More than fifty years ago, a spaceship landed on planet Earth. It landed just off the East cost of South America, on a tiny island populated exclusively by crabs and occasionally birds that ate said crabs. Out of the spaceship and directly into a dead crab stepped out a person called Elid. This already (the landing on Earth part, not the stepping into a dead crab part) was a bit of an achievement since they had previously spent a whole year trying to land on Earth and not managing that trivial enough task.

Their first issue was getting caught up in a gravitational well around Jupiter, which forced them to land on one of its moons by the name of Europa. There they spent several stressful months being dragged into one party after another by the giant squids that lived under the ice in its enormous oceans. The parties had an uncanny quality to spawn other parties, due to which the entire population of the squid species was constantly engaged in at least one and often several parties of various styles. They educated each other through parties and met their mating partners at parties and typically died at parties as well, sometimes of old age, sometimes of party-related causes.

All of this was not known to Elid, which is why they made the foolish mistake of accepting an invite. It then took them quite a while to figure out how to exit this never-ending cycle of parties. After numerous failed attempts, they finally broke free following an accidental proposal of marriage and flew straight to Earth.

They ended up on Venus.

On Venus, they spent several more months trying to trade precious metals with the sentient bacterial clouds in the upper atmosphere. Unfortunately, Venusian bacteria did not have any precious metals and also did not understand the concept of money or technology or trade. They were, however, more than happy to discuss poetry endlessly, and it took Elid weeks to find a moment to ask to leave politely. They were a wise, experienced traveler by then, and did not allow themself to get dragged into a century-long discussion of limericks.

In the end, they gave up and landed on what they thought was a lifeless piece of rock in the middle of the Solar System. Specifically, they landed into a whole pile of dead crabs. The crabs also did not want to trade precious metals with them, but it was unclear whether it was due to Elid’s abysmal marketing skills, or disagreement about costs, or the fact that these were crabs that were also, indeed, dead.

It then only took Elid a few days to find a habitable piece of land, meet the people who inhabited it, and begin their journey of exploring the planet.

Although they were, at last, in the right spot, Elid was far from keen on managing trading agreements with humans. Instead, they reasoned that it would be helpful to get to know the local society first and devise a proper marketing strategy. Or that’s what they wrote in their company report at least. In truth, they hated everything about their job, including the very concept of money, and were rather more inclined to spend a month or two getting to know as many people as possible.

The planet confused and infuriated them at first, but they quickly discovered that it infuriated and confused the locals as well, and that helped tremendously in bonding. Elid also found plenty of people who hated their jobs, and made many friends over that shared passion. They spent their allowance generously, helped out where they could, and amused themself to great lengths by sharing sacred arcane knowledge with unsuspecting pub attendees.

Eventually they concluded that the planet was adorable and almost pleasant to live on and definitely had many fine humans inhabiting it, but ultimately it was an insignificant, useless, mostly harmless chunk of rock. Perfect for trading! They were about to get back to their ultimate mission when a chain of acquaintances and chance events lead them to the American state of Washington, to a fascinating little university full of the most amazing, curious, and bananas cuckoo bonkers people they’d ever met in their entire life.

The hope of getting back to work was abandoned. Elid had a new dream now. “What will a few more years do, in the grand scheme of things?” they asked themself, signing the admission papers into Cooltown University Department of Physics and Applied Mathematics with the name Arthur Smith. “I’ll catch up on work later,” they thought, accepting their diploma four years later. “They won’t even notice I’m gone,” they reasoned while applying, being accepted into, and working hard in graduate school.

The reports were forgotten. The spaceship was hidden safely in a specially constructed bunker somewhere in the Californian desert. And the fifty light year difference between Earth and Ursa Major meant that the company would not actually notice for quite some time. The ships could travel through hyperspace in about two weeks, sure - but the reports couldn’t. And fifty years was later, not now.

Now, Arthur was blissfully happy studying and teaching physics in a human university, not worrying about much. Nothing serious had been done after all. No bridges had been burned, blown up, or split into atoms by a specialized weapon. They were always planning, at the back of their mind, to come back home at some point. In fact, they even reminded themself about home by keeping the key to the spaceship visible and present in their house, like a tiny beacon of his past life. That was the plan for a couple of years anyway. And then they met Roger.

It didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t a sudden realization of “oh my god nothing in this entire stinking universe matters even a little bit except for this person”, but that’s where Arthur arrived eventually. Those were days over weeks over months of going from casual chats to night-long conversations to living together in a tiny apartment and feeling like the world was enclosed in that apartment and everything beyond it was upsetting and meaningless and fake.

They weren’t friends and they weren’t lovers either. They were two individuals existing on just the right frequency to understand and accept each other completely and utterly. And it wasn’t sudden, but they both realized quickly that life apart was no longer possible. That they had stumbled into something way more precious than any metal and their only goal from that moment onward was to keep it going, no matter what.

One day Arthur was sitting at their desk, staring at the key to their spaceship, and it made them feel like they had cockroaches scrambling in their brain. Their mind buzzed with anxiety, persuaded that the key was about to jump out on them and maul them to death, or worse - forcefully take them back home, away from Earth and away from Roger.

The feeling was unbearable and something had to be done about it. So they made one last trip to the spaceship to pick up some items, then sealed the whole thing for good and left, hoping to never ever return. Arthur made a music box from some metal scrap and put the key inside. Now instead of a key they had a music box that played one of Roger’s favorite tunes, and they could look at it again.

From that point on, their only real name was Arthur Smith, and they tried their best to conceal their identity and integrate themself into human society. It didn’t always work, considering that their passion for fixing things quickly spread out beyond the institute and made them very famous in specialized circles. So famous in fact, that one day they found CIA agents knocking on their door.

That whole bit was annoying, but Arthur didn’t think much of it. The agents never imprisoned them or ever made them a formal job proposition. The CIA just made house calls every now and then, and left them alone after they would fix whatever pointless junk needed fixing. And that wasn’t worth the fuss of explaining their origins and risking their identity just to make the humans go away. The department fell apart soon anyway, and the agents never called them again.

Arthur lived a long, happy life, studying and teaching physics in university and being Roger’s person. They felt so at home that they began to forget where they were from, and who they really were, and what their body would inevitably go through, whether they wanted it or not. When they remembered at last what was about to happen, it was already too late to do anything about it or even prepare for it properly.

*

The people of the Ursa Major Collective are a peculiar species. They don’t give their children names and instead wait for them to pick one instead, which sometimes results in wonderfully hilarious choices. Their lifespan ranges in the four to five hundred, but they celebrate their birthdays only every 15 years or so to save up on the traditional river eels and confetti. And the majority of them overwhelmingly prefer washing the dishes to cooking, which is why the dishwasher was invented only after the hyperdrive engine.

A thing about them that is not at all peculiar and in fact quite widespread across the galaxy is their genders. All children of their species are born to a form that most humans would call male. In that state, they spend about a hundred and fifty years, after which comes the moment of Change. The outcome of the Change depends on their genes, their environment, and the societal influences of their upbringing. Through the Change, these individuals are transformed into either the next stage of male, a gender that most humans would designate as female, or a gender that many humans with no education on the topic would designate as snowflake made-up bullshit.

Of course on the planets of the Ursa Major Collective, the Change is a natural part of life - fully studied, expected, and celebrated. No one is surprised when a hundred-something adolescent disappears for a few weeks, then returns in a drastically younger, different body. Humans, on the other hand, are less accustomed to such transformations. Not all can even comprehend a change of gender! A change in apparent age and physique is completely beyond them.

Or so judged Arthur when they woke up one day, hungry as a hibernating bear that overslept well into summer, and realized that they were totally and definitively fucked.

Nothing was to be done. They had some impressive technology on their hands, but they doubted that some fancy screwdrivers could overturn their biology. Could they explain this away to humans? They doubted it. In fact, Athrur even doubted that Roger, with his limitless curiosity and vivid imagination, would believe them. It would also mean telling him the truth, and explaining that they made up their entire identity, invented a whole backstory for themself, even going so far as to paying some random woman in Louisiana to pretend to be their sister. Would Roger ever forgive them for lying to him for forty or so years?

