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15

After leaving Union customs, my Emissary escorts led me to another bank of elevators. This part was pretty unspectacular; it could have passed for a ritzy office complex on Earth if it hadn’t been for the collection of Grays, reptilians, and insectoids all waiting along with us. The scene was much more crowded than the expansive terminal had been, and the crush of alien beings, the unfamiliar smells and sounds, all combined to make my head swim. My knees began shaking and I braced myself against a nearby wall.

Sven moved past them and waved his ring across one of the elevator doors, which slid open silently. He motioned for me to follow him in, which attracted some unwelcome attention from the crowd. Nobody protested that I could tell, but they couldn’t have been happy. After all, who was this scrawny human chick to be getting special treatment?

I closed my eyes and blew out a long breath after the door closed behind us. Bjorn turned to me as our car began moving. “You are perturbed.”

“Just curious. How is it we get to skip to the head of the line?”

“Our diplomatic status accords us certain privileges, though we use them sparingly.”

So they didn’t like to throw their weight around, another point in their favor. “Aren’t all of you Emissaries diplomats of some kind?”

“Of a fashion, yes, but not all of us perform the same roles. Since Earth does not have membership in the Union, admitting you as a resident falls under our first-contact protocols. That requires us to tightly control your exposure to other races.”

“Ah. So you didn’t want me hanging out with the riffraff for too long.”

“We could sense your anxiety,” Bjorn said. “Your first exposure to other Union kind was in the expanse of the terminal. While no doubt shocking to you, we kept them at a distance for your comfort. Being pressed into a crowd of alien beings is difficult for anyone to absorb. Many fail. So far, you have not.”

So far. “And you’d like to keep it that way.”

He nodded. “True, for you and for us.”

Bjorn noticed me raise an eyebrow at that. “We are not concerned for ourselves. It will be good for the Medical Corps to have someone like you in its ranks, and if that experience leads to the Union extending membership to humans, it will be good for everyone.”

“In the meantime, we have to take it slow. I get it.”

“Baby steps,” he reminded me. The lift came to a stop and we stepped into another wide, curving corridor lined with more oval doors.

Sven checked his crystal and began walking. “Our transient quarters are not far at all.” He stopped in front of a door and began to lift his hand, then paused. “Perhaps you should try your ring, Melanie.”

“Sure, but how’d you find our room?” There were no markings and it looked easy to become hopelessly lost.

He pointed to the crystal in my pocket. “That will provide everything you need to learn your way around. You will find it to be invaluable the longer you are here.” He pointed to the ring on my finger. “But first . . .”

“Yeah. Got it. Try the room key.” I waved my hand in front of the door and it whispered open.

We stepped into a cozy living room furnished for Emissaries, which made it compatible with humans. A pair of tub-styled easy chairs sat across from a semicircular divan, all made from a fabric of variegated colors that dazzled against the platinum-gray walls. A small kitchen with a food synthesizer occupied one wall, similar to the setup on their ship. Next to it was a triangular dining table. Doors on opposite sides of the living room led to private bedrooms, which I was elated to see. “Transient quarters” had sounded mighty austere, and I was beginning to crave some privacy.

Before I could settle in for the night, Sven tapped a white rectangular screen on the far wall. When it lifted, the room was filled with Rigel’s brilliant sapphire-blue light. “Ah. Excellent. We have a spectacular view.”

I held my hand in front of my eyes. “It’s awfully bright. Can you dim the screen?”

“It’s not a monitor, if that’s what you mean. It’s a window made of transparent alloys. But yes, we can adjust the light filter.” He showed me how to swipe at the window, dimming the light to a more comfortable level by simply drawing my finger across the surface.

“How long are we here for?”

Sven moved over to the food synth. “Overnight, by your time reference. Longer if necessary. For now, I believe we all need nutrients and rest. Are you hungry?”

“Starving. What’s on the menu?”

“Whatever you want, assuming the synthesizer recognizes it.”

That seemed like a tall order. “Cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato, chocolate shake.” The machine chirped to let me know it was working on my order.

It took a minute, but damned if it didn’t produce. I grabbed my tray and plopped down at the table. “Looks about right,” I said, and took a bite. “Tastes about right, too. How does this thing know what humans like?”

