Too Small For Tall

by Rosenberg, Aaron

  “Yep.”

  She scrubs at her face with one hand. It doesn’t help. “When Agent Thomas brought me here that first time,” she rasps out, “I couldn’t help but notice the arched portals gaping up above. What about those?”

  “They’re terraces.” See, without numbers my answers are a lot clearer! And quicker!

  “And is there some reason the strike team couldn’t use those to gain entrance?” She tries grinding her teeth, but really I’m not impressed. Compared to Tall she’s an amateur. I bet she can’t even hit different octaves, let alone grind in dual harmony!

  “Yeah, there’s force fields on them,” I tell her. Gently, because I feel bad for her lack of teeth-grinding prowess. “Air flows through, but that’s about it. Even liquid gets stopped, in both directions.” Which I learned all too well one time when I thought it’d be funny to lay in wait and lob water balloons at Tall as he showed up for one of his visits/spot inspections. Let’s just say it’s a good thing my feathers shed water so easily. And that I’d decided at the last minute not to go with grape Kool-Aid, as I’d originally planned.

  I can see Jones visibly relax a little, which means she’s now only as tense as your average day trader during a Wall Street blitz. “Ah. Well, good. So we just need to defend this one door and we’re all set.”

  “Yep.” It occurs to me that I haven’t heard any shooting or fighting for at least a minute. I listen. “Uh, should you maybe go check on him?” I suggest. “I’d do it, but—” I hold up the cord tethering me to the Matrix.

  “I’m sure Agent Thomas has matters well in hand,” Jones says, and there’s that hint of hero worship in her voice again, making it sort of high and breathy under the rough smoker’s rasp. Not a good combo. “It’s only six other agents.”

  “Uh, yeah, sure, okay.” I scratch my head. “I mean, yes, Tall’s a bad-ass, but what if—”

  I don’t have to finish that thought because the front door swings open and a long shadow stretches down the hall. “Exterior secured,” Tall reports as he emerges in the doorway. He’s got a pair of MiBs with him, one slung over each shoulder like they were hand towels. “Let’s bring them all in, make sure they’re secure, and then we’ll get Ned to run that gizmo of his to deprogram them.” Jones nods and brushes past him, presumably to go retrieve more downed agents though I suspect she also took the liberty of checking him for weapons on the way past—and I’m trying REALLY hard not to think about that one too much, thanks all the same—and Tall looks over at me. “You okay?”

  “Fine.” I sigh. “I mean, I feel a little violated, with them bursting in like that, and I’m annoyed, and now I’ve got all this onion dip that’s probably gonna go to waste, but otherwise, yeah, I’m good.” He gives me one of his looks—it might be Number Four but if so it’s a kinder, gentler version than usual, maybe Four-A?—and shakes his head, then lumbers past to deposit the unconscious agents where Ned had set Brad up before.

  After he’s gone and I’m by myself again, I sink down onto my couch—which doesn’t protest, for once—and rest my head in my hands. Though only for a minute, because this bill is heavy! I wasn’t kidding about feeling a little violated. This place may be weird and wacky and Day-glo and the last known remnant of some ancient space beastie, but it’s still my home, and those MiBs kicked down the door and started shooting it up. I’d be lying if I said I was happy about that.

  But more than being scared or upset or even relieved—I’m pissed. Whoever’s behind all this figured out I was involved and sent those agents here. After me. Well, mister, whoever you are and wherever you are, it’s on!

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Answering in double-negatives

  After the other MiBs have been restored to their proper minds—or whatever passes for such a thing when you’re a top-secret government agent whose whole job is tracking, categorizing, and generally policing alien creatures the entire rest of the world don’t even believe exist, much less run out on bar tabs and use up all the paper towels and hand soap in public restrooms—they’re all appropriately embarrassed about breaking down my door and trying to kill me. They even offer to help repair the damage, though I don’t take them up on that for a number of reasons. First off, even your standard MiB wouldn’t know what to make of my humble abode, and how can they possibly patch it up if they don’t even know what it is? Second, this whole place is still classified, and not a one of them has the clearance for it—I suspect half of the reason behind their offer to help is for an excuse to poke around.

