Aliens on Parade
by Everett Maroon
He rapped his fingers on the dashboard to the beat of some catchy tune, decided it was annoying, and flipped to the next station. Not much interested Rufus during the morning commute.
He picked up a small flat screen and skipped to the next page of the news section. Metro service was down between Seattle and Portland again. No shock there. He looked out the window at the HOV lane and sure enough, people were disembarking from the big blue tram cars, looking for anyone to pull over and offer them a ride into the city. Rufus sighed, thinking something about karma, and punched a few commands into the dash. He unlocked the doors as the car maneuvered into the far right lane and slowed down, stopping at the front of the line of people.
—Thank you so much, said a woman in white sneakers and an overloaded briefcase, as she climbed into the front passenger seat.
Two other people—a scraggly young man and an older man with graying hair at his temples—sat down in the back. They gave him nods. He waited for everyone to strap in, and programmed the car to get into the HOV lane, since he had made the minimum passenger count.
His friend worked as a Commute Investigator, pulling over drivers she suspected of having fake people along for the ride. In the early days these were just mannequins and easily spotted, or sometimes they were dolls in a baby seat, but over time they’d become creatively convincing. One intrepid cheater even tried an android that blinked and smiled. Camilla had laughed after she’d pulled him over, but she wrote him a ticket. Camilla always wrote the ticket. And she had a fool-proof weapon: a heat index tracker, her own little invention. Nothing out there could mimic the heat signature of a human being, even if you calibrated it to 37 degrees, or so she declared. Month after month Camilla came in with some of the highest ticketing rates. It was only a matter of time before her office removed her from the job she did so well and promoted her into a position with which she’d have no experience. She seriously thought about performing just a little bit worse, but couldn’t bring herself to ease up on the chase. It was what she loved.
Rufus flew down the highway because with all the Metro vehicles off the lane, there was plenty of space to zoom along. Of course the car wouldn’t speed more than 8km over the limit. But it felt like flying all the same, after he’d been crawling along in the regular lanes. The young man in the back had struck up a conversation about nothing with the woman in front. They steered clear of any personal information. It was customary not to share one’s name in a slug car, which was what this was now. In fact, it was rule number one. Even if he saw the same slug rider again, even if he learned their name via some other context, he did not mention the slug experience they’d shared. And if asked, Rufus would not have been able to articulate why that was. It just was.
He pulled into downtown, and the riders got out, only the woman courteous enough to thank him again. He gave her a quick smile, and selected the customized destination of his workplace. Taking the last two minutes of the ride for a quick nap, he put the car on full auto and closed his eyes. A pleasant alarm woke him back up once he was in the parking garage. It always smelled like brownies to him in there, because awful chemicals were always made to smell pleasant, even if each person’s olfactory nerves picked the scent up slightly differently.
He saw other employees walking through the garage, toward the small green door that let them into the building.
—I think it’s cruel that I have to start every day smelling chocolate chip cookies, Isabella said. I’m trying to keep my weight down.
—Why not just enjoy it and know that you’re not taking in any calories, asked Ronnie, the new girl from human resources. Clearly nobody had told Ronnie not to talk to Izzy about weight, food, eating food, or the weight one has taken on after one has eaten food.
—What are you saying, Izzy said, shocked, and Ronnie spent the rest of the walk to the door apologizing and trying to backtrack. She’ll figure it out, Rufus thought.
Entering the building should have been where he scanned his retina to enter, but the scanner had been broken for as long as anyone remembered. Some higher up had decreed that a committee be formed to identify solutions, and nobody could agree on a plan. He held his badge up to the Jose, the guard, who grinned and waved him past. Rufus walked through doors that opened on their own, sensing his presence just late enough that he had to slow down a tick or he’d clip their edges.
The office building once had been a mall, built in the preceding century, when developers still had hope for foot traffic-based retail and suburbia. Now each block of cubicles were separated by slow-moving automatic doors. And Rufus had no idea where the pretzel bakery, the junior’s department, or the sad, old woman hawking real silver-plated necklaces had once stood.
