by Lynne Murray
A thin girl with neon green hair plunked down in the chair next to mine. She wore a pink t-shirt with #AlienLabRatGirl emblazoned across the front and pale pink-rimmed glasses. She way too young to be at work. She leaned over me to wave at Star, who wildly waved all the tendrils on one side at her.
“You must be Mia,” I greeted her. “I recognize you from Star’s disguise.”
I slipped my own glasses down my nose to see Star nod. “Yes, Mia is not full grown but she fights to save her hive. All honor to such a one. I find Mia to be the ideal human.”
Mia laughed.
“And this is Angie—” Star continued.
“I know, I know, the Death Dealer,” Mia said.
“Mia studies UFO abductions on social media. Are there any today?” Star leaned toward Mia’s screen.
“Not that I’ve seen.” Mia leaned back in her chair with her hands behind her head. “Nothing real. Just a lot of people working out their homophobia with visions of alien probes.”
Star waved dismissive tentacles at both of us. “Human obsessions. Not interesting.”
Mia turned in her chair leaning closer to me. “You don’t have to ask. I’m not keeping it a secret. I actually was abducted. Some people call it alien experiencing. Not a fun ride when you can’t say ‘no.’ I was about five when the lizardmen took me up to their ship to study me. They kept coming back, checking and measuring me.” She shuddered at the memory.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. It helps to fight back. Finding other people in the same mess and trying to rescue them helps even more.” She looked me in the eye and I felt the force of her character. Star was right to admire her.
“So you’re not talking about the Ekrot eye in the sky kind of experience?”
“I see you’ve met Dennis. I’ll never understand why he seems to want to be abducted.” Mia shook her head and let out a humorless chuckle.
“But you were so young,” She was so matter-of-fact. I tried not to sound shocked. “Did your parents believe you?”
Mia nodded. “They did. They weren’t even surprised. It turned out that both of them had been contacted too. They were sad because they knew it was real and they had no way to protect me. They told me they didn’t know how to stop it, but they said for both of them, it stopped after they got older. That scared me even more. My parents admitted they couldn’t help me. They also said no damage was done. Can’t agree with them on that. They didn’t harm me physically, but I think emotional damage counts.”
“It sounds terrifying,” I tried to imagine the helplessness of it and my mind recoiled.
“I put up with it. I had no choice. But I wasn’t going to go quietly though. When I got older I started posting online. Got the domain name—Alien Lab Rat Girl. Other victims got in touch. There’s strength in knowing you’re not alone. Then things got dangerous in a new way. Have you heard of the Forbidden Zone?”
“Mr. Kirby said something about it and the database here described humans worshipping alien tourists—”
“Yup, we’re a pretty lazy species—humans. Instead of solving our own problems, we keep trying to find someone to blame and begging other species to rescue us, as if they could be bothered. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, some do-gooder branch of the galactic government decided Earthlings needed protection from ourselves and while they were at it, stopping off-worlders who were treating us like—well, lab rats and cattle. The Rutbans, that’s the lizard group that keeps abducting me, were ordered to wind down their research project and get out. They planned to destroy their ‘experimental animals’—meaning me and several others before they left. They were up against a deadline to close down the project. I heard them discussing how soon they’d have to terminate us. The Rutbans planned to take a bunch of us with them so they could finish up the experiment. They’d get the last of their data by dissecting us to see where several generations of genetic tinkering had taken them. We’re just bacteria in a Petri dish to some of these guys. You don’t exactly weep when you throw out your lab experiment.”
“That’s horrible. Wouldn’t the ETPA stop them?”
“The Rutban weren’t going to tell them about that part. By the time any authorities found out, if they even cared, we’d all be dead or trapped in a lab halfway across the galaxy. I sent out alarms. Mr. K read my online posts and sent Wade to talk to me. Caught me after class at Lowell High.”
“Not Chad?”
“Oh, right you got recruited by Chad. No, they’d never send him to a high school. He’s way too hot. He’d have caused a riot.”
“Wade is hot too.”
Mia tilted her head with a sly smile. “I see, so that’s how it is.”
“How what is?”
“You have a crush on Wade.”
“Uh.” My experience didn’t give me a clue how to respond to that. I’d never got close enough to any other girls at school to talk about hot guys.
Mia ignored my confusion. “I agree, Wade is hot. But he’s so solemn and serious and that cools people down.”
“I see.”
“Unless that’s the kind of thing that heats you up,” she added with a giggle.
Time to change the subject.
“So you got a visit from Wade and then talked to Mr. Kirby?”
“Wade explained and we went to talk to Mr. Kirby right away. He immediately contacted my parents.”
“What did they say?”
“They were relieved. They thought that if the aliens wanted me, they’d just take me. Kirby told them that our family and any other abductees I could contact were welcome to stay here until it was certain we were safe.”
“Are your parents safe?”