  Third, I’ve actually been wanting to put up a few coat hooks and maybe a small basketball hoop but I could never find a way to pierce the skull walls. Now I’ve got a half dozen or so holes, ready and waiting. I’ll have to remember this and ask Tall to bring his sidearm the next time I need to install new shelves.

  Anyway, Tall bundles the others off back to Earth—the slow, boring, interstellar bus way, presumably because they don’t deserve the Grays’ instant-teleport method—and Jones elects to go with them. She’s made the trip once before, after all—which is one more time than any of these other yahoos, at least when they were in their right mind—and besides, she wants to check and see if that query she put in on Agent Smith has come back yet. I can’t say I’m sorry to see her go, at least not with a straight face. She’s not as terrible as she was the first time, admittedly, but that still doesn’t mean we’re gonna be late-night drinking buddies. Though a little alcohol—okay, a lot of alcohol—might do wonders for her personality. I’ve been told it vastly improves mine. And expands my vocabulary, which is a little disturbing—apparently I speak passable Welsh and nearly fluent Japanese when I’m drunk, which might just say something about how those languages evolved in the first place.

  “So, what now?” I ask Tall as I hand him a beer—a regular Earth-variety one, I don’t need any more excitement at the moment—and plop down on my couch with another. It’s still behaving—I think all the commotion scared it.

  “Now we wait for Agent Jones to see what she can find,” he replies, taking a healthy swig from his bottle. “Hopefully, we’ll get the name of Smith’s old partner, and then we can set about tracking him down.”

  “You really think that’ll work?” I ask him, and I’m not surprised when he frowns and shakes his head. “Yeah, me either. This guy’s smart enough to erase people’s memories after they meet him, and he even got to Smith somehow—he has to know enough to erase his old work history from your computers.”

  “It isn’t quite that easy,” Tall protests. He actually sounds a little hurt, like I’ve insulted his haircut or something. Hey, just because I don’t want my head to look like a fresh-cut lawn or a gravel landing strip, don’t let me stop you! “Our computers have the best security on the planet,” he says, “or in the solar system. And we’ve brought in guys like Ned before to make sure it can stand up to alien interference, too. Plus it’s all hard-shielded, so there’s no way to break into it from off-site.” Which I personally know to be true. Hey, what do you want? I’ve got oodles of spare time, a computer that can practically write a sonata while rebuilding a classic car engine and calculating the approach of a meteor swarm, a sensor array capable of tracking stray particles in solar systems on the other end of the spiral and determining each one’s size, density, and frequency, and a penchant for sticking my bill where it doesn’t belong. And I was curious what they had to say about me. But no luck. I couldn’t get in, no matter what I tried.

  “So this guy’s been to your headquarters,” I say. “Doesn’t that mean you have him on tape? I know there’re cameras everywhere.”

  “There are,” Tall agrees, polishing off the last of his beer in two long swallows, “and we can check, but I’m guessing he was smart enough to hack into those and erase any footage.” Which makes sense. Why be this careful in everything else and then get sloppy with something like that?

  There is something that’s bugging me, though. “Why couldn’t Smith remember when you told him
to? That worked before, on the cookie guy.”

  “I don’t know.” And I can tell from the way Tall says it that having to admit that is killing him. “There must’ve been something different about the two situations, but we have no way of knowing what.”

  We sit there in silence for a bit after that. Eventually I get bored—okay, as soon as my beer’s done—and switch on the TV. Turns out one of the channels is having an all-day “If Our World Was Ending” marathon, so we sit and watch a few episodes of that. The “Supernova” episode is particularly good—I’m impressed how the focal character thinks to dry his laundry and cook his food using the convection heat beating down from the swollen sun, thus speeding up his pack-and-go time by at least a few hours. Waste not, want not!

