Year 9917;
The United Nations of the Earth Republic Intergalactic Consulate
South-909 Highway, X22 Star System,
Z-10 Local Cloud, G-37 Local Cluster,
New Outer Arm, Inner Boundary 1.B, Andromeda Galaxy
"Goodbye!" said the Tazian clerk, with his Taz accent. His voice came out through the speakers of his helmet, as he swiped his digital tag at the sensor passing by the building's exit check point.
It was closing time, as the staff and employees of the local Earth Consulate punched their employee tags and went home for the day, as they did in more than a century of daily operations since the Consulate was first built and established, initially for humans visiting the then-growing tourist attractions of Andromeda.
The local Earth Consulate building was actually designed and structured as a large-scale space station. It resided by the South-909 main cosmic-highway, among other intergalactic, and even foreign, business and government buildings. Just beside the Consulate was a "Fuse-69" station, where the locals refuel their fusion-based space cars, ships, and crafts with deuterium gas - an isotope of Hydrogen efficient for igniting nuclear fusion, just like in the core of stars. And at the other flank, an interstellar bank stood, serving both tourists and investors alike.
Although the Consul was no doubt pure human, of European descent in particular, the Consulate had employed staff of the local Andromedan, foreign race, particularly dominated by the Tazians, whose small planet, Taz, was just one Astronomical Unit away from the Consulate building - a distance the same as the Earth to the Sun. But the United Nations, which was established long ago as the official central government of the Earth as a planetary republic state, insisted to only employ natural human resources strictly from Earth for security positions in all of the diplomatic establishments around the whole Universe, especially in Andromeda, where the galaxy was torn into two political states - the Unified Galactic State of democratic parliamentary star-clusters and planets in the West, and the Socialist, dictator-led, rivaling territories in the East (granting there were no such things as west and east, nor north and south, in intergalactic space, but the two governments insisted to call themselves as west and east, each respectively).
At the Consulate, the building had centralized O2 ventilation for the majority human personnel, so the foreign employees all wore pressurized helmets regulated by a mixture of halogen gases – the kind of atmosphere the locals breathe in. Of course, there were many planets in the region with different atmospheres, but most foreign, non-human employees were Tazians, who were already provided with the halogen helmets, and the Consulate did its best to accommodate everyone, even providing specified kinds of gears for the non-Tazian Consulate personnel. These alien employees would all go punch their employee tags at the security checkpoint by the building exits, while the natural human staff would go through security checkpoints by the exit hallways in the main wing, which filled with elevators exclusive only for all human personnel. Unknown to the alien staff, these elevators were actually private exclusive ports for direct teleportation to and from Earth. It was built and included along with other ports and stations in the Earth's Universal Tele-Transit System, a series of networks of teleport stations around the Milky Way, Andromeda, Local Group galaxies, and deep parts of the Universe – built and designed by the physicists and engineers of the UN. With just their personal employee tags, the teleport elevators would direct human employee personnel straight to and from the station of his or her city hometown in Earth, by scanning the bio-information of the person and processing those information with the use of quantum computers, then translating it back at the arriving station. Such a process was developed by the use of Quantum Entanglement between atom particles. These particles were paired and could "communicate" and "interact" with each other even from a distance. One could change the spin of Particle A located on the Moon, and would result to the opposite spin change of Particle B located in another galaxy. A relatively considered ancient physicist, Albert Einstein, referred to this as "spooky action at a distance".
And now, at the local Earth Consulate in the Inner Boundary of Andromeda, the human guard gave out a salute as the Tazian clerk cleared the checkpoint and went out the door at the main entrance-exit. The foreign clerk was the last employee to check out and go, and now the guards began to close and lock down the building. The guard at the exit checkpoint went out of his post and grabbed the card-keys from the security desk at the reception table. Another guard came in from the main hall and approached the exit. He clicked away at the computer on the main security dashboard by the security desk, as lights turned off and central ventilation was killed. As he grabbed the card-keys, the guard rushed to the main exit and scanned the card-keys at the security alarm dashboard, to activate lockdown measures.
As gray metal doors began to slide down, to close and cover down the whole main entrance of the Consulate building, a woman - an alien in form as the guard saw it - rushed through the rotating doors suspiciously. Her features were not of the local alien race, as the guard thought. She still seemed from Andromeda, but her make must had came from another star system, probably at the Capital near the Galaxy's core, as denoted by her Magenta eyes - a familiar feature of the local life-forms in the galaxy’s Capital Region.
