Welcome to Night Vale - 162 - Alpha

Episode Date: February 15, 2020

Amelia Anna Alfaro was always the best at everything. (Part 1 of 5) Weather: “Skinchanger” by Skeptic skepticdeath.bandcamp.com Just announced: our 13-city book tour for The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home! Come see Joseph and Jeffrey out on the road this spring. Plus, we’re sending out exclusive patches and an art print to folks who pre-order the novel! Check out all of the details on our website: http://www.welcometonightvale.com/books/ Our 2020 World Tour has a name: “The Haunting of Night Vale.” Our host, Cecil, and his beautiful scientist husband Carlos are building a new house for themselves, but strange occurrences and ghostly encounters are plaguing the construction process. It's probably nothing. After all, how could a house be haunted before it's even done being built? Get your tickets today: http://welcometonightvale.com/live Music: Disparition http://disparition.info Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin.  http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents.  http://nightvalepresents.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy y'all. It is Jeffrey Craneer. I'm not sure which episode of Welcome to Nightville you're listening to, but I am speaking to you from April of 2026, and I'm here to tell you we're going to be in Europe. If you want to see Nightville live and you're going to be in Europe, come check us out at the end of May. We're going to be in Edinburgh on May the 27th. We will be in Manchester on the 28th, London on the 29th, and Amsterdam on May the 30th. Just go to Welcome to Nightville.com slash live to see the show dates and to get your tickets. This is. our newest Nightville live show Murder Night in Blood Forest. It is so much fun. Please come check it out. Also, coming up this month here in April, it is the return of Alice Isn't Dead, brand new episodes of our other crazy hit podcast. This is written by Joseph Fink, produced and with music by Dysperition and starring Jacique and Nicole. So make sure you are still subscribed to Alice Isn't Dead and go get those on April the 13th as new episodes come out. Finally, speaking of other shows, do you want to hear us talk about other things? things. We have three other really great chat shows. First of all, there's Good Morning Nightvale for all of your Nightvale needs. You can hear Hal, Meg, and Symphony talk about every single

episode in order of Welcome to Nightvale. Also, we have Random Horror Number Nine. That is me and Nightville star Cecil Baldwin talking about horror movies one at a time in a random order. And then Joseph and Meg do best, worst, which is a really fun podcast where they look at hit TV shows and they review the best rated on IMDB, the worst rated on IMDB, and if you're a Patreon member, they will review the middleest rated on IMDB. So check out all of those at nightfallpresents.com or just wherever you get your podcast. And hey, thanks. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Fear makes the heart grow louder. And death makes the heart grow flowers. Welcome to Nightvale. Amelia Anna Alfaro was always the best at everything. On the day she was

born, she was named the healthiest baby at Nightvale General Hospital. The doctors had never seen a healthier baby. What a healthy baby, they said, from behind a bulletproof two-way mirror as they operated the robotic arms that carefully held the infant aloft. The doctors high-fived each other, missing slightly. The trick, by the way, is to keep your eye on the other person's elbow, that or glue high-powered magnets to each person's hand. And all of the nurses cheered from dozens of feet down the hallway where they were playing with a standard tarot deck, common in most neonatal units.

This cheering was unrelated to Amelia's birth. The nurses had drawn the Ten of Swords, which is everyone's favorite card. It features a relaxed man, receiving acupuncture by a river. Amelia learned to walk at four months, and to talk at six months. She read Plato's Republic for the first time at age four. She taught herself German and began to write sonnets in that language at age seven. At age 10, she won her first engineering competition after designing a concrete canoe that could float, even on the most turbulent water. There is no body of water in Nightvale, so she had to prove her work using a software she wrote that generated three-dimensional models to corroborate her advanced mechanical physics formulas.

She even won the state spelling bee, five years in a row, from ages nine to three. Her streak was only broken when the spelling bee was cancelled after the sponsors lost their dictionary. Amelia was always the best, and her mother knew it. Her mother was proud of her daughter, or rather her mother was proud of herself for producing such a daughter, or rather she was proud of both in a way that was difficult for her to untangle. Amelia's mother was named Yvette. Yvette could not afford much for her daughter. She worked long hours to earn the respect of her bosses, which garnered her promotions and larger paychecks.

But Yvette had hit the glass ceiling. She did not want this limitation for her daughter. Her daughter would need to be smarter, more talented, and more driven than she. Yvette wanted Amelia's value to the world to be so great that no one could deny her success. Yvette recognized Amelia's specialness and pushed hard to make her even more special, signing Amelia up for athletics and adult learning classes and piano lessons. Amelia sometimes pushed against this. Mother, I don't want to, was met with,

but you will, Amelia. Why? Was met with, because I said so. I hate you for this. Was met with, you will love me for it later. Regudgingly, Amelia fulfilled her mother's wishes. It wasn't because she understood her mother's motivation to secure her child a better life,

nor was it because Amelia did not have the stomach to fight back, no? Amelia did it, because it all came so easy. She was a black belt, a sharpshooter, an academic decathlon champion. She wrote her first novel at age 12. It was called A Golden Age for Parachuting, in which an all-Jewish female parachute team wins Olympic gold in 1936 Berlin in front of Adolf Hitler. In the publisher's rejection letter, the editor said the novel was, quote, immaculately written. However, Parishol. shooting stories are out of vogue. Do you have anything about magical baseball players? Amelia did. It was a novel called One Last Swing for the Tuesday Boys. But she had written it in German

and did not have time to translate the Dien Stokyungen manuscript because she was currently taking a course on bird husbandry. Yvette enrolled the teenage Amelia in night classes at the community college, where she took English 113, sonnets are for lovers, structural engineering 212, buttress is a funny word, and meteorology 301, clouds y'all, am I right? She earned all A's, and scores of college credits long before she even graduated high school. None of these challenges were difficult for Amelia.