No, Arthur made up their mind. They had their chance and they blew it, and nothing was to be done now except to pack their things and go away for a few weeks, and see where the process would take them. So they said their goodbyes and gave away their key - not as an anchor anymore, but as a punishment for themself. They messed it up. They made too many mistakes. Now they would have to see their person, their closest living soul in the entire universe, live out his remaining years and slowly age to death… alone.

He didn’t even take him to the train station. Fair enough, since Arthur wasn’t driving anywhere either. They just took two suitcases - one filled with simple clothes and one filled to the brim with snacks - to a local hotel room, where they stayed for the next few weeks. First, they spent half a month eating twice their daily need of calories, which was easy enough thanks to the astonishing variety of junk food that America provided. One night when they were watching reality TV and eating a whole pack of mac’n’cheese all by themself, Arthur realized: this body or a different one, they could never leave this place. Not ever. It felt, annoyingly, way too much like home.

They fell asleep on a bed filled with candy bar wrappers one day and did not wake up for another week or so. When they did wake up, with a raging hangover and the taste of week-old chocolate in their mouth, from the mirror at her looked a blond teenage girl, hardly older than 15 in human years.

*

Things did not go easy from that point on; in fact they went about as easy as riding a bicycle blindfolded, drunk, and with a duck giving you instructions for where to drive. In other words, it was definitely an interesting experience, but nothing about it was even remotely easy.

Although she had the common sense to withdraw her retirement money beforehand, she had basically lost everything else she had ever owned. Coming back to Roger’s was out of the question. All of her previous social, professional, and legal connections were gone. She was in need of new documents, a place to stay, and a whole new life to live.

And she quickly realized that building a life as a young girl in 21st century America was not as wonderfully straightforward as it was the previous time, as an educated white man in the sixties.

For one, the retirement money was not enough to buy her even two semesters at the same university she spent decades in teaching. In fact that money would soon run out even if she only used it for rent and food. She spent a couple years trying to get the hang of her new circumstances and discovered that everything was difficult and infuriating and ridiculous. She almost wanted to come back home… but she also missed her person, bitterly, every single morning and every single night.

And so, despite every ounce of common sense she still had left, she returned to the university - this time as Lilly, with no prospects or education, just to work as a cleaner.

*

Meanwhile, more or less in the same time frame, four young engineers from the nerd enclosures at Silicon Valley set out on a drunk adventure to the depths of the Californian desert. It is important to note here that only three of them were drunk and the fourth was driving, completely sober and content with her drunk friends providing unlimited amusement. It is also important to note that all four hated their jobs for one reason or another. This felt very ungrateful to them - all either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, blessed with opportunity and talent for coding - but no matter how hard they tried, they could not make themselves love what they did.

So they often ran away to various places, sometimes drunk, always trying to pretend that their daily lives were but a prolonged round of grinding in a badly designed video game, and these were their real missions.

On this particular mission, their completely sober driver Varya drove off the road in a laughing fit and crashed into what was supposed to be a sand hill but was indeed the shaft of an elevator. None of them got hurt. All of them thought it obvious to dedicate the next few weeks of their lives to studying this fascinating phenomenon, and eventually built up the courage to go down in the elevator. And they were right to do so, since inside they discovered something beyond their wildest sci-fi infused fantasies - a whole functioning alien spaceship.

And of course they opted for taking it apart and selling it bit by bit in order to quit their jobs.

They did not sell the important bits, of course! Only some of the less useful stuff. All of the things they deemed interesting and important were taken apart, analyzed, and put back together to the best of their ability. The underground hideout became Their Place.

This is where they came to invent things and have fun with their inventions and feel like they were kids again, exploring a world full of wonder and mystery and also a lot of sawdust and spiders. And if they had to sell some piece here and there, sure, why not!

One of such pieces was a battery that seemed to hold an almost infinite amount of charge. It was sold to a shady guy called Jo, who then sold it to another person, and through a long chain of buyers - along with a beautiful ornate ring - ended up in front of one bored billionaire, Kevin McDougall. He bought both of them; the ring for his girlfriend, the battery for the pacemaker in his heart.