Mia reached out and clasped my hand. “Thank you for asking! Not everyone does. My parents are convinced that the aliens were done with them. I tried to get them to come here, but they have jobs they like so they’re taking a chance that the Rutban are done with them. It’s hard to explain vanishing from your daily life. No one outside of the ETPA Agency knows where I am. It’s safer for everyone that way. Everyone except my parents thinks I’ve been accepted at a very exclusive boarding school—which is kinda true, except that it’s in another dimension. I can get a degree by taking online courses here, so I’m technically still in high school.”
“I don’t see too many other people your age.” Actually I didn’t see any, unless you counted Star’s disguise, which I didn’t. But I’d only been to the Data Center and the canteen.
Mia sighed. “I’m the only one now. I couldn’t even tell everyone in UFO circles. It would put them and everyone in this facility in danger. I keep my social media accounts, but I just post a selfie with books and no background from time to time and talk about how hard I’m studying.”
“Are some of the other abductees in danger?”
“It’s possible. They may not know. Unless they put it out there, we can’t tell them. The Rutban researchers had to submit their list of subjects when they got permission to finish their experiments. Most of the people on that list are here or in protective custody elsewhere. As for the rest, that’s my mission online, to find any other people who need rescuing. The Rutban can suck it.”
“I hope you can find everybody,” I said fervently.
“Me too, we’ve got other branches of the ETPA looking too. Which reminds me I have to go contact them.” Mia stood up and took a step to go, then she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Angie, wanna have lunch tomorrow?”
“Okay.”
“It will be a memorable experience,” Star said. I hadn’t realized she had been listening, but if she could talk while multi-tasking with all those eyes, maybe she could listen to nearby conversations while working.
“Meet you in the canteen at 1:00.” Mia leaped up and bustled off at high speed.
I turned back to my screen, sneaked a quick look at the Pacifica site of the Harvester clean up the scene. Wade and Chad were nowhere to be
seen now and neither were the humans I’d seen staggering out of the ship. It served me right for trying to get a glimpse of Wade. I glanced over at Star, who didn’t seem to be paying attention to me, for which I was grateful.
Chapter 13
I wasn’t sure how long I’d be stuck at the station before I could get clean clothes. My go bag held four shirts and two pairs of pants, but it wouldn’t hurt to wash and dry my grasshopper-blood-stained clothes. Examining the map, I saw that the place was like a small village with everything necessary for comfortable living. I searched for a laundry area and sure enough, there was one. Most people who worked at the Station seemed to commute. I saw just a few coming and going to the Guest Quarters. We exchanged nods and smiles. My instinct, drilled into me after so many years of running, was to be polite but not to talk to strangers.
Kirby called me as I sat in my room in front of the big screen searching through the history of Earth tourism. “We’ve got a team investigating threats that might prevent you from going home, so it looks like you should stay here for the next day or so. Come over to the small briefing room tomorrow morning around nine so we can go over the Harvester incident in detail.”
The canteen never seemed crowded. Two self-serve buffet line split with no cashier on either, so I didn’t need to flash my amulet to pay. The line I picked had fresh food, skillfully cooked but simple, heavier on the rice, vegetarian and hot-sauce laced ethnic food in line with the Bay Area diverse population. The other line, my glasses read-out told me was all extraterrestrial with closed containers. I saw some of the aliens in that line swiping their amulets across the top of the containers, which opened discretely shielded from human observers so that the contents could be extracted into high-sided serving dishes. One semi-transparent box shook slightly as some of the contents seemed to crawl up the sides of the containers, which made me a little nervous.
“Don’t worry, the alien food never escapes. Don’t know how they do it. Don’t want to know,” I looked up to see Mia standing next to me in line. “Gotta go, see you for lunch.” And she hustled out of the canteen at her usual rapid pace.
“And good morning to you too,” I said to her retreating back.
I was fifteen minutes early for the meeting but Wade and Kirby were already at work when I got to the small conference room. The room held an oval table with six office chairs and a screen at one end. Rather than views of the Bay, the two men had pulled their chairs closer to a screen display of aerial photos of Isabel’s block in Pacifica.
I sat down.
“Coffee, tea or cocoa over there.” Kirby gestured to a small cart with hot drink carafes and cups in the far corner of the room.
“Just had some, thanks.”
Wade nodded but didn’t say anything. Was he was irritated with me about the Harvester incident? I forced my mind away from the thought. He seemed absorbed in examining the overhead view of Isabel’s house clinging alone to the ravaged cliff looked even more vulnerable from above. The Harvester craft was still holding it up, viewed from above, it was clear that there was no way to stop the cliff side from crumbling under it.
Wade met Kirby’s eyes and shook his head. “I told the Harvesters to fix it...”
Right before they tried to kill us, I thought, but didn’t say.
“It looks like that’s just not possible,” Wade concluded.
“No, it’s too visible. The Harvester group has the means to stabilize the whole cliff. But using off-world tech would raise too many questions and jeopardize the secrecy of our operations,” Kirby said. “After the last big rain a few weeks ago, the three other houses on that block were red-tagged. Too close to the edge of the constantly eroding cliff face. The local officials had no idea that the houses were being salvaged and then pushed off the cliff by the Harvesters. Just before the Harvesters took them, those three homeowners told officials and reporters that they were moving to Bakersfield to stay with relatives.”
