First Contact

Child trafficking not on the page, only as the discovery

FIRST CONTACT

Day 1,095. The signal sweep should have been routine.

Dr. Marcus Webb had performed this exact sequence over a thousand times before—calibrate the array, scan frequencies, log the silence, move on. Three years alone in deep space had reduced most protocols to muscle memory. He could run diagnostics in his sleep. Sometimes he suspected he did.

The failed colony survey was behind him now. Eighteen months of orbital mapping, soil analysis, atmospheric modeling—all confirming what the preliminary data had suggested. The planet was dead. Had always been dead. Would remain dead long after humanity forgot it existed. Webb had transmitted his findings in the flat, clinical language the academy expected, packed his samples into their designated containers, and pointed the ship toward home.

Earth was still eighteen days ahead. Nothing but void and his own breathing in between.

The cabin had grown smaller over three years. Not literally—the dimensions hadn't changed, and he'd measured them twice to confirm during a particularly bad stretch around month twenty. But the walls felt closer now. The recycled air tasted thinner, carried a staleness that no filter could fully scrub. He'd stopped talking to himself around month fourteen, when the sound of his own voice began to feel like an intrusion on something that preferred silence. The quiet had become a companion of sorts. Reliable. Undemanding. It asked nothing of him, and he'd grown comfortable asking nothing of it.

Then the scanner chirped.

Webb's hand froze over the calibration dial. The sound was so unexpected that for a moment he thought he'd imagined it—another auditory hallucination, like the phantom conversations he sometimes heard in the white noise of the life support systems. But the display confirmed what his ears reported: signal detected.

Not cosmic background radiation—he knew that signature intimately, had traced its patterns across a thousand empty frequencies until they felt like the texture of the void itself. Not equipment malfunction—he'd rebuilt these systems twice during the mission, knew every circuit and relay by heart. This was something else. Structured. Repeating. Intentional.

His heart rate spiked hard enough to trigger the medical monitor. The soft chime seemed obscenely loud in the cabin's silence, an alarm announcing that something was finally, impossibly, happening.

He triple-checked the analysis. Ran diagnostics. Recalibrated. Ran diagnostics again. The signal persisted. Multi-frequency transmission, sophisticated modulation patterns, temporal cycling that suggested operational schedules. Every marker screamed technological intelligence.

After three years of silence, something was talking back.

Webb routed the signal through the linguistic analysis suite—systems he'd helped design for exactly this scenario, theoretical frameworks for decoding non-human communication that he'd never actually expected to use. They'd been an academic exercise, a way to publish papers and secure funding, not a practical toolkit for first contact. Now they were the most important programs he'd ever written.

The audio crackled through his headset, fragments emerging from static like shapes resolving in fog. He leaned forward, adjusted the gain, held his breath.

The voices were wrong. Distorted. Phonemes didn't map to any language family in his database. He ran comparative analysis against Indo-European, Sino-Tibetic, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian—nothing matched. The prosody was clipped, functional, stripped of the social markers that made human speech human. No pleasantries. No emotional inflection. No warmth or hesitation or doubt. Just cold, transactional exchanges between entities that had apparently evolved past the need for such inefficiencies.

"How many in this shipment?"

"Twelve. Fresh inventory, ages six to thirteen."

"Condition?"

"Optimal. No prior handling."

Webb rewound the segment, isolating phonemes, running spectral analysis on the vocal patterns. The speaker's accent was unplaceable—or perhaps there was no accent at all. Something about the flatness suggested a species that had evolved beyond the need for emotional signaling. Communication as pure information transfer. He cross-referenced against his xenolinguistic models, the frameworks he'd developed for identifying non-human intelligence patterns.

The structure was fascinating. Heavily coded. Almost no direct object references—everything expressed through euphemism and numerical designation. His theoretical work had predicted this: advanced species might communicate in abstract data matrices rather than concrete narrative forms. The constant streams of coordinates, classifications, quantifications suggested mathematical cognition. Or hive-mind information distribution. Or both.

He began building a glossary, fingers moving across the keyboard with a purpose he hadn't felt in months. The work was exhilarating—real linguistics, real analysis, not the endless documentation of absence that had defined his mission. Package: biological specimen. Inventory: specimen collection. Processing: preparation for study. Fresh: newly acquired. Optimal: ideal research condition.

The conversation continued. Two entities coordinating logistics. Transport routes. Timeline constraints. They mentioned "southern corridors" and "checkpoint bypass"—territorial boundaries, perhaps. Evidence of geopolitical structure. An organized civilization with territory to protect and protocols to maintain.

Then one word repeated across multiple transmissions.

"Moving three grays to the northern facility."

"Gray lot requires secondary processing."

"High-value grays, client specifications attached."

Webb isolated the audio, enhanced it, played it back. Grays. They called themselves—or someone among them—grays. After centuries of human speculation about beings from elsewhere, here they were. Not little green men. The Grays.

Real. Operating a vast network. Conducting systematic biological studies. Communicating in compressed linguistic patterns his models suggested indicated post-emotional rationality.

