Note: Due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm currently without internet (I'm posting this from a Internet café.) I'll try and reply to any reviews as fast as I can, but it may take a while. Thanks in advance!


Aliens
Chapter 12: An Awkward Meeting

In spite of how dark it was, Michael Evens' fingers blazed across the keyboard of his laptop, his eyes fixed on its screen. Every now and then his elbow hit something metallic, and it was all he could do to stop himself yelling in pain – he had bigger things to worry about. Something was definitely fishy about this place, and he wanted to find out what.

He accessed the company's wireless hotspot, using a backdoor that he'd put in just in case – a user account that only he knew the name and password to, granting him full administrative privileges. He flipped through some folders, most of them containing mission statements or briefs dripped in corporate speak, until one caught his eye.

To tell the truth, Evens was only paid on a contract basis – he hadn't been able to negotiate full-time pay, and this had been the only job available. If he did come across something, he might be able to use it to his advantage. Not necessarily blackmail – knowing the boss, he probably wouldn't be able to get away with that anyway – but something much more subtle might be in order.

The folder he'd found was labelled "Operation Zarploc IV", and was buried deep in the folder hierarchy, nested in a folder named "Coffee Machine Purchase". (Entire folders devoted to trivial items were always suspicious.) It had several files and a few folders in it, and all had names that consisted of nothing but squares.

This puzzled him. The squares indicated that the kind of script the software wanted was not supported by his system font - however, the font he was using supported all of the scripts provided by the Unicode standard. This was odd.

He tried opening one of them in his word processor. However, the program didn't recognise the file type at all – instead, it spit out all kinds of nonsensical strings that Evens recognised as the result of a program trying to interpret a binary file as plain text. A quick look inside with a hex editor revealed no readable text whatsoever – everything was encoded in binary. Every document in that folder was like that – completely unreadable.

Unfazed, he tried one of the folders. This yielded better results – they were apparently PNG image files, readily readable by any image editor and quite a few web browsers. The first folder he'd selected was a set of pictures of the little girl and the blue dog he had seen on the boss's screen earlier. By the rather bland and slightly blurry look, he judged that they were taken with a long-range telescopic lens, similar to that the paparazzi used to stalkHollywoodstars.

He flipped through the sequence of photos. The little girl was carrying a newspaper, rolled up in a cylinder. As they continued, the dog got up on its hind paws, ate the newspaper, came back down, and continued walking. Not a particularily important event, or so Evens thought.

Another sequence was the girl and her dog driving across a rough dirt track in an all-terrain vehicle with a large, fat man and a extraordinarily thin lady – the girl's parents or aunt and uncle, most likely. These shots were blurry – they'd been going too fast for the camera – but he could still make out the long hair of the female adult billowing in the wind and the moustache of the male.

Why on earth would someone be taking these kinds of photos?

A house in the background of one of the shots gave him some pause – he recognised the house as being from his neighbourhood. Some of this had been happening in his neighbourhood!

The other folder was a bunch of scans for documents – except that the script was in no language he could recognise. They looked official, though, and would probably come in handy.

He downloaded the documents to his laptop. If he couldn't use them as leverage, the police – or perhaps even federal investigators – would be very interested in their contents.

He logged off the server and shut down his laptop. If all went according to plan, no-one would suspect a thing.

Evens had planned this out. If he'd picked any old broom closet, he'd have a hard time explaining why he'd been there. He'd specifically chosen one with no door handle on the inside, so he could claim he'd gotten locked in while looking for a can of compressed air to clean out his keyboard.

Ah, footsteps. Now would be his chance.

"Help!" he yelled, banging on the door. "I've gotten myself stuck! Help!"

"Hold on!" replied a voice – a young man who, from the sounds of his accent, had grown up a North Londoner. The footsteps rushed to the door, and the handle rustled.

"Got it!" the man exclaimed, and with a tug, the door opened wide.

"Thanks, mate, you don't know how long I've been in there," Evens said as he tried to manoeuvre across the various cleaning instruments. "Came in here for some compressed air, and next thing I know the door's closed!"

"Lucky I found you then!" said the man. "It's only about an hour to closing!"