He sat down in his cube and the computer asked for his password. He typed in his latest.
This password has expired, it told him. Please create a new password.
Rufus thought for a moment and came up with a new password in his head.
H8Th!sJB, he typed.
Password rejected. Reason code 92: Previously used.
He growled under his breath.
SCREWu!1. He pressed the enter key with force.
Password accepted. Good morning, Mr. Javier, the monitor announced to him, and then the screen appeared, the logo of his agency in a field of light blue.
Suddenly his phone lit up with a call. He grabbed his headset and picked up the call. It was a colleague from OSTS, Outer System Technical Support.
—Hi, Frank, he said, trying not to sigh the greeting instead of say it.
—Hi, Ruf, we’ve got a problem on the SS Canaveral.
He pulled up the data on the ship and glanced over the basic specs screen as Frank kept talking.
—She came into contact with an enemy vessel at oh-300 hours and in the course of trying to negotiate passage with their captain, was fired upon.
Standard so far. Rufus waited patiently to hear what the problem was.
—She returned fire, but didn’t damage their shields much at all, he said, sounding increasingly upset.
—Frank, Frank, just send me the transcript. I’ll take a look at this. Is everyone okay?
—Yes, she sped away, but we need to figure out what went wrong and I don’t see anything out of order here. What if they’ve got a new kind of force field?
Frank was all about the what ifs. Really, tech support was the worst place for him because he always made the caller more concerned than before they’d rung him. On second thought, Frank mused, policy would probably be a worse department for him, because everything would be predicated on the most awful scenario possible. Maybe it was just as well.
—Okay, let me take a look at the log, please.
—Sending it now.
Rufus looked at the record of the exchange. Exhaling, he took Frank off hold.
—If they keep their missiles set on Decimate, they will always only do ten percent damage. Decimate means to destroy by ten percent.
—Oh my God, are you kidding?
—Am I ever kidding?
—Good point. Thanks, Ruf!
—Good bye, Frank.
That crisis averted, he started reading through his email. The unidentified song from this morning’s commute echoed around in his head. His boss poked her head in.
—Emergency meeting, room C24 in 10 minutes, she said, and he nodded. There were no meetings in her world that weren’t better as emergency meetings.
He stood up to get a thick binder off of his shelf, because no matter how hard it tried, the government just couldn’t get over its addiction to paper. The monitor beeped at him for standing up.
If leaving computer, please log out. Agency reminder: §737.82-.84: All communications of Agency employees must be kept confidential at all times, pursuant to penalties outlined in §739.12-28.
—I know, I know, he said to nobody in particular. He sat back in his chair, watching the alert disappear. In protest, he farted into the seat.
Precisely eight minutes later, Rufus unhooked his monitor and held it close to his chest, walking in the direction of the meeting. He steeled himself for some nonsense issue that Eshlie had deemed urgent, and walked into conference room C24. He didn’t quite notice the banner over the doorway that cheeringly declared his group’s new motto in bold font and bright colors: With Better Quality Than Last Year.
But Rufus was taken by surprise at her announcement. They had a real emergency.
—The D2400s are down, Eshlie said, pressing a button at the edge of the conference table, and a scattering of quiet beeps sounded around the room as everyone’s tablets updated with her meeting notes. People lowered their heads to read the brief. They also appeared on a screen on the wall, but none of them looked at it because it was half-broken, the screen mostly dark except for the top third that still struggled to communicate some message or other. Sometimes the whole screen would flash back to life, only to reveal a birthday greeting for Carmen. Carmen, for her part, had retired four years ago.
Rufus asked how many D2400s were down.
—All of them, Eshlie said, looking somehow graver than she had a moment ago.
—So it’s a system failure, Rufus asked. There are a few things we can check–
She cut him off, as she was prone to doing when she was anxious about work.
—We’ve gone through all of the troubleshooting. It’s something that we haven’t identified yet. But we’ve got other maintenance to handle. The administrator has already asked for help from Homeland in dealing with the overflow.
