by E. M. Foner
“Seeing Helen at college reminded me of the importance of an education for humans,” I replied, hoping she didn’t know that my exemplar was cutting all of her classes.
“You know, Sue likes you,” eBeth said nonchalantly.
“Your crude attempts to change the subject don’t work on me, and you’re confusing our encounter suits with flesh-and-blood bodies. Sue and I have both been around for longer than your country, and when AI decide to form a partnership to bring a new sentient being into existence, it’s based on more than hormones.”
“She still likes you,” the girl retorted, her thumbs flying over the game controller. eBeth’s ability to multi-task was one of my more interesting discoveries since coming to Earth. “You should ask her out.”
“On a date? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“I’m just saying.”
The doorbell rang and it was Sue with pizza. As I let her in, I couldn’t help wondering if she’d overheard the conversation. eBeth hit pause and put the game controller aside. Spot began to drool as Justin knocked and entered, holding the door open for Stacey von Hoffman and Kim in turn. I shook my head at them.
“What?” Kim asked. “You said to be here at 6:00.”
“I think it’s neat how you all showed up at exactly the same time,” eBeth volunteered.
There was another knock and Paul entered. “I saw the others arrive so I counted to a billion before following,” he said. “Hey, eBeth. Hi, Spot.”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “We should have practiced this.”
“Is the meeting about my doing too good of a job at work again?” Kim inquired. “I dropped my efficiency by thirty percent after your warning, but I heard some of the other employees talking about me in the bathroom today.”
“You go to the bathroom?” Justin asked.
“It’s kind of suspicious if you never do, and it’s a good place to eavesdrop while the women fix their makeup and chat. Maybe it’s different for men.”
“It’s only been a day, and thirty percent off for you is still a hundred percent more than your co-workers are capable of,” I reminded her. “Just try to gear down to their speed and don’t go so hard on your inspections.”
“But people’s lives are at stake.”
“Humans have been living with bacteria in their guts and kitchens forever. You don’t have to ignore things that would send somebody to the hospital, but those checklists are written for inspectors with average perception, not a walking biohazard detector.”
“I intentionally don’t fix the problem the first time on one in four vehicles I repair,” Paul volunteered. “It gives me a chance to gauge how people really feel about their cars, and it doesn’t hurt the bottom line either.”
The door opened again and Helen walked in. “Sorry I’m late, guys. I had to find a parking spot where a policeman driving by wouldn’t notice the license plate.”
“You stole another car?” I asked.
“No. It belongs to one of my roommates. She doesn’t believe in paying fees to the state so it’s not really registered. My other roommate is an art major and she made the car a really cool inspection sticker.”
“Don’t hit anything,” I warned her before getting down to business. “I’ve got bad news, so everybody—”
“Worse than a Hanker exploration ship entering the solar system?” Justin interrupted.
“I saw the reflected signal on the web,” Stacey von Hoffman said. “Do you think the humans will be able to figure out those waveforms?”
“The two of you participate in the search for extraterrestrials?”
“Sure, it gives me a nice break from mining Bitcoin while the old folks are sleeping,” Justin said. “Some of the noise patterns those antennas pick up are kind of soothing.”
“Did anybody else know about the Hankers?” I asked.
“I picked up the mass on my orbital detection grid,” Paul said, and then flinched under my stare. “I was going to tell you about the grid as soon as I finished testing. I mean, come on. You couldn’t expect me to live on a planet without some sort of early warning system. I have enemies.”
“All right. For those of you who didn’t already know, there’s a Hanker exploration vessel heading this way. They intentionally announced their presence by intercepting and reflecting back a narrow beam signal the humans sent out decades ago.”
“Why would they do that?” Kim asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and my conclusion is that they want Earth’s scientists to make the connection and realize that faster-than-light travel is involved. It’s a simple way to prove the technology exists and give the humans a little time to adjust before they make their sales pitch.”
“But will the humans figure it out when they don’t believe that going faster than the speed of light is possible?” Helen asked. She noticed my surprise and added, “I scanned the textbooks for the prerequisites on my fake transfer transcript in case somebody asks.”
“While technically we aren’t allowed to interfere with the actions of unaffiliated aliens, I might have given the astronomy professor at the college a nudge in the right direction after she showed me the data,” I admitted.
“I sent NASA an anonymous e-mail,” Paul said.
“Me too,” Stacey von Hoffman chimed in.
We all looked at Justin. “I submitted a decoded version with all of the intermediate steps to WikiLeaks.” He shrugged. “They seem to be good at spilling the beans. I’ve been sending them all the dirt I come up with on the pharmaceutical industry’s attempts to turn senior citizens into zombies, so I have a personal contact there.”
“That answers Helen’s question,” I said. “Are the rest of you onboard with this?”
“We can’t let the Hankers con the humans for the sake of having a funny story to tell their friends,” Sue said. “I don’t want the kids in my daycare growing up in a country where they owe a mountain of debt before they even finish school.”
I saw eBeth open her mouth to say something and shook my head at her to let it pass. Sue worried enough about the young humans in her charge without knowing about the national debt clock.