She's dressed in a long, black, trench coat made from gorgon, a similar kind of fabric as leather that was familiar to humans, but made from a different local material. She had dark sunglasses which made her overall look just like in the Matrix movies, from more than seven millennia ago. She appeared to be tired, exhausted, and wounded on her stomach with weird periwinkle-colored fluid oozing from what appeared to be a gunshot wound, probably gamma bullets from the wound shape. Her jacket was filled with drops of the colored fluid, which the guards assumed was her blood.
She stopped and stood at the very center of the entrance hall before the guards, as she arrived inside from the rotating doors. The guards rushed to take out their electron guns, designed to induce electromagnetic fields around an alien body and temporarily paralyze its nervous system. Many modern anatomies and body systems of non-human races were made of metallic cells, most particularly in their central nervous and brain systems, where their neural and nervous networks were exactly configured like wires of electric circuits. Firing a charged electron, or an ion, to an alien's body, can cause electric paralysis. To stop the paralysis, the shooter would have to shoot a follow-up bullet, consisting of armed anti-electrons called positrons. The positrons would collide with the electrons and would annihilate each other.
The woman took a deep breath while the electron guns were all aimed straight at her head, and finally opened her mouth to speak.
"Haish ug el furok Andromedente yi spero gele." She said, as some of the colored fluid dripped from her coat.
There was total silence, as the guards kept their stance and their aim at the woman. Her voice was clear, but her dialect was unfamiliar. The only words the guards understood were "Andromedente", which meant "Andromedan", and "furok", which meant "threat".
"Andromedan threat?" The guards thought between themselves, as the woman remained her composure and stood still, holding now her wound.
"Gaol vaae norok." The woman spoke out again, but in the same unfamiliar language again.
Finally the guards signaled each other to call additional security, and the manager if possible. One of them moved and rushed to the main hall as the other remained and kept his eyes and gun straight towards the woman.
It was great timing. The building manager was with the Consul, as their whole entourage just arrived down at the lobby by the main hall, where they were headed towards the exclusive "teleport" elevators. The guard ran towards the herd of people, and then exclaimed to call their attention.
"Your Honor, sir!" the guard shouted. "We have an intruder! She has this weird-looking fluid dripping from her wound, and said something about a threat..." Out of breath, the guard could not finish his words.
&nbs
p; The Consul then stopped at his tracks with his whole entourage as he heard this, and turned his head at the guard, who just gestured at them to follow him. The Consul walked swiftly towards the guard, followed by the manager, and then the whole entourage. The guard then rushed back to the entrance with a multitude of diplomats and security detail following right behind.
As the whole group arrived, rushing to the entrance hall, the other guard who remained and kept his eyes on the woman, turned his head towards the arriving backup. For one miniscule second, he took away his eyes from the woman, and at the next second, he returned back his sight. Just as the Consul and the whole entourage arrived at the scene, the woman was gone - just an empty entrance hall, without even a trace of the colored fluid stains on the floor, and just the sight of the rotating doors swiftly twirling around with the wind.
"Where is this intruder you speak of?" the Consul spoke out, scanning the whole area from left to right.
"She was just here!" the guard said. "I kept my eyes on her the whole time! But just for a second I turned my head, now she's gone!"
"Yes, she was here. I saw her myself." said the other guard, standing next to the Consul. "She was speaking in strange language, though Andromedan-like, but with different accent and dialect."
"Well, there's nobody here." the Manager said, stepping forward from the group behind.
Without saying anything further, the two guards rushed forward to the security desk, and went inside a nearby room through a door behind the desk. After a minute, they went out running with helmets on their heads, and then dashed through the rotating doors out the building, where lay the empty deep space with no breathing atmosphere. Some of the security detail also picked up some helmets in the security room and followed them from behind.
Outside, there was no one in sight. Nobody. Just the sight of the empty highway, neighboring buildings, and silhouettes of nearby planets, one of which is Taz, with the backdrop of twinkles of stars from millions of light-years away.
Finally, when everybody was about to give up the search and condemn the guards for falsifying emergency protocols, it was the Consul himself who went through the rotating doors, also geared with a helmet, and stepped outside. And it was him who saw something that not a single security personnel had detected. Just across, by the road of the main highway, something by the side-road drain caught the eye of the Consul - something periwinkle.
The Consul walked gently towards the side-road drain and bent down to have a closer look. And his thoughts were correct. That 'something' was definitely alien blood, alright.
"Check the security tapes," said the Consul calmly through the helmet speakers, breathing pressurized air. "From the cameras around the whole perimeter of this building, including the feeds from the driveway, and inside the entrance hall."
*****
THE END OF EPISODE ONE
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A WARNING FOR EARTH:
EPISODE TWO
AVAILABLE ON YOUR FAVORITE eBOOK STORES
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