She was the best at everything. But her life was not perfect. Because of the voices. It was the voices that made life hard for Amelia. From birth, she heard the constant chatter of dozens of people. None of the voices spoke directly to Amelia. They just talked and talked about their lives. And Amelia was afraid of the voices and what the voices might imply.

about herself. She found solace in puzzles. Crosswords, nonograms, acrostics, cryptics, pseudocou, which I think is the one where you have to catch a bunch of marbles with a lever-operated hippopotamus.

Her mother hated Amelia's puzzle vice. If she caught Amelia doing puzzles, Yvette would make Amelia go practice archery, or write poetry, or at least listen to classical music. Amelia's favorite was Van Clyburn's masterful 1961 record of Rachmaninoff's piano concerto number 13. Knuckles on the black keys. When she was thinking through the solution of a puzzle, the voices did not speak to her.

All was silent. It was her only time of peace. It was the only time her body could rest. and curl up comfortably into her own thoughts. Anything that took her away from her logic problems, including music, no matter how soothing, invited the voices back into Amelia's thoughts. Amelia was accepted to several top colleges across the country, including MIT, Stanford, Rice, and the University of What It is.

But she wanted to stay near her hometown and her. her family, so she went to state. Hey, that's where my brother-in-law went. Go state. She was elected the youngest president of the student body ever at age 17 and graduated valedictorian two years later. Her friends, her professors, her mother, all knew the world was Amelia's. She could become poet laureate or a senator or a Supreme Court justice or a quantum physicist, but she became none of those. This is not to say Amelia was not successful, or that she amounted to nothing. It is to say the semantics of success were her own, and no one else's. Amelia became an air traffic controller. The voices never told Amelia to become an air traffic

controller, they were never that specific. The voices did not tell her to do anything. They simply talked about first dates, about apartment hunting, about their grandmother's improved health, about a bad movie they sort of loved. None of the voices talked directly to her. It was simply as though she overheard conversations from lives lived somewhere else. Other people and their quotidian hopes and worries and interests. She tried seeing therapists and psychiatrists.

She tried medication to stop the voices, but nothing worked. Eventually, she decided they were not harmful voices and that she was not dealing with schizophrenia. She simply heard people talking, at all hours, about all things, having nothing to do with her. And they never told her to become an air traffic controller. Amelia chose her own career, her own path. Others thought the reason was that it was the first job opportunity to present itself for. Maybe it was her admiration of aircraft, maybe a moral sense of serving humanity through public safety and comfort. In fact, it was none of these reasons.

But it should not be surprising to know that Amelia was very good at air traffic control. She was calm, clear, and efficient. The Nightvale International Airport, although when Amelia started, it was just a commuter hub, has never had a high volume of plane traffic, and almost all of those are departures. There are very few arrivals. My husband Carlos, he's a scientist, and he is also very good at his job, tells me that it's impossible to have far more departures than arrivals, but I told him, not everything has to make sense all the time.

So, in some ways, air traffic control in Nightville was easier for Amelia than just about any other class or job or task she'd ever attempted. It appeared from the outside to be far below her capabilities. She held that job for 20 years. even taking over as president of the Nightvale chapter of the Air Traffic Controllers Union. In 2004, she was featured on the cover of Affirmative, a monthly trade magazine for air traffic controllers. The headline of the article was, You're cleared for success.

In 2006, she was asked to deliver the keynote speech at the annual Roger Con, a convention for air traffic controllers and fans of air traffic control. It's a huge deal. Held every year in Orlando. People dress up like their favorite airline pilots and wait in long lines for autographs from top flight attendants. There are even panel discussions about everything from the best textiles for seat cushions to secret first class meal offerings. Amelia was the best at what she did. She probably would have been the best poet laureate or senator, but this was the path she chose.

She chose this path because of the voices, not from what they said, but what they didn't say. When Amelia was in the control tower, when she was communicating with captains and co-pilots and navigators, her head was clear, all was silent. It was like those many nights sneaking a copy of the crossword from the newspaper on the kitchenette and solving it by flashlight under her covers. She became an air traffic controller to be by herself, to become her own person. Her mother was disappointed, but loved her in spite of it. Her professors were let down, but still had many fabulous stories of their greatest student.

