Sabino has not given any comment to the press after the photo was taken, but did give an interview on The Hot Seat with Satomi Mack on Friday advocating against the Third Option. One specific remark Sabino made has drawn attention, in which Mack asked her to describe some personality traits of the ETI she had interactions with and Sabino responded, “He likes the ocean.”

Some speculate on social media that one of the two ETIs in the photo and the one Sabino is describing are the same.

“I’ve already seen conspiracies about mind control, but based on her expression in the picture alone, I don’t believe it,” wrote Facebook user Claire Salz. “You can’t mind control the fear on her face. What it looks like to me is that she threw herself between the alien and the gun, because she knew the alien, and she wanted to protect it.”

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Cora jerked her head up, having almost nodded off again. She checked her phone—it had turned into Monday at some point and was now around 5:00 a.m. Go home, they said. Get some sleep. If she went home, it was nightmares. It was nightmares here, too, but the sleep was so thin and halting that she generally woke from them before too long, roused by the clacking of shoes in the hallway or by human voices.

She looked down at Ampersand, still roosting in the same position he’d stayed in for the last few days—limbs tucked under him, head on the floor and tilted at a ninety-degree angle, dark, unfocused eyes half-lidded. They’d brought in a foam top for a mattress to act as bedding, but that was the only material situation that had improved. It was still too fucking bright, still too fucking cold. He wasn’t responding. His mental processes were tapped out. He was done.

Did I do this to you? The horror of the situation had been bad enough, and the memory of it was both foggy and painful at the same time, but how much had one’s fear amplified the other’s?

Did my terror filtering into you do this to you?

She brushed her fingers along the ridge over his eye, along the crest on the back of his head. Those were sensory organs, she now knew, designed for picking up electromagnetic waves and sound. Normally, if she touched them, there was some reflex, like a touch-me-not plant that closed its leaves when touched, they would contract a little. But now the air around his body was so thick, the shield so strong. There was no reflex.

How much of this is me? How much of this is you?

It didn’t matter, she knew. What was done was done, and besides, she knew it was happening organically inside both of them—neither was making the other be like this.