The Gray Man

“You can forget about seeing your family again,” the gray-skinned man with the beetle black eyes said to me as he stared at me intensely through the glass cell separating us.

“Do you even know where your family is?” I ask him sarcastically. I know he can kill me with a thought but it’s still fun to mock Greys about their family life.

He then goes through my mind again, reading through every volume of my life story faster than any therapist ever could.

I hated when they did that, thinking that they were truly intellectually superior to every other living creature in the galaxy.

“Why did you join them?” He asks me. Didn’t even bother to ask me how my day was going, just wanted to go straight to the difficult questions.

“You’re the one reading my mind, you tell me,” I say. It would be nice to stall him, just enough time for my partner to track the implant they put in me when I first joined.

I mean you can’t really stall an alien that can read your mind, but at least you can play stupid with him and make fun of him to kill the time.

“Well I figure that it would be more productive than you trying to play stupid while you wait for your partner to come with reinforcements and rescue you from this imprisonment.”

And everyone wonders why we consider the Greys to be the biggest assholes in the galaxy. Exhibit A.

“You want to tell me why three weeks ago, five members of your military were detected above Paris in direct violation of the United Planetary System Treaty?” I ask him.

“Earth is our home as much as it is yours, your ancestors made sure of that,” he tells me. They love rubbing that in our face.

To say that humans and Greys have an awkward history together would be a massive understatement.

“Look, I am sorry that at one point we kept your kind locked away in a hidden underground government base, okay?” I say.

I sound sarcastic but if he could read my mind at that moment, he would know that I was genuine, but the fact of the matter was that it went both ways.

We would imprison the Greys and experiment on us and they would abduct us and do the exact same….

“At least we wouldn’t bring your kind back in body bags,” he says, interrupting my thoughts with some statement to garner pity.

“Yeah, you guys just used to abduct humans and inflict them with mental and physical trauma they had to deal with the rest of their lives. I can do this all day,” I tell him.

He definitely wants to kill me now.

“You see, this is why I joined,” I say.

“Excuse me?” He asks, this is the first time he’s been confused in a minute.

“You asked me why I joined the CIA. I was sick of seeing my own people being abducted and invaded on by assholes like you,” I say.

“Yet you were caught in the Alpha Centauri System scoping out our cloning facilities with the intent of destroying our work,” he says.

“Actually, funny story about that,” I tell him. “After you guys were spotted on Earth, I was actually sent on a reconnaissance mission to figure out what else you guys are doing behind our backs.”

“How ...?” He says confused.

“How did you not know what I was thinking? I’ll explain that in a minute. But the bottom line is, I found that human labor ring that you guys had hidden under that nifty cloning facility,” I tell him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says with his pupils dilated.

“What do you care what I know, I’m just a human being whose head you could turn to mush at any minute,” I say.

“You humans are nothing to us, to us you are like the cattle you prepare for slaughter on your homeworld, we treat those slaves beneath your facility like the animals they are,” he says in a pulsatile manner.

“Cool story, bro,” I say.

“What??” He asks.

“That’s a cool story,” I reply. “But the funny thing is that my guys already liberated the slave ring and let everyone go like three days ago.”

“What are you talking about??” He says, fuming with every word.

“Yeah, basically you and I have been in a psychic mindscape constructed by one of the telepathic aliens on our side just trying to goad a confession out of you.”

“But you’ve been in this prison for four days!” He yells at me. The Grey has officially lost his cool.

“Actually,” I say. “I was rescued from your prison unit a day ago, so for the past day we rallied you and a bunch of your other cloning researchers to get to the bottom of things.”

“I can’t…..” he looks at me like he wants to kill me now. So much for being superior over human beings and all other species.

“Yup,” I say. “All the researchers insisted that you were the one coordinating the abductions and visits on Earth.

“I’LL KILL YOU!” He screams at me.

“I mean you could technically kill me,” I say. “But we’re both in a psychic simulation on a spaceship in the Alpha Centauri System.”

“How…..did I not know this?” He says.

“You see,” I say ironically. “Since we’re in a simulation that is being run by a telepath way stronger than you, you can only read the thoughts I want you to read. As soon as I say the magic word, in fact, I’ll wake up from this simulation.”

“You liar, I will kill you and…..”

“Adamski.”

I wake up to the sight of my partner and the others looking over me, Heidenberg has just taken his palm after my forehead, the most human alien I have ever met, a sight for sore eyes.

“We got the confession,” Heidenberg says. “Since he violated regulations we established, the treaty says we are well within our rights to take him back to Earth for trial.”

I scramble and look over my shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” Lee, my partner tells me. “We sedated the hell out of him. He’s going to be asleep for a few days.”

“You know, for someone coming face to face with a Grey for the first time, you did a helluva job,” Heidenberg says.

“You need anything?” Lee asks me. What could I need? A detailed history on early US government experimentation with aliens? Someone who could help fix things between us and the Greys?

“I…...I just want to see my family.”

END