“That was what Isabel said too,” I told Kirby. “I also heard myself starting to say I was moving to Bakersfield when—”
“When you killed the two Harvesters coming off the ship,” Wade said.
“Right.”
“Harvesters don’t use spoken words among themselves. Their disguises include neural-to-vocal simulators, but like several extraterrestrial species we’ve run into, their own mind-to-mind communication makes it possible to influence human thoughts as well.” Kirby tapped a few buttons on a control console in front of him. The image of an undisguised Harvester replaced the view of the house on the crumbling cliff. “The Harvester was lazy. He plucked that sentence from one neighbor and inserted it into the other humans he wanted to control. They proceeded to tell everyone they met they were going to Bakersfield. It bought him the time to plunder that block and cover up their disappearance. He was counting on no one checking till he was long gone.”
“The neighbors didn’t suspect foul play?” I asked.
“It seems like the other people in the neighborhood and even the Coastal Commission investigators assumed the three homeowners went out of town to stay with relatives after their houses collapsed,” Wade said. “One of the neighbors really did hail from Bakersfield, but they all ended up in the stasis locker in the Grasshopper’s ship.”
“Oh.”
“Which is where you and Wade would have ended up if both of you hadn’t reacted so quickly. What tipped you off?”
I took a deep breath, still not liking to discuss my hallucinations. But I had to. “Wade, didn’t you see the black cloud swarming around the Harvester just before he attacked?”
There I had said it. Neither of them even blinked.
“Nope.” Wade raised an eyebrow and smiled at me. “I’ve never heard of that but it sounds like a useful skill.”
“We’ll have to look into that later,” Kirby tapped a note into his tablet.
Wade tapped on the tablet in front of him, pulling up a file. “Only the first victim, a man named Frank Landry, actually had relatives in Bakersfield.”
“But all the victims, including Isabel, insisted upon going to Bakersfield immediately even though only Frank had ever been there. Nothing anyone said could convince them that they didn’t have relatives there. I assigned Chad to go with them,” Kirby’s face was expressionless, but his voice held a note of amusement. “They ended up carpooling together. That’s the last time we heard from Chad.”
“My brother wasn’t thrilled to be babysitting delusional alien kidnap victims,” Wade added.
Even though he’d been a bit snarky to me, I didn’t envy Chad. “What will happen to Isabel and the other victims?”
“Depends on how much of their memory and ability to function comes back. Their houses were destroyed by coastal erosion and they all have insurance, so they could start again somewhere else.”
“Maybe Bakersfield?” I had to say it.
“So you know the area?” Wade raised an eyebrow.
“My Aunt and I stayed there briefly, not a place anyone would look for us. How about you?”
“Did some research,” he said. His face was serious. “The mental tampering the Harvester’s victims have been through can have permanent damage.”
“Chad will bring them back if they’re not functional,” Kirby said. “The Harvesters are committed to funding their rehabilitation for as long as it takes. They take responsibility for their rogue grasshopper’s crimes. They want us to understand that most Harvesters follow the treaty provisions.”
Kirby set down his tablet. “We’ve had some suggestions for training you, Angie,” he said. “Let me review them and get back to you later today.”
Before things could get awkward with Wade, I told them I was having lunch with Mia. “You know her?” I asked.
“Everyone knows Mia,” Wade said.
“One lunch with Mia is equal to a dozen training sessions,” Kirby waved in dismissal. “I’ll still get back to you about lessons.”
I nodded and the three of u
s parted going in three different directions. I managed not to stare after Wade’s retreating back. Well, just a quick peek. He looked good from that angle too. No idea when I’d see him again.
But I wanted to get whatever training I could as soon as possible. It’s bad enough to reach into a bully’s chest and give him a heart attack. But it seems like escalation when I hit an alien’s chest hard enough to crack his chest armor without ever touching it. I still had no idea how I’d done that.
Wade’s question echoed in my mind. How did I know where the grasshopper’s heart was?
I found Mia in the canteen gazing at the ferries making their measured progress across the Bay toward Tiburon. She had been bursting with so much energy a few hours earlier. Now she seemed either exhausted or sitting still to think things through.
I poured myself some cocoa and sat in the chair next to her. “That is an amazing view.”
Mia “We’re actually located on a null space between dimensions, so there’s no ‘outside’ on the other side of the walls that wouldn’t drive us humans insane. But we’re kinda wired to want to see what’s outside. A room this big with no windows would feel oppressive. Most people don’t mind a few seconds delay on the video from San Francisco Bay.”
Looking through the glasses, most of the people at tables were ordinary humans.
“I notice that hardly anyone here is wearing these glasses,” I said, tapping the red readout on mine.
“Some people don’t need them. They’ve got enough alien DNA to clearly see aliens without mechanical aid. Others have the glasses, but they don’t wear them, particularly at meals. They’d rather look at the disguise. There’s a whole Department of Alien Disguises here. I think it’s funny, but some people can’t handle the fact that the guy across the table has tentacles.”
