Aliens
Chapter 10: The Message
Jumba yawned.
Since Lilo's morning epiphany, it had been unusually, well, quiet. Jumba supposed they were out collecting up the newspapers, but still – it unnerved him.
There was something wrong. He hadn't noticed it earlier in the day, but he had been busy for much of it, and had only decided to come down to the living room a few hours ago, after which he then proceeded to doze off in front of the television. (Not that that was his fault - he'd not gotten any sleep whatsoever the previous night.) Now he had awoken to the unfamiliar sound of silence.
Definitely something very very… wrong. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something was off.
Where was Pleakley?
"Pleakley? Are you for to being here?"
Nothing. He was probably out shopping or something.
He sighed. He was probably being paranoid.
He dug out the remote and flipped few some channels, but it became increasingly clear that there was nothing of interest on.
He switched off the television. There usually wasn't much of interest at this time anyway.
It was at this time that he became aware of a small, rather muffled, beeping noise. His communicator was beeping. He ruffled around the couch until he had found where it had fallen, and swiped its screen to unlock it.
He'd missed a call.
OK, things were definitely strange. In the two-and-a-half years he'd been on planet Earth, he'd gotten at most twelve calls that weren't from contractors responding to his requests. Eight of those were from the Grand Councilwoman, two were from his mother, and two were from some kind of parole officer or something. He'd definitely hadn't been making any calls to contractors recently, and it can't have been one of his regular contacts, since his phone didn't recognise the number.
Come to think of it, the return number was of an Earth-based format, and the area code was somewhere in the area. How would they get his number? How would they even connect to the subspace network? The nearest transmitter was orbiting Jupiter, and Jumba was pretty sure it was undetectable by humans.
The person had left a message. Jumba selected the message and hit Play.
"Er, hi Jumba. I doubt you remember me, but I have something I need to talk to you about. I really can't say anything over this line, company's probably listening in, but can you call me on my personal cell? It's really really urgent – I mean, I can't stress how urgent it is – so please send me a message as soon as possible."
The man's voice sounded young and energetic, but at the same time tired and disheaveled. It reminded him of interns who sometimes got burnt out on their first week at Galaxy Defence. He hoped it wasn't the case there.
And it could be Qweltian. If he was, he would have come from the planet's North, judging by his accent - although, Jumba+-'d heard people on Earth speaking the same way.
The number he had left was an interstellar cellphone number. Very odd.
"I wish I could call you directly, but the company disables all cellphones and… well, it's really urgent. Oh, and could you add to your message the times of day you'll be available for a call? Thanks."
Jumba sat up. What was so urgent that he needed to know about?
He walked over to his laptop, which was sitting at the dining table (he had been reading the Quammian Times over his breakfast - eggs and toast) and pulled up the Federation's public access database. The phone number wasn't listed there. He then pulled up his old Galaxy Defence phone records – no one there either. He quickly hacked into the Federation's Bureau for Defence and Security's staff's records, just to check them – but they showed nothing either.
He frowned. He couldn't think of anyone else who'd want to contact him, and he was naturally suspicious of anyone who was off-the-records. It wasn't, after all, like he hadn't made a few enemies along the way.
And who was this "company"?
He guessed the only way to find out anything was to send this person a message. Since this guy already knew his phone number, it'd not be like not sending a message would protect it or anything.
First he tried a simple phone call.
"The number you have called is currently not answering calls right now. Please try again later."
Great. He was probably still at work.
He plugged his communicator into a dock at the back of his computer and tapped out a short message. He then set his computer to notify him – loudly – if he received a reply.
And then, on a hunch, he looked up Earth on the Registar of Non-Member Planets.
All members of the Federation had to register themselves before going on to a non-member planet, and there wasn't much reason to go to this particular planet. Of course, unscrupulous fiends would probably not even bother, but it was worth a check.
Jumba Jookiba, Wendy Pleakley, Sanak Zubar, Tareen Tabot.