“Most of the old people I work with have nothing to live on besides their Social Security,” Justin commented. “We can’t let the humans raid the trust fund to pay the Hankers for some worthless trinkets.”
Again I motioned to eBeth to remain quiet. She mouthed, “You owe me.”
“I really don’t like the Hankers,” Helen said. “I once had an assignment working as a counter on one of their ice harvesting ships operating in the neutral nebulae. They were always trying to cheat on their quotas and pretending the whole thing was a big joke.”
“How about it, Kim? I’d like this to be unanimous.”
“The Hankers make the humans look like neat freaks. When I visited one of their worlds on a training exercise, I actually fell for the guide’s line about their species being avid open-air recyclers. Now I realize the whole place was a dump.”
“Great. Keep in mind that the secrecy of our mission is paramount, but within that constraint, we’re agreed that we’ll do whatever we can to stop the Hankers from pranking the humans.”
“Do they know that we’re here?” Sue asked.
“They never would have found this world if we weren’t here, and the timing is just too close to our mission completion to be a coincidence. There must have been a leak on the executive council.”
“Why do you have to worry about secrecy if they already know?” eBeth asked through a mouthful of pizza.
“It’s a secret from you, not from them,” Paul explained. “Well, not you-you, obviously, or Death Lord, but from humans in general.”
“Who’s Death Lord?” Helen asked.
“Human kid, a friend of eBeth’s I hired to help me out in the garage,” Paul explained. “He’s got a lot of aptitude so I’ve been bringing him along on the more advanced stuff. Speaking of which, if that’s it for the meeting, we’re upgra
ding the traction control in his Jeep tonight.”
“That’s all I have to say for now,” I told them, somewhat taken aback to discover that eBeth had asked a favor from Paul behind my back. “Let’s sleep on it a few days and we can discuss our options at the Tuesday meeting.”
My team members made a big production of leaving one at a time, silently counting to sixty on their fingers between each new departure, their lips moving in sync. They weren’t such smart alecks when they first arrived on Earth so I blame it on all the electrical noise the humans create. I joined in on the joke for the sake of team spirit, and four minutes passed slowly. Then I noticed that Stacey von Hoffman was holding back, pretending to study some reproduction prints that had come with the frames I bought when decorating the place. Helen and eBeth were fooling around on the hopped-up laptop I’d given the girl.
“Now we’ll be able to play remotely,” Helen concluded, stepping back from the table. “And don’t forget, the party starts at ten.”
As soon as the door closed, I turned to eBeth and said, “You are not going to a college party. It’s going to be a bunch of drunk boys twice your size who only have a quarter of your brains when they’re sober.”
“Helen will be there too,” eBeth protested. “She’s promised to hook me up with a fake ID tomorrow. Everybody at the college has them.”
“Helen hasn’t been on Earth long enough to recognize dangerous human behavior, and she’s not going to follow you into the bathroom, which is more than I can promise for the other partygoers.”
I could see that eBeth was startled by my last comment and was about to press my advantage when Tracy von Hoffman horned in on the conversation.
“Actually, I could use your help tonight,” she said, radiating guilt on a broad spectrum of frequencies. “Both of you.”
“Something wrong at the museum?”
“Not exactly. I seem to have a bit of a problem with U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
“ICE?” eBeth asked with interest. “Have they figured out that you’re an illegal alien?”
“I got caught up in an investigation of antiquities exported from the Middle East,” she confessed. “I thought that the paperwork looked suspicious, but I really wanted the pieces for the collection.”
“Doesn’t the museum have attorneys to deal with this sort of thing?” I asked.
“Yes, but I bought these for my private collection. Just to use up some Bitcoin that was burning a hole in my wallet, you understand.”
“Can you pretend that you intended to donate the artifacts to the museum?” eBeth asked a step ahead of me.
“I could, except I was using a false identity myself.”
“So what exactly is the problem?” I demanded, tiring of all this beating around the bush.
“The ICE agents raided my warehouse.”
“You have a warehouse? I thought you kept a few things at home.”
“That’s just the smaller pieces.”
“Don’t you have, like, super-high-tech security?” eBeth asked.
“So here’s the problem,” Stacey von Hoffman said, finally getting to the point. “I got the alarm just as this meeting started. I knew that stopping them at the door would just create more problems because they would know something was fishy and call for backup. So I let them in and blocked their phone signals so they couldn’t upload any pictures.”
“They’ll probably think that the phone-jamming is just the building,” eBeth said. Her face was a mask of concentration that usually only showed up when she was playing a game. “What do you want us to do?”
I was about to tell her she wouldn’t be coming, but then I realized that bringing eBeth along on a Federal crime was likely the only way to keep her from Helen’s party, so I chose the lesser of two evils.
“I’m gassing them as we speak,” Stacey von Hoffman said matter-of-factly. “Kim made me a batch of modified hospital anesthetic for security purposes that should keep them unconscious for six hours after it takes effect. She’s really good at human medical stuff. The problem is that the agents know about my storage space, and unfortunately, ICE produces lots of paper, so altering their computer records won’t accomplish anything.”
