Bea Cannon - A Small Gray Dot

He touched a spot on the thing and then turned it loose. It hung there in midair and then it began to expand.

“What the hell?” slipped out before I could stop. It was startling. And damned convincing.

The doctor chuckled. “My reaction exactly when I discovered the controls on the side and pushed one of them.”

It increased to become the size of one of the approximately twenty-four inch computer monitors and began to glow white.

Morgan came back in carrying our jackets and gloves, and her hat. She stopped short when she saw the thing hanging in front of the doctor.

“What is that? ” she said, staring at the object as she dropped our outerwear on a chair.

“It’s a type of recording device,” said the doctor. “There are other facets to it, some I’ve yet to work out, but just watch it for now.”

A face appeared in the center of the “screen”. It wasn’t human.

MORGAN GAWPED AT THE IMAGE.

“Is that some kind of trick? How can a monitor float like that, and what’s that picture? Geez, it looks like something out of an old sci-fi movie!”

She was right. It did. I stared at the face that resembled nothing I’d ever seen. It was roughly triangular with eyes that reminded me vaguely of pictures I’d seen of the eyes of a squid with horizontally slit pupils – except there were four of them. The skin was a dull shade of yellow, and if there were ears, they weren’t evident. The nose, or what I thought was a nose, was a row of four fringed holes directly beneath the eyes, the mouth a wide, laid-on-its-side figure eight – or an infinity symbol. I couldn’t tell if it had teeth.

Morgan hadn’t heard our previous conversation so I explained as we examined the image. “Dr. Bennett believes Semptor Labs is a front for aliens. The floating device isn’t a trick. I saw him activate it. That is supposedly one of them.”

She stared wide-eyed at the doctor. I could see the disbelief in her eyes. Then she went back to gaping at the image.

I eyed Dr. Bennett. “Are you telling me this is how Henderson looks?” I was on my way to being convinced but if he was saying that this… being … was at Semptor, then considering that Frank hadn’t mentioned a non-human supervisor – something that as nosey as he was I think he would’ve noticed and mentioned – I was ready to take Morgan and quietly slip away. Before he became violent.

I was relieved when he shook his head and said, “Of course not. Henderson looks human enough to pass for one of us – as long as no one does an internal examination. I’ve never personally met this, er, being. This is an image of Henderson’s supervisor.” He touched the side of the floating frame and the image moved back to show the entire creature.

It stood on two legs and sported two arms but there the resemblance to any of Earth’s bipeds ended. Hanging from each arm was an arrangement that looked more like an array of tentacles than hands. I was only guessing it wore some type of clothing since its body was a different color – brown – than its face and rather long, thin neck and its tentacles. It also wore wide brown boots that merged with the garment that covered its legs. I supposed the boots were wide to accommodate what, if they resembled the hands, were likely tentacles instead of toes.

“Er, is it male or female?” I asked.

“Without examining it, there’s no way of knowing, Tennessee,” said the doctor. “It could be either – or both. Or something else entirely.”

Damn.

The figure became animated and its tentacles wiggled with what appeared to be agitation. Its face didn’t seem to be expressive but its mouth moved – sideways. It appeared to be speaking. The doctor pressed the side of the frame again and the sound came in.

A shrill voice spoke in a language like none I’d ever heard. I stared at the doctor.

He said, “Oh, wait, there is what I call a universal translator… here,” and he pressed something else and it became stilted English.

It came in, midsentence… “get it done now, Simretun! If you do not, you will forfeit your ****!” it blinked out. The last word was apparently untranslatable.

I sat in silence, unable to think of anything to say. It was awfully convincing.

“But… but… where would they have come from? How did they get here?” stammered Morgan as she dragged her eyes away from the now blank screen and back to the doctor. She eased herself down into a chair at a desk opposite the ones the doctor and I occupied.

He sighed and pushed away the lock of hair that kept falling over his eye. He touched the side controls and the monitor telescoped back to its original size. He placed it on the desk.

“I’ve learned a lot over the last couple of weeks.” He indicated the again card-sized apparatus “This is one of their communications devices. The machine from which it appeared is a type of transporter. Getting this enabled me to hack into Henderson’s computer and I have gone through some of the records I found but I have not yet been able to discover from where they originate. The problem is that they, of course, don’t call the stars their planets circle by the names we have for them, and I’ve not yet found star maps that might allow me to compare it to my charts and pinpoint any known stars. Indeed, they may not even be from our galaxy.

“As to how they got here, I did learn that and it was not by way of a spaceship. That’s one way they have taken advantage of the anomaly we call the Event.” He pointed up. “The gray film that hangs above Blue Heaven is their passageway. It is a small part of the anomaly that they have kept… for lack of a better term… wedged open. There are other transporters hidden within one of the warehouses, I think. They all interface somehow with the anomaly through the device or wedge that holds it open. They bring personnel and other items in that way. Each time they use a transporter to bring them or anything to our world, as a side effect a residue is generated, a vapor that clings to everything and leaves everyone with stinging eyes, and it emits odd frequencies that are picked up by my instruments.”

I stared at him. That answered my two-months-back question to the entryway guards of what was causing eye irritations in Blue Heaven. It also explained the oily roads, and indicated that not all the grime on the surfaces of the buildings was from fireplaces or wood-burning stoves.

I was trying to get it together and ask pertinent questions but my thoughts were scattered and the question I came up with was probably not very relevant but was all I could think of at the moment.

“Er, so, why is the place called Semptor Labs? Do they have a lab, and do they actually develop anything there?”

“They don’t have a lab. As near as I can tell, Henderson called it that because he liked the way it sounded. Perhaps the name is similar to something in his language.”

I was unable to think of what to say to that, so I nodded as though it made sense.

This was not anywhere near how I’d thought things would go after getting Morgan away from Talbert.

I ordered my jumbled thoughts. I supposed the doctor could provide an answer on why the neighborhood was so damned hard to navigate, but now I thought of the question in which I was most interested. What produced the thing that killed half the world?

“Okay, you said they didn’t cause the Event but that you know what did. You want to elaborate on that?”

Morgan gasped and leaned forward. She hadn’t heard that part, either. “What? You know what caused it?”

The doctor nodded and said flatly, “Yes, I do, and the epicenter of the interaction was right here in Blue Heaven.” He leaned back and crossed his legs at the ankles. “On the day of the Event, I stepped out on my front stoop preparing to take my morning walk when suddenly, the sun, well, it flickered. I looked up to see what appeared to be a small gray dot about the size of a dime from my perspective. I ran back inside to get a camera, and rushed back out to take pictures but the camera wouldn’t work so all I could do was watch. It grew larger and began spreading across the sky.