The slogan blinks out at me from the screen shimmering above my desk, a cheery grin fine-tuned for the cameras splashed beneath it. They'd spent so long getting that just right- hell, everyone has probably seen it by now, the result of hours of consultants and photographers telling me how the set of my jaw needed to be just so, to narrow my eyes a little more, and so on until the image, that smile everyone in all fifty-one states knows by heart now, was stitched together from a hundred takes.

It was true.

Mostly.

This was the wave to ride, everyone had told me, in the corridors of power. The vast ships had arrived ten years before, and the world had held its breath. Turns out the guns, the rockets, the frantic scramble to the silos were all a bit silly in hindsight- our visitors had come, and offered us a better world if they could share it. Nothing miraculous- a hundred-year leap, the science guys were calling it, but the deserts were beginning to bloom, after a fashion, and it'd been a year, almost to the day, since the last case of the flu had been confirmed.

But people were scared - are scared, and why wouldn't they be? I'd built my career on the hinted what if's and why, really's and letting the cameras catch the concern in my eye.

Looking over at the photographs on my desk, I sigh. The last guy to hold the job I'm vying for had already called me, and a passing aside that his husband hardly knew him anymore had stuck with me.

Then again, I'd always been private. Seems that me being the first single fucker since Buchanan wouldn't stop people. Not this election...

I'll stay private.

The hundred year leap had left some of our own behind, too - I'd talked with truckers in Ohio and nervous-eyed nurses in California, a world apart from those who mingled, black-and-orange hands gracing all the shades of humanity while red and blue tongues chattered naively. The future had hit us like a freight train, and not everyone could see themselves in it. Much less their children. There'd been rumors there, too, that I'd not-quite denied in my stump speeches. What it meant for humanity when graceful, curving antlers and the flash of one of their tales caught your son's eye, or when your daughter came home smelling like them with her hair disheveled and their eyes dreamy.

And people... responded. The polls are tipping my way, and I tell myself that it's all for the best. That jobs and energy and the rumblings from Abuja will take center stage once the horse race is over, and I can look at the portraits of my forefathers and tell myself that I'm on the right side of some two hundred and fifty-odd years.

There's a lump in my chest, and my head rests heavy in my hands. It's been hell, the hydrogen rumble of jets my only music, and not seeing her for close to a month...

My heart pangs.

I can see her in my mind's eye, all bright eyes and a wit sharp as steel, an all-too-human grin shining in the dappled orange of her face. Slender black hands wrapped around my neck, and the shiver in her spine when my fingers caress her horns...

The slogan stares back at me, above myself, and I grab the phone, a waterfall inside me threatening to burst.

Click-click-click, three quick swipes on the phone.

"Jill?"

A sleepy answer murmurs from the other side of the line.

My thoughts race over the last few years- all the rallies, the glistening cameras lapping up ever word, the handshakes and the intimations...

But I know.

"Jill," I echo, fire in my voice. "There's going to be a change in our messaging."

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