A peculiar atmosphere filled the cave as the question dropped. It was unclear whether this was the result of the tangible tension and excitement in the room, or some freak effect of the bosses’ tech on air molecules, or both. What it accomplished was to make the tip of everyone’s tongue buzz with static electricity, as if a battery had been applied to it, and create a subtle taste of copper in everyone’s mouth. They all took a few seconds to process it; then, Todd exited the crowd and spoke up.

“So I have a few questions,” he said, getting his phone out of his pocket. “I took notes,” he explained, scrolling through the text file. “Question one: if you’re aliens, how come you look human?”

“Stupid questions,” Lilly replied immediately, “half the sentient universe looks like this, it’s just convergent evolution. Same reason everything keeps turning into crabs on this planet. Next!”

Todd had further questions after that question, but decided to get back to his list.

“Second then: why was Kevin freaking out randomly for no reason, apparently because he was being watched?”

“Probably the battery in his pacemaker,” Lilly continued, “and whichever device they were using to track and remove it. Tends to mess with whatever piece of tech its tracking, sometimes other things as well. Might have been killing the wi-fi in a mile radius. Oopsie-doodle dude.”

“And how did those two track everything?”

“Complicated,” Sandi told him, “and not for your human ears. I can tell you one thing, for your entire species – stop posting everything on Facebook.”

“That is good general advice,” Dirk nodded thoughtfully.

“Why did the linkedin mercenary dude end up in the same hospital as Kevin?” Todd was not done yet with the questions.

“A coincidence, probably,” Dirk said, “those do happen. They both had the same medical issue, in the same location, more or less. Makes sense they ended up in the same hospital as well.”

“How did you get involved in this?” Todd swirled on the spot and pointed at Amanda.

“I was just following my visions,” she responded. “Got in trouble with this lot,” she added, pointing in turn at the IT mafia. “Thanks, Beast.”

“You’re welcome,” Beats signed back.

“And there’s Black Wing involved?” Todd said.

“I don’t know about any wings,” Lilly replied, “but I did have CIA contacting me, yeah. For a little while anyway. They just stopped calling one day.”

“Hopefully that is the entire extent of their involvement,” Dirk said, “I do not want them to show up unexpectedly like ‘aha, you thought we were gone, well sike!’. They probably wouldn’t phrase it like that though,” he elaborated.

“They’ve been kind of quiet since Wendimoor,” Todd nodded, “maybe they were disbanded again.”

“I’ve met a dude from there in my vision,” Amanda said, but was promptly ignored.

“List!” Todd remembered, scrolling on his phone. “Right. You,” he turned towards Lilly again, “what the hell were you doing on this planet in the first place?!”

“It’s like he said,” she shrugged, “trying to trade precious metals.”

“Like gold and silver you mean?”

“No, dumbass, precious metals,” she scoffed, “like copper and zinc and aluminum. You have buttloads of those, and you don’t even value them much! Use them in things like fences and keys and cutlery. It was going to be the deal of the century,” Lilly pondered, “I was going to buy all this stuff from you… a million meters of copper wire. One billion rolls of aluminum foil. One septendecillion brass doorknobs. Precious metals for all.”

“One septendecillion?” Varya asked. “There is not enough atoms in universe for so much brass.”

“Well that’s what I wrote in my report,” Lilly shrugged. “They’re managers. They can’t count for shit.”

“All these statements are being recorded and will very much be used against you in corporate court,” Sue reminded.

“Yeah well you can suck my entire dick,” Lilly scowled. “Cause you know how many brass doorknobs I bought from these people? Zero. I bought absolutely nothing from them cause I hate this job and refuse to do it.”

“This makes zero sense to me,” Farah spoke up, slowly stepping out of the crowd. “You come from an amazingly technologically advanced planet,” she said, looking at Lilly, “and you are possibly the best engineer in the world with knowledge of advanced quantum radiophysics, or whatever you were researching in that institute. And you come to Earth? To live in… Seattle?”

