Mary
Mary fought the grief of loss by throwing herself into her work. She hadn’t appreciated how much her brain had been focused on the kids until they were gone. She’d applied herself to questions previously ignored with their new plentiful resources. Her results often generated more questions than answers.
One example; the layers of stone strata around Eastwood exposed by the crater around UE 000 struck her as odd, and she’d requested a sample. She saw the truth spelled out with a reference sample from a geographically similar area. Two cylinders sat on her desk, one labeled ‘Eastwood,’ each layer of the rock parfait representing millions of years of geological deposition. The two looked eerily similar until she took one and flipped it over. Then they looked exactly the same.
Director Minos was less than pleased with her discovery, “That’s what you’ve been spending our time and money on, Doctor?”
“It’s not that I haven’t been working on other projects. The subdivisions are progressing… slowly,” she explained over the phone, “It’s just that—”
“—It’s just what, Mary?”
In her frustration, the words she’d suppressed ever since the day of Daniel’s departure slipped, “It’s just that the alien tech is a little too advanced.”
Her boss was skeptical. “How can it be too advanced?”
Let me count the ways. “There are no plugs or jacks for us to adapt our hardware to. Everything is wireless. We can activate a display projection from the ship’s console by banging on it, but we can’t translate their software language. To make things worse, there’s no input control. No keyboard, no mouse, no buttons, no voice activation, no motion sensing, nothing! And,” she laughed, “The piece we crack open, what’s inside? Pink gelatin that rots when exposed to light, something so alien we have no clue how to deal with it.”
She shook her head.
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“We found these weird earpieces on the mummies.” She waved at the nine blue things that looked a bit like half-headphones on her desk. “Nobody can get them to work. There’s no evidence of a physical connection between the devices and bodies we can exploit. They must be activated by some password, electromagnetic signal, genetically engineered pheromones, or, for all we know, it ran out of batteries. We don’t have the equipment to analyze them.
“Even the physical makeup of the ship is comprised of nanomaterials so complex in structure we can’t imagine how they were mass assembled. It looks like we’re going to have to face the facts—”
“—Don’t you say it!” Minos commanded.
Mary pounded her fist on the desk. “Reverse engineering this technology from our level is impossible!”
The other end of the line went quiet. Then Minos said, “There are some things that shouldn’t be said, especially on an internal line. That aside, I’m giving you until tomorrow to come up with a new plan and a better attitude. If you don’t, I’ll be forced to find a new Head of Research and Development.”
“Not that I care anymore,” Mary said into the dead line after Minos disconnected. “Good luck finding someone willing to deal with this.” She slammed the speaker’s ‘End Call’ button.
She sighed and started packing. Mary knew better than anybody the pointlessness of their endeavor. There was so much money here and nothing to do with it. They were hiring bean counters to count bean counters, and nothing would come of it.
No. The real prizes flew away over a year ago, gone where we can’t follow.
She loaded up a picture of Daniel on her smartphone. “Where are you?” she whispered, “Are you doing well? Having fun with your new friends? Your old friends? You never did get the chance to tell me about your past. What do you look like now? Are there others like you out there? Have you been a good boy? Are you in trouble?” She let the device slide from her hand, put her forehead to the cool surface of the desk, and sighed again.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, who is that?” the small, high-pitched voice of a child said. “Is he your son? No, couldn’t be. That’s a pure-blooded Angel if I ever saw one. I’ve never seen one, though.”
The door had been locked. Mary looked up. A ten-year-old girl dressed in what appeared to be a purple unitard sat on the desk. She seemed very familiar. The strangest aspect of her appearance, however, was the partial transparency.
“A ghost?” She rubbed her red and weary eyes.
“Really, Mary? You’re a smart woman and as well-educated as could be hoped. Such an anachronistic superstition is beneath your intellect. You know who I am.”
Mary blinked, “The mummies from the ship, one of them was a little girl…”
“Bingo!” The girl pressed her mouth into a smile of pride and delight, “I knew you were the right choice.”