There's plenty of room in Los Angeles these days. Of course, that's true everywhere, I suppose. Ever since they fixed all of our problems for us.
Back then, I was living in Washington D.C. I'd scored a job in the Justice Department's IT division, and I was on top of the world. I wasn't really a cop; all I did was check computers that were brought in as evidence and crack the security on them. There usually wasn't any, so the job was pretty easy most of the time. Occasionally I got in a PC that somebody with a clue had owned, but the full resources of the U.S. government provide all the tools necessary to crack whatever encryption a civilian might be able to come up with. I was 25, making good money, and loving life.
People in the government really do find out things before your average Joe Citizen. I heard about the objects being tracked in the fall of 23 - the official announcement didn't come until after they couldn't shut up the amateur astronomers anymore. One of those amateurs started contacting every reporter on the planet, and the White House decided it needed to get out front on the issue.
Since there was no real information, even in the classified channels, the press conference consisted mainly of saying that the objects might or might not hit the earth, we had plans in the works for deflecting them if needed, blah, blah, blah. I'd checked some of the servers I wasn't supposed to have access to, and it was true - they didn't know whether or not the things were going to hit the planet. But they did have some better close ups, and the things weren't natural.
That made most of the people I shared the information with either completely petrified or oddly calm. I have to confess that I was one of the ones in the calm camp - I didn't think aliens would be hostile. There's plenty of room in space, and plenty more resources in the rest of the solar system that they could get at without having to kill the natives first. But I could completely understand my petrified friends, too. I had grown up on alien invasion movies, after all.
Emotions got more manageable after the announcement, at least among the general population. Those of us with a little more access remained high-strung, but we had non-disclosure contracts to keep us in check. I violated mine, but only with people I trusted, and I never shared files with anybody who wasn't also cleared to see them. Anyway, I was more excited than scared; it was cool to think that we were finally going to see aliens.
Once the ships hit orbit and were close enough to be seen with hand-held telescopes, the pretenses dropped and the U.N. started demanding access to all of the information that America, Russia and China had gathered on them. It was quite a bit, and China had even attempted opening preliminary talks with the ship's occupants. Nothing had been transmitted back to them, though, as far as the people listening in from America and Russia could tell; and they were listening hard, let me tell you.
There was surprisingly little worry in the streets. I'd half-expected riots and governmental overthrows, as did most of the intelligence community, but people seemed to be taking the arrival of a couple dozen alien spaceships in stride. I think we took it as a matter of pride. "Alien armada in orbit? Ain't no big deal."
The U.N. acquired the frequency that China had been transmitting on, and sent their own message of welcome. Secretary-General Aguilar promised a peaceful reception and the first return message crackled through to her. "We shall land a small shuttle in the harbor next to the statue of the human female. That shall be our base of operations while we negotiate diplomatic relations with your people. We require a meeting with your general assembly within twelve hours of our landfall. We look forward to cultural exchanges with humans and other residents of the earth. We are excited to meet you."
The initial message was in Spanish, Aguilar's native language, and it was repeated in the language of every U.N. member nation. It was a flat, robotic voice with no emotion or inflection, and alien-watching forums exploded with speculation that the aliens themselves would turn out to be robots, something that made a lot of sense to anybody watching NASA's missions for the last few decades. The forums figured that the aliens were robots; that whoever created them was long gone and the next stage of evolution was a brain in a tin can.