The Emissaries shared a look. “We added some menu items based on our observations among your kind.”

“Will this be the same wherever I go?”

“Wherever you go. The synthesizers are networked throughout all Union outposts.”

“You’ve got much better IT support than anything on Earth, then. I wouldn’t trust my food supply to a computer network if you put a gun to my head.”

They winced at my lame joke.

“Sorry. Human expression. Maybe a little too aggressive.”


After savoring my first extraterrestrial burger, I picked up my shake and said goodnight.

My room was small and sparsely furnished, but then it didn’t need to be extravagant. So long as there was a place to clean up and crash, I was happy.

I opened the screen, dimmed the window to something below retina-burning level, and sat on the edge of the bed.

Rigel looked close enough to touch. With the filters on full, I could study it for the first time. I’d never seen anything like it. There was texture to the surface, like the pebbling on a basketball, but it bubbled and boiled in a froth like milk in a hot saucepan. There were a handful of black spots on its surface, and filaments danced around its edges like loose hair blowing in slow motion.

Occasionally spacecraft would move in and out of view, of all shapes and sizes. One of the big horseshoe-crab-looking transports drifted past, speckled with hundreds of lights on its way to who knew where. It reminded me of a vacation with my parents a long time ago. We’d watched the giant cruise ships moving out of Miami harbor at night, lit up like casinos as they headed for the Caribbean.

All of this, right outside my bedroom window.

What in the world was I doing here? What could I possibly offer these people that they didn’t already have, or hadn’t already thought of?

“Unique ability,” they’d said. They’d also gone to a lot of trouble to bring me here, so maybe it was time to relax.

Of course, relaxing wasn’t part of my nature. If there was a type A-plus personality, it would’ve applied to me. I was too amped up to sleep and it wasn’t like I’d be able to do anything useful on the next leg of our trip. The best use of my time would’ve been to study the materials they’d given me, but something else had put a burr under my saddle.

They’d made it clear I wasn’t the first human the Union had encountered, and it sounded like there might already be a few others here. In fact they’d been rather cagey about it. Instead of studying alien anatomy, I pulled out my crystal tablet and began poking around in their network to see what was there.

It took some doing. First I had to figure out their interface. So far the tablet had done everything I’d needed it to in the moment, like it knew what was coming. I suppose that’s predictable when going through customs or looking for your room, but now I was freelancing. After a few minutes of swiping and poking, I was getting frustrated. If our comparatively primitive tablets had voice control, why wouldn’t theirs? It was worth a try. “Main menu.”

What do you know? Main menu. Now it looked a lot more like my iPad, absent the cute little icons. This was a bit more sophisticated and businesslike, with blocks of text in small print that expanded with touch. There was a lot of that.

After a time it was like trying to navigate a clunky government website. If you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for, you’d never find it. Of course, stubborn old me had tried to stick with the meat interface instead of voice commands. I decided to be as specific as possible. “Record of Union interaction with human race.”

A tab marked “Archives” appeared, which opened up a disturbingly long list of events. Judging by the numbers tagged to each, it looked like they were in chronological order. “Are these cataloged by date?”

The crystal answered in a voice that sounded for all the world like a live human. It even had a vaguely Midwestern accent. “Affirmative.”

“Can you translate the dates into Earth . . . err, human . . . reference?” I had a sneaking suspicion that “Earth reference” would be in billions of years.

“Which cultural calendar would you prefer? Judaic, Indian, East Asian . . .”

The voice kept going. I had no idea what to tell it, and frantically searched my memory. There’d been something in Western civ, way back during freshman year . . . “Roman . . . no, Gregorian!”

“Converting to Gregorian calendar references. Please stand by.”

The numbers instantly changed to something more recognizable. The first event on the list was recent, which was my encounter with that crashed spacecraft. Of course. I flipped at the list, scrolling down further. They went back a long way . . . 

Holy shit. BC.

