Professional writer Jim Gotaas always manages to make a science fiction story come alive and be real. This story deals with an alien ship that has shown up. And so much more.

As I have said before, James’s stories are always amazing and different and powerful. This story, his eighth story in these pages, is no exception. For more about James, go to www.jimgotaas.com

Sara counted all the time. She couldn’t help it. The numbers gave her purpose.

Counted days up, since the alien ship had appeared over New York in 2039, simultaneous with the moment of her birth in an ambulance, minutes after her mother had died from an overdose. She knew the number of days by heart, carefully added one with each passing twenty-four hours.

Her internal bioware clock counted the minutes since that arrival, the minutes since her birth, again exactly the same, flashing figures constantly incrementing in a corner of her virtual field of view. After a while, she no longer even needed those figures to keep track, but she found them comforting.

Counted days down, until she was eighteen, and could escape.

Dead mother, no known father. Straight into the system. Even as a baby, she didn’t connect, didn’t like being held, being fed, just squirmed away. Nobody’s maternal instincts could break through her barriers.

As a child, she liked to be alone, playing with numbers, first just in her head, then on her smart tablet. She pushed away normal toys, ignored other children. Numbers were all that mattered. She smiled inside when they glowed, even numbers green, odd numbers blue, and then the special numbers, the gold and the red and the silver.

She was slow to speak. She didn’t need words when the numbers filled her.

She discovered the magic of base twelve arithmetic and played with the multiple factors. She saw sequences, first in one dimension, then along multiple axes.

She was seven before she understood the special numbers, understood her connection to the alien ship. She saw a picture of the ship and her mind seemed to explode. She instinctively understood the ratios of the sizes of the various surfaces, saw the numbers reflected in the physical construction. She grasped the connection between those numbers and the height of the ship above the ground, and she saw the patterns in the timing of flickering displays.

The ship was a physical manifestation of the numbers in her head. Its existence couldn’t be chance, the connection had to be real.

From then on, she had her purpose. She finally found a use for language: to learn about the aliens and their ship.

She ran away from the foster families, trying to reach the aliens. People always caught her, brought her back. Eventually, the fostering system gave up and transferred her to a secure residential care center.

She kept running away, always brought back, but always with an additional dynamic tattoo cycling on her skin, a new sigil of alien words or images. She already knew the back streets where strange tattoos were done, paid for them with stolen cash or sex. Stealing was hard, because it meant moving into a temporary relationship with the target. Sex was easy, even when it hurt, because it happened outside of her, it never touched the inner core, the unceasing parade of numbers.

Nobody liked her. So what? Fuck their stupid rules and ideas, fuck their group activities. She just sat and kept her mouth shut and her eyes closed, watching her life counting up. The other youths didn’t care for her, and she didn’t care for them. What use were they? They had no purpose, no reason for existence, no idea where they belonged.

By fourteen, they gave up on her at the center as well, stuck her with a control implant. No more running away, not with that monitor buried in her skull, always waiting to paralyze her muscles, transmit a warning to the residential system. So she stayed there physically, but prowled the web, both the sites that the IT staff knew about and the dark sites that held the real good stuff.

The keepers didn’t understand. They hadn’t experienced that moment of euphoria, the sudden realization about the numbers, that it wasn’t just a coincidence that she’d been born prematurely just as the ship appeared to humans. The ship had called to her, even still in the womb, called her forth, called her into the harsh human world, so she could be ready to join them. They gave meaning to her, and she would give meaning to them.

Released after school hours, she refused to leave her small room at the residential center. She kept it dim and cool, the way the aliens liked it. She filled her room with scents that didn’t belong to the human world: the mix of pungent sweetness that hid an acid taint, the scent that filled the atmosphere around the alien ship. A three-dimensional model of the alien ship hung in the center of her room, just below the ceiling, slowly revolving, displaying every facet, flashing every unknown glyph and indecipherable message that had ever appeared on the surface in the past eighteen years.

Three-D posters projected different views of the aliens that had appeared, no two the same. She studied them avidly, concentrating on every biological feature, every element of their bodies and clothing. She saw the constant geometric ratios of their physiques, whether they were short or tall, and how their voices interwove with movements of their four fingers and two thumbs.

Alien sounds echoed, a soundtrack downloaded from the Internet, every sound that had emerged from the ship or an individual alien, mashed together, running in a constant dynamic remix. Already she could almost understand those sounds. She could sense patterns, numeric sequences, numbers hiding behind the tones. If she could only reach the aliens, it would all be clear.

Deep inside, waiting to emerge, she knew the key to communication with the aliens.

Years passed, and the numbers became more real than the walls that surrounded her. She saw new patterns, new meanings, new ways of combining the numbers. The fragments of alien language revealed their patterns.

To cope with the demands of people, she constructed a human translation system: when the eyes did this, the person often did that. When the face moved in that way, a certain class of words followed. She mapped human appearances and behavior onto a landscape of numbers. She still didn’t feel anything, but she could react to others when she felt like it, could react in ways that didn’t provoke them.

She reacted to an IT tech’s hesitant approach, traded oral sex for a way to fool the system monitors, a way to stay private in her room.

She reached an arrangement with one of the female keepers: sex in exchange for parcels delivered secretly to her room. Then she learned how to use tatbots and added to her skin collection.

She started a darkweb blog and sold answers to stupid questions about the aliens, sold images of her naked body covered with alien signs, sold anything that idiots wanted, storing the generated e-cash away from prying eyes in off-shore cyberbanks.

