Page 4 of Love at First Sighting

Carter

They don’t pay me to ask the big questions, but I do it anyways, because one day, I’m going to ask the right one.

Today’s question: Did this local teen really see a UFO, or is he just horrible at photography?

The composition is awful, for starters. It’s a dark screen with shaking white lights fluttering around.

It’s an unspoken rule that if you’re going to video something mysterious, it must look like it was filmed on a potato so it’s near impossible to identify the class of UFO it might be.

Based on the way the kid shouts “Holy fucknuts, dude,” I guess he thinks it’s a UFO.

Me, though, I’ve seen enough of these hoaxes that I’m not sold.

It’s a typical Tuesday at the Private Intelligence Sector, which means Jim, our accounting guy, brought donuts.

It also means that sightings are slow down here at the bottom of the ladder.

On weekends, people stay out late and see things they shouldn’t.

On weekdays, everyone settles into bed with a face mask or Ambien and leaves the sky alone.

“Carter, is this a close encounter?”

I glance beside me at Toby, the newbie I’m supposed to be training.

To be fair, we covered office basics in about fifteen minutes and were able to dive balls deep into government cover-ups.

He learned where the kitchen is, to spell out the letters in the Private Intelligence Sector’s name like the CIA rather than call it “piss,” and one of the most important regulations: the dress code.

Black suit and white shirt.

Suspenders.

Trilby hat.

When PIS was founded in the forties, after the catastrophic failure of the Roswell cover-up, we were of the utmost importance.

The so-called Men in Black and the iconic uniform were critical to controlling the narrative during the height of the Cold War.

When people were anticipating mushroom clouds, it was important to keep a close eye on what they saw in the sky. Now, though…

Our funding has diminished to next to nothing. I suppose in the age of camera phones and special effects, there are far too many UFO “sightings” and close encounters flooding the clickbait sites.

Much like our Stone Age technology, our uniforms haven’t been updated from the shadowy silhouette that haunted spanjects who saw things they shouldn’t have, and it’s a prevailing strategy.

Back then people were so afraid of government surveillance and espionage that our suits and hats struck fear.

Now the uniform is so conspicuous and strange, it practically discredits anyone who tries to talk about our visits.

Who’s going to believe anyone who said they saw a UFO and that men in suits showed up at their door anymore?

Toby, though, I think has been tragically misled on how cool being a Man in Black is.

Unlike the suave and mysterious lore surrounding the job and the multimillion-dollar franchise starring Will Smith, we do not have cool laser pointers that erase memories, and PIS agents are not aliens sent to cover up sightings.

All Sector agents are poorly paid government employees with varying degrees of tact and skill.

Most of my days are spent scrolling through social media or UFO reports spanmitted to us, determining whether someone’s bid for internet fame is worth my overtime or if we have a real case on our hands.

Luckily for most of our agents, our main assignment tactics will never change—intimidation, persuasion, and gaslighting.

There’s no software upgrade for following around some naive person who thinks they saw something and scaring them enough that they never speak about it again, or sprinkling in fake stories to cover up the real ones.

The only problem with that is I’m about as scary as a Backyardigan.

I’m a baby-faced Gen Zer who hardly even likes answering the phone or being an inconvenience.

A waiter could bring me a live cow and I would be too uncomfortable to ask them to cook my steak.

Those are not traits anyone at PIS truly values.

Maybe that’s why, after three years in the Sector, my list of accomplishments mostly consists of fixing the printer, training the new agents, and royally fucking up my first and only job in calamitous fashion. But at least I got PIS to upgrade to Windows 7. That’s gotta count for something.

Scouring social media and UFO reports might not seem like a big job, but my higher-ups assure me it is.

Someone’s got to have a finger on the extraterrestrial pulse while they’re out investigating suspicious crash landings, sitting in closed-door security council meetings, and convincing spanjects they didn’t see anything, even when we know they did.

But before we send some crotchety fortysomething agents to investigate, Toby and I have work to do.

Toby turns his screen to me and presses play. I recognize the video he’s found online immediately. It’s from Chino Hills three years ago and is clearly a fake. I debunked it as a new hire myself, when it first dropped online, but it does circle the interwebs every so often.

