It should have been a normal day at the Orange Bay observatory, situated in sleepy Orange Bay, Florida.

That day should have been a lot of things.

It started easily enough, you roll out of bed, see your bleary-eyed reflection in the mirror, gulp down reheated coffee because the Starbucks down the block’s still closed. You throw on your normal clothes, a pair of jeans, a light jacket and your “I want to believe” T-shirt. You think it’s funny to work in an observatory and wear those clothes. Your co-workers are either too dead inside to appreciate the joke or you aren’t as funny as you think.

Regardless, you’re on your way to work on time, watching dawn break across purple and orange clouds over the bay.

It’s quite beautiful where you live, but being here for years has sapped some of the wonder. Like an old photograph left in the sun, the sunrise’s color is leached from your view by mind numbing routine.

Even though the sunrise doesn’t elicit the same burst of endorphins it once did, you still take a route that allows you to gaze at it nearly the entire ride. You tell yourself it's a habit. You notice a couple of dark sedans, four door types with tinted windows. They’re convoying past you, the black paint contrasting with the ocean and the sand and the sunrise. Your car, made in the 90’s and utterly unremarkable, rolls over the iron bridge connecting Orange Landing from the rest of the town, the small island replete with boardwalks, sand, boat rentals, trendy bars and restaurants and the Orange Bay Observatory.

Nothing special about your place of work. You roll off the line at a reasonably priced but mediocre midwestern college, earning your Ph.D. in Astronomy, Then eagerly applying yourself to the first place that took you. Orange Bay! Floridian coast paradise and purgatory.

It’s quite boring, actually. You used to laugh at yourself as a kid, foolishly wondering what’s out there in the sky. You know what’s out there. And it’s really nothing special. It’s nothing at all, really. Just like the dawn here in Orange Bay, space is nothing but a multicolored light show to captivate casual onlookers. And the fool that you were, you made it into a career.

It’s not all bad, honestly. You get an office party four times a year, five if you're slated to work at Christmas. (Not that you have any family of your own. The rest are still back home, out of the reach of everything but skype).

Every year there’s an astronomy conference in Hawaii, which is nice. You usually go, unless you don’t have to work on Christmas, in which case Dana from the night shift attends.

The scenery is nice enough there but you live in Orange Bay long enough and all picture-perfect coastline looks the same.

Besides, you hate the conference itself. Tourists think Orange Bay having an observatory makes it important. Your colleagues across the U.S. know differently. Half of the conference itself is in the biggest observatory in America, named Mauna Kea. It’s like yours but with more expensive equipment.

And probably not as soul-sappingly boring.

You roll past the gates, a security booth checking you in. The fence wouldn’t even be necessary if the teenage hooligans of Orange Bay didn’t think it was funny to damage million-dollar stargazing equipment or have bad beer and sex in the parking lot.

You don’t bother to look at the massively overweight security guard, Keith, who probably hates his job more than you do. The funds at the observatory were recently cut, again, so half of the janitorial staff was let go, leaving only one. That means, whenever the teens inevitably break in, he’s normally the one to mop up whatever refuse they leave behind.

You hand him your I.D. without looking, knowing it’s a formality at this point anyway. You’ve worked here for fifteen years and not once was there a problem with your identification. Until today, apparently. Because the hand that grabs the card from you isn't Keith’s pudgy, soft fingers, it’s a pair of well worn, well dressed, and well manicured hands. You do a quick double take, as the man in the booth is most decidedly not Keith. He’s dressed in a sharp, well fitting, tailored and mysterious black suit, with a white tie cutting the middle. Sunglasses cover his face and an earpiece fits snugly in his left ear. He’s got a name tag too. His name’s Henry.

You want to ask where Keith went, suddenly missing the former guard’s familiarity, if nothing else. Before you can open your mouth, he hands your card back, with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Something about those dark shades dissuade conversation, and you hurriedly edge your car from the 90’s through the gate.

You’ve never once had a problem finding a space to park here at the observatory, unless you count that one time Keith had to clean the carcass of a seagull from your favorite spot. Regardless, barely a dozen staff work here, all shifts included, and twenty parking spots were made. You never understood why, as no tourists ever got past the gate, so why did the government spend on twenty parking spots while only hiring a dozen staff?

All twenty are filled, and the curbs too, so you coax your car up the hill, staring at the identical fleet of four door jet black sedans, all of the same make and model, all with tinted windows, and all with the license plate removed.

A chill runs down your spine. Is this legal? Suddenly all you want to do is finish your shift and go home, or better yet, find your boss and pretend to be sick..

Two men stand at either side of the double doors to the observatory, all in immaculate black suits. They all have the same body type - not one man below six feet tall, nobody with a spot on their black suit or white tie, and not one without earpieces feeding past their collars.

