There were fewer Smiths and Johnsons at the Silver Spoon diner, and the guys there were all a little subdued. O’Connor came ready for some jeering, but these guys looked like they might have partied harder than they should have. “Ah, the Tiggers are here!” a guy called from one of the booths. O’Connor couldn’t tell if it was the same guy that he talked to the day before. They did look remarkably similar. The same collection of beef sides lined up at the lunch counter, still elbowing each other for room, all sharing the same surly expression. O’Connor spotted the three empty seats near the end and shoulder-checked his way in.
“Well, hello Mai Tai!” The blonde called cheerily as O’Connor took his stool. “My horoscope said to look for the sun breaks, and here you are!” She cleared a few plates from the end of the counter and, passing by at full speed, leaned in to give the sergeant a very European kiss on the cheek.
Stunned by the sudden appearance of cleavage, Paulson chuckled to himself.
“And you brought company with ya!” She dumped the plates in a bus tub and grabbed three fresh mugs.
Martinez smoothed his hair back again and opened the trifold menu as if he needed to look through the lunch and dinner dining options as well.
The kitchen erupted in a cacophony of clashing egg pans and heavy ceramic plates skidding across the stainless steel. A staccato string of obscenities in both Spanish and English piqued Paulson’s interest. “Ask the chef how fresh the fish is, would you?”
“Oh, sweetie.” The blonde shook her head slowly, glancing back at the pass-through window. “He ain’t that kind of chef.”
O’Connor had just picked up the menu. “Same cook?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes and nodded.
“Ask him anyway,” Paulson asserted confidently.
“I’ll ask him.” She flipped over their coffee mugs and started filling them. “But I don’t want to hear a lot of whining if he spits in your eggs.”
“Make it three cheese omelets and three coffees,” O’Connor said, surrendering his menu. Martinez protested weakly, glancing up from his reading on George’s incredible cooking skills.
“Just trust me,” O’Connor said.
The waitress nodded in agreement and pushed her pad back into her pocket. “The boys should be back anytime.” She said, probably trying to convince herself more than anyone else.
Chief Martinez’s phone rang again. Once more he pressed the ignore button and flipped it over, ignoring the screen. “Are you ever going to answer that?” O’Connor pulled a couple of creamers from the dish and peeled back the foil covers, pouring them into his mug.
“It’s Levy,” The chief grumbled. “He’s been calling since three this morning. Something about a monster robot and aliens or something.”
“Related to the case?”
Martinez shook his head. “He’s incoherent; something about giant robots and a pair of gray aliens walked up to the back door last night, then he blathered on about time travel, instant oatmeal, and the security cameras.”
“Let’s just hope he doesn’t hurt himself,” O’Connor muttered into his coffee. “There’s nobody left to call an ambulance.”
As beat cops, both Martinez and O’Connor had spent extensive time dealing with junkies of all sorts. They both knew exactly what Levy was up to when he started gritting his teeth and chewing his tongue. Whether they were afraid of Levy’s retribution, or afraid to lose their last technician and mechanic, neither of them wanted to be the first to mention that he was high as a West Hollywood hooker most days, and worse at night. Which is why the chief wasn’t the least bit interested in a time-traveling robot and its little gray friends at four in the morning.
O’Connor watched the waitress sidle past, just a little easier than she had the day before. The Smith or Johnson next to him shoveled food into his face like he was still half asleep. “Rough night?” O’Connor asked, eyeing the agent’s unshaven chin and generally dour expression.
The agent rubbed his chin and shrugged. “Cold showers this morning.” He glanced around at the rest of the Smith and Johnson family reunion.
O’Connor realized they all looked just slightly off-kilter, unshaven, or otherwise askew. “No reflective surfaces down at the Playa Seca,” he quipped.
The other agent bristled slightly. “No electricity,” he muttered. “Whole grid went down last night, I guess.”
Mr. Paulson chuckled in his unsettling manner and continued reading the short biography on the back of the menu.
Martinez frowned. “We didn’t lose power.”
O’Connor shook his head. “Air conditioner was on when I left.”
The agent snarled slightly and continued bulldozing his breakfast into his face. “They’re fixing it now,” he muttered.
Feeling a little more content with his choice of motor inns, even if he did envy the daytime room service, O’Connor leaned back. “Well, fuck your waterslide, then,” he said, checking his phone again.
If the chief was avoiding his phone, O’Connor couldn’t take his eyes from his screen.
“Still no answer?” the chief asked, sipping his coffee.
