~*~
Miranda didn’t see or smell anything that resembled cat feces in her room, so she took a quick shower to wash off the desert. Slipping into an old robe, she twisted her hair into a thin hotel towel and ordered room service. No time to get her own food.
While she waited, she set up her equipment on the desk, calibrating the machinery to filter out human gamma waves. Dreamers knew there were aliens on Earth—even the original gamma machines picked up traces of non-human brain patterns. The prevailing theory was most of the blips had been times when the military was transporting an ET from base to base since no Dreamer had met an ET yet.
Miranda’s youthful interest in what her dad had always called E&E had led to a four-year program at a tech institute and, ah, independent studies in electroencephalography since she couldn’t afford med school. To supplement her tiny outpost stipend, she’d taken a second job delivering pizzas. That’s how she’d been able to swing the new scanner design without alerting any Dreamers, who’d snag any research, and credit, away for the “good” of the organization.
She’d perfected, or hoped she’d perfected, her scanner upgrades only a few weeks ago. Now her hard work and newfound hatred for pepperoni were going to pay off with the field test to end all field tests.
Miranda manipulated the dials and knobs on the scanner until she was satisfied with the baseline readout. The machine was picking up activity on all gamma levels. Vegas was densely populated, so that was to be expected. Slowly, she calibrated the sensitive antenna to disregard the human wavelength, which she’d tuned using herself and the residents of Alamo, where she lived. No ETs there, that was for sure. Her, and their, reading hit the charts midrange, except when dreaming. An ET, with a more active gamma pattern, would hit the charts above and below human expectations. The handheld, if close to the subject, could determine whether the discrepancy was dreamstate or alien.
So far, both in the past and with her upgrade, blips had always been dreams, but she had to be sure now that she was working with new equipment. Too bad she couldn’t go room to room and ask all the occupants if she could test their brains with the handheld. She had to standardize the primary unit for the number of approximate humans sleeping in the surrounding two miles, filter out interference like radio waves and cell phones, and...
Voila!
Miranda stared at the long, narrow display of the scanner. That couldn’t be right. It was lit almost completely red, as if the whole block was full of...
No, her machine must be broken. She entered a stream of data at the keyboard, but nothing changed, so she rebooted the hard drive. Readjusted dials. Wriggled the antenna, the plug in the wall. Maybe that asshole at the front desk had damaged it when he’d butted into her conversation. Either that or everyone in the building was deep in dreams.
Because according to her scanner, Miranda was surrounded by extraterrestrials.
As she stared at the readout, a knock sounded at the door. The scanner’s proximity sensor flared.
Her stomach as knotted as her hair in the drying towel, Miranda jumped up and grabbed her taser.
Had the Dreamers found out about her machine? Were they ruining her test somehow? They pretended to be all in this together, but it was a facade, and they wouldn’t appreciate her hiding her technological advances from them. Or heading to Vegas to look for the ET without running her plan by them. Or getting permission to scratch her butt.
“Who’s there?” she called out.
A voice she could swear she recognized called out, “Room service.”
Right, right, she’d ordered dinner. Miranda’s stomach unknotted and rumbled.
“Just a sec!” She folded up the antenna and tossed the comforter from the bed over her desk unit to forestall questions. Then she hid the taser, grabbed her wallet and trotted to the door, opening it with a smile.
“Boy, that took a long time. Hey! What the hell are you doing here?”
Outside her room holding a silver tray stood Lupin, the asshole from the front desk.
“Delivering your ham sandwich. I expect a big tip.” Although he’d stared at her downstairs to the exclusion of everything else, now he peered past her into the room.
“You’re a waiter?” She eyed the silver tray and noticed the bucket of champagne in his other hand. “I didn’t order booze.”
“Compliments of the house.” He shoved past her into the room—pushy bastard—and walked over to the small table, covered by an assortment of the tools she used to affect repairs on her machines. He inspected them, and then the blanket-covered mound on the desk. “Where should I put the food?”
“On top of the television.” It was the only part of the room not covered by her junk. What could he be thinking about the electronic gizmos and burners and spools of wire everywhere? She held out a couple bills. “Here’s your money. I’m so sorry you had to deliver my dinner to the cat pee room. Please leave.”
“Doesn’t stink any more. Huh.”
“I think it never did. You just said that to get a free upgrade.” And why a member of the wait staff was staying at the hotel—and dressed in a ratty T-shirt—she had no idea. The many times she’d been to Dunvegas, the staff hadn’t been so peculiar.
“No, it definitely smelled earlier.” He set the tray on the TV and the champagne bucket on the floor. Then he picked up her handheld scanner and clicked it on. It whined almost silently as it powered up, and he winced, rubbing his ear quickly on his shoulder.
“Put that down,” she said.
He ignored her. “What are you doing in here, Miranda Mellons? Making bombs?”
“No, and none of your business! Give me that.” She snatched the scanner away from him but stopped short when she noticed it was flaring as red as a cherry tomato. And it was pointed straight at Lupin.
Lupin was the extraterrestrial? But...but he didn’t seem like a poor, tortured escapee. He wasn’t wonderful and fascinating. And he certainly wasn’t the answer to all her questions.
He was an asshole!
“I can’t believe you’re the alien,” she said, and the enormity of it overwhelmed her as her vision blurred and she sank to the floor in a faint.