Marta Reyna Fraga had been cleaning the offices for nearly seven years, ever since her sister’s husband had been made foreman at the vivero. Marta liked the solitude. Most evenings, cleaning, she was by herself. Some nights her children would accompany her. Her daughter, the eldest, would assist her, emptying wastepaper baskets or cleaning the small kitchen. Her son, the younger brother, would spend his time in the lobby. Years ago, he had a small box of toys hidden under the front desk but now he sat quietly in a chair for hours without moving. He played games on her telephone while she cleaned.
Marta had nearly finished the downstairs restrooms when her son, wandering about with his tiny screen held before him, tugged gently at her tunic to get her attention.
“Si, mijo. ¿Qué te pasa?”
Her son, never taking his eyes from the small screen, absentmindedly continued to tug at her apron strings. “El robot tiene monedas, pero no tiene manos.”
“Mande, mijo?”
“El robot necesita ayuda.” Her son pointed down the hall, still not glancing up from his screen.
“Mijo,” she cooed gently, reaching into her pocket to withdraw a few dollars. “Comparte con tu hermana.”
“No,” little Chuy said, “Tiene monedas. Falta un mano.”
Marta didn’t understand her son. She thought perhaps he spoke of one of his videos that he watched. “Enseñame,” she said. He gently took her hand, and still not looking up from the cartoons on his screen, led her back through the front offices and to the break room double doors. Marta opened them to find her petrified daughter hiding in the corner behind the fridge. “¿Que te pasa, querida?” Marta asked. Her daughter pointed towards the dark portion of the breakroom, where someone had somehow parked a car in front of the vending machine. On closer inspection, she realized it was some giant metal person, closely resembling a fat chrome toad squatting in front of the vending machine.
“Siento mucho molestarte, pero…” Attached to its left forearm, which was as big around as her stock pot, the robot had a single woman’s hand, like a dress shop mannequin. It was perfectly formed and moved with a strange magic as if it were real. The robot held its small human hand before the vending machine, showing a fistful of dollar bills in the dim light of the display. “Aparentemente debería haber instalado una mano derecha también.” It lifted its great right arm brandishing a large metallic hand that resembled a piece of construction equipment. “¿Te importaría ayudarme?”
Marta took the collection of bills from the hand, which she noticed had a lovely manicure.
“¿Qué quieres que compre?” Marta asked.
The giant steel toad with the woman’s hand pointed into the clear acrylic display window. “Les gustaría avena,” it said. “Dos, por favor.”
Marta carefully uncrumpled the dollar bills, smoothing them to insert them into the machine. She selected the instant oatmeal cups and they both watched as the wire spiral rotated, dropping the disposable cup to the bottom of the machine. With the perfect tiny woman’s hand attached to its big stock pot forearm, the robot probably could not reach in to retrieve it, so Marta pulled the cups from the bottom of the machine.
“¿Quieres agua caliente, tambien?” Marta gestured towards the hot water spigot in the coffee maker.
Upon realizing that it could not easily turn around in the cramped space, the robot assented cheerily. “¡Sí, por favor!”
She peeled the foil tops from the paper cups and carefully filled them to the line. Offering them to the robot, she saw the uncanny left hand which did look remarkably realistic.
“Tienes uñas bien linda.” Marta said, commenting on the robot’s lovely manicure.
“Gracias,” the robot politely responded.
* * *
If Levy had nodded off for a minute or two, he hadn’t slept well. His vivid lucid dream had been a badly dubbed monster movie, complete with the two grays grown to monstrous proportions, stomping through downtown Tokyo, closely followed by an even more immense robot, gleaming chrome in the miniature army’s spotlights. He must have screamed at some point — he startled violently — because when he realized he was sitting in a lawn chair in the back corner of the garage, both the frogs were staring inquisitively, and the android rotated out of curiosity. Levy wiped a bit of drool from his lower lip and apologized. “Sorry,” he wiped his face and checked his glasses. “I must have dozed off.” Waking from a nightmare about an alien attack and still high enough that he might be hallucinating, he wasn’t comforted by the pilots or the android. “Did my phone ring?” He checked the missed calls and found a half dozen calls from a number he didn’t recognize, but nothing on a secure line, or at least one he recognized. He wasn’t about to start phone calls yet, at least not until the chief told him what to do about his little guests and their big friend.
The pair of visitors stared at each other silently, possibly discussing something of importance, or just ignoring him. They were busy examining his antiquated analog tools with an archaeological reverence and curiosity.
“Did I miss anything else?”
The android shrugged. “You snored a little bit?”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Levy got up to find some more coffee and possibly a few more pills. Professionally speaking, falling asleep during a close encounter of the third kind was probably a bad idea. He emptied the spent coffee grounds into the trash can, wondering when he’d finished the last pot, and set about his coffee-making ritual, smoothing out the awkwardly crumpled filter, and counting out scoops of cheap grounds. Anything he could do to distract himself from the giant freakin’ robot and a pair of translucent humanoids kicking it in his back repair bay like a graveyard shift hangout. Anybody else in this situation would simply call 911, and they would then call in the Terrestrial Investigations Group. And, with everyone gone balloon hunting, he would have to answer the call.
But Levy was an investigative agent like O’Connor was an administrative assistant. If he were a real agent, there would be some sort of instructions for an incident like this; or barring the specificities, maybe some sort of flow chart for a combination of time-traveling extraterrestrial first contact events. Levy realized that he had been lost in thought while waiting for the coffee to brew and had been staring at the little gray guys absentmindedly for some time. Now the little gray guys were staring right back at him. Afraid to move once they’d made eye contact, Levy continued staring and worried that they might be reading his mind. For no reason whatsoever, he instantly thought of porn, afraid that they might think he was thinking of porn. The big robot reached up with its delicate mannequin hand and waved at him, twiddling its well-manicured nails. “Coke and Twink got me all fixed up, I guess. They seem eager to get going.”
