As I descend into the basement, the dim light reveals a room unlike anything I've ever seen. The walls are lined with sleek, metallic panels that emit a faint, otherworldly glow. The air hums with a soft vibration, and the temperature drops noticeably, giving the room an almost clinical feel.

In the center of the room, a large, circular console dominates the space. It's made of a material that looks like a fusion of glass and metal. Embedded within the console are intricate controls and displays that flicker with symbols and data streams.

Scattered throughout the room are various pieces of advanced technology. Some look human-made, while others appear so foreign and alien that I can’t be sure of their origin. Tall, slender towers made of crystalline substances pulse with ethereal light, casting a spectrum of colors across the room. These crystals seem to resonate with a silent energy.

One side of the room is dedicated to an array of what looks to be communication devices, each more sophisticated than the last. Devices resembling sleek tablets, but with a translucent quality, are mounted on stands. Next to them are helmet-like structures with visors, one of which lies in pieces on a workbench, projecting a holographic image of a running horse at the far end of the table. The horse looks so lifelike that I wouldn’t be surprised if it simply galloped off on its own accord.

In the corners of the room, small cylindrical pods hum quietly. Their surfaces are covered in complex, luminescent circuits that intermittently light up. The room is meticulously messy, which I know is an oxymoron, but there seems to be a method to the scattered chaos.

“Jack?” comes a voice.

I spin around, but no one is there. I grip the shotgun and glance up at the stairs, but they’re empty.

“Jack, is that... oh my g—it is you!”

I catch the subtle flicker of a light in the top corner of the room. It’s a camera, moving to focus on me.

“Jim?” I say.

“What are you doing?” Jim’s voice comes from a speaker on one of his consoles.

“If you tell anyone I’m here, I’ll start shooting all your pretty tech,” I blurt out, trying to sound threatening, hoping that he values this junk as much as I think he does.

“Wait, just—why are you in my basement?” he says.

“Well, I was going to surprise you when you got home, maybe have a cake baked and everything, but…” I cock the shotgun and take aim at a particularly expensive-looking piece of equipment.

“Don’t, Jack! I swear I haven’t told anyone. I got a motion alert on my watch and no one knows but me.”

“You sure, Jim? Your track record recently isn’t great, let’s face it. And I really don’t want Peter Rabbet showing up right now, if I can help it.”

“Peter who? Oh, right. No, look, Jack, I’m on my way over right now. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

"I don't know, Jim. Blasting away some fancy stuff right now actually sounds like great therapy. I do have all that pent-up resentment and trauma from, you know, being tortured and all that.”

“I swear, I’m… look, I’m getting into the elevator now. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Just… Why are you even back here? Are you suicidal or something?”

I take a few steps around the room and shrug. “Maybe.”

“For real, Jack. They have a new guy in charge now and he’s twice as psychotic as Browning was. If he finds out that—”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“I need your help with something,” I say.

There’s a pause and I hear the soft ding of elevator doors opening in the background.

“With what?” he says.

“I’ll… I’ll show you when you get here.”

“Okay. Yeah, I’m on my—”

“By the way, I think your milk is expired,” I say, holding my gut, suddenly feeling a little ill.

There’s another pause. “Supply chains are all wrecked, Jack,” he says. “We take what we can get nowadays.”

—•—•—•—

“You know,” I say, “for all your supposed expertise in alien communications, I never once saw you do anything remotely communication-ish while imprisoned down there.” I’m sitting on Jim’s couch in the far corner of his basement lab, with the shotgun across my lap, watching him. He’s at one of his tables, peering through a strange-looking microscope at one of my three marbles and my football sized crystal.

“That's because when you think of communication,” Jim says, adjusting a lens, “you think of radios, text messages, and megaphones.” He looks up at me. “The aliens who visited us communicate very differently. They ‘talk’ in a very different way.”

I snort and look at the scar on my hand. That was a fact I knew all too well.

“You know,” I say, as Jim returns to the microscope, “the alien stuck in my arm—Xeno, I think I mentioned that—finds language and audible speech very intriguing. He’s obsessed with the novelty of it, in fact. He says they have no individuality. Well, they do, but every thought and action is known. There’s no ‘art of crafting a thought,’ as he puts it.”

“It’s a he?”

“Well,” I shrug, “I’m actually not sure about that. He … was very touchy on how they reproduce. Something to do with the birth of stars and their religious affiliation with their mysterious progenitors.”

Jim looks back up. "I really wish I could speak with it … him. I’d give anything to …" he trails off. "Why didn’t you tell me before?" He holds up his hand. "Never mind, I understand. That would have probably ended up even worse for you."

I shift to face Jim better. "So, how can you go along with it? How can you live with yourself, knowing the kind of stuff that goes on down there?"

Jim sighs. "Jack, look, most of what we do—I do—is relatively benign. It only took a turn for the worse when you arrived. It's not really like that, not usually. The work we do down there is incredibly important."

"Important to who?"

He opens his mouth, shuts it, then shrugs. "Look, Jack, I’m so, so sorry for what they did to you. What I did to you. From a human perspective, it was cruel and ugly and... well, wrong. But we learned so much—I’m not justifying it. But we’re talking about aliens here, Jack. We’re talking about technology that can change the course of human history, and maybe, just maybe, save the world."

"Too late for that," I say. "Even our alien friends couldn’t prevent what’s happening. Which, as I told you, is why they created a gateway to another world for us."

He looks back into the microscope, studying each marble in turn. After a few minutes of silence, he says “These are absolutely incredible.” He holds up the crystal. “And you’re saying you, or he, materialized these spheres from a crystalline structure like this?”

“It was more like he sucked them out, or whatever, but yeah.” I made a sucky face to emphasize that I was being literal. “You think you can make them work?”

“I want to try something.” He stands up, all three marbles in hand. He leaves the crystal by the microscope and he walks over to a cluster of very dark green crystals acting as a centerpiece at one of his lab tables, and places the marbles around the crystal. He puts his hand over the crystal and closes his eyes.

“What is this?” I say, standing up to join him.

He shushes me.

It takes about ten seconds, but the marbles begin to move. At first, it’s subtle, then they start rolling around the crystal in a circle, each following the other.

“Whoa,” I say, “What, are you some kind of Jedi?”

He ignores me.

The marbles roll faster and faster until they lift off the table. An inch, then two, then four. The collective spin increases until the marbles become a blur. There’s no sound, only motion. Jim’s face scrunches up, his outstretched hand begins to twitch. Then the marbles get wobbly and suddenly freeze, mid-air. The sudden halt in momentum at that speed looks extremely unnatural. The yellow one is glowing. Then … they all fall to the table and roll into the crystals.

Jim lets out a breath and collapses, bracing himself on the table.

“What just happened?” I say.

He lets out a breath and looks up at me.

“Communications,” he says, flatly.

“With whom?”

I feel a twinge and look at the underside of my forearm. I can almost see Xeno squirming around in there.

Jim let’s out another exhausted breath, then looks at me. “I want to try something else,” he says. “Help me get that heavy thing out of your van, will ya?”