Some time after they first met the alien, little Cole, Cameron, and their dad sat in a restaurant with their extraterrestrial guest. It was the boys' birthday, and a waitress had taken a Polaroid picture of the boys with the unsmiling young woman.

Seeing his brother's excitement at having a picture to show his friends, Cameron had stressed that she's not an alien, though Cole remained convinced.

Their dad had simply said that it would be nice if she told them something about herself, but the woman continued to study the view outside in silence. Nothing about her expression changed, but when Cole turned to look in the same direction, his own eyes widened as he spotted a car racing straight towards the glass wall of the restaurant.

At the last moment, Dad glimpsed the car and pulled Cameron to safety, but there was no time to reach Cole on the other side of the table. The car plunged through the glass, crashing into tables, and finally came to a stop. Dad jumped up to look for Cole and found him safely held in a protective embrace by the woman.

With trembling hands, Cole pointed out the blood on the woman, and his dad finally registered the large shard of glass sticking out of her neck, though she had no reaction whatsoever to it. As Dad hurriedly called for an ambulance, the woman with the emotionless eyes met Cole's shocked gaze.

Part 1: Beta Project

Ten years later, Cole follows his brother out into the rainy streets as he races off to find the "alien." When Cameron comes to a sudden stop, looking riveted, Cole turns to stare across the street at a familiar figure walking towards them.

He stands frozen in place as memories of the alien's first arrival replay in his mind. There is no doubt that this woman is the same creature. Then, as she takes a walkway and moves away from them, Cameron gives chase. Unfreezing, Cole realizes that his brother is running into speeding traffic with little care for his own safety.

Following him across the road, he grabs Cameron, but his brother is too engrossed in his pursuit to pay him any mind. He notices a bus moving away the nearby bus stop and studies the passengers. The woman from their past turns and looks straight at them.

Cameron chases after the bus, but Cole — after almost getting run over — gives up and watches in frustration as his brother disappears after it. He walks back to Cam's hidey-hole and notes the post-it on the wall under the mugshot of a stereotypical movie alien that says, "Culprit. Maya George = Alien."

Turning away from the wall map, charting the suicides, he notices a camera stowed with the bedrolls on top of the cupboard. When he examines the pictures in it, they are of the "alien" woman. But this one is smiling happily with friends in the campus of his college. Cole tries to convince himself that this woman is just a lookalike.

Then he gets a call from his brother's number, and it turns out that Cam is in the emergency room with a fractured foot. Cole runs to the hospital, and the first thing his brother asks him is if he saw "Exhibit three... the woman from ten years ago."

Barely restraining himself in front of the nurse treating Cam, Cole snarls at him to finish his treatment first. When Cam brings up the woman again outside, Cole argues that she just looks like the same person. Cam points out that she ran away when she saw them, convinced that she's the one responsible for the deaths of the college students.

Cole calls him delusional, but Cam reminds him that he was the one to first call her an alien. He pushes Cole to acknowledge the truth, but this time Cole looks at him squarely and asks why: "What if that woman is an alien? Why is that my problem?"

Cam begins to shout that that woman took their father, but Cole cuts him off and asks if anything would change if their dad came back. "I already feel like I'm dying dealing with you. But dad too? Why should I?" Cole asks. Cam falls silent at the clear desperation in Col's eyes, but he can't give in when he asks him to forget about their dad and the alien and just live normally.

Cam walks away, saying that he has to confirm it with his own eyes. Watching his brother leave, Cole shouts out a final ultimatum: "If you walk away now, I'll never see you again." Cam pauses at this, but after squaring his shoulders, he keeps walking. Behind him, Cole looks crestfallen, until he too walks away in the other direction.

When he gets back home, he packs up his brother's bag and throws it out in the hallway. Slamming the door shut, he tells himself: "There are no such things as aliens."

The next morning, the bag is still sitting outside, but Cole has to run to his college and apologize to Professor Park for missing their meeting the day before. The professor seems keenly interested in Cole's reasons for wanting to join their PTSD Research Team.

He asks Cole which of the current treatments for PTSD is most effective, in his opinion. Cole answers that he thinks none of them are — since traumatic memories remain untouched by the normal curve of human forgetfulness, people can never forget the pain and horror of the experience. His solution is to eliminate the memory completely, much like one eliminates cancer cells.