I stopped cold. They’d been observing us since before the friggin’ Babylonian empire. I tapped on one report at random. It was pretty dry reading, describing the time, place, human activities, soil samples, air samples . . . but all the locations were referenced to a planetary grid they’d set up. I’m sure it worked fine for them, but it told me nothing. “Can you convert these locations to modern human references, too?”

“Affirmative. Please stand by.”

And just like that, grid squares turned into text. I went to the first entry.

“2579 BC. Cairo, Egypt. Extended observation of construction activity by intelligent primates. Structures are pyramidal and impressively large for their current technological level. Estimate completed height will be 146.7 meters above local surface. Hominids exhibit rudimentary understanding of algebraic mathematics and engineering principles. However, their construction methods remain primitive, relying on beasts of burden and manual labor from other hominids. First Contact protocols not recommended at this time. Further cultural development is required.”

Extraterrestrials hadn’t helped build the pyramids like some fanatics thought, but they’d been there. The Old Testament would have a thing or two to say about the “primitive manual labor” part a few hundred years later. No signs that these guys had anything to do with the plagues or miracles, though, so my Sunday School lessons remained unmolested. That came as something of a relief.

I tapped on a subfile marked “Imagery” and about fell out of bed. There were pictures. No kidding, 3D holographic images of the Great Pyramid of Giza while it was still under construction over four thousand years ago. I’d gone looking for confirmation of tabloid abduction stories, instead I was getting deep insights into our own history. No matter what else happened to me here, this alone would be worth the trip.

There was too much to read through each account, so I kept scrolling and stopped on whatever looked especially interesting. The next entry was a hoot.

“AD 788. Skiringssal, Norway. Technical malfunction aboard survey ship led to inadvertent contact with a large tribe of humans. Survey party was unable to maintain concealment due to failure of transparency field. Our sudden appearance led to great confusion and alarm among the humans.

“The tribe our team encountered is one of a warrior class which dominates the region. Tribal traditions and societal structures are centered on agriculture, harvesting of local aquatic and land animals, and wanton aggression against neighboring regions. There is considerable warring between tribes as well.

“It is a primitive, quarrelsome culture. One Emissary was gravely injured by a particularly agitated human male wielding a heavy melee weapon known as a ‘battle axe.’ As punishment, this individual was then subjected to a gruesome ritual they call ‘blood eagle,’ which will not be described here.

“We attempted to dissuade them to no avail. The tribal chieftain’s insistence on this dreadful punishment is symptomatic of a more unfortunate consequence of our appearance: they now worship us as deities. Further contact NOT RECOMMENDED.”

This time I did fall out of bed, laughing my ass off. Thanks to a mechanical glitch, the Emissaries had unwittingly become the foundation of Norse mythology. Gods. Odin and Thor’s invisibility cloak goes tits-up and what happens? They’re immortalized in legends that would be carried through the ages in oral traditions, ancient Norse texts, and modern comic books.

It was literally epic. I could have great fun at my hosts’ expense with that tale.

I skipped over the rest of our secret history with the Union’s survey teams, moving up to more current events. How many of those wild stories were true? Now that I’d seen the Grays face-to-face, along with proof of their butt-probing proclivities, they had to be.

Short version: It’s true. All of it, at least the more notorious incidents. Roswell? True. Betty and Barney Hill? True. The Pascagoula Abduction? True, but to be fair that one was an unsanctioned contact and the perps got into serious trouble with the Union science ministry. I felt sorry for the two guys caught up in that mess; they’d only wanted to go fishing after work and ended up having the living shit scared out of them by some Grays on a bender.

The Union seemed less and less intimidating as I read through each account, in fact some stories sounded all too familiar. You know who gets the scut work on a big university-funded anthropological expedition? The grad students. They’re sitting around in the jungle, bored out of their skulls while watching some remote Amazon tribe from afar. One of them smuggles in some booze to stave off the boredom, and next thing you know they’re screwing with the locals for shits and giggles.

Judging by this history, the same thing occasionally went on in the Union. Where do you think crop circles come from? Bored alien research assistants.

They made mistakes and it looked like they’d owned up to them, which was more than I could say for too many of my own kind. Especially the ones who think they’re in charge.

I went to bed content in the knowledge that I could make it here. It was the best sleep I’d had in days.


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Framed