He should have felt triumph. This was the moment every xenolinguist dreamed of—first contact, confirmed and documented, falling into his lap during a routine signal sweep on a ship nobody expected to find anything. Instead, something cold settled in his chest. A weight he couldn't name. A wrongness his training had no framework to process.

By Day 1,099, Webb had catalogued forty-three distinct facilities. The network was vast. Global. The Grays had infrastructure on every continent, operating with a coordination that suggested centuries of establishment—or technology so advanced that such coordination was trivial.

He'd stopped sleeping in regular cycles. The transmissions never ceased, and neither did his analysis. Coffee had run out months ago, but the stimulants in the medical kit worked well enough. His logs grew detailed, obsessive, comprehensive—page after page of frequency analysis, vocabulary mapping, organizational charts. He told himself this was scientific rigor. The most important discovery in human history deserved meticulous documentation. It had nothing to do with the cold feeling that hadn't left his chest since the first transmission.

Their communication patterns revealed organizational sophistication that rivaled—perhaps exceeded—anything humanity had built. Clear hierarchies. Specialized roles. Division of labor that suggested either advanced cultural evolution or biological caste systems. Every transmission slotted into the framework with disturbing precision.

Acquisition teams used clipped, urgent communication. They discussed "targets," "extraction windows," "resistance levels." Field operatives gathering specimens with military precision. Webb noted the efficiency, admired it in a distant, analytical way. Whatever their research objectives, they approached them with admirable focus.

Transport coordinators spoke in pure logistics. Routes. Timelines. Checkpoint protocols. Everything reduced to data points and efficiency metrics. No wasted words. No emotional content. Information transferred and received with machine-like clarity.

Processing facilities maintained the coldest discourse. "Specimen preparation." "Compliance conditioning." "Quality assurance." Then handoff to "clients."

Webb had initially theorized the clients were other research divisions. Separate branches of a vast scientific apparatus, each with specialized needs and protocols. But the pattern didn't fit. Clients had preferences. Specific requests. Age ranges. Physical characteristics. Behavioral profiles. They paid prices—three hundred thousand for a batch of twelve, ages seven to eleven. Payment verified in what his translation software flagged, with 85% confidence, as U.S. dollars.

He stared at that figure for a long time. Three hundred thousand dollars. The number felt wrong in a way he couldn't articulate. He pushed the question aside, added it to the growing list of anomalies that would require further analysis. The Grays had clearly adopted human economic systems for convenience. Or they were paying human intermediaries to facilitate their research. Or the translation was wrong—context was everything in xenolinguistics, and he was working with a limited sample set. Any number of explanations were possible.

What troubled him more was the signal triangulation. The source wasn't distant. The coordinates resolved into something his navigation system recognized—not perfectly, the format was slightly off, decimal points in unexpected places. But when he adjusted the parameters, compensated for what he assumed were differences in Gray notation standards: Southern California. Southeast Asia. Eastern Europe. Central America. West Africa.

The Grays weren't just near Earth. Their entire operation was Earth-based.

Which meant contact had already occurred. Humanity had allowed—or hadn't detected—an alien civilization establishing infrastructure across the entire planet. The implications were staggering. How long had they been here? What agreements had been made? Who knew?

Unless.

He thought about the specimen collection. Systematic. Organized. Industrial scale. Discussion of "local population density," "discovery risk factors," "law enforcement pattern analysis." The Grays were actively avoiding human detection. Operating covertly. Taking specimens from human populations without permission or acknowledgment.

What if humanity wasn't a partner? What if humanity was the subject?

The word trafficking flickered through his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. He dismissed it immediately. That was human criminality—chaotic, profit-driven, confined to the desperate margins of civilization. This was clearly scientific research. The precision, the organization, the sheer scale—this was advanced civilization conducting systematic study. A species capable of crossing interstellar distances didn't traffic for profit. They researched. They collected data. They pursued knowledge with the cold efficiency their communications demonstrated.

Humans trafficked for exploitation. The Grays were researchers. Different paradigm entirely.

He returned to his translation work, pushing the anomalies to the margins of his attention where they belonged.

Day 1,101. A video transmission came through. Clearer than the previous fragments.

Webb's hands trembled as he processed the feed. He told himself it was excitement—three years of isolation, and now this. Visual confirmation of non-human intelligence. Footage that would rewrite every textbook ever printed. His name would be remembered alongside Galileo, Darwin, Einstein. The scientist who proved we weren't alone.

A facility resolved on his screen. Concrete walls. Fluorescent lighting. Industrial architecture, utilitarian and cold. Rows of small figures in cramped enclosures, arranged with the efficiency of a warehouse. The video quality was poor, degraded by distance and encryption, but he could make out details. More details than he wanted.

The specimens were definitely humanoid. The size ratios, the proportions, the way they moved—they looked almost exactly like human children. Small bodies. Thin limbs. Faces that, even through the static, seemed to carry expressions he recognized.

Convergent evolution, he thought. Taken to an impossible extreme. The universe had apparently arrived at bipedal bilateralism more than once. Perhaps it was inevitable—certain forms simply optimal for intelligent life, recurring across galaxies like fractals. Perhaps the humanoid shape was written into the mathematics of evolution itself.

The Grays moved through frame—tall figures in gray clothing. Efficient, practiced. They checked enclosures, made notes on handheld devices, spoke in that same clipped language Webb had been translating for days. Their movements were unhurried. Routine. Professional. They'd done this a thousand times before, and they would do it a thousand times again.

One specimen—a girl, humanoid female presenting around age nine—approached her enclosure barrier. Small hands wrapped around the bars. She reached through, toward the nearest Gray, the gesture unmistakable across any species barrier. Pleading. Desperate. The universal language of a child asking for help.

The Gray didn't acknowledge her. Didn't even glance in her direction. Simply finished their notation and moved to the next enclosure, footsteps echoing on concrete.

Webb watched the girl's face. Even through the poor video quality, even across what he kept telling himself was an evolutionary divide, he could read the expression. Had seen it in documentary footage from refugee camps, from disaster zones, from all the places where children learned that adults couldn't—or wouldn't—save them.

Terror. Desperation. Helplessness.

He stopped the playback.

The medical monitor pinged. Heart rate elevated. Blood pressure climbing. The cabin felt smaller than it had in months, the walls pressing in, the recycled air suddenly thick and hard to breathe.

He pulled up the audio from earlier transmissions. Played it back at original speed, no enhancement, no filtering, no xenolinguistic framework. No comfortable distance of academic analysis.

Just listened.

"Package secured. Female, age seven. Blonde. Client confirmed delivery payment."

Underneath the static, underneath his theoretical models, underneath his desperate desire to hear something else: English. Accented, cold, human English. The language he'd grown up speaking. The language his parents had used to tell him bedtime stories.

Webb sat in the dark, fourteen days from Earth, surrounded by evidence he could no longer translate away.

The Grays were human.

The Grays had always been human.

He didn't move for a long time.

The viewport showed stars. Distant, indifferent, unchanged by anything happening in this cabin or on the planet growing larger in the navigation display. Webb stared at them and felt something inside him—something he'd carried through three years of isolation, through the failed colony survey, through the silence that had become his only companion—begin to crack.

Three years he'd spent searching for proof that humanity wasn't alone. That somewhere in the vast dark there were other minds, other civilizations, other ways of being. The loneliness of the void had been bearable because he believed something else was out there. Something worth finding.

Now he'd found it. And it was human after all.

If he accepted what he'd heard, everything else followed. That humanity contained people who did this. That his species—his own species—had built an industrial apparatus to commodify children. That somewhere on Earth, right now, a six-year-old was being "processed" while he sat in space doing nothing. That the monsters weren't out among the stars. They were home, waiting for him.

That there were no aliens to blame.

The console chimed. A new transmission, clear as the others had become. He should have turned it off. Should have archived the data and walked away, let someone else deal with the implications. Instead, he listened. He couldn't stop listening.

"First time doing an extraction. Uh, confirming protocol—we just grab the target and go?"

"Correct. Speed over stealth. Target is age eight, female, apartment 4B. Parents work nights. Standard procedure."

"What if she screams?"

"They all scream."

Webb turned off the speakers.

Silence filled the cabin. The familiar silence, the one he'd lived with for three years. But it felt different now. Heavier. Darker. Full of things he couldn't unhear, things that would follow him for the rest of his life—however long that turned out to be.

Earth hung in the viewport, blue and beautiful and fourteen days away. He'd spent three years wanting to go home. Counting down the days, marking progress on charts, dreaming of real food and open sky and conversations with people who could answer back. Now he stared at that pale blue dot and felt nothing but dread.

He thought about the girl in the video. The one reaching through the bars. He thought about apartment 4B. He thought about what "standard procedure" meant when applied to an eight-year-old whose parents worked nights. He thought about all the glossary entries he'd built so carefully: package, inventory, processing, fresh, optimal. Clean words. Scientific words. Words that meant nothing and everything.

Then he returned to the console. Opened a new file.

His hands moved across the keyboard. Steady now. The trembling had stopped. The words assembled themselves—clinical, precise, exactly what the academy would expect from a first contact report. Exactly what the situation required.

"First Contact Protocol, Dr. Marcus Webb, Day 1,101. Continued monitoring of Gray communications reveals increasingly sophisticated operational networks. Translation remains challenging due to their unique linguistic structures, but I have identified what appear to be research facilities across multiple continents.

"The Grays appear to have established extensive presence on Earth, possibly with human knowledge and cooperation. I recommend Earth authorities be alerted to potential Gray presence immediately upon my arrival. The scope of their operations suggests either: first contact has already occurred and been suppressed, or the Grays have infiltrated without human awareness. Either scenario requires urgent investigation.

"The focus on juvenile human subjects remains unexplained. Possible theories include comparative developmental biology studies, genetic research, or assessment of human adaptation potential. The clinical nature of their specimen handling suggests advanced scientific rather than hostile intent, though human ethical frameworks may not apply to non-human intelligence.

"Upon landing, I will present full documentation to appropriate authorities. Humanity deserves to know we are not alone.

"This is, without question, the most significant discovery in human history."