Finally, counted down to zero: Thursday, March 15^th, 2057, midnight.

Personal freedom.

No alarm, she couldn’t have slept. She was already dressed.

She sent the residential security system a request to disable her control implant. It counted the same days that she did, and recognized her new freedom, paid for with the simple currency of time. The almost unheard hum at the back of her mind finally quieted permanently.

Out of her room, down the stairs. All her possessions in a dark gray knapsack, her wallet tucked inside her blouse, all the money that she’d been given, earned, or simply stolen since she had realized what she needed to do.

She’d already wiped from her memory everyone inside that building, everything that had happened, everything she’d done.

She was on her way.

Sara had only seen pictures and virtual displays of the ship hanging in the sky above New York City. The reality was disappointing. It was so much larger than her, it was hard to see the numbers dance. Was she wrong? Where was the connection?

Then she focused on just one surface, watched it change, watched the changes follow the familiar patterns, watched numbers given physical existence. Yes. The ship was the other end of a bridge from her inner self. The ship was waiting for her.

Were they as impatient as she was? Did they know she was there? Had they been watching down the years, waiting for the moment when Sara was ready to fully understand the numbers?

She dropped her knapsack at her waist and just stared up at the ship.

“I’m here,” she whispered.

Nothing happened.

“I’m here.”

Still nothing. Her fingers began dancing, her imitation of alien movements.

Come on, it’s time.

Her lips started twitching, slowly began to move with the silent shaping of alien words, in time with her fingers. Ignore time, ignore doubts. She was there and they would recognize her. The dance of her lips and fingers picked up pace, bordering on frenzy, demanding attention. The silence became the alien sounds that she struggled to reproduce.

Sara was oblivious to the people who walked past.

Rain came, but she didn’t notice, except to blink more.

Eventually, people came and talked at her, tried to move her. She shrugged them off, just kept staring and speaking to the ship. Others came, surrounded her, gently touched her arms. She jerked and pushed them away. They became more insistent, and she slapped them. They kept grabbing at her and she started blindly flailing, trying to keep the ship in view as she struggled.

No, I can’t stop, can’t go anywhere, can’t do anything else. This is where I belong, this is where I need to be.

Finally, hands and arms gripped her firmly. She started kicking. A soft, cool pressure against her neck, and everything went away.

“Sara.” The man’s soft word woke her.

Sara was lying on her side, curled up. Ignore the voice, open the eyes, see a pale green wall. Too warm, an antiseptic sting to the air. Softness underneath her bony hip.

“Sara.”

Ignore the word, maybe they’ll go away. Watch the numbers flicker. Eighteen years, sixteen hours, twenty-two minutes.

9,461,982 minutes.

“My name is Mateo. I know you’re awake. I know you’re conscious because I’m linked to your bioware.”

“Not legal,” Sara forced out.

Softly, “It is when the subject is being held for examination.”

“Not a subject.”

The voice wouldn’t go away. “I’m afraid you are. Will you look at me?”

“Let me go. They’re waiting for me.”

“The aliens have been there for eighteen years. They’re still there. They’ll be there tomorrow. It would help if you would look at me.”

Sara jerked her head back and forth, a sudden, violent rejection.

“Let me go.”

“If you want to see the ship again, you need to look at me.”

Sara twisted, turned her head, stared at the man. He was big and fat and Hispanic. She analyzed his numbers. No, he wouldn’t settle for sex. He was one of the caring ones. She concentrated on his appearance, searching for clues about what would satisfy him, make him let her go. The numbers danced, but didn’t reveal his truths.

Another try. “Can I go now?”

Headshake, wobbling double chin. “Not yet. We need to talk.”

“I’m eighteen. I don’t have to stay at that place anymore.”

“That’s true. But that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want.”

“I just…need to be there. Need to be ready when they…need me.”

He ran chubby fingers through short-cropped black hair. “Are you sure about that?”

Sara just nodded.

“Because the ship came and you were born on the same day?”

Sara stared at him.

“Yes, I know. I have your records. I know what you’ve said over the years.”

“Not just the same day. The same minute of that day. Probably the same second, if they’d recorded that.”

“But it could be just a coincidence. There are roughly ten babies born every minute in the US.”

No. She had the connection. The numbers stretched from her to the ship.

“You like numbers?”

Sara frowned. What did like have to do with it? Numbers were there, numbers were the core of everything.

“You’re not the first.”

“First what?”

Gently: “You’re not the first person to come to the ship. Not the first person to feel a connection. There have been thousands.”

“Not like me.”

Mateo shrugged. “Perhaps not. Of course, everyone is different in some respect. But is that difference significant?”

He was trying to confuse her. She looked back at the wall and started reciting her favorite alien words, creating a barrier, protecting her from his doubt.

“Sara, can you admit that you might be wrong? Can you understand that the aliens didn’t cause your birth, didn’t form a connection when you were born? That they’re not waiting for you? The aliens haven’t directly communicated with anyone since their arrival. They just hang there and send out their strange messages.”

She put her hands over her ears. If she ignored him, he’d go away.

“How long would you wait for them, Sara?”

For as long as she had to.

“How long, Sara?”

For as long as it took. The numbers couldn’t lie, they couldn’t be wrong, not like people. She could be patient. If the aliens weren’t ready for her, she could wait. She could study more, she could learn more. She could find the deeper symmetries that still lay hidden from her gaze. She could become exactly the person the aliens wanted and needed.

The numbers tumbled in their alien patterns. She knew. They would come for her when the numbers were right. She could wait.

She would wait.