“Well they didn’t need engineers or physicist on Ursa Major Epsilon,” Lilly said, “they only needed market investigators in a company. And yeah this planet is pretty infuriating at times but so is mine. At least people here are decent and let me do physics in peace.”

“And you never noticed that your most dearest friend person was an alien?” Farah asked, this time at Roger.

“How was I supposed to know?” he responded. “We met in a research institute! He, I mean, she, I mean…”

“Either she or they,” Lilly interjected, “whichever is easier.”

“Yes, indeed,” Roger continued, “Arthur and I met in a research institute and they weren’t even the strangest person there! Now that I think about it, might be quite a handful of aliens working in my department. George especially. And possibly Rachael.”

“Or they are just very not neurotypical,” Lilly pointed out, “that’s why I loved being in a university – very easy to blend in!”

“And you still didn’t tell him the truth,” Todd interrupted, “and let him think you were dead. For five years. I’ve told some horrible lies in the past,” Todd added, glancing at Amanda, “but something like that, to someone like that…” and despite his best intention to look at Farah, ended up looking at Dirk. “I could never…”

“Well what was I supposed to do!” Lilly responded, her voice cracking all of a sudden. “I knew they’d come to drag me away sooner or later anyway. And that I would outlive him. In the end.” She met gazes with Roger, her eyes filling up with tears against her best effort. “Imagine living with that thought for fifty years.”

“I forgive you,” Roger said unexpectedly. “I am very angry with you, still, but I do forgive you. I believe you had good intentions. Just a very bad execution. As usual,” he said, and a smile crept up on his face. “So I am moderately angry with you. More angry than when you flooded the institute and ruined the second draft of my master’s thesis.

But less angry than when you put my hat into a particle accelerator.”

“Oh you told me that story,” Dirk beamed. “Pity about that hat.”

“It was a very ugly hat!” Lilly disagreed. “It deserved to die a horrible death.”

“Arthur,” Roger said, smiling, “is it okay to call you that, still?”

“Yeah, whatever, I don’t really care,” she replied.

“Arthur…” Roger repeated. “I missed you so much!”

A few movements, a few moments passed, and soon they were embracing each other, and many more people in the cave felt tears swelling up in their eyes beyond all reason.

“I’m so sorry,” Lilly muttered into Roger’s shoulder, “I was such an idiot… ugh I’m going to fix everything that got broken in your apartment!”

“There’s quite a lot,” he smiled, letting her go at last, “all courtesy of those bosses of yours.”

“While this is all undeniably touching, I’m sure,” interjected Sue, “I feel like we are straying from the very urgent topic of Elid committing crimes against capitalism.”

“You say that as if that’s a bad thing,” Lilly smirked, “and yet you’re here, and not by choice, I’m guessing. So how’s that capitalism working out for you huh?”

“I will not tolerate such insubordination!” Sue exclaimed, hand darting to the device on the table in front of her.

“Oh stop it will you?” Dirk tutted, raising his hands in the air momentarily for a show of good will. “There’s absolutely no need for violence here. In fact, I think I have a solution that will satisfy all parties involved.”

“We’re all ears,” Sandi responded, blatantly unconvinced.

“Well,” Dirk began, pacing the room slowly, “could you please elaborate one thing for me, about the whole changing process? If that’s appropriate of course,” he added, glancing at Lilly. She gave him a quick nod. “Yes. Right. Well. When you go through the process, how do you record and acknowledge it, bureaucratically speaking?”

“It’s all quite well organized,” Sue replied, “there are protocols. When the time of the Change approaches, the individual goes to a special center for observation, to make sure everything goes right, like meeting their caloric needs…”

“How you survived the process in this barbaric place I have no idea,” Sandi pointed out.

“’twas quite alright,” Lilly shrugged, “calories and everything. They have this amazing thing called cheese wiz…”

“…and their hormone levels are adjusted,” Sue continued as if there was no interruption, “also it is tracked carefully to affirm identity. Genetic code is altered during the Change so it wouldn’t be possible to issue new documents otherwise. All kinds of situations happened before the monitoring was introduced.”