  The “Stolen by Space Pirates” episode is just past the credits when Tall’s phone rings. “Yeah?” he answers, eyes still on the screen. It’s like he’s evasive on sheer reflex! He listens for a second, nods, sighs, says, “All right, thanks. I’ll keep you posted,” and hangs up. “That was Agent Jones,” he tells me, which I kind of guessed. “She got Agent Smith’s work history. His partner’s name isn’t listed.”

  “No real surprise there,” I comment, leaning back and folding my hands over my belly. What, I think best when reclining! Especially while sleeping! “It is kind of weird, though.”

  He shakes his head at me. “How is that weird? You agreed earlier that he probably got to the files as well.”

  “Well, sure.” I shrug. “I dunno, it’s just—if you were trying to cover up who you were, how would you do it? If you didn’t want people to track you through your old case files and blog posts and things.”

  “I don’t blog,” he corrects with that same tone you hear from super-elegant ladies who exclaim that they don’t stoop to such-and-such behavior—usually right before sneaking off for exactly that. “But I would most likely create a false persona and use that to obscure my real identity.”

  “Exactly!” I try to wave my arms around but I forgot my fingers were laced together, and it winds up just looking like I’m doing some old breakdancing move. I’ll have to remember that if I ever make it back for a college reunion. “But this guy, he doesn’t insert ‘Agent Stick-Up-Butt’ or ‘Grimjaw McShady’ or anything like that. No, he just removes himself completely. It just seems like a weird choice to me.”

  Tall’s thinking—I can tell because he’s chewing on his lower lip, and because he didn’t glare at me for the “stick-up-butt” thing, and after a moment he raises his cell phone again and dials somebody. “Thomas here,” he says a second later—presumably the person on the other end just picked up. “Can you pull up that file again?” Ah, Agent Jones. She’s a lot more pleasant like this, where I don’t have to see or hear her myself. “Check the file history,” he tells her next. “It should be under ‘Status,’ right after ‘Check out,’ ‘check in,’ and ‘report.’ Yes, right there. Now, what’s the last entry before your check-out?” He listens intently. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Agent Smith’s file hasn’t been recently altered,” he tells me. “It was officially redacted—almost forty years ago!”

  “Redacted? What the hell’s that? Is it like ‘reduced’ but with a dramatic reading involved?”

  Tall doesn’t laugh—I don’t know why I bother. I guess mainly because I laugh. Hey, I’m a funny guy! He does answer, though: “No, ‘redacted’ means to obscure or remove text.” His frown deepens—I can practically see through that crease in his forehead, right into his skull! “Typically it’s used to refer to government alteration of some official document.”

  “So you’re saying the agency removed the name of Smith’s partner, and it was years ago?” I scratch at my bill. “Man, I can see why he’d be pissed!” There’s something tickling the back of my mind, and it’s not the business end of the feathers gracing my neck. But what? Forty years ago, official censoring of agency records, all traces of this guy wiped clean . . . “Hey, would the agency erase memories, too?”

  Tall nods. “Of course. I told you that’s standard procedure when an agent decides to leave—or doesn’t make the cut and gets sent back to a normal life.” The sad little quirk to his lips tells me he’s thinking the same thing I am, that a life like that, especially after everything we’ve seen and done, might not even be worth living. And even though I know he hasn’t been entirely thrilled about his job since the whole saving the universe thing, there’s no way he’d ever give up everything we’ve seen and done.

  But I’m still going over his explanation. He said something similar once before, about going back to a normal life—and then it all clicks into place. Of course!

  “Agent Mercer-Messer-Miezer!” Tall hits me with a Number Seven, and I hurry to explain. “The first WiB, remember? You told me she was there in the early seventies, and after they kicked her out they wiped her memory and set her up with a normal, boring life instead. She’d have to be, what, in her sixties or seventies today? Which is—”

  “—about the right age to be a little old lady who bumps into Reg from the cookie factory and hypnotizes him into adding Jorbinate Sublimate to the cookies,” Tall finishes for me. “Damn.”

  “And the timing’s right for her to have been partnered with Smith,” I add. “Then they wiped his memory of her, too, after she left.”

