A Small Gray Dot

He held up the item he’d taken from the drawer, a rectangular object about the size of a deck of cards. “I appropriated this from Julius Henderson, whose real name, by the way, is Simretun, or that is how it sounded to me when I heard it. Normally, I work from home, I am only occasionally required to go in, and then only for brief visits.

“Over the past year, I’ve observed some… odd… behaviors on the parts of some of the employees that I have come to consider his inner circle, most notably, Martin Bedlow, his head of security. And by the way, there are varying numbers of them housed on the Semptor grounds in one of the buildings – around five hundred at this time, I think.

“They work at organizing the merchandise while folk from the neighborhood do packaging and loading, and then moving the goods to their various endpoints. Occasionally, Henderson’s people go out with the drivers but, other than organizing merchandise, their main task is to guard the company warehouses. He never uses human guards for that and uses none of his people as guards in the neighborhood. All neighborhood guards are humans.”

I wondered if Bedlow was the guy with the odd accent that I thought of as black suit, but I didn’t stop the doctor to ask what the man wore, though, there was one question I thought was pertinent.

“How do you know these people aren’t human?” An odd accent didn’t make a person non-human.

“They’ve made mistakes that I’ve had occasion to observe; small inconsistences such as their movements aren’t always the ones you’d expect, or they will laugh inappropriately.”

I remembered the odd giggle black suit let loose the first day I’d come to Blue Heaven. I still wasn’t convinced but it was something to consider.

He went on, “But the incident that sealed it for me was the day I dropped by Henderson’s office to ask about something. His door was ajar but he didn’t see me. He removed a panel on a machine and reached inside. I don’t know his reason for doing that, but when he withdrew his hand, he cut it on something sharp and it bled. The blood was more blue than red and it had a peculiar odor. At that point, he was turning toward the door so I knocked as though I’d just arrived. He quickly rubbed at the hand and the cut disappeared.

“He invited me in. Since the odor still lingered, I thought it would be suspicious if I didn’t ask about it so I did. He explained it away by saying it was the smell of oil as he was trying to get the machine to work. I had never seen the machine in operation so I asked him what was its function, and he said it was a new type of printer but was malfunctioning so he wasn’t using it. I could see it wasn’t a printer but I didn’t dispute him. He replaced the panel and I didn’t mention it again.

“No human has blood like that or can heal a cut that fast, Tennessee. That was big but I have more. I hired on with them because I’d been seeing strange frequencies on my lab instruments for some time and after determining they were coming from Semptor, I was hoping to get inside to get a look around. It didn’t take me long to spot some peculiar machinery that I reasoned might well be the origin of the odd frequencies, but I was never able to get close enough to examine one.

“After the incident in which he cut himself, Henderson was overseeing something, and had me meet him in a different area than usual. It was in a large room of a small building adjacent to his main office building. He wanted to go over new distribution scheduling, he said. While there, his walkie-talkie went off and someone said something to him in a strange language. He excused himself and said he’d return shortly. I had noticed several of the odd machines at the back of the room so the moment he left, I hurried over hoping to get a quick look at one of them.

“I must say I was nervous he’d return before I’d gotten my look. While I was doing a hasty job of studying one, it made a noise, a buzzing sound, and this” – he indicated the thing he held – “appeared on a ledge on the front of the machine beside it. Afraid Henderson would be back at any moment, I put it into a pocket and got back to my seat just in time.” He smiled again. “He therefore doesn’t know I have this. It’s what has led me to discover what they are and their agenda.”

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.