I told them I was an alien, and when they refused to believe me, I told them it didn’t matter, because the invasion was going to happen anyway: believe it or not, I was telling the truth, and when our motherships darkened the skies, they would have to deal with the consequences of their disbelief.

Not that I can prove it. I said I was the vanguard of an invading species of intelligent alien plants—I’ve always been very clear about that—and yet I looked human, sounded human, walked like a human, and had human bodily needs. I ate, I slept, I caught colds and twisted my ankles and did everything else a real human would do. I couldn’t even photosynthesize, despite spending the entire summer when I was ten trying to figure out how. I’m an ordinary thirty-five-year-old woman. I just happen to be an ordinary thirty-five-year-old woman who’s been talking about the alien invasion for the last thirty years.

As personal quirks go, it’s not the strangest. And it means I always have something to talk about at parties. Lucas thinks I’m a little nuts, but his girlfriend lets her lizards roam freely through her apartment, so he tries not to judge. Mandy doesn’t care one way or another. I think she’s hoping I’ll be proven right one day, just so she can see the looks on everyone’s faces when they realize they had thirty years of warning, and chose to do nothing.

The waffles were delicious. It was time to get ready for our day.

2.

Being the vanguard of an invading species of alien plant people doesn’t get me special privileges on the bus. I sat crammed between a man who seemed to think he needed to occupy my seat as well as his own, and a teenager who was trying to cover up their lack of a shower with about a gallon of cologne. I sneezed, earning myself a dirty look from the man with the spreading knees, as if I had done it solely to annoy him. I smiled sweetly in his direction.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m only allergic to manspreading.”

He moved his knee away from mine.

That helped. I was still way too confined, but at least now I wasn’t fighting a losing battle to retain my seat.

The tech industry had already put Seattle in the middle of a massive population boom when the rising ocean levels became less something for pundits to argue about and more the reason San Francisco was experiencing sudden, catastrophic flooding events. They didn’t have enough rain in California, but they had tsunamis washing into the Financial District. Silicon Valley fared better but still had to contend with rising temperatures—a new record every summer, as the previous summer faded from “the hottest on record” to “I wish it could be that cool again”—and constant wildfires.