Maria trashes her phone and goes inside of a Walmart to buy another for cheap. Maria doesn’t trust the CIA or the NSA, any government organization really, not since it came to light that they were listening to average people like soap operas. The last thing she wanted was for some government drone to find out the things that she knew, the things that her mother had tried to convince her was just dreams when she was a child, and the things doctors gave her drugs to forget, or to obscure in a haze to suggest hallucinations. Maria was never abducted by an alien, but she had met one who was kind to her and invited her onto his ship that she couldn’t see until she was inside of it, but from the inside she could tell that it was massive, like the inside of the Biltmore House in Asheville where she went with her family for Christmas one year. Her family lived near Asheville when she was a girl, in a house that was relatively remote and she liked to walk around the nature in her backyard. She should have been wary of the man, that turned out to be an alien, who invited her to take a ride with him, her mother had warned her of strangers, but the man had the kindest face, it was beautiful like a woman’s, and Maria felt that she could trust him. The man had dark skin and his hair was a neat aphro of big, silky black curls on his head. He wore something like a jumpsuit but it was more formal, similar to a fancy suite, and it had crisp creases in all the right places. He was tall and muscular but Maria approached him with no fear whatsoever. She didn’t seem to mind that his hands had two fingers connected by a deep web and a long thumb with a talon like nail, she took his hand and let him lead her through the woods. And when she was on his ship, he gave her good things to eat and asked her questions about her life.
“Would you like to see where I am from?” He asked with a kind smile. She thought that he was the most pleasant human man she’d ever met, only he wasn’t a human and he was taking her on a trip, an unfathomable distance through the stars and Maria saw an alien city that was not completely different than big cities she had traveled to on Earth, but it was definitely more technologically advanced with its transforming cars and antigravity roads, floating street lights with no posts or wires, buildings built like pyramids with huge escalators with stops on each floor that went all the way to the top. The man asked Maria what she thought about everything as they made their way back to Earth; the trip was extremely short compared to the distance. “It was nice, I want my mom to see it.” Maria answered. “My mom would like it. And your house,” she said eating ice cream the man had given her, looking around at all the buttons and lights, the seemingly metal walkways and countless see-through doors. “Maria, if you tell your mom about this, your life will be difficult, do you understand,” the man said, looking very pained and regretful, as though he knew all of the difficulty Maria would face if she told a story about getting onto an invisible ship and flying across the universe to another planet. “You are very brave Maria and we are very thankful that you came to visit us. You’ve shown us that our worlds are not so different, we can live as one. But it will be some time before we can make an official journey and reveal ourselves to your world, so Maria, you must try and keep this to yourself. Will you try for me?” He was sincere and Maria smiled and said she would do her best. But after the alien man dropped her off in her backyard and disappeared back into his ship, and Maria went into her house, she had to tell her mother about the things that she saw.
And the alien man was right, it only caused trouble for Maria who has not known happiness like she’d experienced that day on the ship since. But she is determined to find it.
Having changed her phone number, Maria decides to head back to the IBF to talk with the receptionist, Wendy, who was supposed to call her with any news of Dr. Thomas Eakran, the man who had visited Columbia University in NY where she worked and had given a lecture about the universal nature of the singular consciousness. Maria only managed to attend the lecture by chance, it had been relocated from the auditorium in Lerner Hall to the biggest lecture room in Pupin where she cleaned classrooms. She overheard Dr. Eakran talking about the absolute nature of consciousness, “One brain, one consciousness. Two minds can’t inhabit the same body. Two minds cannot meld. The brain is a kind of fortress because it knows, a dual conscious is fractured and ineffective. A fractured consciousness is a sign of insanity.” He continued that this was true of every living thing, no matter how simple the brain function. The complex brain, Eakran explained, can’t repair itself at a certain point because introducing new brain matter into an already complete brain is counterintuitive to proper brain function, “the new material might as well be a foreign implant, it is rejected just the same.” Maria didn’t follow a lot of the review of his experiments with stem cells to regrow brain cells for people with various degenerative brain disorders, but there was a point in the lecture where Eakran referred to “all sentient beings in the universe” that made Maria think that if anyone would believe her alien encounter, it was him. He seemed open to ideas that others couldn’t conceive, and if he didn’t believe the alien story, at least she could tell her mother that she had talked to a world class neurosurgeon. But after his lecture, the doctor had left so fast, and Maria was forced to track him down. It wasn’t easy, the exact location of Dr. Eakran’s office wasn’t easy to find, though she found out that he worked with the IBF from the department chair that organized the lecture. The IBF has offices in two states and the District of Columbia, and she decided that DC was the best first stop. It was there that she seduced a security guard without even touching him and she found out that Eakran did classified research for the DEA, CDC and the NIH.
At the IBF, Wendy had developed a nervous habit of twirling her shoulder length, brown hair on a finger. Ever since she’d discovered that Dr. Eakran was some sort of top secret government scientist, she wondered if Maria was a spy or an assassin. She hates herself for taking Maria’s number in the first place. She shouldn’t have been so attractive, Wendy thinks, if she’d been ugly I wouldn’t have been so nice. But Wendy is being hard on herself, of course she would have been nice to an ugly Maria, Wendy is an excellent receptionist.
When Maria walks in, Wendy is startled at the sight of her and her heart races. Is it possible for someone to get more attractive in a couple of weeks, Wendy thinks, eyeing Maria’s slender frame in her jeans and tight, collar shirt. Her hair, Wendy watches the thick hair like it is a slow motion scene from a shampoo commercial.
“It’s Wendy, right?” Maria says, already standing before Wendy’s desk. It takes Wendy off guard, she had been watching Maria approach in slow motion in her mind.
“Yes. Yes. How can I help you?” Wendy clears her throat many times and tries not to look Maria in the eyes.
“I’m Maria, I was here a couple weeks ago.”
“Yes, Dr. Eakran right?” Why did I say that, Wendy thinks, I could have pretended not to remember her.
“Yea, I lost my phone and had to get a new number. Just wanted to make sure you could get in touch.”
Wendy’s heart leaps. She came back to give me her number, Wendy thinks.
“Oh, well.” Wendy says standing to smile at Maria directly in the eyes. “You wanna go grab lunch? There’s a place, its kind of a drive, but that’ll give us time to talk. I can tell you what I know about Eakran.”
Wendy isn’t particularly starved for attention or for sex, there is just something about Maria, knowing, or thinking, that she likes Wendy is enough to make Wendy jump through hoops. Its a feeling that makes Wendy completely trust Maria, despite the fact that Wendy is putting her position at the IBF in jeopardy. The last person to divulge the secret location of Eakran’s lab lost his job as a security guard at the DC office; the manager of the office had found personnel files out of order and the security guard admitted to letting a beautiful, leggy woman in to find out where Eakran worked. The guard was later found dead, but it was an apparent car accident, so surely neither Wendy nor Maria should fear for their safety.
Although, the head of IBF security did get an alert on his facial recognition software matching the leggy woman in DC to a recent walk-in at the rural GA location where Wendy was the receptionist.
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