“Oh yes, chaotic fun times,” Lilly chuckled, “all in the history books. Unlimited opportunity to mess with people! I kind of wish I was born back in our ancient history. Must have been a very exciting life for them.”

“Well there’s your solution!” Dirk announced, smiling ear to ear. “There has been no documentation of Lilly’s change so frankly she could be anyone.”

“Whatever you are suggesting,” she said, “I’m on board so far.”

“It’s perfectly straight-forward,” Dirk continued, “these two wonderful, uh, individuals,” he pointed broadly at Sue and Sandi, “can just claim you are dead! Come up with any story, doesn’t matter, really. Say you crashed upon landing and died instantly, and that’s why the ship is like that.”

“Lie to the company?” Sue asked. “That’s preposterous!”

“And what’s in it for us?” Sandi added.

“Anything you want,” Dirk said. “You can take Lilly’s report. Use it for your own work. You can be the people to establish trade with Earth and take all the credit for it! More than that,” he turned around to look at the rogue engineers, “you have a bunch of people here who have been trading your tech for the last five years, and tinkering with it as well. At a wild guess, I think they’d be willing to work with you, in exchange for better work conditions.”

“If by better work conditions you mean not yelling at us and treating us like people,” Grażyna said, “and allowing us to keep tinkering, then yeah, sure.”

“We know the market,” Dancho agreed, “we know Silicon Valley, we have the entire routine down to a t.”

“If we can just do tech things,” Varya nodded, “and be your consultants and inventors, that would be cool deal!”

“We want medical insurance,” Milena concluded.

“There you go,” Dirk said, “I’ve got it all figured out for you. No need to thank me.”

“Two conditions on this,” Lilly interjected, “you leave me and Roger alone and never talk to us ever again. Also, you give me a good death story. Don’t have any family left on Epsilon but I do have some mates and co-workers there and I want them to remember me well.”

“That is a lot of conditions for a fugitive,” Sue scoffed, “what makes you think we will go against the company and assist you in your delinquent behavior?”

“Oh drop it,” Lilly shook her head, “you hate the company worse than me! See I just don’t care about it, but you do. You want to be good at all that bullshit. So of course you’ll go with that suspiciously psychic human’s plan. You’d do anything to get back on that employee of the month board.”

“I’m not psychic,” Dirk muttered, but was ignored.

“Well,” Sue said, “we’ll have to discuss it. In private.”

And with that, they disabled their translating devices and walked together to the far end of the cave.

“This is going amazing,” Todd beamed, running up to Dirk, also excited beyond reason, “I’ve never seen anything like this! You didn’t just solve the case, you like, solved everything!”

“What about Kevin?” Farah asked Lilly. “What about all those people who had their brains scrambled?”

“It’s reversible,” Lilly assured everyone, “quite easily so. I mean, it will probably take them some time to get back to full health, but the scrambling itself can be undone with one button push. They don’t give out tech like that to be used on potential business-suitable populous without some fail-switches.”

“So,” Dirk said, “about 99% of this had been dealt with then. Let’s just hope nothing suddenly happens to ruin this all.”

And that phrase had been Dirk’s one mistake. Quite a novice mistake, too – never say such things until everything is said, done, and settled. Mostly cause it just looks terribly silly when something does suddenly happen, which is exactly what occurred next.

Just as the bosses were about to walk back towards the crowd and announce that they were open to negotiating the human deal, a sound appeared in the cave. It appeared in a moment of anticipation-heavy silence and was therefore amplified and heard by almost everyone in the room.

It was the sound of a descending elevator, working perfectly despite every applied intervention.

No one dared to move or say a word as the elevator went down and down. They were all still keeping quiet as it descended completely with a subtle bing, and the doors slid slowly open, and out of it – disheveled, exhausted by an extraordinary long drive, climbing over the barricade and brandishing a loaded gun – stepped Black Wing Supervisor Ken Adams.

“Stay still, all of you!” he yelled, emerging at last out of the barricade and walking towards the crowd, which was a completely redundant gesture considering they did not have any intention to move, “I’m here for Prometheus, and I am not leaving without him!”

And with that, he pointed the gun confidently at professor Roger Daly.