Head In The Stars

I rubbed Millie comfortingly on the back. I could feel her quivering slightly. This was different from that distant feel she had when she first woke up.

"Hey, it's alright," I said. "It makes perfect sense that you can't say it. If it's an alien word then of course it would be hard to say it with a human shaped mouth, right Kai?" I didn't care whether what I was saying was logical or not. All I wanted was to break her out of her fear.

Kai looked at me with surprise. "Uh…" Shoot. I'd asked the wrong person for help.

"Right," cut in Aron. "It's totally normal. Don't think too much about it." He plunged his spoon and chopsticks into the main dish of tomatoes and fried egg and shoveled them into Millie's bowl. "You like this dish, right? Here have some more."

It took a bit of time, but eventually Millie calmed down and began to eat again.

And it turned out that she did indeed like that dish. So much so that she fell asleep after eating the whole thing by herself. Thankfully I hadn't had a chance to pack away the mattress from last night, so I picked her up and laid her down on it. As soon as she hit the bed, her little hands grabbed the blanket, and she rolled into it like a little caterpillar. For a moment I thought she'd woken up, but the soft snoring told me otherwise.

I smiled and shook my head then quietly went back to the other side of the office. Without discussing it, we'd decided to commandeer the furthermost set of computer stations for our impromptu meeting so that we could keep an eye on Millie while also, hopefully, not waking her.

"She's fast asleep," I told the others. Kai had just come from the kitchen and had a tray with steaming cups on it while Aron cleared a space on the table.

"She really is a kid huh?" said Aron.

"What else could she be?" I asked, half-jokingly.

"Not an alien," cut in Kai, setting the tray on the table. "Here." He handed me a coffee then put the cup of tea in front of Aron. He had a cup of coffee for himself.

"Thanks."

Aron stared at my cup. "How do you drink so much coffee?" he asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled. "Doesn't the caffeine make you hyperactive?"

"Tea has caffeine in it too," Kai pointed out, taking a sip of his.

Aron turned to stare at him. "What?!"

"Shh!" chided both Kai and me.

"Sorry..."

The three of us carefully peered at the opposite corner of the room for signs of movement but Millie looked to be sleeping soundly. We turned back to our drinks with relief.

"So, I take it you don't believe in aliens, Kai?" I asked. I wasn't sure why, but I was in a mood to play around a little and cause trouble. I blame it on Millie and her influence.

Kai nodded. "They may exist," he said, very seriously. "But I don't believe we've found any. It would be too difficult to cover up something of that scale. Think of all the kinds of people it would involve. Besides, searching for extraterrestrial life is an open-sourced project now."

"You really think that?" asked Aron. He had an odd look on his face that I wasn't quite sure how to interpret.

"You don't?" replied Kai. He looked skeptical.

"Wait," I interjected. "You're not actually thinking this alien stuff Millie's talking about is real, right?" Looked like I wasn't the only one being influenced by the all-powerful little girl.

Aron shrugged.

"I just think that if we humans did manage to find aliens, it would well be within our interests to keep it quiet from the general public," he said.

I'd read pulpy novels about secret aliens and magic and a whole host of other things and, while I enjoyed them, the reasons for keeping the whole thing secret seemed more like a contrivance to add drama to the plot than for any real reason.

"Why?" I asked.

Aron took a sip of his tea. It seemed to still be too hot for him.

"Think about it," he began, setting his cup aside. "If aliens turned out to be real, what would happen to all the religions of the world? Here would be something that either irrefutably goes against their creed or irrefutably supports it. There would no longer be something called 'faith' and nothing to hold anyone back from forcing their beliefs on others.

"What about science? We have a certain understanding of the world and would adding aliens support or contradict what we know? When humans thought the Earth was flat, thinking the Earth could be round was seen as radical, and it took decades for things around that to settle down. If encountering aliens completely turns our science on its head, how would we deal with that?

"Then what about normal people? Ask anyone if they think animals are sentient, the same as us, and you'll get a whole range of responses. Now imagine you're asking them to assess something that doesn't even come from Earth. Think of the kind of anxiety and paranoia that could cause, especially if it turns out these aliens are more technologically advanced than us. A lot of people, whether they realise it or not, feel like we, humans, are special in the universe. Take that away and what do we have left? Some people would lose the will to live."

Aron rotated his cup so that the handle faced away from him.

"In the end, all of this means chaos and there are some who like to take advantage of chaos to gain power over other people which would mean a radical reordering of the world in a short span of time.

"And that's just if the information is spread around equally. It would be easy to weaponise this kind of information." After his speech, Aron picked up his cup and tried it again.

I was... frankly stunned. Not so much about what he'd said, some of the sci-fi novels I'd read touched on these kinds of things, but the face that it was him that said it. It wasn't like I thought he was stupid or anything, but I, I suddenly realised, had been assuming he was on the macho end of the scale, not the thinker end. Had he thought up all this just then or was this something he pondered regularly? Despite knowing each other, I actually didn't know him at all.

"What do you mean 'weaponise'?" I asked.

"Repackage it, feed it to certain sectors of an enemy country, use it to build paranoia among the population. If they don't do anything about it, then sooner or later, the whole country will be destabilised."

"You're smarter than you look," said Kai. "But what you've talked about is only motive. There may be a reason to do something, but are people actually capable of it? Credit card details, passwords, even upcoming characters in a video game, none of it can be kept perfectly under wraps."

Aron rolled his eyes. "What's your opinion, Lachlan?" he asked.

"I..." Honestly, I hadn't even begun to process any of this. "I don't know," I said with a self-effacing smile. "Although..." I let my gaze wonder over to the nest of blankets in the opposite corner. "I think Millie probably has a complicated home situation."

Kai looked confused. "Home situation?"

"Maybe arguing parents, money issues, anything really," I tried to explain.

"And all this about aliens is... a way for her to cope?" asked Kai.

I nodded. "Something like that?" I turned to Aron. "Does that seem reasonable, Officer Tam?"

"Huh?" Aron gave a start. "Oh, I guess so."

"What's on your mind?"

"Oh just... She's a smart kid," he said, nodding toward the corner.

"She is," agreed Kai.

"And?" I asked.

"I just found it interesting what she said about Claire."

I thought back through what Millie had said about the woman. "She said she had... 'qualms' about her, I think. So?"

Aron sat back in his seat and laced his fingers together over his stomach. "You know, just because someone walks in, flashes a badge, and acts like they're supposed to be there doesn't mean they really are," he said finally.

"You suspect her?" asked Kai.

"Suspect's a strong word. I'm just... curious, that's all. Today was the first day I've met her."

"Is it... normal for you to be curious about her colleagues?" I asked. Somehow the thought seemed more in line with police dramas from overseas.

Aron laughed. "No, no, it's just my personality. Forget I said anything." Odd. He didn't strike me as being a suspecting person.

"You're weird," announced Kai.

"You're sounding like Millie, Mr. Paili," replied Aron.

I was used to their bickering by now, so I ignored their back and forth.

It wasn't just the appearance of Millie that was strange. Last night there had been those trespassers too...

"Paili Kai, is there anything valuable at the station?" I asked.

"Valuable... not unless you're someone into radars," replied Kai. "But even then, the equipment here's ancient, no offence."

"None taken."

So, they couldn't have been here to steal anything, unless... unless what they were after wasn't a thing, but a person. For some reason I glanced at Aron and the look on his face told me that he was clearly thinking the same thing I was.

Could the trespassers have been after Millie?