“Wake up, sleepyhead.” She lay with the white duvet and sheets gently curled around her in the morning sun. I sat down next to her, and she stirred at the smell of the coffee in my hand, making a sort of ‘mmmm’ sound.
“I made breakfast and coffee, come downstairs if you want any, honey.”
A few minutes later, I heard the gentle creaking of the floorboards in the rustic home. Jenny yawned, and opened the wood stove to add a log. Outside, the green countryside was a mix of grass and heather, green contrasting the blue sky and white clouds. Highland cattle grazed lazily in the spring sunlight, with long horns and shaggy reddish hair drooping over their eyes. My gaze couldn’t help but to fix on that unnatural shape, the colossal construction, a ship I guess you would call it, looming gray over the horizon. As one of the picturesque puffy white clouds drifted in front of it, the size of the thing was unfathomable. Somewhere between here and Glasgow, it hovered impossibly in the air, disappearing into space if you tried to look for the top of it.
Pushing it out of my mind, I asked Jenny if she’d like to go for a walk. Our spaniel Merry was doing circles at the door before I even got up from the table, and tugged hard at the leash as I opened the door. I suppose I could have trained her better, but she only weighed about ten kilos, so it hardly mattered. We made our way down Innes Street, waving at an old man driving his red Saab that slowed down to near walking pace as he passed us. It was a sleepy little town, even calmer these days.
I had checked that it would be low tide, letting us make our way out to the small island that had a path submerged by the tide most of the day, but was now passable if you didn’t mind mud and rocks. The smell of the bay at low tide was nostalgic, although somewhat foul if you really focused on it. It didn’t bother me any, I had too many fond memories of coming here summers in my childhood, playing in that mud. Standing on the small hill covered in shrubs and mostly surrounded by seawater, we peered at Duncraig Castle, the other side of the bay. Jenny said we should walk to it, and I agreed.
Once we were away from the town, I let Merry off her leash and threw a stick into the low, lazy waves. She exuberantly fetched it each time, and carried it with us the whole way to the ‘castle’, if you could call it that. It was a semi-abandoned late 19th century mansion, with a flock of sheep grazing on the lawn out front.
“I hope she’s happy.” Jenny said, eyes back on the ship. It towered past the town, back the way we had come from.
“I couldn’t tell you if she was or wasn’t, even if she was standing here now.” I could hear the anger, the bitterness in my voice, and regretted it. I pictured her beautiful hair, golden-tanned skin and shining blue eyes. “I hope she’s happy too.”
Jacqueline had been an ‘oops’ baby for us. Jenny was forty when we got pregnant. We’d tried ten years before, but after talking to a fertility doctor had never pursued IVF. I couldn’t tell you why we never did. Possibly because some things weren’t going well between us, possibly stress in general, or just how busy we both were with work. I was a pediatrician, and Jenny worked in marketing. When we found out for sure she was pregnant, we were shocked.
The pregnancy was hard on Jenny and our relationship, but when Jacqueline was born, we loved her instantly. I’ll never forget seeing her beautiful golden skin, the full head of hair, and the vibrant blue eyes when the doctor handed her over. I will also never forget the guarded expression on the doctor’s face, how tentative it was. There was no doubt that she was one of the ‘golden ones’, as they called them.
The very first one to be born was in India, and had been a huge news story. A beautiful boy born with a full head of long, blond hair, shining blue eyes, and impossibly golden skin. Geneticists were baffled, and many people hailed it as the incarnation of this or that deity. Then another child was born in Brazil the next day, then more and more of them, all over. Conspiracies, superstitions and in some cases pure fear spread as the golden babies became more and more common.
Their temperament was always mild, and they rarely cried. Then, as they grew up, they all acquired language at a shocking rate. Most of them could speak and read by age two, and displayed high intelligence combined with a sort of social aversion. They didn’t mind company, and were almost always polite and considerate, but they often preferred to be alone. More disturbingly, they seemed to much prefer their own kind over ours.
In retrospect, it’s easy to think we loved Jacqueline because we were supposed to. There was a long time, perhaps years after she left, where I felt betrayed, used. I felt like a fool, like a rat fallen into a trap. I tried to hate Jacqueline, to hate all of them. That’s an easy way to feel when you realize your child doesn’t need you, and is better off without you. Even when she was born, over 30% of all infants were ‘golden’. It was clear something was happening, but no one knew what.
There was always this or that new paper, with some new genetic element identified, hypothesizing that x implied y. The politics of it were such a nightmare that we couldn’t really manage our lives and raising a child while trying to decipher what was real from what was sensationalized in the news. We just went about it as any parent would, trying to do the best we could. I remember punching a man, John Stratton, in the face when Jacqueline was in third grade because he yelled at me, saying he didn’t want his daughter in a class with mine.
I had my arguments with her, and acted in ways I shouldn’t have. Even now, knowing what I know, I should have been a better father. When the anger wells up in me, the anger at her leaving, I can’t blame her for it. That’s the worst part. The more I think about it, the less I can blame her.
Jenny squeezed my hand. I let out a long breath, and focused back on the world, on the blue sky, clouds and the muddy bay and Merry sniffing something or other on the ground.
“There doesn’t have to be a reason for everything.” She looked at me, and I looked back at her. Really looked. My eyes began to water, I’ll admit. I loved her so much, through everything we had been through, good and bad.