In the video, a child waddles around an open field in an alien mask clearly from Party City. This kid looks like he more likely escaped from an elementary school Halloween parade than Area 51. He flaps his arms with abandon as ominous music plays over the sound of the child gurgling.

Obvious alien bait.

“Nah, dude,” I say. “It’s a fake.”

“How do you know ?” The distress in his voice is palpable.

The fact that Toby thinks there’s a chance this is real proves the “detail-oriented” note on his résumé is a lie, so I’m also not counting on him being “extremely proficient” in Excel while we’re at it.

When we filtered through candidates, I tossed Toby’s resume aside initially.

I was overruled because Toby’s brother-in-law, Brad, who clips his nails at his desk, is a senior agent.

Brad is six-seven and can grow a beard in like eight minutes, so I chose my battles wisely.

“Look, you can see the seam in the kid’s mask.” I make him rewind it, outlining the mask for him. “It’s an obvious ploy for views.”

Toby will learn this in time, but aliens are not terribly photogenic, and even the best proof we have locked up and classified is grainy and obscured. Or so I’m told.

“Why do people do that?” Toby runs his fingers through his red curls. “I mean, why do they want attention so badly?”

I chuckle to myself. I’m not the person to answer that.

Of course, I’m not selling feet pics on the internet, but everything I do is in hopes that someone will look.

That someone will notice what an exceptional job I’m doing and give me another shot.

“Great question. Seems silly to me. Also,” I add, “that video is old. It ended up in a WatchMojo video, so it gets reposted a lot. You couldn’t have known any better. It’s all right.”

Toby rolls his pen across his knuckles. “Dammit. One day I’m gonna be as good as you. I swear.”

I raise my eyebrows and take a long sip of my late-afternoon coffee.

Good is not the typical word I hear in my performance reviews.

I’m more used to unreliable , below satisfactory , and we don’t really know what to do with you , despite keeping this office afloat and preventing everyone from getting a computer virus.

But nepotism comes in strong around here.

Nepotism might be the only reason I still have a job after failing my weapons and field training twice.

“Let’s try another one,” I instruct. “We’ve got plenty of videos to go through. Then we can move on to spanmitted sighting reports.”

Toby turns back to the computer screen and continues to scroll.

I’m called away on important business—showing a senior agent how to move a folder on their desktop—and snag the remaining half a lemon loaf someone left in the lunchroom with a happy free :) Post-it on the bag.

When I return, I am not surprised to find Toby watching a video of…

well, possibly the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen.

The lighting is dark, but her flash illuminates her enough for me to see a pair of big brown eyes, silky dark hair, perfect makeup, and a small peppering of freckles on her nose.

She’s the kind of woman I’d expect to be selling seamless pastel underwear on posters at the mall or trying to get me to switch to shampoo with something like jojoba oil in it.

But it’s immediately clear she’s not selling anything right now. Except maybe her own fear, and I’m buying it.

The woman moves the camera to the side, showing off a series of flashing lights. First white, then red, then blue. There’s an odd shimmery shadow behind her, punctuated only by the glaring lights.

I freeze. I’ve seen this before. I’ve lived this before, and I’m about to live it all over again. It can’t be…

Logically, I know it can’t be, but the sight of whatever is behind her takes a sledgehammer to the trauma I’ve spent years working through in therapy.

The flash of a camera. The ghost-white look on my dad’s face. The words “keep this somewhere safe.” A flash of white light. A flash of red light. A flash of blue light. A scraped-up cheek on the asphalt. White, red, blue lights—an ambulance this time.

“Bruh, this might be something,” Toby says.

I hardly hear him as I shake out of my trance.

My hands are sweaty and the urge to puke into my desk trash can is about as strong as it was the morning after our last PIS Christmas party.

I ease back into my chair as Toby passes me the headphones and restarts the video.

“Hi, guys,” the woman begins. “So, I was out shooting some really great Spinx content that should be coming in a few days, and I’m on my way back to the car, but there is something following me.

I can’t see what it is, but it looks like a ship or something.

I don’t know, but look, it’s just behind me.

” She pans the camera up and the lights flash. “Holy shit.”