Her friends were just happy she was happy. Things changed on June 15, 2012. when Delta Flight 18713 made radio contact. In her tall tower, at her tiny airport, in the middle of a vast desert, in the middle of the American Southwest, an airplane appeared on Amelia's radar. It was carrying 143 passengers and six crew members, and was flying from Detroit to Albany, over the Great Lakes, in the American Northeast.

It appeared briefly, the green dot, blinking in and out of existence like the sun glinting off a water ripple. It was almost unnoticeable. But everyone noticed it. Later, Amelia was the only one who admitted to noticing it. The radio transmission was equally brief, a surge of static, and only one word. Difficult to discern, but she heard it. Alpha was the single word

The letter A in the NATO alphabet It was garbled so maybe it wasn't that word Maybe it was a more adult variation of O-Fudge Alpha O-Fudge It was unclear Amelia requested identification of the aircraft

She requested further communication But nothing came As soon as it had squawked it had gone silent. But while the radio communication was silent, the voices were not. On June 15, 2012, upon hearing a word that sounded like Alpha, these myriad conversations returned. No one else in the tower could hear them, but Amelia Anna Alfaro could. And for the first time in her life, she began to speak back to them.

Everyone else in the tower could hear that. The voices did not cease. The voices continued for days and days, and Amelia tried to talk back with them. As one voice said, I have an interview on Monday, Amelia would ask for what job? Or if a voice said, we went to Palm Springs on vacation, Amelia would say, did you also travel out to the Salton Sea, but over and over, no response. The voices did not affect the quality of Amelia's work, but it affected the perceived quality of her work. and her colleagues became uncomfortable with and distrusting of Amelia.

A month later, Amelia heard that word again from one of the voices, Alpha. It was the same voice that radioed in June, but upon hearing it again, she realized that they didn't say Alpha at all. What they said coming up. But first, the weather. The voice had said Alfaro. The word had been truncated just as the airplane's appearance in Nightvale had been truncated. The voice saying the word was the captain of the aircraft, and he had been trying to tell Amelia something. The pilot was trying to tell Amelia that he knew her, had always known her since her birth.

He didn't know how he knew her, just that he did. And he wanted to tell her he had found her. And she should find him. Where are you? Amelia asked the captain. No where, the voice said. Did you land? Amelia asked. Yes, the voice said.

Were there injuries? Amelia asked. Minor, the voice said. Do you hear the other voices too? Amelia asked. Yes, the captain said. I'm with them right now. Find us, Amelia.

Where are you? Amelia asked again, louder, more scared than before. Know where, the voice said, not like the vague concept of in no place, but nowhere. Two words capitalized like the name of a specific place. Amelia felt a tap on her shoulder. It was another air traffic controller. Boss wants to see you, Amelia, they said. But Amelia did not go to see the boss.

She knew. She knew her time and the tower was done. She grabbed her belongings and walked to the elevator, out across the tarmac, to a shuttle, to a parking lot, and into her car. And no one saw her again. Her friend said she always talked about going back to school to get an advanced degree. Maybe she went to Stanford, or Rice, or the university of what it is. Other friends said she had lost all touch with reality talking to people who were not there, and maybe her mother checked Amelia into the night veil asylum.

Yvette says Amelia knew too much, that agents from a vague yet menacing government agency had been to her house, and that Amelia must have been taken to a secret location. Representatives from the National Safety and Transportation Bureau in Washington, D.C. Came to Night Vale two months ago to investigate the disappearance of Flight 18713. They are on an undercover mission inside the Night Vale Asylum. Right now, on a tip from Sheriff Sam to discover more clues into this mystery. Perhaps Amelia is in there too, thinks so. I think she went to find the plane.

I think the voices were the passengers on Delta 18713. I think she set out looking for them. Perhaps wandering the desert. The great nowhere. To find the people who had been a part of her life since birth. Amelia, Anna, Alfaro was always the best at everything. And if anyone will find the plane, she will. Stay to next for our new investment advice show, billionaire roulette.

And as always, good night, Nightvale. Good night. Welcome to Nightvale as a production of Nightvale Presents. It is written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Craneer and produced by Dysperition. The voice of Night Vale is Cecil Baldwin. Original music by Dysperition. All of it can be found at disparition.info or at disperition.com. This episode's weather was Skinchanger by Skeptic.

Find out more at skepticdeath.bancamp.com. Comments, questions, email us at info at welcome to nightvail.com. follow us on Twitter at Nightville Radio, or close your eyes in the shower and whisper your comment into the warm water. Check out Welcome to Nightvale for more info about our newly released live show recording A Spy in the Desert and info about our upcoming novel, The Faceless Old Woman who secretly lives in your home. Today's proverb, love means never having to say, You're a werewolf. Hi, I'm here to tell you about Good Morning Night Vale. Welcome to Nightveal. Welcome to Night Vale's official recap show and unofficial best friend food podcast. Join me, Meg Bashwinner and fellow

tri-hosts, Hal Lublin and Symphony Sanders, as we dissect all of the cool, squishy, and slimy bits of every episode of Welcome to Nightvale. Come for the insightful and hilarious commentary and stay for all of the weird and wild behind-the-scenes stories. Good morning Night Vale, with new episodes every other Thursday. Get it wherever you get your podcasts. Yes. Even there.