“You always want to explain everything.” She sighed, and it was half lost in the breeze and the sound of waves.
“Everything has to happen because of something else, it all has to fit together like a puzzle. I admire it, it made you a great doctor. But it’s not how the world works. Things don’t have to make sense. There was one person ever recorded to be hit by a meteorite, and there was no reason it was them and not someone else, no reason it didn’t go a meter to the side and miss them completely.”
“The person was dramatically overweight though, which kind of makes sense if you think about statistics and surface area and whatnot.” I couldn’t help myself.
“Harry, you’re a little shit, and you always will be.” She smiled and the wind blew her gray bangs around, and I could not have loved her more.
I had tried to explain Jacqueline’s obsession with reading as a child, at least to explain it to myself. When she was eight, I demanded to see what she was looking at day and night. It was something resembling English, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. I read it over and over, and gave up. I asked her what it meant, and she tried to tell me. Still, I can’t forgive myself for yelling at her, for saying that it made no sense. For interrogating about who wrote it, and eventually finding that it was another one of the golden children. Well, not specifically one, I guess they would sort of all write things and add and change them in real time. It wasn’t a forum as I recognized it, but I guess some of them had coded it to show changes over time, and anyone could change anything. I was angry because I couldn’t understand it, this mass of ever changing alien words and ideas.
“For so long, I tried to forgive her. Can you believe that?” I smiled, a bittersweet smile. Merry was completely oblivious to my expression, but Jenny knew it well.
“I did, too.” She pulled at the stick in Merry’s mouth, the brown and white fur smile eventually giving the treasure up so that it could once again be reacquired from the shallow waves.
“But there was nothing to forgive. That’s where we failed her.” She said, a sadness in her voice.
I thought about Jacqueline, about her going to university. It seemed that all of the goldens went to uni, if only to interact with each other. That was a terrifying turn of events for so many of us, the seemingly instant unification the goldens had with each other as adults, their solidarity and common goals. Ubiquitously, they were environmentalists. All of them were pacifists, all of them liberal. They paid their taxes, but they seemed to resent everything about capitalism, about our society, about humans. We just couldn’t understand why or how they were different.
The awakening came to us all at once. When the first ship arrived and the goldens all acted as if they were ambassadors to these aliens. Things began to make sense, then. The reason that two thirds of all children born were now golden, the reason that they had communication we couldn’t understand, the reason that… I hate to admit it, even now. The reason that they were better than us.
I wouldn’t say that I ever imagined an alien invasion. If I did, it was based on movies or books, and I guess I assumed that it would be violent. That there would be fighter jets and flying saucers, or some type of nuclear holocaust. I don’t know. I didn’t picture this. I didn’t picture this planned, peaceful takeover. I didn’t picture the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, my girl, being one of them. I tried not to love her, but it’s pointless. I do.
If I try to tell myself that I’m a rat in a trap, that I only need to be smarter, it doesn’t work. What they’ve given Jacqueline, what they’ve even given to Jenny and me is a better future. I can’t deny it. More peaceful, more sustainable, less tribalist and small-minded. People want to take up arms, sure. Rockets, even actual missiles have been fired at the ships, but to no effect. There’s really no stopping them, at this point. Perhaps with another aeon of technology and putting every golden to death when they were born, it would have been possible. But it’s not, now. They won before they even got here.
We walked back home, the late afternoon sun a welcome guest on the Scottish coast. The cows still ate, the clouds still drifted, the grass still grew. Whatever tragedy or disaster people tried to portray this as, it wasn’t. It was just a change. I couldn’t help but notice the shadow of the ship on the high clouds, and wonder about the beings that had built it. No one had ever seen them, and a part of my imagination wondered if they even had bodies. They must, but it probably facilitated an easier transition for us not to see them, for the dumb humans not to have a strange face to rally against. It was surely one of many smart, well-planned decisions leading to a successful transition.
When we walked up our gravel drive, a new electric car was in the driveway. Jenny and I looked at each other, and our steps quickened. We rarely had visitors, and if we did, they were announced. Jacqueline sat on the front steps, painted even deeper gold by the late afternoon sun. She wore a black coat I had gotten her for her birthday years earlier.
“Mom, dad.” She said in a soft voice, getting up to hug us each in turn. I couldn’t help myself, a tear rolled down my cheek and dripped off my chin. I don’t remember what exactly we said, something like ‘how are you’ or ‘I’ve missed you’.
“Can you stay for dinner? We’ve got a roast I can make.” Jenny asked, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice.
“Of course Mom.” She said. Jenny and I hugged her again. It had been almost a year since we had seen her.
She had brought a bottle of wine, something Spanish. The dark red went perfectly with the roast, and she asked all about Merry and us. Asked how we were liking retirement. I wish we had more to tell her about than our various doctor’s appointments and dull battles with ailments that were bothersome but not urgent, and unlikely to improve. Such is the nature of old age.
After dinner, a silence came over the small table. We could ask what she was doing, what she was working on, but we wouldn’t understand it. Every year or so we tried, but now it seemed futile. I took a sip of the wine, the last of my glass, and found more tears coming out of my eyes. Trying to steady my voice, I eventually spoke.
“Are you happy, dear?” My voice cracked. I sounded old. I was old. “I mean, are you doing what you want to?”
“I am, Dad.” Tears ran down the perfect gold of her cheeks, a gentle rim of red shone around her blue eyes. “ And I love you, too.”