Assuming that she was having an affair might be a fatalistic fantasy, but her radio silence wasn’t helping. O’Connor shook his head grimly. “I think we might have done it this time.” For all he knew, she could be filing the paperwork already, and he would arrive in Los Angeles a week late, and just to sign his divorce petition. He checked the screen again before sliding it away.
The chief sipped his milky coffee. “You’re overreacting.” He set the coffee cup back onto the moist napkin, catching the oversplash. “My ex didn’t file for divorce until nearly ten years into TIG.”
O’Connor raised an eyebrow. “You were using your office for extracurricular activities, boss.” He knew that he was crossing the line, but he was about to lose his own wife to another weather balloon incident. “There’s a big difference.”
Martinez quietly seethed, glancing over at Mr. Paulson, hoping that he hadn’t been listening.
Mr. Paulson watched them both with a bemused expression. He motioned for them to go on.
“Mistakes were made, Sergeant. Let’s not go hashing up a lot of old news.”
O’Connor regarded the auditor, recognizing that he was probably not helping the financing situation. “Yes, sir,” he muttered, hunkering over his coffee cup. The waitress leaned over to deliver their plates and proved a well-timed distraction. Paulson chuckled at the presentation of a can opener sitting on top of his breakfast. “Chef says try the soup.” She shook her head. “I warned you he wasn’t in a good mood.”
Paulson considered the can opener before passing it back to her. “Soup is good food,” he said. He checked his watch before nodding politely.
She pulled the coffee pot from the hotplate and waved it over their mugs, instantly ruining their perfect cream and sugar-to-coffee ratios. “Honestly,” She glanced around like anybody might be listening, or even care. “The fish comes in battered and frozen just like everything else on the menu, but there aren’t a lot of people coming to the middle of the California desert for our catch of the day.” She winked at O’Connor and tossed the can opener into the pass-through window.
Paulson chuckled as she walked away.
Baptizing his breakfast with Cholula hot sauce, it dawned on the chief that he wasn’t commanding a legitimate black ops investigative group; he was running an adult daycare facility.
After breakfast the three of them piled into the Chevy Tahoe, still listing badly. They bounced out of the parking lot with an ominous squeak. The suspension bottomed out against the frame with a slight crunch. They headed north, hoping to get another look at the crash site before the word got around. O’Connor and Vickers were first on the scene, and they already had the intel. As far as the chief was concerned, the commissioner could call in the CIA, the FBI, the EPA, and the ASPCA. She could get as many dog catchers and DMV employees as she wanted up to Arroyo Grande for all he cared. They were first on the site, and therefore, they had jurisdiction.
Rounding the bend, however, it became clear that the new guys were working with the same intel that they were and somehow, they had managed to get to the crash site first that morning. Chief Martinez’s phone rang again. Without taking his eyes off the twin pop-up shade structures that had been erected over the spot up the hill, he punched the ignore button on the phone and started surveying his commandeered crash site. He counted three black SUVs already unloading folding tables and field equipment. While this sufficed to explain to O’Connor’s satisfaction why the Silver Spoon was not as busy as the previous morning, it also gave the invasive investigative group imminent domain over the radioactive site. Without official jurisdiction, occupation served as a sort of ownership. By the time they were finished with their inspection, the soil was guaranteed to be picked clean, securing samples for further research as well as cleaning and containing any potential evidence to sanitize the area from future public inquiry. It was standard operating procedure. Before they left, they would be filling plastic bins with contaminated topsoil, preparing it for transport to an undisclosed location where it would inevitably get filed away. There was a good chance that a few extremely heavy bankers’ boxes would arrive at TIG in the next few weeks. Aside from the two-ounce samples that O’Connor secured, the crash site itself was a nonstarter.
He pulled a small set of binoculars from his bag and surveyed the scene up the hill. They seemed to be unloading an entire laboratory up there, delicate equipment packed in rugged industrial cases, more field equipment than TIG had in their inventory. Whoever these guys were, they were better-funded and better rigged. One of the field agents up the hill glanced down at the chief, grinning. He slapped the shoulder of another agent, and both chatted and started laughing. A third agent dropped his black utility trousers far enough to show Martinez his pale Anglo ass and slapped his butt cheeks at the chief.
Martinez muttered to himself. Short of finding microscopic shards of the artifact after sifting through the soil, there didn’t appear to be much up there anyway. Somebody somewhere could get him copies of their field reports after the fact if they turned up anything good. Hell, the file would probably end up in another banker’s box, stacked against his front reception desk, waiting to get dumped into an empty office for the foreseeable future.
O’Connor judged the sun rising toward the most miserable heat of the day and felt a little relieved. “Look at the bright side, Chief. At least we don’t have to hike up there.”
Martinez glared up at the temporary field lab with a smoldering intensity that recalled his hardened beat cop days. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sergeant. We’ll drive up once they’ve cleared out. I doubt they’ll occupy the site all night.”
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
O’Connor glanced back at the listing Tahoe, the front end tilted upwards and the back bumper bowing as deeply as the overworked suspension would allow. That they had made it through the parking lot without scraping off the oil pan was a miracle in itself, off-roading up a steep incline was a good way to end up calling Jack down at the tow company again. “Yeah,” O’Connor shook his head. “I don’t think driving your lowrider up the hill is such a good idea.”
Martinez glanced back at the Tahoe and agreed.
“You know what I don’t see, though, Chief?”
Standing by the side of a desert highway, buffeted by truckers hauling past, the list was long. “A spaceship? Little green men? A cocktail waitress?”
O’Connor smiled smugly. “Air support, sir. McGoohan’s got to have some sorta infrared cameras or something. Why don’t we get him up here for some eyes in the sky?”
Martinez glanced up at the clear blue sky, looking around as if he was worried about heavy air traffic. Even though McGoohan had requisitioned and acquired some strange additions to the Blackhawk, he doubted that any of them would be of much use in surveilling a fifty-year-old crash site. The Smiths and Johnsons had the right idea, combing through the desert topsoil, looking for isotope residue. If they could isolate what type of radioactive isotope it was, they might be able to at least establish if they were looking for military-grade plutonium or something out of this world. At least, Martinez thought, with a Blackhawk circling the crash site, it might put the greedy bastards off the field work long enough to let them get a better soil sample. “Dammit, O’Connor. I think you got something right.”
As he pulled out his phone to call McGoohan, it rang in his hand. He didn’t bother to check the caller ID. “Dammit Levy! I’m in the middle of something, here.”
“Chief, I got a two-story tall android and a pair of—
“You got a pair alright, I’m in the field right now and need to keep the cross chatter to a minimum. If you have a robot problem, call Barnes.”
“But, Chief!”
“I want a preflight on the Blackhawk and put some coffee in Captain McGoohan. I want wheels up in an hour and McGoohan prop washing my crash site in less than two, got it?” Chief Martinez didn’t bother to wait for confirmation. He hung up abruptly and stuffed the phone back into his EDC bag. “You said you knew a guy with tools around here?” Martinez asked the sergeant.
“Yeah, oh yeah. The tow truck driver, Jack. He had a bunch of welding stuff in his shop.”
“Do you think he might have the equipment to pull that slag apart, see what’s inside?”
“At least we could probably dump it on his lot for the next couple of days.”
As much as the chief would prefer to keep his meteorite from the public, the idea of offloading it elsewhere did seem practical. With the weight of a small car crumpled up in the back of the Tahoe, there was no way they would be getting close to that site, even after McGoohan scrubbed it clean of the uncooperative interlopers.
“Alright, Sergeant. Let's go meet this Jack guy of yours.” He hung his head, disappointed in what the department had become. “Because nobody sends real top-secret files through FedEx.”
* * *
Levy stared at the phone after the chief hung up on him. The thought occurred to him, briefly, to take a picture of the android and send that to the chief, but there was a good chance that somebody would be watching. Even a top-secret black ops government contractor had to worry about surveillance. He knew that they weren’t the only dark-budget investigative group employed by the United States government.
He’d seen the trucks following him. At least, he was fairly sure that he had seen trucks following him. The problem with supersecret intelligence agencies was that generally, they looked just like everybody else and any number of unmarked cars in traffic could be following him or taking turns following him so that every soccer mom and business casual office worker could be suspect.
Whatever tin foil crash site they were on, Levy could be sure that they didn’t have a giant time-traveling robot and a pair of mute geckos strolling around, comparing and contrasting Quaker oats flavors.
Readying the Blackhawk was a two-hour project, and Levy wasn’t exactly a flight technician. Reynaldo was the flight tech, and he cut out nine months ago when he got a job maintaining some rich guy’s G6 at a private airfield in Tucson. They had damn near lost McGoohan with him, but the captain liked his little roost and rarely had to fly anywhere. Taking a job that might require work, no matter how much more it paid, was more than he cared to contemplate. Getting McGoohan off his leather couch and into the Blackhawk was another two hours, at least. The man knew how to flip hidden switches when he didn’t want the hawk to fly.
The android squatted in the middle of the loading bay, allowing the translucent twins to crawl all over it. Clinging to the giant metal beast’s legs and arms, they moved remarkably like geckos, darting around the immobile metallic monolith. “Did your friend answer?” The robot inquired cheerily.
Like Gulliver being patched by Lilliputians, it hummed and purred, shifting armored plates to expose hidden control panels. Although the pilots didn’t speak, the robot seemed to anticipate their movements, shifting to lift them to a shoulder or lower them back to the floor. Using a long set of forceps borrowed from Levy’s tool stack, one of the pilots dislodged an arrowhead-shaped chip of stone from a joint near the robot’s left shoulder. The pilot held the item at forceps’ length from the central sensor array sphere, allowing the robot to get a better look at it. Raising its left arm, it unsheathed the delicate left mannequin hand, holding it palm up to accept the rock shard. The robot held the shard out, in its gorgeous left hand, offering it to Levy.
“What is it?” Levy asked, squinting up at it. “A meteorite? Space debris?” His mind raced with superterrestrial possibilities, worrying that he might need a hazmat suit, or at least a specimen bag of some sort, to prevent cross-contamination.
Worried about catching an interstellar cold or the time-traveling equivalent of smallpox, he pulled a paper cup from the sleeve beside the cooler and held it out to suffer as a sterile sample container.
The robot dropped the pointy shard into the cup with a clatter. “It’s an arrowhead!” it said. “I’m guessing it’s probably the Diné. They seemed very upset with us for some reason.”
The Diné sounded just exotic enough that Levy could imagine the tribes of petite translucent frog people, thriving in their jungle villages millions of light years away. He remembered the movie with the big blue cat people and the fictional rare earth element with the idiotic name. He glanced down at the arrowhead, realizing that it might be exactly that sort of stone, composed of some material that was off the charts priceless and unknown on Earth. “Diné, huh?” He knew a guy, a geologist at Phoenix Tech. Levy figured he could get the rock analyzed for a small cut of the haul. “So,” he said, setting the cup aside. “I guess you probably shouldn’t tell me much about the future, to prevent a paradox or something?” Levy fished.
“Okay.” The robot politely agreed.
“I mean, it’s not like I’m going to bet on the Super Bowl or something. You probably just shouldn’t tell me much about it in case I try to influence it and go changing the future accidentally.”
“Okay.” The robot agreed again.
Levy peered at the robot’s joints, inspecting the greenish, yellowed discoloration coating the clean steel like a fungus or mold. It gave the robot a strange greenish pallor. “I mean, even telling me who wins the next election could get us all in trouble, right?”
“Alright, Levy.” The robot said and lifted its right arm to give one of the pilots access to the torso. A panel hummed and slid away, revealing a soft glowing light and bundled cables, meticulously organized. It looked like earth technology but miniaturized. Levy tried to get a better look, but the little guy in the yellow shirt finished whatever it was doing, and the panel slid shut again. Even if he’d had some time to inspect the works, he wouldn’t know what he was looking at without schematics. The robot held its left arm rigid before it, allowing the little technician to walk along its forearm, checking various points.
The pair shuffled back to the tool chests in the laboratory, returning with tools as needed, but mostly just inspecting his undoubtedly antiquated equipment. They tended to make Levy a little nervous, poking around back there, but then they did seem to know what they were doing, and they did have a giant robot squatting in the middle of his garage. Everyone had been polite so far; he didn’t want to spook them by telling them all to stay the hell away from his stuff.
Levy saw the strange, seemingly human left hand again, extended out in front of the robot like a model posing. “You could probably tell me about the hand if you want. I mean, I doubt that telling me about the hand is going to butterfly out into some sort of timeline-bending paradox or something.”
“Okay,” the robot said, extending its manicured nails and twiddling its fingers. The robot held the hand before Levy as if offering it for a kiss. The hand began to move in a demonstration mode, swiveling, fingers flexing individually, and then in a rhythmic display of various poses. “This hand was originally designed by Barnes Robotics. It is the fourth and last iteration of the original Handy Annie home use model popular for initial retail sale between 2027 and 2035, although they were still in use for decades afterward. I’m guessing this one is from a companion model because it has longer fingernails.”
“Yes, but why do you have it?” Levy asked, taking the hand in his as if he were proposing.
The robot attempted an awkward shrug. “I installed it for Jack.”
“Who is Jack?” Levy was impressed with the quality of the silicone skin covering, turning it over in his own hand, he was impressed with the level of detail, including slightly generic loops and whorls to simulate fingerprints.
“Jack designed me.” The robot inspected the fingernails. “I have saved a collection of Jack’s favorite musical selections. Would you like to hear them?”
Levy recognized the friendly twang of the early AI assistants, just trying to be helpful. “No, thank you.”
“Jack is left-handed.” The robot went on. “I thought she might appreciate a more dexterous appendage.” It retracted the remarkably human-like hand. The forearm rotated, extending the great four-fingered steely robotic claw, demonstrating the giant fingers, each as big around as Levy’s own forearm. “The stock hands aren’t so good for detailed work.” It opened and closed its hand a few times.
Levy shuddered. The robot’s stock hands were perfectly sized to crush a human skull like a glass Christmas ornament. “Yeah,” Levy agreed. “I can see that.”
The overhead lights flickered in his workshop, and he heard the high-pitched whine of the capacitor bay as it started to charge. “Hey!” Levy hopped up, rushing past the robot to the corner workroom where the amphibian pair were poking and picking at his research. “Don’t uh,” he glanced back at the robot, not wanting to upset anyone. “Please don’t touch that.”
The pair of grays watched him with a silent, expressionless gaze. They glanced at each other quietly, heads tilting back and forth slightly as they presumably discussed whether or not to have him killed by the giant robot who waited just outside the shop door. “It’s very fragile,” Levy implored, uncertain whether they even understood him. The one in the Coke shirt glanced up at him with an expression that might have been a smile. It wandered past Levy without a word. The one in the yellow shirt gently took Levy’s hand and led him over to the tabletop workstation. It began pointing at various components, glancing up at Levy with an inquisitive head tilt.
“You, uh, like lasers, huh?” Levy asked.
The visitor pointed at another component and repeated the same curious head tilt.
Levy built laser arrays in the same way that old men tinkered at model railroads. For lack of a decent laboratory, he had framed and finished the workspace. It was still a little rough, but it worked for his research. In addition to the specialized tools and a small desk in the corner, most of his workspace was occupied by a large, flat tabletop built of sawhorses and sheets of plywood. While he had not necessarily needed to build the array out of class four lasers, the budget windfall allowed him to build a fairly robust prototype of his first quantum computer, but without the expensive OSHA permitting. While it really didn’t improve the functionality of the prototype and could potentially bore a hole into the mountainside if it were ever bumped out of alignment, it was nearly identical to his first attempt, if only a little more dangerous.
The little humanoid kept pointing at relays and refraction points. “Yeah,” Levy said. They’re pretty, just don’t go poking your fingers in there.” He gently nudged the visitor’s hand away, avoiding potentially slicing off an alien fingertip.
While the larger version of his quantum computer was far more robust, it was also, theoretically scalable down to nearly standard Silicon Valley microchip processor size, given inevitable technological advancement. The university could keep all of his initial research, even keep his original prototype, but without understanding it completely, all they had was an elaborate light show with a lingering hypothesis. Without his continuing research, the bastards back at Arizona tech could run Pink Floyd laser light shows in the planetarium for all he cared. Levy wanted a patented quantum laser computer processor in every new laptop. That’s where the money was. All he had to do was finish his prototype and wait for the nanotechnology to catch up. His desktop-sized prototype would inevitably end up in a museum somewhere, along with a stellar biographical note on the inventor.
As he proudly picked at imagined dust motes and examined his mirror arrays, the one in the red shirt walked up behind him. It held out its hand, long slender fingers unfurling to reveal a small metallic rectangle. For its size, it could have been a pack of matches or an extraterrestrial lighter of some sort. A small rectangular piece of nondescript hardware without a visible interface or any hard wiring ports. It might just be an alien tchotchke of some sort, but it felt different. There was no way to explain it. For an object so entirely nondescript, it seemed to carry a gravity of its own. “What’s this?” Levy asked as if they might finally speak to him. He flipped it over in his palm, still unable to understand what gave it weight.
The one in the red shirt motioned towards the quantum laser computer setup and glanced down at the widget in Levy’s palm. It looked up at Levy and cocked its head to the side slightly as if asking if he understood, and he sort of did. Levy was holding a tiny quantum laser computer in the palm of his hand. It was like getting the holy grail as a souvenir cup at an amusement park. “And this is for me?”
Just to be sure, he held the little rhombus up and pointed at it. “This, uh, this thing,” he motioned to the plywood tables, pointing at his own quantum computer, “This is the same as that. You’re sure?” The little frog in the red shirt stared at the little frog in the yellow shirt. The yellow-shirted frog shrugged. The red-shirted frog shrugged in agreement.
“I see,” Levy said, crestfallen. His life’s work was reduced to a pocket trinket that they gave away with complimentary shrugs. He could, and would probably attempt to reverse engineer it, but taking something apart wasn’t the same as building it from scratch. “Well, that’s very nice of you.”