These purchases did not bring him any luck. He broke up with his girlfriend first; the battery out of his very beating heart was ripped out shortly afterward.

*

The next in our long act of convoluted events and semi-competent people who hated their jobs were two sales managers from the Ursa Major Collective that we can call Sue and Sandi. Their real names are too cumbersome for humans to pronounce and also profoundly offensive in at least seven human languages.

They had the misfortune to come last in their tri-annual sales report and were sent to Earth on a mission as a punishment, which, knowing everything about Earth, kind of made sense. Operating on a tight schedule, they jumped right into action on the same day they landed. Unfortunately, they managed to land on the South Pole and wasted two days negotiating with a group of penguins. By the time they had checked their files about what humans looked like, they had three weeks left to fulfill their task.

To make matters worse, they also quickly discovered that the scale of the problem was far wider than they had anticipated. Rogue investigators were rather common, but rogue investigators that had managed to get involved with local governments and had their tech stolen and sold all over the world? Less so.

Suddenly the situation needed outsourcing, so they employed the services of several mercenaries. Knowing very little about how humanity operated, they found those mercenaries through linkedin and craigslist. Surprisingly, most of them were quite good at tracking down bits and pieces of alien tech and taking them back through buying, stealing, or murdering its owners. Really, Orson was the only one to fail.

So they took care of Orson.

The billionaire was a bit of a tricky person to deal with. The ring given to McDougall’s girlfriend was stolen by one of their temporary employees, but trying to figure out where he kept the battery was a tad more complicated. They got it out in the end, using a subatomic matter-splitter. It left him with no scars and a brain thoroughly scrambled by the company patented memory wiping device. It didn’t really wipe the memory, but it did freeze consciousness either temporarily or permanently, and that was good enough since you can hardly access any memories without a functioning consciousness.

Despite doing their best to keep a low profile, the two sales managers were seen all over the place by multiple, multiple people. After all, they weren’t exactly subtle, with their terrible translation devices and energy-shielding suits that made them look like a character straight out of a creepypasta.

Their other tech didn’t exactly help with hiding either. For one, it required a tremendous amount of electricity, the draining of which from local power lines caused electricity shortages all over the place and even messed with weather on some occasions. And the waves that their teleporting device generated were powerful enough to affect everything from air to roads to walls, creating horrifying noises and scaring half the block of buildings on some occasions.

Gratuitous use of brain scrambling devices neutralized maybe 10% of those sightings.

The rest most definitely ended up as gossip, youtube videos, and creepypastas.

The more days passed, the more things spiraled out of control. The rogue engineers that were excellent at selling off alien tech proved useless at tracking it down, and the actual rogue investigator was nowhere to be found. With the rising stress levels fell the bosses’ dedication to keeping a low profile. As they entered the last week they could realistically spend on Earth, they had a two-person business meeting and decided that after they were cheated, tricked, laughed at and even shot at one time, it would be fair to retaliate.

All bets were off. All safety protocols were forgotten. They would get it done in time, no matter the cost - and screw the trading agreement with humans.

None of this would have happened if Elid/Arthur/Lilly had the option of sending her resignation letter instead of a report.

(Also, if some random truck driver did not spot a group of people disappearing into a sand hill in the middle of the Californian desert and made a facebook post about it, tipping off both Black Wing operatives and the Ursa Major Collective managers, it would probably slow things down a bit. But that was beyond Dirk’s knowledge and therefore beside the point…)

*

“And that’s more or less the story,” Dirk said, and folded over, breathless. “Sorry,” he muttered, “these are, oof, these are shorter, usually. Need to, uh, need to practice for these some time. Was I right, plus minus?” he asked, looking at Lilly, the Slavic mafia engineers, and the bosses in turn.

The bosses stayed quiet. The rogue engineers just gave him a silent nod and a few shrugs.

“How the hell do you know all this?” demanded Lilly, twirling a blond hair strand on one finger in an uncharacteristic display of nervousness.

“Just guessing really,” Dirk brushed it off with a hand wave, “now, the real question here is…” and he turned slowly on the spot, making sure to look at everyone at least once, “what are we all going to do about it?..”