for. Field agents, on the other hand…

    “And it wouldn’t have anything to do with tracing this call?” Snow wanted to know. “In order to find me and silence me before I finish off your organization?”

    “Hourglass has given you a very brutal picture of this world,” replied Hashtag. “We don’t do that sort of thing. This isn’t a mob movie. And at any rate, if I wanted to trace your location, I can only get as close as the nearest cell tower. Quite an area to search, in the middle of ground zero. There are endless possibilities for you to escape before I or any of the Moniker Men got anywhere close to you. We wouldn’t know that we’d missed you for a week.”

    That actually wasn’t a lie.

    Which is why he was calling her instead.

    “You called me at ground zero to grant me an interview,” summed Snow. “Are you serious?”

    “Can you think of a better time?” Hashtag countered. “Everything’s still fresh.”

    “Or I can choose not to listen to liars,” replied Snow, “And do something useful. Like get the full scoop on the very first contact with aliens. Starting with the ship that your people just left laying here, splattered in their blood.”

    Hashtag paused a beat. His mind’s eye replayed the footage of poor White Knight’s head disappearing. He shook his head and continued his call. This was too important to linger on such details.

    Thank you! He crowed. Move, you silly girl.

    “Or both?” he suggested. “You can walk and talk, can’t you?

    There was a pause on the line.

    “Pictures of the ship, words from me,” Hashtag said, spelling it out. “Even if all of my words are a complete lie, the other reporters will be green with envy.”

    He heard the echo as Snow’s phone went to speaker. That was fine. There was no one else close enough to hear it that could tear themselves away from the tragedy long enough to listen. And if he was lucky, she would connect it to a wireless headphone, so there was nothing to hear at all, from her side.

    “Fine,” came Snow’s answer. “Let’s hear it.”

    Greed, Hashtag sighed, shaking his head. Useful thing, sin.

    “What would you like to know, Miss Snow?” he asked. He kept one eye on the screen and waited for her to start taking photos that he could steal. If he was lucky, she would take a comprehensive video. And why wouldn’t she? She was alone with the world’s first alien invaders, with no one around for miles.

    “Let’s start at the beginning then,” Snow said. “Who created the Moniker Men?”

    Hashtag couldn’t resist.

    “You did,” he told her. “I have the article, to prove it. It was one of Gatekeeper’s favorites. I understand he wanted to get its words tattooed on his back at some point, but no one could figure out the logistics of breaking his skin.”

    He could practically hear her rolling her eyes.

    “I wrote the article that named you in the public eye,” Snow replied. “But I didn’t start the team. How did it happen? Some eccentric millionaire with too much time on his hands?”

    Hashtag thought about that for a moment. It brought back memories. No, the origin story of the Moniker Men was certainly nothing like that. In fact, as of yet, the Moniker Men had yet to see a single millionaire. Certainly some of their armor had come from millionaires: White Knight’s portal gear, Hourglass’ seizure equipment. But to call them “donated” by its rightful owners was generous.

    In fact, he thought to himself, That would be lie number three, wouldn’t it.

    “I started the Moniker Men,” Hashtag confessed. “That was a way back, in my college days. Ten years ago.”

    “Oh really?” asked Snow, skeptically. “What was your major?”

    “Predictive analytics,” Hashtag replied, more to head her off from telling frat boy jokes than anything else. “The two ideas are related. My major is what led me to believe that the world needed Moniker Men. I studied the history of tragedy and did more than my share of recreational drugs and I started to see patterns of many kinds jumping out: for example, the shining stories of heroes through American history. Stories, you know. Who can say if they’re true? But in the 40’s a moniker man might’ve been an alien who came from a doomed star to hide among us and protect us, to inspire us with his example. In the 60’s, a radioactive spider might have bitten a teenager and given him great powers and great responsibility. And now? In the 2020’s, it’ll probably be genetic engineering. At least, assuming there isn’t some new and anxiety-producing scientific advancement between now and then. But there was evidence for all of it, or so I thought.

    I can’t say for sure just how much of that was hallucinogenic speculation. Tragedy is always reliably there. And more often than not, the hero stories. But not always. It makes sense, really. Tragic circumstances being real and consistent, I mean, and people not always really showing up to save us from them. I still have the notebooks I filled. Sometimes I go through them, just for a laugh. So I created an algorithm, to track and ideally, to predict. I had a very eventful sophomore year.”