“So we’ll have to move it all,” eBeth said.
“Finding enough trucks on such short notice would be tricky, and besides—”
“How about one big truck?” I interrupted. The last thing we needed with the Hankers on the way was to get caught up in a Federal investigation. “Paul keeps a forty-eight-foot trailer at his place for extra storage, but he can move the stuff into his spare bay for a few days since it’s an emergency. I’ll bet he can find a truck to haul the trailer over on short notice.”
“It would take a half-dozen semis to move my collection. But I have a better plan…”
Spot insisted on coming along as we piled into my van, and for once, eBeth didn’t pester me to drive. She was too excited about the prospect of taking part in a movie-style heist, even though I pointed out that Stacey von Hoffman already owned everything we would be stealing, sort of. When we arrived at the warehouse, the only other vehicle in the parking area was a black SUV that I recognized as an airport rental.
“Are the agents asleep?” I asked.
“Like babies,” Stacey von Hoffman replied. “I’ve been running the ventilation fans for the last ten minutes so it will be safe for eBeth and Spot.”
The keycard reader on the front door looked intact, which meant that the agents had either broken in somewhere else or had some type of universal bypass card. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that her collection only took up a fraction of the floor space and was all boxed in large crates. A man and a woman lay unconscious on the floor, a crowbar between them. They had only had time to pry the lids off of three crates, all of which contained large stone panels that looked like they might have come from an ancient temple.
“Good, they didn’t damage anything,” Stacey von Hoffman said. “You guys stuff the packing back in and I’ll just grab some nails and secure the lids.”
“Shouldn’t we tie them up or something?” eBeth asked, motioning to the unconscious agents.
“Save a little packing to pillow their heads,” I suggested. “And keep those gloves on. I don’t want your fingerprints found in this place. Spot, you keep an eye on the Feds and bark if they start moving.”
“It’s cold in here,” eBeth said after we finished stuffing the packing material back into the open crates. “Isn’t that bad for the art?”
“The warehouse is climate controlled, but I had to pull in outside air to get rid of the gas,” Stacey explained, returning with a handful of nails. “Give me a hand with these, Mark.”
I helped hold the crate lids in place while she drove in the nails with her thumb, like a human pushing tacks into a cork-board.
“So you and I carry these to the elevator one at a time?” I asked.
“That’s what the forklifts are for,” she said. “The warehouse came with four of them as part of the rental. They used to make engine parts here, but the building wasn’t suited for modern factory automation. Most of the equipment was sold for scrap a long time ago, but the owner thought that keeping the forklifts would make it easier to rent the space.”
“Are you sure the next floor up is empty?”
“It better be since I rented it under another name. Can you drive a forklift, eBeth?”
“Just show me.”
We walked over to the parking area and Stacey von Hoffman demonstrated the basic controls for us. After my acquisitive colleague’s off-hand comment that the least valuable crate in the place was worth millions of dollars, eBeth was on her best behavior.
The main bottleneck in the operation was the freight elevator. Tracy von Hoffman ignored the sign reading, ‘Unsafe for weights over 300 lb,’ lifted the safety gate, and drove her forklift with the first crate right on. The lift groaned a little, but it took her up to the second floor.
; I hung onto eBeth’s safety cage for her first couple trips, making sure she understood that the most important thing was to lower the forks before approaching a pallet. After that, we placed two crates per trip on the elevator. I intentionally drove slower than necessary to set an example, and with two of us loading and Stacey von Hoffman unloading one floor up, it only took four hours to work our way through a collection that any museum director would have killed for.
I checked on the sleeping ICE agents while eBeth went up to see the collection in its new home. By analyzing their vital signs and brain-wave patterns, I could tell that the anesthetic was wearing off.
“They’ll be awake in twenty minutes or so if they’re anything like children,” I told Stacey von Hoffman after she and the girl returned.
“How can you tell?” eBeth asked.
“Sue included a whole treasure trove of data on human sleep patterns in one of her reports. The daycare has made her an expert on napping.”
“I’m not sure that adults and pre-schoolers sleep the same way.”
As if to confirm her speculation, the female agent groaned. I held my finger to my lips and hustled eBeth over to the loading dock, where we opened both of the doors. Tracy von Hoffman made a quick visit to the electrical box in the corner before following with her forklift, which she left parked on the dock as if it had been abandoned after loading a truck.
“I shut off the power for the elevator, took the fuse, and flipped the sign,” she told us. “Let’s get out of here before they wake up.”
I glanced back at the elevator and saw that it was now posted as ‘Out of order.”
The four of us went back to my van, and two minutes later, Tracy von Hoffman began a running commentary on the actions of the ICE agents based on her hidden surveillance video feed.
“She just poked her partner in the ribs and he pushed her hand away, saying something about sleeping until the alarm clock goes off. No, he just sat upright and he’s checking to make sure he has his gun, and she’s getting out her smartphone. He’s telling her there’s no signal, but of course, there is now, and she’s making a call. I should have turned out the lights when we left.”