Three out of four of the cameras around the loading dock were out of order. The fourth looked on from the high ceiling at the far corner. It had a view of both loading bay doors and the small back door that led out to the mechanics’ abandoned smoking section. The view wasn’t great, and with three-quarters of the screen dark, the image was miniaturized. Even in the tiny index card-sized image on the top right corner of the screen, it was obvious that whatever that thing was, it was big, and definitely not a delivery truck.
Levy toggled every switch he could find to try to get rid of the three blown cameras and enlarge the image, but the rear entrance never suffered the security updates that the front offices had. He didn’t see the point if all he needed was to check the truck pulling in, but then, he had never expected Voltron to walk up to his loading bay door. That thing, that giant mechanical thing paced back and forth outside the loading bay, waving its arms around like it was talking to itself. Levy watched the screen, transfixed. He blindly slipped another Adderall from the little orange plastic bottle, set it on his tongue, and flushed it down with a swig of cold coffee.
There was nobody else in the offices, nobody to witness this, nobody to call, and no point in calling. Most of the crew was in California chasing after a weather balloon and there was a freakin’ Gundam wing having some sort of schizoid episode outside his loading bay doors. As exciting as that should be, Levy was from Detroit. When you see a guy coming down the street, waving his arms around and cussing at the sky, you don’t make eye contact and you don’t walk up and introduce yourself. He was fairly confident that the same rules applied to giant robots as well, so he just watched. After a few minutes of wild gesticulation, the thing faced the loading bay doors and reached out with a huge steely forearm. Levy half expected an explosion, laser beams, or a missile launch. Instead, the monster knocked politely at the rolling bay door and squatted down in a resting position. Echoing through the empty warehouse, the polite knock roared like thunder. Levy stepped out of his office eyeing the big bay door.
The first time in his eight years with the company that he encountered anything remotely alien, and without a single witness. Levy gently pressed the panic bar for the small side door. Easing it open a few inches he peered out at the visitor. Squatting down before the door, it looked like an enormous chrome toad and emitted a gentle humming sound. It didn’t move as he pushed the door open a few more inches. This being possibly the first communication ever with extraterrestrial intelligence, Levy felt the pressure to establish a strong rapport with this spacefaring being. He leaned out the door a bit, glancing around, expecting an ambush. “What!?” he barked at the thing. The thing rose to gently whirring servos, hissing hydraulic shafts, and the humming of a dynamo spinning like a gyroscope. Transforming from an amphibious ferric form to a tower of potentially dangerous humanoid, it pivoted to face Levy. He made a quick mental note that he should never answer the door to strangers on dark and stormy nights.
Standing at full height, it must have been at least fifteen feet tall. The storm raging across the desert beyond casting the mechanoid giant in ominously striking shadows with every flash of lightning, the steady thrum of fierce desert rain, and the long, lingering thunder set Levy’s gritting teeth on edge. The rain-wet steel glistened, reflecting the flickering sodium arc lamps above the bay. Standing, it looked more like a gorilla than a toad, with bulky, armored fore appendages. It stood on sturdy squat legs, thick steel toes splayed out for stability. Its head and chest appeared to be made of foggy glass, armored but undoubtedly a cockpit of some sort. The looming metal monster stepped forward, raising one great arm towards him. Adderall brave, Levy stood his ground, expecting to be vaporized. The armor sheath around the end of the forearm slid away to reveal a great metal hand, as broad as a hubcap. “Hi!” it chirped. “I’m Andy,” politely offering the enormous hand to shake.
Levy timidly grabbed the end of one of three enormous fingers, shaking it firmly. The first contact with an alien life form, and it wanted to shake his hand. A rubbery gecko hand slapped against the foggy cockpit glass, startling Levy. He jumped back and let slip a timid squeak. The hand wiped back and forth, clearing the condensation and revealing the big-eyed, greenish-gray face of something that could not possibly be human, although it bore a distinct resemblance to something like the frog prince’s firstborn. “Is Jack here?” The behemoth inquired politely.
Levy realized, too late, that he might be ridiculously high. “There’s no Jack here,” he said.
“Oh,” replied the Autobot. “We’re having some issues with our climate control systems, and in need of a few antique petroleum products. Could I trouble you for a gallon of hydraulic fluid and possibly a towel?” For an enormous, armored metal monster, it was incredibly polite. The cockpit hissed softly, equalizing the air pressure. Long gummy fingers wrapped around the edges, followed by not one, but two of the little bug-eyed faces he had seen through the glass. They glanced around, silently surveying the TIG warehouse. They faced each other for a moment without saying a word and both turned to stare at him with those big blank black eyes. One cocked its head to the side inquisitively.
“Yeah, uh.” Just your regular old neighborly transgalactic visit to borrow a gallon of DOT3. “Yeah, sure.” He swung the door wide, then realizing that there was no way the thing was getting through, fumbled at the green button to lift the rolling bay doors. “You, uh, wanna come on in? Get out of the rain?” A battle bot rolled up to his back door and suddenly he was Miss Manners; everybody else was out fighting the Martians, and he was having them over for tea. The bay door shuddered and stopped at its apex, echoing through the warehouse, mimicking the thunder rolling across the valley. Levy flicked a few switches to turn on the overhead lights.
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The giant robot sauntered easily into the warehouse. With a slow, surprisingly casual gait for something so entirely ungainly, Levy noted that the robot walked with a fairly human swagger. It strolled in, swiveling slightly to take in its surroundings; the two alien pilots glanced around, silently. “Perfect landing, Coke.” The machine said, taking inventory of various vehicles, tools, and heavy equipment. “But we might be a little early.”