Those last two names were new. Pulling up the relevant records showed they were both Plorgarians living on the mainland of America, studying frogs and their effect on the mosquito population. Or something like that.
He searched for them in the public phone database. Both of them were listed, and neither was the phone number he'd received.
He should talk to Pleakley about them. They might be friends of his.
Where was Pleakley?
He tried calling Pleakley's communicator.
"The number you have called is currently not answering calls right now. Please try again later."
Urgh. Not helpful.
Pleakley sometimes turned off his phone. Usually to charge its batteries, but still, it wasn't anything to be worried about.
But Jumba couldn't shake the uneasy feeling he was getting. Something was definitely wrong. His gut was telling him this quite plainly.
Then again, his gut was sometimes wrong as well.
He sighed, and walking back to the living room, he switched on the television. Might as well do something while he waited for a reply.
Maybe he really was being paranoid, and this was an old collage buddy trying to get in contact. He did sound slightly familiar – like he was from a distant dream of a far-off memory – but he couldn't remember anything more. The theory that he was someone he'd met at the Academy seemed somewhat more likely than his other postulations, that was for sure.
But what was it he wanted to talk about? And why was it so urgent?
One of the men in Workspace C at the Eve Hill Corporation was tapping out things on his keyboard, his USB drive's light flashing at a remarkable speed. He'd managed to work around the surveillance software on his desktop - it was easy enough to exploit the program, and at that moment it showed he was working on an Excel document.
Which is to say, he wasn't. Rather, he was typing rather furiously into a command prompt. Or, at least, he had been; the batch job had been set up, and now all he had to do was wait for whatever processing it had to do to complete.
He sat back in his chair – these people really needed better security.
In a few minutes it had finished, and with a quick key combination, he closed the command prompt.
"What exactly were you doing?"
The man froze. His voice chat program had launched, and the voice of his superior was now speaking through his workstation's cheap tinny speakers.
Quickly, he switched the exploit off so that his actual screen would appear. The boss would probably pin the delay of his voice chat program appearing on their screen on network lag or something.
Not that it would matter, if they had worked around the exploit. If they knew what he had been doing, he was dead for sure. And not dead in a figurative sense. Dead as in the wearing concrete shoes and playing with the fishes in Boston River dead. Harp-playing, wing-flapping, halo-wearing dead.
He shuddered. He didn't like this society, but he was assigned to them, and orders were orders.
He tried to feign ignorance.
"Sir? I'm not sure…"
"Forty minutes ago you used the telephone to call someone. Who was he and what did you want of him?"
Oh. He could explain that away pretty easily.
"Oh, him? Er…" the man's eyes darted from the phone back to the screen. "He's an old friend. I wanted to discuss something personal, but I know we're not allowed to use the phones for extended personal calls."
"I see." Silence for a moment. "You'll be docked one week's pay."
One week's pay was well worth it. He couldn't risk calling when he got home – it would be rather late, and the recipient might not get back to him until tomorrow. And tomorrow might be too late for them.
"Yes, sir. It won't happen again."
"See to it that it doesn't." The voice paused again. "How is Project Indigo?"
"We've reached Milestone Two, sir, but QA reports there might be some problems."
"Problems?" The voice had a slight tinge of displeasure in it.
"Some of the bugs might stop working after a while. We've identified the fault, but we'd have to delay the project by a week to fix it."
More pause. The man hated pauses, but especially faceless pauses. There was no way to tell the emotion of the speaker, and thus no indication of their thinking.
"No. It's too important to delay – we'll have to risk it. Launch Milestone Three."
"Yes, sir." He'd hoped that he'd order to delay the project – that way, he could make sure his own plans worked out.
He reopened the command prompt and tapped out several commands, and then sat back in his chair again as green text scrolled by. What was he going to do?
Now, everything hinged on time – how fast he and others would be able to act.
And time wasn't a luxury either of them had.