“And you’re really hearing it in English?”

“Yes!” He gave her a goofy smile. “That thing in my ear—it’s a translator!”

She bit her lip, nodded. “Yeah, I got that much. What does it sound like though?”

He listened, as if sorting it out. “Like, uh, a very high, weird voice, except I’m actually hearing it form words in English. I mean, it’s funky, because it’s definitely not a human voice, but I can understand it.”

“And your ear doesn’t hurt?”

“No.” But he didn’t look thrilled to be reminded that he had a foreign body in his head. His brow cleared. “What amazing luck.”

He touched the metal sheet, and the alien characters shifted. Then his face closed up—she could see it, going from ecstatic to thoughtful to grim. Jill thought he was feeling the magnitude of what had just happened. She felt it, too.

“This changes everything, Nate.” Jill began to pace excitedly. “It’ll be easy to make contact with the aliens now. Damn. As for their technology—I wonder if we can find a computer that will talk to us? Can you imagine? If we can get it to read aloud, we could understand everything! And even barring that, after we make contact the aliens could—”

“Jill,” Nate said quietly. “That won’t be necessary.”

She stopped pacing. “Why not?”

“Because I’m seeing English as well.” His voice was numb.

“What?”

Nate reached out a tentative finger and pressed the screen. The screen changed again to a diagram. He laughed in a strangled voice and backed away from the monitor.

“Nate?”

He was laughing and crying at the same time, could hardly get the words out. “I p-pressed a button labeled… ‘directions’ and g-got a street grid. Our current position—” He doubled over with laughter, his face red. “Our current position is… marked: ‘You are here.’ Oh my god! ‘You are here’!”

“Nate, calm down.”

Jill didn’t—couldn’t—believe him. He had to be mistaken. And he was getting hysterical, and it was really scaring her.

She had the metal capsule she’d grabbed from Nate in her pocket and she’d known, from the moment when it had become clear what was going on, what she would do. Without a thought, she brought it out now and looked at it. His eyes widened.

“Jill, no!”

She didn’t even have to put the capsule in. As soon as her hand got close to her ear, the capsule slipped through her fingers and into her ear canal as if it were a living thing. It startled her, making her gasp. Her hands clenched at the very unpleasant sensation of the capsule traveling deeper, burrowing. It was all she could do not to scream. Then the movement stopped and she was left with a full, stuffed-up feeling in her ear that gradually began to fade.

Nate was watching her, wide-eyed. “Why did you do that? We have no idea if these things are safe or not, Jill. Goddamn it!”

She gave him a defiant glare and held up a hand. She strained to listen.

At first nothing changed; then she was hearing English. It was weird, like a switch being thrown, as if her brain always had been hearing English and she just hadn’t recognized it as such. Nate was right, the voice had a high tone, but the words were unmistakable. She felt a rush of joy and terror at it—how simple it was, how cleanly it worked. Now that was technology.

“Remember your duty, citizens. Report to the fertility clinic today.”

“It works!” She had a hard time keeping her legs under her. She grabbed his shoulder for support and stepped closer to the monitor. Nate pointed to the screen. At first she just saw the incomprehensible alien characters, but from one blink to the next she was seeing English. It was as abrupt and integral as the speech had been, and no matter how her eyes strained, she couldn’t see anything but English now. Unbelievable. Whatever that capsule was, it was altering the very sensory perceptions of her brain.

Nate pressed a button that was labeled: DIRECTIONS and a map came up. The fertility clinic was a few blocks away, marked in green. And there was a red dot labeled: YOU ARE HERE showing their current position.

“Do you see it?” Nate asked.

Jill nodded dumbly.

Nate barked a laugh. “Explain that, Jill. Explain that. This is like some sick freaking joke.”

“Nate—”

“Isn’t it? I mean, what—are we dead after all?”

“We’re not dead.”

“But this place is like a dreamworld! Everything we say, everything we want, and snap, it just happens. I feel like a rat in a maze! I mean this whole empty world, this feeling of being watched…” He backed away from the machine, scanning the buildings on either side of them, looking for Alien Funt again or perhaps Joseph Mengele.

Jill tried to remain calm, but her equilibrium was thrown off, too. She remembered how she had asked the computer at the spaceport to locate her equation, the universal wave equation, and based on no more information than that it had printed it out. And the blank emptiness of the City, almost like… what had she thought that first day? A movie set.

She shook her head angrily. “No. Why would someone go to the trouble of running us through a maze? This City doesn’t exist for our sake, Nate; I mean, it’s pretty damn vain for us to think so. ‘Any technology sufficiently advanced will seem like magic,’ remember?”

“I know that. And I can handle the audio translation and even, though god knows how they do it, the writing. But ‘You are here’? I mean, is this an alien planet or a shopping mall?”

She swallowed a lump in her throat. “Well… ‘You are here’, means pretty much what it says, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

“Why not ‘This is your present location’ or something? That’s a pretty big coincidence!”

Jill did find it freaky, but she would never admit it. “Well… any good translator program uses colloquialisms. Right? So it must be familiar with that particular colloquialism, that’s all. We don’t have the technology to do this kind of thing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.”

Her words seemed to be having some effect on Nate. He stopped trying to find hidden cameras in windows and sank down against a wall in a squat, head in his hands. “So why does this place give me such a creepy feeling?” He shuddered.

“You’re just not used to it.” Jill squatted down next to him.

They were quiet for a minute, but even in English, the alien voice was annoyingly distracting. She thought at the metal plate, telling it to shut up, and was relieved when it paid absolutely no attention to her.

“It really is all too easy, Jill. We needed food and water—we found them. What are the odds that the food the aliens eat would be suitable for us? Shelter has been no problem at all. I mean, there just happen to be hundreds of abandoned apartments in this City, unlocked, unguarded in any way.”

“Nate—”

“Then there are the aliens, right? Could be dangerous. Could be very dangerous. But not only haven’t they threatened us; they can’t see us at all. Or the spaceport—the power came on when we went in, including all the equipment in the control room. It didn’t have to. It clearly isn’t being used anymore. You ask the computer for a Hammurabi math code and presto! it gives you one. But even that’s not enough.” His voice was rising again. “The same day, I find a translator in the supply room and decide to hang on to it, and I hold it to my ear like an idiot. Presto, chango, I can hear alien speech! Then you say—”

“I get your point.”

“No, then you say maybe we can get the computers to talk to us and blink, I can read the alien script. We now have access to everything, Jill—absolutely fucking everything.”

“I know.”

“I mean— You’ve heard of ‘too good to be true’? There’s never been anything as ‘too good to be true’ as this. This is the paradigm, the quintessential, the Platonic ideal of ‘too good to be true’!”