On his way out of the building, Cole spots the woman from last night crossing the campus grounds. He chases after her, but soon loses sight of her.

During his next class, as he tries to convince himself that he had been mistaken, his professor teams the students up in pairs to study. His partner gets a sudden nosebleed and has to leave the classroom, but moments later, another girl walks in and introduces herself as Maya George.

Cole's mind flashes back to the post-it in his brother's motel room, and he slowly looks back at the alien he remembers from his childhood. As she walks towards him, he can't stop staring. She takes a seat beside him, and the professor outlines their next assignment.

Maya brings up branches of data-mining they can work on, just as if she were a real college kid sitting beside a new partner in class. Cole's response is to bluntly ask her name, origin, and age. Maya visibly bristles at his rudeness, until the professor snaps at them to pay attention.

Outside the class, Maya strides up to him (while Cole stumbles back a few steps) and asks for his phone. Putting her number in, she tells him to meet her in the library at six to work on their assignment. Then, she walks away with her friends, just like a normal college kid. Cole watches her leave with a frown.

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Later, he sits at a cafe with his student — a school-aged Lucas Axton — while distractedly playing with a Rubik's cube. When he gets a text from Maya about their meeting, Lucas sniggers that he's got a girlfriend. He tries to cut their study session short by claiming that he'll succeed by using his computer skills anyway, but Cole gets him to focus by pinching his eyebrow.

At the library, Cole sits across from Maya while they work. She catches him staring a few times, and Cole tries to cut it out, until he remembers the glass shard in the woman's neck from ten years ago. Maya's hair is down, but Cole tries to get a glimpse of the skin there in order to check for a scar.

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This is simultaneously nerve-wracking and hilarious, since Cole looks utterly embarrassed at his actions, despite being unable to stop his curiosity. He fails, but when Maya gets a call and leaves early, he decides to follow her.

She goes into a local bar and greets a group of young boys in army uniforms like a friend. As Cole watches from across the room, they challenge her to chug a tumbler of beer, and she braces for this by tying up her hair. Cole sits up and finally gets to see... completely unmarred skin where a deep scar should be.

Laughing at himself for thinking she was an alien, he gets up and leaves.

A younger Chief Sebastian, still a detective, is busy sketching the perpetrator of the serial college suicides — only his sketch has no face, just a cap pulled low over the eyes. His partner hands him the file of all criminals caught using a taser, then grumbles to another cop that when Chief Sebastian gets a hunch about someone's guilt, they always turn out to be innocent. At his desk, Chief Sebastian pulls out Cam's sheet from the file and places it beside his own sketch.

When Cole gets home, he finds Cam's bag still sitting out in the hallway. He picks it up and brings it in, then rings up his brother. Cam's voice sounds hushed as he says that he thinks he's found the alien's hideout. Cole tries to tell him about the woman, but Cam suddenly says, "The criminal is Bluebird!"

Cole tells him to come home and tell him about this Bluebird, and Cam promises to come over right after he checks something. But the next morning arrives with no sign of Cam — his phone's switched off and his boss at the bakery hasn't seen him after his first day at work.

Chief Sebastian arrives with his partner at the bakery too, and after speaking to the boss, he decides that Cam is the man with the taser.

Cole visits his brother's motel room and faces an irate owner, who says that Cam was supposed to pay his dues that day. Before leaving, he notices a map stuck to the wall with "alien's hideout" written on it. He takes the map and runs to the location. It's a PC gaming den, and there is no sign of his brother among the gamers.

The other thing he remembers from the wall is another post-it note about the library, and runs there only to find Maya studying by herself. He walks up to her and begins to ask a question before changing his mind and running out.

Back at the motel, he remembers the camera and pulls it down from its place on top of the cupboard. The recording in it shows Cam placing it there and leaving it on as he switches off the light and leaves the room. Cole almost groans, until he fast forwards a little to see a hooded figure enter the room and switch on the light. The person scans Cam's wall, then turns to leave.

At the last moment, the figure looks towards the camera, and Cole jerks back when he sees Maya's face.

He immediately goes back to the library and waits for her outside. When she sees him and asks why they keep bumping into each other, he walks up to her and asks if she's really Maya George.

He grabs her by her collar, and in the face of her seemingly genuine outrage, he yells: "Who are you? Who the hell are you?"