  “Which is why commanding him to remember wasn’t going to work,” Tall agrees. “When she uses the cookies to alter people’s memories, she’s really just hiding those memories away so nobody can find them—until I order them to go ahead and remember after all. But the agency’s redaction methods are a lot more thorough. There really wasn’t enough there for Agent Smith to grasp onto, or to even realize he’d been tampered with.” He’s nodding slowly. “I think you’ve just found our culprit, DuckBob.” And I know I’m not imagining the respect in his voice. I wish I could bottle it and save it for later, like the next time I do or say something stupid. It probably wouldn’t even go flat by then.

  “Cool. So, now that we know who she is, how do we find her? I’m guessing she’s not gonna make this easy for us.”

  Tall grins at me in reply. “Of course not. Where would be the fun in that?” He gestures toward my computer. “Come on, fire that thing up and let’s get cracking.”

  I’m already off the couch—it goes into a sulk, but I refuse to let my own furniture guilt me into doing something—and a few seconds later I’m sliding into my desk chair and waking the system up. “What’re we looking for?”

  “We’ll need her full name, first,” he points out. He walks over to stand right behind me, both hands on the back of my chair, and frowns—I can see him reflected in the monitor. “Look for articles from the early seventies about young women recovering from a coma,” he tells me. “That’s always the agency’s favorite cover story—it explains why the person hasn’t been around, and covers over any odd behavior as they readjust.”

  I nod and type in the search request. A few minutes later, my computer dings—sometimes I think it mistakes itself for a Betty Crocker oven, which just tells me I need to try scooping brownie mix into the CD tray—and the results start to pop up on the screen. There’s a good page or two of them, but a lot we can rule out immediately—like the ones talking about a twelve-year-old coma victim, or the ones where it’s a forty-year-old housewife. That just leaves four possibilities, and I click on each one to read the full article and check out the accompanying picture. The first one looks to be tiny, a waif-like thing with big dark eyes and a dark pixie cut. The second one’s got light hair of some color but she’s not much better-looking than Agent Jones—plus she was in a coma for only a week, which doesn’t match. But the third—

  “That’s her!” Tall grips my chair so hard I have to plant my feet to keep him from tipping us both over. Down, boy! “That’s definitely her!”

  I study the image. Okay, yeah, I can see it—she’s tall, broad-shouldered, busty, with long blo
nd hair and a strong but still graceful jaw and dark eyes. She could be Wonder Woman’s blonde cousin.

  “Olivia Ann Mercer, age twenty-five,” I read, “thrilled hospital and family alike when this morning she suddenly woke from a two-year-long coma. Miss Mercer had graduated Sarah Williams College with a degree in Romance languages and had been traveling to Boston for a job interview when the bus she was in had a mechanical failure and flipped over. Miss Mercer was rushed to the nearest hospital, St. Luke’s in Grandville, but somehow her identification got lost in the shuffle and she languished there for two years known only as Jane Doe, while her family believed her dead. It was only this morning, upon awakening, that she was able to let the hospital staff know her name and who to contact. Doctors say that Miss Mercer is showing signs of a remarkable recovery, and they hope to be able to release her to her family soon.”

  “Sounds about right,” Tall says, and I can tell from the dreamy tone that he’s still gazing at her picture. Yeah, okay, she’s a hottie, but focus, please!

  “Two years, though?” I ask him. “I thought you said she was only a WiB for a month?”

  He nods, making my chair shake. “She was, but she had to undergo training first. They wiped out all memory of that as well. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work—I did hear once that the early memory wipes weren’t always perfect, and sometimes random images or names could crop back up.”

  “Yeah, well, sounds like she kept a lot more than that.” I reread the article. “At least we know her name now.” I type that in and hit “search.” “Let’s see what we get.” What we get turns out to be page upon page of information—seems there’re a lot of Olivias and Anns and Mercers. Who knew? But I group the whole name and this time the results are sparser. The first one, though, knocks me for a loop: