Despite, or perhaps because of its fairly unsophisticated practice of space exploration (a pursuit often likened in intergalactic circles to rooting around in ones underwear looking for pirate gold), Earth’s immediate post atmospheric space is rather liberally strewn with garbage. In the grand neighborhood that is the galaxy, Earth looks a bit like an extraordinarily unkempt trailer park.
The denizens of Earth have no real consciousness of this, outside of those space agencies that enacted the original missions, and the government programs that monitor the skies and, with limited interest, what lies beyond them. With full knowledge of this space debris, they recognize that, occasionally, tiny pieces will fall out of orbit, breach the earth’s atmosphere and make contact with the surface. 99 times out of 100, they figure, those pieces land in the water. Once or twice of 10,000, the pieces that land on the ground actually hit something important. But in between the water landings and the catastrophic international incidents, there are your run of the mill land-fall events that amount to little more than a piece of scrap metal that a local national guard unit can clean up during exercises. So when a microscopic piece of debris flickered onto the radar and made contact in dense Washington forest, air traffic monitors made a note of its landfall location, made sure a fire hadn’t started, and got back to waiting for something important to happen.
Agent Thomas Ross of the Portland FBI Field Office, however, notified his supervisor that he would be out for the rest of the afternoon on casework, and left promptly thereafter. His supervisor promised to save him a piece of cake from the birthday in the conference room, but that was a lie. He didn’t like Agent Ross. Most of the office tended to bristle around him.
It wasn’t due to a particularly grating personality; he was actually quite affable and occasionally flirted with the receptionist, brought in donuts in the morning, and told mild, office appropriate jokes. What bristled them was the arms’ length at which he kept everyone in the office, a distance which one didn’t notice at first, but became more vivid and obvious the more time one spent around him.
Agent Ross was tall, blonde and slim, though clearly muscular beneath the well-pressed black suit he always wore. And he wore the same black suit and pressed white shirt every day, though the tie was of a different pattern and color. He seemed to own five of them. He didn’t seem to observe Casual Friday, and no one knew what he wore on the weekends, because no one had ever seen him after 5 pm on a Friday. Not even from pictures, because there were no pictures. Not on his desk, not in his slim wallet when his coworkers had happened on a glance inside. There was no evidence that this man had a family, a partner, even parents. And his record was a slim, spotless file that merely remarked upon the 5 years of faithful service he had offered the FBI from the Portland branch office. He had been there longer than the current supervisor by a year. Agent Ross was an utter mystery – a mystery far above their security clearance.