Snapping out of his daze, Levy checked the coffee’s progress and realized that even without a first-contact operations manual, he ought to be handling the whole situation better. “Yeah, well, it’s probably still a little early for you to be out and about right now, people and everything.” He checked his incoming call screen. Either the chief was avoiding him, or the chief was incredibly busy. Either way, he was going to have to stall. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you let me get us a van or something? I can pick up a panel van, you can load up in the back, and I’ll drive you guys wherever you want to go.”
“Oh, we don’t want to be a bother. It’s only a few hundred miles.” The android demurred.
“It’s no problem, I mean, we’re friends, right?” At least if he got a rental truck, he would be with them for a few days and he might eventually get through to the chief. He collected his keys from the desk and grabbed his windbreaker. “I’ll be right back.” Opening the back door, however, he realized that it was still dark outside. It was probably around four in the morning, judging by the sound of the morning birds calling to each other. “You know what? On second thought, you’ll feel better after a fresh coat of paint. You want to ask them if I can paint you?”
The android tilted towards the amphibian pair. “Why would I ask them if I should be painted?”
“Well,” Levy glanced over at the pair, staring intently at him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they might be reading his mind somehow. The expressionless stare seemed accusative like they might be digging through his deepest memories, and he was suddenly ashamed of making fun of his science teacher’s socks in the eighth grade. “I just thought, you know, if you wanted their opinion or something.” He thought the android seemed just a little accusative as well. “Look, uh, maybe you’ll feel better after a fresh coat, right? I can get you in and out of the spray tent in about an hour.” Levy grabbed his Tyvek suit off a hook behind the office door and plucked a paint-splattered respirator off the back of the chair. “I know you guys are busy, you have places to be and everything, but I think you’ll do a lot better to tone down the whole steel samurai look you got goin’ on here.”
The robot, programmed to favor function over form, considered the idea of a fresh coat of paint as an upgrade. “What colors do you have?”
Levy swung the paint cabinet doors wide, trying to look hopeful for his guests. “Well, like I said, I’ve got, uh, the high heat, low magnetic signature flat black.” He dug through the cabinets, looking for something, “and uh,” he reached behind a few barrels, “well,” he finally gave up, “yeah, that’s what I’ve got.” Levy shrugged. The pilots shrugged back in response.
“I don’t know,” the robot said. “It seems kind of dark to me.”
“Well,” he didn’t have a good reason for the color palette, he just needed the robot to stay put long enough for him to get through to the chief finally, and waiting for paint to dry was notoriously time-consuming. “It’s a little less flashy and might help you keep your radar profile low?” When the robot didn’t immediately answer, Levy assumed that it would be a hard sell. “I just think it’s important for us to practice a little subterfuge, you know? We need to get a little sneaky.”
The visitors stared at each other silently and then stared back at Levy. It was a miracle that they had made it across the parking lot without being seen, let alone a three-hundred-year trek like they seemed to be inferring. “Sneaky?” the android asked.
“Yeah,” Levy nodded. He squatted down, hunkered over towards the office wall, and surreptitiously snuck along to the corner like a cartoon spy. “You know, sneaky.”
The android mimicked Levy’s posture, adopting the hunched shoulders and limp lurky forelimbs, attempting to tiptoe gracefully behind Levy but making plenty of noise.
“Okay, okay.” Levy relented. “So, you’ll never be a ninja. Do you happen to know how to play hide and seek?”
“Oh no!” The android rose to full height and took an indelicate step away from Levy, kicking and nearly crumpling a stacking tool chest directly behind it. “I’m not playing that again.”
Levy, whose heart had nearly exploded when the robot reared up, raised his hands slowly and clenched his exits uncomfortably, confident that his testicles had just shriveled back into his body cavity. “Okay,” he said slowly. “No hide and seek.” He would have accepted a variety of answers to the question of a children’s playground game, but he could not have anticipated a post-traumatic fight-or-flight response. “I just want to teach you how to hide a little.”
The pair of pilots chittered and shivered, cowering behind the leg of the robot. As it squatted, the pair rushed up its shins to its knees and chest and clambered into the cockpit. “You’re not going to deactivate me like that again.” The robot turned its back to Levy and took a slouching posture that could have been misinterpreted as pouting if it weren’t a big robot.
“I wasn’t going to deactivate you.” Levy couldn’t believe that he was looking for a way to apologize to what amounted to an expensive erector set, but anytime anybody turned their back on him like that, he knew it was going to come up in couples counseling. “It’s just best, you know, to keep a low profile.” There was no way that Levy was buying flowers for this thing. “Look, uh, Andy.”
The robot seemed to take notice of the first time Levy used its name. Levy saw the shoulders raise slightly. Remarkably life-like, he thought. “It’s like you said, okay? I’m from all the way in the past, and I wouldn’t even know which button to push to deactivate you anyway, okay?” The robot didn’t move, but the pair of pilots peered over the top of the cockpit, watching Levy and glancing at each other occasionally. “Look, Andy, there are a lot of bad people out there, you just gotta trust me. You seem like a good guy who could use a hand. I just want to make sure that those people don’t find you. I just wanted to see if you could, you know,” he regretted the idea even before he finished the sentence, “transform yourself into a car or something.” Dumbest idea ever. “Or maybe a cassette tape player?”