Making the Galaxy Great

“Oh my God, you’re not making breakfast.”

Evie stood in the kitchen doorway, barefoot. She had swapped Jason’s t-shirt for one of his button-down office shirts, which she wore over her skirt. She watched him drop beaten eggs into a pan where he’d been sautéing onions and peppers.

His head was sore. Not throbbing headache sore, but wincing wound sore. He had whimpered like a baby earlier when he pulled the bandage off and inadvertently ripped the scab that had started to form, then whimpered even more when he’d stepped in the shower and felt the warm water attack the same demolished scab.

“Cooking helps me relax,” he told her. “I woke up thinking about what happened last night. I mean, not us — well, I definitely thought about that, too — but that girl with the weird face. And then that crazy chick who followed us here.”

Evie inhaled emphatically. “You don’t really think she’s a government agent, do you? ’Cause I think she’s deranged and maybe a stalker. I’m glad I was here or she might have . . . who knows?”

Jason swallowed hard. Whether or not she was really a government agent, Agent McCauley — if that was really her name — looked like she could kick just about anyone’s ass. As for the possibility she was a stalker — his mind refused to go there. He slid scrambled eggs onto two plates, which he’d already populated with orange slices and bagels.

Evie waved a hand at him. “I don’t eat breakfast,” she continued, almost as if she were offended. “And anyway, that’s sort of, you know, . . . it makes it seem like dating or something.”

Jason didn’t look up and tried not to flinch as he reached for his coffee maker. “Well, you need coffee, at least.”

Evie accepted the cup he offered and sat down, pulling one of her legs up onto the chair to display one of the long tattoos with which Jason had recently become intimately acquainted. Then she checked her phone. “Whoops. My car is two minutes away. Gotta go.”

A minute later, she had scooped up her things and was walking out the door. Jason finished his breakfast alone, then trudged upstairs to straighten the debris from the previous night. He picked up the bedspread from the floor and underneath it found the chinos and blazer he’d discarded when he was rushing to get into bed with Evie. With a sad expression he held up the blazer.

“Damn.”

He only had two blazers, and that one had been his favorite. Before he took it downstairs for a burial in the trash, he checked the pockets. He found his car keys in the right pocket, and a receipt from The Grinder in the breast pocket. But also found something in the left outside pocket. It was the small, sparkling crystal and metal device he’d cut his head on. With its oval shape and tiny metal frame, it reminded him of his grandmother’s brooch, which he was keeping to give to Shelby someday. But there was no fastener on the back, nor did it look as though there ever had been. Definitely not a brooch, but perhaps it was important to someone. He should probably take it back to The Grinder in case the person who’d lost it and came back for it.

He set the flat side on his desk and stared at it, and Agent McCauley’s stern face appeared in his mind. What if the girl in the hoodie had dropped it as she’d collided with him? If so, then perhaps it might be something more than it seemed. Maybe it was a valuable gem — a blood diamond, maybe. Or it wasn’t a gem at all, but some type of new drug Jason had never heard of. Pale sunlight streamed through the window behind the desk, and when Jason bent down and looked at the crystal closely, it almost seemed as if there were tiny veins inside.

Or wires.

He held his hand over the object to see if blocking the light might reveal more. When he did, a three-dimensional image appeared. A moving image. Jason sucked in his breath.

Jesus, it’s a hologram.

The hologram displayed some sort of document, which turned as if on an unseen, spinning pedestal. There was no paper; simply blue-white text floating in the air. Jason leaned in and saw that the left side of the document was composed in what looked like Chinese characters — but could have been Japanese or Vietnamese or virtually any Asian language for all he knew. On the right side, there was what he assumed was text also, but in some language that looked even less familiar. Like Elven runes. When the document completed a full 360-degree turn, it vanished, and Jason was staring at his desk.

“That’s it?” he said aloud. “Isn’t there any more?”

As soon as he said the word ‘more,’ a new image appeared. This time it wasn’t a document. A group of tiny, foot-high figures seemed to walk just above the surface of his desk. There were several people dressed in what looked like dark jumpsuits. They were all relatively short and stocky with distorted, puckered faces and small, round mouths that looked like sphincters. There were also soldiers with rifles and men in gray business suits, all of whom looked Asian. The group was talking amongst themselves (except the soldiers, who just stood and looked menacing), but there was no sound on the hologram. Not that he probably would have understood what they were saying. After a few seconds, the entire group, Asians and sphincter faces, turned and walked through a revolving door into a brightly lit building that could have been an office tower or a hotel.

When the entire group had disappeared into the building, the image vanished, just like the first one.

“More,” said Jason.

He was now looking at some type of mechanical device, or a part of a mechanical device. What it was, Jason had no clue. A circuit, maybe. All he could say for certain was that it looked advanced and complicated

“More.”

Another device. And then another.

“More.”

This time, Jason nearly fell off his chair. Instead of a tiny figure, Jason was staring at a life-size face – the girl in the hoodie, but without the hood. He could now see her entire head: the top covered with extremely thin, short pale hair and the ridge of her brow so prominent it almost reminded him of illustrations he’d seen of how Neanderthals might have looked.

“Holy shit,” he whispered to himself.

Then she spoke.

“Agent McCauley, it is imperative that you take this to the highest authorities in your government as soon as possible. Before any agreements are signed.”

The voice was small and strangely pitched, as if it had been distorted on a soundboard like the ones used by the video production agencies with whom Jason sometimes worked as part of his job. The words were clipped, with pauses at odd points.

The girl (creature?) vanished and when Jason said “more” he returned to the document he’d seen at the beginning of the cycle.

He put his hands on his head and leaned back in his chair. Even though it was just after ten in the morning, he considered grabbing a beer from the fridge.

Government? Agreements? Sphincter faces?

It was clear this was the item McCauley had been inquiring about. He reached into the pocket of his sweatpants and found her card. Was she actually the Agent McCauley the girl talked about, or an imposter? Evie was right: there was something stalkerish about the way she’d followed Jason to his house.

“Fuck me,” he yelled at the walls. “What the hell do I do?”

Jason paced around the bedroom for several minutes. He pulled back his curtain and looked out over his small front yard and beyond. One of his neighbors, the middle-aged guy with the beard who always wore a hat, was walking his dog. There were slate-colored clouds behind the houses across the street, which probably meant rain was on the way. It was a normal, if slightly drab, Saturday morning.

No, not normal.

Jason grabbed his phone and punched in Agent McCauley’s number.

She answered almost instantly. He hesitated, then faltered when he began to speak.

“Hi. Umm . . . this is Jason Fleming. The guy from—”

“Did you remember something, Mr. Fleming?”

“No, I found something. You’re not going to bel—”

“Are you at your house? I’ll come get it right away. Whatever you do, don’t handle it.”

“Too late,” he responded.

A short pause followed. She asked him again where he was. He was reluctant to meet with her at his house, where she could easily murder him. But he couldn’t very well show her the holographic device at a coffee shop. So in the end he told her to come to his house.

There was no particular reason to think she was actually a government agent. And even if she was, was that much better than the alternatives? He had to be prepared. He didn’t want her to kill him and leave his corpse rotting in the house until Candice dropped off Shelby next weekend. Candice might take it in stride, despite her claim that she no longer hated him, but Shelby would be devastated. So a few minutes later, when he peered through the dining room window and saw McCauley walking toward his house, Jason took his phone into his trembling hand and turned it on to record, then set it on the sideboard next to the brooch.