“Sorry, I am bad at telling stories,” Manny says. “Back then I was a staff member for Congresswoman Joffries, who was chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. It was a token chair position, a place where the house speaker often tossed someone they needed to keep happy, but didn’t want to offer too much power to. I’m proud of the work we did, even though it rarely got covered in the press. We worked with NASA, SETI, the National Science Foundation, labs and institutes all over the country. We coordinated with the other congressional committees to—”

Tanq makes an exaggerated yawning motion.

“Okay, I’ll get to the point. One of our SETI consultants approached the chairwoman with the most outlandish claim: Earth was receiving transmissions from an alien source.”

“Wait, stop,” says Tanq. “SETI?”

“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” Trey says. At her expression, he adds, “I know it sounds wack, but they’re cool. They use the search for extraterrestrial life as a framework to discover more about the origins of life in general.”

“Nerd,” she says, smiling.

“Trey has it right,” Manny says. “Their contributions to science, particularly in regard to exoplanets and astrobiology have been . . . well, I’ll be honest, I don’t understand all that. I just know that one day we aides went in for our daily morning briefing with Congresswoman Joffries, and instead of the usual meeting around the conference table, she ushered us downstairs into a SCIF . . . uh, that is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility . . . to tell us that our friends at SETI had made contact with a hostile alien civilization, and that the world would be ending in approximately seven years.”

We gape at him collectively. “You knew?” Trey says.

“Yes,” Manny says.

“Then why didn’t you tell anyone?” I ask, my voice coming out a little shrill. “We could have prepared, we could have stopped this from—”

Manny is shaking his head. “There was no stopping it,” he says.

“He’s getting to that part,” Wyatt says. “Be patient.”

“The Farmers were already here on Earth,” Manny says. “And they had already infected us with the virus. They were just waiting for it to spread to every living human on the planet before hitting the kill switch.”

“A ghost virus,” Trey says. “Like a prion. Engineered to spread undetected until it was time to murder everyone at once.”