Now that the door wasn't in the way, he could see that the man certainly didn't look like a Londoner – indeed, his long forehead and relatively flat face reminded him of several people he'd seen inManhattan. He was also somewhat short – although not much shorter than Evens, if truth be told.

Once he'd managed to get himself out to the hallway, he held his hand out to the person.

"The name's Evens – Mike Evens, though some people around here call me 'Mark'. I really wish they didn't, though."

"Why not? Mark's a fine n-"

"First day here, I'd had a run in with a palette of ink. It spilled in some… unfortunate places."

"I see." He took Evens's hand and shook it. "Well, Mike, my name is… er, Senko Batola."

This just puzzled him more. The first name sounded Japanese and – well, he didn't even know what to make of the last.

"Nice to meet you, uh- Senko." He broke off the shake. "If you don't mind me asking, what's with-"

"The accent and the name?" Senko grinned. "I've been getting that a lot. I was born in Berstin-"

"Berstin?"

"Oh, sorry, hang on-"

To Evens' great surprise, the man whacked the side of his own head – twice.

"Ah, there we go! Just had to get the old brain juices flowing, you know?"

Evens nodded slowly – he wasn't too sure what to make of this guy, but he certainly had at least a few marbles loose.

"Anyway, where was I?"

"Berstin."

"Ah, yes- sorry, that was Boston. Anyway, born inBoston to an American father and Japanese mother, who both moved toSalisbury soon after."

"Ah." He'd certainly heard less believable origin stories. "Well, I'll see you around, then."

"Probably not for much longer – I have to see a friend about getting out of- uh, moving to somewhere else. Tootles!"

Evens gave him a dubious glance, but he turned to walk back to his cubicle anyway.

"Oh, hang on!" called Senko's voice from behind him. "You forgot your laptop!"

He turned back – Senko was indeed holding his mobile computer.

"Ah, thanks!" He held out his hand, into which Senko placed the device.

"No problem," said Senko. "Although-"

He picked up a red USB stick that had been resting on the lid and now had fallen to the floor.

"Sorry, that's mine, don't know how it got there. Must have absent-mindedly put it there, my bad!"

"Er… no problem?"

"Take care!"

"Er, you too!"

As he walked away, he silently wished that that had really been the weirdest thing that had happened to him today.


Senko glanced back at the man as he walked down the hallway. He couldn't quite pinpoint it, but there was something… off about his story. According to the scanner built into his USB key, the temperature of the laptop indicated that he'd recently used it for something within the last few minutes, and as the area surrounding his wifi transmitter was warmer than it would be normally, he was probably on the company network as well.

He smiled. It could be an investigator. Or it could be a petty blackmailer. Either way, he could have an ally on his hands, if he played his cards right.

Of course, it could also be a spy working for Eve Hill. In any case, he'd have to keep an eye on him.

He'd reached his cubicle. He'd check it one more time, and then he'd leave to see Jumba – it'd be close enough to quitting time that no-one would care if he checked out a few minutes early.

But when he sat down, he saw that a terminal window had appeared, and on it read four words, followed by a flashing cursor.

"MILESTONE OBJECTIVE FOUR COMPLETE."

That was… that was impossible! While he knew that milestone two and four had been worked on concurrently, and while he'd known that the latter was nearing completion, he hadn't expect it to be done for at least a few days – or more probably, another week or two! Forget the technological state of the humans of planet Earth, even Qweltian technology didn't work that fast – never mind completing Milestone Four's objectives, just clearing the space necessary!

He shut down his computer and hurried towards the lift. Once he got outside of the company's satellite phone restrictors, he'd call the Grand Councilwoman about this – these humans clearly had access to alien technology, and he needed to shut that down as fast as possible. And then, he needed to contact Jumba Jookiba immediately. There was absolutely no time left – absolutely none – and if he was interpreting the documents he'd found earlier correctly, Jumba's very life could be at stake.

He got in the lift, and clicked in the ground floor. The lift shuddered, and began to sink.

Thank Glacknar, he thought with relief. If he could get to Jumba before Milestone Three was carried out to completion, he could stop this madness.

The light for the ground level flashed on, and the lift shuddered to a halt. But the doors refused to open.

"Hello, Senko," came the cold voice of his boss through loudspeakers installed above his head. "Any news for me on the project?"

