What do you do when the creature that comes tumbling out of the capture pod is not Experiment 626, but an Earth native, a child, who spends three seconds wide-eyed and terrified before the assembled command before she bites someone? She gets him good, too, the disgraced captain who kidnapped her. She punctures through his scaly hide with her blunt human teeth until he shouts, and then she scurries between legs and tentacles and flailing arms. She makes it out of the room and a little down the hall before she's caught again, brought back snapping and screaming, tears in her eyes.

"Let me go!" she yells, pitched so high your ear-chutes ache and shut slightly to block it out. "Let me go! Let me go! Let me go let megoletmegoletme-" Faster, without breaths between the words, as tears spill down her cheeks and her nose starts to run. She kicks the guard holding her, and they drop her.

"Who are you?" you ask. You motion for Captain Gantu to be sent away. You will deal with him later. Now, you soften your tone and approach the girl.

You have never given much thought to collateral damage, but now, it's having a breakdown in the middle of your workplace.

The girl sucks in a messy breath, straightens up, and shouts at you, "My name is Lilo! My sister is Nani!"

"Nani?" This only seems to upset her more.

"Nani! She's-" she lifts her hand, gets up on her toes, strains her arm as far as she can reach. "She's this-!" More tears roll down her cheeks as she drops her arm, too small to reach, to make her point. "She's tall! She's tall, and she has dark hair and brown eyes, and you took me away from her!"

You sigh. "I'm sorry," you say, "I don't know who that is."

"I don't care! You have to bring me back!"

You shake your head.

Lilo wails.

What do you do with a child? You have never had one. You've never even been around one. This girl is an alien, lost amid the deep black ocean of space. She can never go home. Who knows what the consequences of that would be? And more importantly, if the few observations Agent Pleakley sent you before you terminated his employment were to be trusted, she was very close to Experiment 626.

She could be useful.

So, the answer is this. You pick her up off the ground. You adopt her as your own. You let her grow. You take her into your employ. You train her. You teach her to fly. You give her a ship and a gun.

You send her out into the galaxy to track down 626.

What do you do when your greatest creation, made to fight and destroy and love every minute of it, instead sits and mopes?

Your assigned babysitter, now fellow fugitive, has finally put two-and-two together. You are not returning your creation, and he is not getting his job back. One mopes, one pouts. It's going to be a very long trip.

You don't have to feed the Experiment. It could last for dozens of years without food and still never tire. You offer it a bite of what little you smuggled off that delightful planet anyway, and for your good deed, get it spat back in your face. You wipe it off in disgust, narrowing four eyes at it, slightly bloodshot from lack of rest.

"What?" you demand. "You're still upset? You didn't belong there. You don't belong anywhere, but you are my monstrosity, and I will take care of you." Your creation glares at you. This is new. You never attached your experiment's destructive capability to anger. No. Too dangerous to teach it how to hold a grudge. You gave it glee instead. And somehow, it has learned how to despise you anyway. "Parts of you, anyway."

A glitch. One you will resolve. Your creation cannot learn. It cannot find new purpose. It simply is what it is, what you made it.

Waiting, croaks with grief in your mind, family.

You look down at your impertinent creation. You feel a twinge of pity in your twin livers.

"It won't hurt for much longer," you tell it. "Soon, I will remake you better. Stronger. We will forget all about this. A blip in our lives." You turn from it, and you see your new copilot poking a button he really shouldn't if he doesn't want this flight to go catastrophically wrong. This ship, as tiny as it is, still has an airlock, but the thought doesn't even cross your mind. You're too fond of him. He makes you laugh, and who else is going to put up with him?

Who else is going to put up with you?

You settle back in the pilot's seat, remove his cool hand from the console, and say, "Do not touch that. We'll explode."

He reacts with characteristic exasperation, "why would you even have that button?!", and you try to pretend you really will go back to exactly who you were before this all began.

(In the years to come, you do try to fix your creation ("Stitch!" it protests, no matter how you put it back together, "my name is Stitch!") and you even pick up a tail. A persistent one. You must still be quite a thorn in the Grand Councilwoman's side. Once, in the middle of a glorious chase across the cosmos, you catch a glimpse of your pursuer through their cockpit window. You even almost recognize her.)

What do you do when the child you were supposed to protect goes missing?

The first thing you do is get chewed out by your boss, a sharp woman who likes order more than she likes children, while you take it stoically, though after the things you've been through, there's not many other ways you could take it. The second thing you do is organize a dozen search parties that turn up nothing. The third thing you do is reread Nani's testimony, as jumbled as it is, written off as the results of grief and denial.

You reread it a few times. You don't have much else to do. They don't have another case to put you on yet. After all, you're the one who comes at the breaking point, the fixer, the man who gets the job done. Not this time.

You record all the calls you get. Used to be standard procedure at your old post, safety. So, alone, you play Lilo's voice again and again, listening hard to the chaos in the background. Do you know those sounds? Have you heard those shots be fired before?

And finally, you give Nani a visit.

You don't want to face her. It's the hardest thing you've ever done. You're including the training to withstand interrogation in that. You would prefer waterboarding.

When she sees you, she loses it. You let her, ensconced behind your dark glasses. She like a part of her has died. You let her scream until she can't anymore, voice hoarse as she collapses, burying her face in her arms.

You have always been aware of how young she is, the injustice of it.

You sit beside her, but you give her ample space. "Tell me exactly what the ship looked like," you say.

Nani chokes. "What?"

You take off your sunglasses. "The ship that took your sister. Give me the most accurate description you can." She looks at you like you're crazy, but then, she does tell you. You've heard UFO stories from all over the country, flying saucers and little green men. It's easy to tell who's lying when you've seen a real ship with your own two eyes, learned how it's powered and how it flies. Nani makes no mistakes. If anything, the details that you don't recognize are natural progressions of alien technology since those that crash-landed on Earth.

She finishes. She waits for you to tell her she's lying.

"I believe you," you say. It changes very little. Neither of you can reach Lilo.

But maybe, between the two of you, you can find a way to have her brought back.

"Are you still looking for a job?" you ask.

(You wish it were as easy as her saying yes, as you calling in every favor you've ever worked for, as creating a force to monitor space that even NASA would be jealous of if they knew you existed. You wish it were as easy as calling out into the void and begging for a little girl to be returned to her family. If Nani won't give up, and she won't give up, than neither will you. No matter how long it takes. This is your mess. You have to clean it up.)