    It was odd, telling her. The only people who knew this story were the Moniker Men themselves.

    Truth number two, he thought, with a chuckle.

    “You mean like data mining?” asked Snow. Despite herself, she sounded interested. A little. Morbidly interested. Like wanting to know if touching a corpse felt fake, like it did in the movies. “Pattern recognition?”

    “Predictive modeling,” Hashtag added. “Machine learning. The works.”

    “If that’s the case, shouldn’t you have seen this coming?” demanded Snow. “Or are you as bad at pattern recognition as you are at saving the world?”

    “Who said I didn’t?” Hashtag replied. “I’ve tracking 1400 divergence points over the past three years. This had to be coming.”

    “And your plan was what?” demanded Snow, “Wait until it died down and buy cheap real estate here when it was all over?”

    “I created the Moniker Men,” Hashtag snapped impatiently. “Why don’t you do some predictive modeling of your own: if one ship can kill 15,000 earth men and two enhanced moniker men, what do you think the next wave is going to do?”

    Pause.

    “Next wave?”

    Now Snow sounded afraid, disoriented, and panicked.

    “Oh yes, Miss Snow,” Hashtag confirmed. “NASA’s saying it too. Everyone with a satellite in the sky can see them coming. And now the moniker team is down by three. Still feeling flippant?”

    “This isn’t an interview,” whispered Snow. “It’s an obituary.”

    “I want them to know the truth tomorrow,” Hashtag agreed. “If there is anyone left alive to know it.”

    He couldn’t decide if that was another lie, or another truth. Maybe a little of both.

    “What is the team going to do now?” Snow asked.

    Good question, Hashtag thought.

    “I need to find Gatekeeper and Hourglass, to regroup,” he replied. “Pull the team together and send them out again. I need to find them most desperately.”

    There was another long pause. For a second, Hashtag wondered why. He could hear Audrey breathing. It sounded like she was trying not to cry. He considered asking her another question, but decided that it was inappropriate. He would let her wait, let her grieve. Even if she hadn’t had a connection to Shanghai before the alien attack, she had one now. But she wasn’t panicking, or freezing up. Or at least, she wasn’t just panicking or freezing up. She was also taking pictures. He watched them pop up, saving them online, with layers of redundancy just in case. Phone, e-mail, Flutter. She backed them up everywhere.

    It was very fortunate for him that he had access to all of that, thanks to her uploading to Flutter, and the backdoor he installed in Flutter’s system. It was also very fortunate that as careful as Audrey was, she like most of Flutter’s users, downloaded updates to the app without figuring out what it was before she did it. He activated the newly installed app and located her phone in seconds. She was standing inside the ship, or at least as close as the GPS could reasonably position her. Then he entered her password, freshly stolen from her Flutter user information, and waited.

    He waited until she was done, thanking the fates that Audrey Snow was an excellent reporter and her data was going to give him all of the intel that he needed.

    Just imagine, he thought, If the woman that Hourglass had stopped to talk to had been one of those vapid internet models that had nothing to say between selfies.

    He collected it all carefully and prepared to delete the rest. Snow was still on the line, but he couldn’t have told for sure what she was thinking.

    At some point, he realized that she was speaking again, and he decided to allow her one more question.

    “Hashtag,” Snow began slowly, from some place in deep thought. “If the Moniker Men are liars and killers…if we can’t trust anything that you tell the media…if there really is another wave of aliens coming for us…can you save us? Even if all of that is true, there’s only one planet Earth, and presumably, you all do still want to see it keep spinning, even if you don’t care how many humans are standing on it to see the sun come back around. But if tragedy is consistent and you created a response team anyway…can you save us?”

    “Yes,” replied Hashtag. “We can.”

    Now then, Hashtag, he thought, as his fingers hovered over his computer mouse. Was that a lie or the truth?

    Then he remotely wiped her phone and everything on it.

    6,000 miles away, Audrey Snow was holding a very fancy paperweight, and only slowly realizing why.

    Hashtag, meanwhile, had to get to back to work. Neither Gatekeeper nor Hourglass were very active on Flutter. And he had intel to analyze.



*                      *                      *

            In an isolated outpost in a far-off galaxy, screens played the live feed of an alien force’s first landing party on a planet that had produced many beings of unimaginable power. However, no aliens were watching it. They had gotten bored and gone instead to their own personal devices. Maybe the next wave of the landing party would produce something interesting.