"Uh…"

He looked around for any possible escape route. The elevator had none – no visible openings, no vents or tubes, no panels – not even screws or grooves. The surface, save for the floor level buttons, was completely seemless.

His heart sank. How could he be so stupid as to not have examined the elevator the first time he'd gotten here? Perhaps he'd thought the humans wouldn't find out about him, or that they wouldn't be a threat.

He'd gotten complacent, and if there was one thing basic training drilled into you, it was 'complacency is fatal.'

There was nothing else to it – he'd have to keep his cool and play along.

"Um, yes I do. Milestone Four has been completed."

"Brilliant," his boss replied. "Tell you what, for your superb work, I'm promoting you."

A lurch, and the sinking feeling in his stomach was joined by a sinking feeling in the rest of his body.

The lift was sinking. The lift was sinking.

"Sure, there'll be longer hours, but the pay is excellent! Hey, you could even make up for your lost pay packet!"

-the-lift-was-sinking-theliftwassinking-theliftwassinking-

SLAP.

There, he thought, rubbing his cheek, now reddish from the whack he'd just given it. He needed his wits about him. He couldn't submit to fear.

"Er, while I'm sure it's a… generous offer, I'm afraid I'd have to decline," he said. "Now, if you excuse me, I have a previous appointm-"

"I'm afraid," said the boss, "this promotion is not optional."

With a metallic thump that echoed in the spaces far above his head, the lift came to a halt on the elevator shaft floor. And the doors slowly opened.

Beyond those doors lay, shining through the pitch darkness that permeated every corner of the room, a massive computer screen, almost blindingly white. And before that sat the blurry silhouette of… well, what looked like a man. The figure was at the very least huminoid, but beyond that, the brightness of the screen made it impossible to tell any other distinguishing characteristics.

This was the boss. It had to be the boss.

"Come here," said the figure with the same cold harsh voice as on the speaker. Well, that certainly confirmed it.

Slowly and carefully, Senko exited the lift.

"Don't worry – when I say you're getting a promotion, I mean it – I'm not being metaphorical or anything," said the boss, not turning from the screen. "But before I do, I need to know I have your complete loyalty."

"O-of course," said Senko. It wasn't like he could say anything else under the circumstances.

"Good," replied the boss, crossing his fingers. "Now, then, it's time to get you started in your new role."

All of a sudden, clamps sprung up from the floor and grasped his legs; a few seconds later, and his arms had been secured by clamps from the ceiling. He tried to struggle but it was no use – they were far too tight.

A robotic arm slowly came forward from somewhere below the computer screen; grasped in its' claw was what seemed to be an eyepiece of some description – one with a transparent display fitted in it, it seemed. Senko briefly wondered if the boss was going to try to throw some kind of anime reference at him, but he remained silent.

The arm was now inches from his face. Senko tried to turn his head away from it as far as it would go – as if it would make a difference, but he had to try something, anything

But suddenly, a few centimetres from his eye, the arm stopped.

And then, the boss spun around in his chair, and Senko gasped.

The silhouette smiled – a horrible, jagged, evil smile. Even though he could see not a feature of his face, Senko could tell he was smiling, for the simple reason that both his eyes and teeth were glowing bright white, with the same intensity as the computer screen he sat before.

"Now, the difference," said the boss, "between me and a doctor is that when I say 'this isn't going to hurt a bit', I actually mean it. That is why I'm not going to say a thing."

It happened before it fully registered – the very next moment, the arm had clipped the eyepiece to his nose.

For a few seconds, nothing transpired. He just sat there, wondering if the mechanism was faulty or something.

But then, it began.

BZZZZZZ-

Wave after wave of intense pain pulsed through his forehead, though his body, through his very brain-

He screamed. He screamed as loud as he could.

The pain pulsed through every fibre of his being, seared through every cell. It felt as if his body would tear itself apart, and for a moment he wished it would, because at least then the incredible pain that he felt at that moment would finally stop-

But the pain did not stop, and he kept on screaming.

He had to scream. He had to. Anything to distract him from the pain, anything to fulfil the vain hope that someone might hear, anything at all…

And his boss silently watched on, all the while grinning at him with his evil jagged teeth.