Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 3: "In & Out"

This one’s a summary of various conversations Oliver Row and Sia ended up having on various social media platforms, which as a signature element of the era must at some point be normalized, and so the summary of what happened to reach the exchanges would look ordinary enough to contemporary readers:

     Girl goes online looking for answers, and finds them, or thinks she does, chasing down rumor, lies, conjecture, whatever seems convincing, and eventually finds someone (Oliver) she thinks is worth talking with about all of it, since they seem to know things…

     “Wait, wait, wait,” she wrote (forget what she calls herself, what he calls himself), “try starting from the beginning again.  Pretend I don’t know anything.”

     “You really don’t,” he wrote.  “No offense.”

     “None taken,” she wrote.  “Probably.”

     “If you’re going to trust me on any of this, it’s just easier to assume you don’t,” he wrote, “because you really can’t.  You have no idea.  Unfortunately I know a whole lot.”

     “That’s what they all say,” she wrote.

     “And yet you choose to trust me,” he wrote.

     “Or so I want you to believe,” she wrote.

     “You can’t kid a kidder,” he wrote.  “I practically wrote the book on it.”

     “So you keep telling me,” she wrote.  “Quit stalling or I’m just going to assume you’re yet another dead end.”

     “I wish,” he wrote.  “House Argos, the thing you learned about that led you to me, the term you kept seeing pop up, the conspiracy of all conspiracies.”

     “I don’t even care about the rest of them,” she wrote.

     “You shouldn’t,” he wrote.  “They’re all nonsense, just ways ordinary lives try and pretend they’re extraordinary.  There’s nothing quite like secret knowledge to spice up ignorance.”

     “You’re still stalling,” she wrote.

     “Character limits,” he wrote.

     “That can mean multiple things,” she wrote.

     “You’re probably right,” he wrote.

     “Just promise me this isn’t a sex thing,” she wrote. 

     “Never asked for a picture, never going to send one,” he wrote.  “I don’t have any of the good ones anyway.  I’m as Earthbound as the next guy.  That’s kind of the whole point.”

     “So you keep saying,” she wrote.

     “I wish it weren’t true!” he wrote.  “Nobody here has spaceships capable of anything truly amazing.  We’re just trying to get to Mars, right?  Dreaming of colonies in the neighborhood.  These guys, they’re off in deep space.”

     “House Argos?” she wrote.

     “The aliens,” he wrote.  “The actual aliens.  I’m told they’re offended if they learn we call them that, though.  But if I told you any, you’d think it was just gibberish.  No way to verify.  You’re not the first to come poking.  We don’t invite strangers.”

     “Yet here we are,” she wrote.  “I guess I’m just too charming.”

     “Sometimes persistence really is key,” he wrote. 

     “You’ve called it pestering on more than one occasion,” she wrote.  “Your honesty is sometimes more direct than other times.”

      “We get all kinds of crazy,” he wrote, “as you might imagine.  House Argos is older than anything else I’ve ever heard about, much less been a part of.  If I told you my history, we’d be here all day.  House Argos, though, you might say, is the original telephone, the first line of communication across vast differences.  I’m told the technology they used in the beginning was so radical it was indistinguishable from magic, as they tend to say about revolutionary science.  Lost to history, of course, some of those lost civilizations that leave nothing for anthropologists to comb, nothing for museums to display.  Sometimes we underestimate just how long human history is.”

     “Or we have old people blabbering,” she wrote, “and that makes us forget.  And fall asleep.”

     “It’s old, suffice to say,” he wrote.  “It’s been searching the stars for longer than most of humanity knew what stars were, when the bulk of our curiosity was trying to navigate by them, both literally and metaphorically.  When we thought the stars were magic.”

     “Hey, I’m into that kind of stuff, too,” she wrote.

     “I’ll bet,” he wrote.  “It doesn’t matter.  The point is, House Argos is humanity’s oldest and best bet to learn the truth of what’s out there.”

     “And you know all this because you’re a member,” she wrote.

     “Precisely,” he wrote.

     “And you were interested in me because of all the genealogy research I’d been doing,” she wrote.  “You were spying on me, my search history, before I ever found you.”

     “Our interests are extensive,” he wrote.  “They have to be.  Our knowledge of history is extensive, a bit more than the average.  When someone goes around digging for certain terms…”

     “Such as Duende,” she wrote.

     “Of course you knew,” he wrote.  “That’s why we were so interested.  I’d like to accept personal responsibility, but you started as an assignment.”

     “I’m flattered,” she wrote.

     “You should be,” he wrote.

     “But someone told you to,” she wrote.

     “I would’ve been happy to drop it if you hadn’t proved to be so insightful,” he wrote.

     “Still trying to get in my pants,” she wrote.

     “Listen,” he wrote.  “It proves nothing to admit I know what you look like, and everything to suggest you and I will likely never meet.”

     “Other than using the internet’s basic anonymity to chicken out,” she wrote.

     “You and I both know you don’t mean that,” he wrote.  “But I appreciate that you keep trying.”

     “If I hadn’t passed your little test, you mean to say, you would’ve just ghosted me,” she wrote.

     “Easiest thing to do in this day and age,” he wrote.

     “But you decided otherwise,” she wrote, “because I happened to know a certain name, which you still haven’t explained, and because you found me so darn charming.”

     “In a manner of speaking,” he wrote.  “Listen, I don’t mean for you to take any of this lightly.”

     “Is that some kind of threat?” she wrote.

     “Not from me,” he wrote.  “Not from House Argos.”

     “I’ll just take the word of a stranger who keeps assuring me we’ll never meet,” she wrote.

     “Don’t be glib,” he wrote.  “There are limits even for us.  We’re traders in information.”

     “But not sharers,” she wrote.

     “Again, there would be no way for you to verify anyway,” he wrote.

     “Convenient,” she wrote.

     “You’re the one who went digging,” he wrote.  “Sometimes you’re bound to find something.”

     “You,” she wrote, “and this House Argos nonsense.”

     “I wish,” he wrote.  “If what we suspect happens, everyone will know.”

     “Ooh,” she wrote.  “Ominous.  And vague.”

     “Invasion,” he wrote.  “Probably within the next decade or so.  Believe me, you won’t be able to miss it.  You’ll wish you had.  All of us will.  If it doesn’t sound too condescending, I’m trying desperately to preserve your innocence, here.”

     “Well, that was a failure,” she wrote.

     “I’m truly sorry,” he wrote.