—But they’re useless, Isabella said, chewing loudly on a piece of gum. —They could just make everything worse.
—Yes, I know, Izzy. So systems has to figure out a solution immediately. Eshlie tucked her hair back behind her ears and leaned on the table, her fingers like bent columns.
She broke them up into teams, each to look at different aspects of the machines’ software, hunting the breakdown. The mechanics guild, a sister team to theirs in systems, was going over the hardware design with the manufacturer.
Rufus hadn’t been assigned a group or a mission. He waited at the table after the other team members left, watching Eshlie shuffle through pages on her tablet.
—Come to my desk, she said, heading off.
They moved through the cube blocks, cutting this way and that, avoiding the people Eshlie and Rufus knew would spot them and force a conversation: the hoarder, whose fault it was that they had a mouse problem, the stinky programmer who knew all about code but couldn’t decipher how to use a bar of soap, the hair-puller, and a few others. Some minutes later they were at Eshlie’s desk. Making sure Rufus was all the way inside the threshold, Eshlie pressed a button on her fabric-covered wall and a privacy screen hummed into existence, cutting off the doorway and top of her cube, which was adorned with statues of pugs. She had four live pugs at her house, pictures of which covered one wall of her cube.
The privacy screen would cut off in eight minutes, as this was the time limit the Agency had decided would suffice for meetings of a private nature. One could yell at their petulant teenage child, give their personal information to a banker, talk to their doctor, or set up an illicit affair, and the sound would be trapped in the cube. One just couldn’t stand up or walk through the cube entrance or the screen would be canceled. Inanimate objects, however, were fine, and so Eshlie’s shrine to All Things Pugs remained unscathed, even though she used the privacy barrier all the time.
—The administrator is afraid this is an inside job, she told Rufus, who was a little surprised he hadn’t thought of that possibility. All of the machines crashing at once was improbable, to say the least.
—So what does she want to do about it?
—She wants you and I to look through the code on the servers to see if anyone was playing around with it.
This meant that Rufus would do it, because they both knew Eshlie didn’t know the first thing about servers and code, although they had agreed never to mention it.
—Okay, I’ll get started, he said, and she cut him off again, waving a hand at him.
—You can’t work in your cube on this, she said. That terminal is monitored. They looked at his tablet, cradled in his lap. —You’ll have to go to the computer center building.
—Won’t people notice I’m gone?
—Yes, so we’ll just tell them you’re having some kind of surgery and will be out for a few days.
—Really? He wasn’t sure people would believe that.
—Sure, it’ll be fine. I’ve already alerted the computer center that you’re coming. They’ve updated your badge on a temporary basis, for the next two weeks.
—When do I report?
—Right now.
—Can I park over there? He tried not to sigh, pretending it was a yawn, because somehow that seemed less offensive.
—Here’s your pass for the lot, she said, handing him a thick piece of plastic.
—Okey dokee, he said, and he started to stand up.
—Hang on. Here’s a handheld for telling me what you’ve found out.
He already had his tablet, so he thought the handheld was redundant. Eshlie picked up on his hesitation.
—This one is secure, and will only transmit to me, the division lead, and the administrator’s office.
Apparently he’d been bumped up a security clearance level. He nodded and pocketed the device, not telling her that now, actually, he felt a bit of concern.
—Okay, get out of here, she said, picking up a stylus to which she’d glued a tiny plastic pug. —Good luck and call me in a couple hours to tell me how it’s going.
Rufus made an okay sign with his fingers, picked up his briefcase, and walked back to the parking lot. The trichotillomaniac spotted him on the way out.
—Where are you off to, she asked, looking nervous to see him out of his routine.
—Just a doctor’s visit, he said as nonchalantly as possible, which of course, looked a bit odd coming from him, he imagined, since he never talked about anything personal.
—I need to see a doctor, too, she said, smoothing one hand against her head in the back. —My hair keeps falling out.
—Well, good luck, said Rufus.
