Witness [A First Contact Romance]

15. Love & Hate

Earth

2019

The cyber attack on the base hadn't made the news or managed to damage the military whatsoever. It had only managed to make Rory's life that much harder as security tightened severely.

The US successfully hid the attack, even though her friends had questioned what happened to make Rory go offline suddenly. She'd excused it as a false alarm, not wanting to give attention to their attackers. The weeks following that attack brought more attempts, each thwarted.

The prison walls closing in on Rory only grew taller. A full three months had passed before she was allowed to leave the base, and only then to attend a panel at the Whitehouse to discuss the issue of her human rights. During those few months, though no international military attacks had been successful, the cultural division worsened. It seemed that the world was in a slow motion free fall that might never end.

Conspiracy theories abounded while violence increased–not only at protests but even just in public spaces. Everyone vied for dominance and Rory was at the center of it all.

Ironically, that landed her isolated in her home on the base, with her access to the internet a shadow of what it had once been.

Time crawled as the world struggled to deal with the aftermath of first contact and the painful silence that met all the questions they had.

As the two year mark of Rory first appearing in the desert approached, she had finally managed to accept that this was her life now. For all the time she'd spent thinking about what she'd lost, the danger the Earth faced, how she didn't want to be responsible for the downfall of an entire planet, she'd paid little regard for herself as a person.

It was always Theo who pushed her to start caring for herself. Even after she'd made friends in the base and developed a social life beyond her computer screen, still he told her that she needed to think about what she wanted in life.

As if her life would ever be her own again.

At some point as a whole world full of people tugged on her in all directions, Rory had decided that she couldn't do it anymore. Theo was right. Rory was alive and it was time acting like it.

The grief buried beneath her lack of self-consideration had burned for many days, because starting a new life here on Earth felt like abandoning whatever she'd left behind on her old world. She'd never truly be welcomed here. This was not the kind of life anyone would choose for themselves. It didn't change reality, though.

Rory could live or she could waste away into nothing.

So when she honestly thought about what she wanted and what would make her happy, she'd known immediately. And that was what had led Rory to lying on the ground in the middle of her living room with a dark crate right in front of her.