I woke at midnight on the day of my one hundredth birthday.

Some sound, perhaps some presence, had stirred my mind. I could see no one in the shadows of my bedroom, but that meant little. Perhaps it had been a dream. But no—I could feel into the corners of the room, into the closet, the hall, the space above the ceiling, and knew someone was near. Moreover, I knew it was someone familiar to me.

One hundred years of relative peace and quiet; now this. I couldn’t tell if the mystery visitor had eyes on me, just that someone was paying attention, the way you might apprehend someone reading over your shoulder.

I had a gun in my nightstand, a knife wedged under my mattress: I’ve had an interesting life filled mostly with whatever interests and challenges I chose to pursue, but every now and then, like the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, I met someone or something that hungered for that life.

This is not one of those times, Skyler, said a voice in my mind, familiar indeed.

“Hello, Mother.”

by ZorkFox

“How close?” We could be famous, and rich if we could get a good scan of the first aliens ever encountered.

“Real close. Their signal only traveled for a couple of kiloseconds.” With her head resting in her hands, and her body shifting in and out of coalescence, it looked like she was trying to hold herself physically in our time.

She paused and solidified long enough for me to hand her the cola float and then took a long drink from it. “Thanks.”

She sat down in the center of the spherical control chamber and I flipped the music pod over to her. “I got you this, too. My kids don’t need them anymore.”

She turned it over in her tiny hands. “Kind of old isn’t it?” The crooked smile reminded me of my own daughter when she was that age.

“Alright, alright. Enough with the age remarks. The aliens? Do they have something to do with the mass aberration we’re seeing? And the drive malfunction?”

“Yes. I think so.” She struggled a moment, faded out then back in. “They’ve been here for a long time.”

by Cobweb