Making the Galaxy Great
Area 69

Jason awoke on a hospital bed in a pale green room. Next to the bed stood a pear-shaped man in his late twenties wearing a white lab coat and wire-framed glasses that accentuated the emoji-like roundness of his face. Next to the bed was some sort of machinery that may or may not have been monitoring Jason’s vital signs. He couldn’t be sure, because there were no tubes or wires attached to any part of his body. He rubbed his left arm with his right hand and there was no blood and no bandage; just a raised area with slightly reddened skin.

Had he only imagined being shot?

He rubbed his thighs, where burning glass shards from his windshield had landed. Nothing.

“Marjan medical tech. Mind boggling,” said the man with the emoji face.

As his brain coalesced around the words, Jason mumbled: “Marjan. Is that some kind of alien?”

“They’re the mysterious ones. They don’t say much, but they have by far the coolest stuff. We’ve only seen a fraction of it. I would love to visit their home world someday.”

The mysterious ones? Jason wondered if they were the ones with the thin hair and Neanderthal brows or the ones with the puckered sphincter faces. The young man walked around and read something on the device next to Jason’s bed. Jason could now see he was wearing red sneakers and jeans under the lab coat. There was a wooden chair with no cushion in one corner of the room, and no windows.

“I’m not in a hospital. Am I still at that lumber yard?”

“Yes you are. Welcome to Area 69.”

“Area 69? Seriously?”

“No, not really. That’s our little joke. Since we feel like we never know which end is up.” The young man chuckled in a conspiratorial and slightly asthmatic fashion. His face turning the color of watermelon. “It’s actually called the Department of Offworld Services. DOS for short. And I’m Michael, by the way.”

Jason felt his left arm again. Nothing seemed quite real, not even his own voice as he said: “Hi, Michael. I’m Jason.”

“Oh, I know. Everybody here knows who you are. We all heard about what a hard time you gave Angie the other day. You’re like a god around here.”

“Angie?”

“Don’t tell her I called her that. She would kill me. Literally. Only the Colonel could get away with that.”

“Who’s the Colonel?”

“Ah, Colonel Williams. The head honcho around here.”

“So this is a military base?”

“Not exactly. It’s a sort of military slash research slash political facility.”

Jason sat up in the bed. The word political frightened him even more than military, he realized.

“It looked like we were driving right into a field or something.”

Michael giggled like an adolescent peeking at online porn. “Cloaking technology. It’s Haku. We’re trying to get the Marjan version. It uses way less power. But so far, the only thing they’ve shared with us is some of their medical tech, which like I said is so cool. And talk about user-friendly—”

“Mr. Rutherford, that’s enough.”

A short Black woman in uniform entered the room behind Michael. She stood quite straight, hands behind her back, and her shoulders seemed to take up the entire doorway. Jason guessed, correctly, that this was Colonel Williams.

After introducing herself and asking how he was feeling, the Colonel pulled the lone wooden chair closer to the bed, sat down and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “Mr. Fleming,” she began, “we have a problem.”

Jason was still dazed, but his mind was functioning well enough to comprehend her meaning. “You mean me.”

“That’s correct. You should not be here. Agent McCauley shouldn’t have brought you here. However, if she hadn’t, you’d be dead right now. Those pulse guns . . .” she shook her head. “We thought we were the only ones who had them, so we need to figure that one out. And they used them in a public place. The Chinese would never have been so clumsy, but that’s the Russians for you.”

“So those were alien weapons,” Jason said nervously. He had not only been shot; he’d been shot with something from out of this world.

Colonel Williams exhaled loudly and drummed her hands on her knees. “This really is a problem. What are we going to do with you?”

Jason’s own hands were knotting the sheet on the bed so tightly he was pulling it away from the mattress. Terrible images flashed in his brain, including being shoved into a dark-colored panel truck and driven away to be ‘disappeared’ — either killed by his own government or kept prisoner in a secret facility on an island where nobody would ever replace him.

“Is there some sort of alien mind meld thing you can do to make me un-remember all of this? Then you could just drop me on a street somewhere and I’d think I drank too much . . .”

Colonel Williams laughed – a huge laugh that threatened to suck the air out of the room. “McCauley said you were a character. Actually, that wasn’t the word she used, but I can see what she meant. And no, we don’t have any kind of alien tech to make you forget, other than just bashing your head and hoping you either get amnesia and go into a coma.”

Jason didn’t care for those options and the alarm on his face must have been obvious because the Colonel laughed even harder. “No, we can’t do that. You’re a US citizen, after all. So what I’m wondering . . . we may have to . . . bring you in. Make you a sort of . . . part of the team.”