Levy glanced around the bay, and thinking discretion might be important, hit the button to close the bay door. “Excuse me?”
“Just telling Coke, oh, er…” The two rubbery things glanced at each other and began to climb out of the cockpit. The robot turned to face Levy and hunkered down into its toad-like squat. The bug-eyed beings clambered down the robot’s chest and forearms and took a moment to wipe away the condensation from the cockpit. They appeared wet and slimy to Levy, and he wondered if he should worry about some sort of alien infection. “This is Coke and Twink,” the robot said, indicating the pair of three-foot-tall bipedal frogs standing barefoot on the concrete floor in front of him.
Away from the colored lights of the cockpit console, they were pale to a point of translucence. Under the shop fluorescents, they seemed paler, with a nearly visible circulatory system and a soft glow. One wore a little red children’s shirt with the Coke logo emblazoned across its toddler-sized chest. The other wore a faded yellow kids’ Twinkie shirt, complete with Twinkie the kid in a cowboy hat and lasso. Both wore jewelry that appeared to be made of silver and turquoise, not unlike the sort offered at nearby tourist destinations, though far more intricate.
“Pleasure to meet you,” he said, unconsciously offering his hand to the one in the Coke shirt. Coke eyed the hand, unblinking, and recognizing the gesture, reached out his own moist hand to shake. “I’m Ben Levy, welcome to Earth,” he said, feeling immediately stupid. They stared at him, still unblinking.
“They don’t talk,” the robot said.
It had never occurred to Levy that the robot was a separate entity. He had thought it was a vocal interface of some sort, an exoskeletal transportation device. “So, you…” He had regarded the robot as a fancy appliance, like a talking toaster oven or a smart refrigerator, but it was sentient.
The robot raised a great hand and waved again. “I’m Andy,” it repeated.
“Where are you from?”
A servo twitched inside a small glass bulb at the base of the cockpit, sensors spinning to overlay blueprints and structural schematics over the current warehouse scene. “Well, here, actually.” It waved to indicate the warehouse, seeing three dimensional images of the warehouse as it had been hundreds of years prior, superimposed over the current sparse structure like temporal double vision. The Laboratory that he knew apparently had not been built yet. “But a few years from now, I suppose.”
So, Levy thought, a time-traveling robot and two actual aliens walk into an Extraterrestrial Investigation’s parking garage one night. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. “Would you excuse me for just a moment?” He slipped back to the office, shuffling through the paperwork on the desk, looking for his phone, or to somehow activate the cameras. He toggled through the various camera views, hunting for anything that wasn’t a black quartered-out screen. Twenty or so cameras in the Warehouse and precisely two of them worked; the one outside the bay door, and one at the far corner above the big front hangar door. It was high enough to see the entire warehouse, but the robot was a blurry hulk crouching partially obscured in the corner, and the aliens were too small to distinguish. He reached for his little plastic bottle and deciding that he wouldn’t be sleeping any time soon, popped another Adderall. He grabbed a bag of shop rags from the supply cabinet and brought it out to the two grays, setting it on the floor in front of them like an offering. Coke and Twink stepped forward, pulled a few rags from the bag, and set about drying themselves off. Although they might look slightly amphibious, they were not thrilled to be wet. Levy watched them dry off, relieved that he wouldn’t be wearing a hazmat suit to disinfect the shop area.
“So where are you guys from?” He asked the pair, as casually as he could. They watched him intently without responding, taking turns wiping down the backs of each other’s giant bald heads.
“They never told me,” the robot said. “They don’t say much. They’re pretty good mechanics, though. They patched me right up.” The robot showed Levy a few obvious repairs, various pieces replaced with a strange, pearlescent sheened metal and some sloppy amateur welds. Looking over the robot, Levy recognized a variety of obvious aftermarket additions, small cases, boxes, and canisters attached to its back like a hiker’s backpack. Closer, under the cold fluorescent lamps, it was easy to see that despite the robot’s impressive visible steel, the joints and seams still bore evidence of various shades of glazing, a patina of safety green, and a fire engine red. Impressed, he realized that he had lost focus, his Adderall-addled attention span narrowing to tunnel vision. Whether a captor or a host, either way, he should show them some hospitality. “I’m um, sure you must have had a long trip. Can I get you anything?” Levy glanced down at the shirt. “A Coke maybe?” He was not terribly surprised that the popular beverage already had advertising on other planets.
The aliens stared blankly at him, heads tilting ever so slightly.
“Do they, uh, speak English?” Levy asked the robot.
The robot, feeling that it had already explained this point a few times, spoke slowly, “They don’t talk at all,” it said.
“Soooo…” Levy’s brain redlined, moving so fast that his cylinders skipped a few cranks. “How do you talk to them?”
Rather than explain the nuances and Zen nature of the relationship between a pilot and a neural-activated exoskeletal android, the robot regarded the tiny pair. They hadn’t eaten anything significant since they had defrosted, and they were sure to be hungry. “Do you happen to have any oatmeal?” the robot asked. “They seem particularly fond of hot cereal.”
So maybe not soda pop. These guys traveled hundreds of thousands of light years across the galaxy for a bowl of instant Quaker oats. “Yeah,” Levy said, “I think there’s something in the vending machine.” He patted his pockets, wondering if he had any change.
“And a Wi-Fi password would be great,” the robot said.
Ben Levy, the first human ever to make contact with an extraterrestrial species, hustled down the hall, digging through his pockets for singles and wondering when the company had become an intergalactic coffee shop.