You want to make a joke about their sunglasses. It’s cliche, painfully so. But as you approach the door and realize the man on the right’s hand is bigger than your face, you bite it back.

Besides, you aren’t that funny anyway, apparently.

You want to scan your I.D. on the doors, unlocking them automatically, but the scanner’s directly behind the man on the right. You think it’d be a very bad idea to ask him to move. The situation takes care of itself, luckily. They saw you coming a mile away, in your car that barely makes 70 on the highway and in your T-shirt with a bad science fiction pun. If they think it’s funny, they show no sign of it. In fact, they don’t seem to have emotions at all. They remind you of the Terminator. The impulsive side of your brain tells you to wave your hand in front of their face to see if they can see you but you value having an arm still connected to you too much for such tomfoolery.

The doors swing open, either they gave some unseen signal or, more likely, another of their identical troupe saw you on the security cameras, which were until today completely useless.

As you pass you notice they have name plates too. The man on the right, the one until now you referred to in your brain as giant-hands is called Thomas. The one on the left, Paul. No last names or titles here, either.

The bad feeling intensifies. The names are too generic, if you’d watch more sci-fi thrillers you’d probably think they're fake. Either that or they come off an assembly line or cloning vats somewhere.

Maybe they’re grown beneath Mauna Kea. The absurdity of it makes you want to chuckle.

There are more of the suited men inside.

You don’t chuckle.

The receptionist desk is empty. A phone’s ringing but nobody stops to answer. You don’t think the receptionist, Darla’s, in the bathroom.

You wander up into the main telescope area, the usual title eluding you. Normally there’s a big screen set up, showing whatever interstellar fireworks display that’s going on this week’s internet backgrounds.

This time it’s a comet.

You frown.

You don’t monitor comets here. The telescope’s too slow for that.

Men and women you don’t recognize, looking for all the world like extras in a 70’s sci fi flick rush around, shouting things to each other. They look perfectly ridiculous, so in place they’re out of place. Except the sunglasses. Why do they wear sunglasses inside? You try in vain to see what’s going on. You also try to locate someone in charge, so you can ask to go home.

No luck.

Wandering up to the screen, you get a better look at the comet. You rub your eyes again, just to make sure it’s as… geometrical as it appears to be.

You recognize the constellation behind it.

That’s above you right now!

Your search for someone in charge redoubles, no longer wanting time off, you need to see if your life’s in danger.

Someone clears their throat behind you.

You whip around, starting a little. A woman stands before you, same trademark sunglasses covering her eyes. No nametag. She’s in a suit too, this time with a red tie cutting down her chest.

It looks ridiculously like a wound.

She smiles, a little too widely.

“You work here, don’t you?”

You nod your assent, suddenly speechless. Backing up, you thump right into another cookie cutter thug. His name’s probably not Logan.

Some techs in white coats are modifying your telescope. It costs multiple millions of dollars, is the most expensive thing here, and the most delicate one too.

You don’t get paid enough to intervene.

“What’s your name?”

You don’t tell her, not because of resistance. “Logan” could probably crush your skull like a watermelon if he wanted too. You don’t tell her because your voice has deserted you. The Techs start wiring up a computer. Flashes of code spit across the screen. Not code.

Coordinates

Coordinates that are directly in the middle of Orange Bay.

You work up enough strength to ask something along the lines of “Can I go home?”. It sounds ridiculously childlike, more akin to an elementary school kid trying to appeal to his teacher than a grown adult negotiating.

Her smile grows wider, which you previously believed to be impossible.

“Tell me. Do you like the sunrise?”

You nod, wondering what this has to do with anything. You don’t like that she dismissed your question. You don’t think you'll go home today.

“Tell the truth” The words have an unnatural malice to them. It’s too late to run. The doors are guarded. You’ve checked.

So you do. You do tell her the truth, The truth of how it meant so much to you, but year after year you took it for granted. And how now it’s nothing more than a view. A tech sits in a chair to the left of you, adorning a comm headset. You don’t even have those normally here. You can’t hear him well but you’re sure he’s communicating with the comet.

You’d be much more attentive if you weren't so afraid of the woman.

She leads you outside, the dawn hitting its full stride now. There’s a balcony area with a beautiful view of the sea, past the banister nothing but a terrifying drop, jagged rocks ending with breaking waves

It’s also very high up. You realize this now.

The wind buffets you and you resist the temptation to look down.

You ask the woman what she is. Who is no longer applicable, you think.

In response, she flicks the sunglasses from her face. They plummet down, past the rocks. Your eyes follow them for a second, before recoiling in horror at the sight of her. It wouldn’t be correct to call her eyes blind. She can obviously see. But they look like cataracts, too much.

Peering into her milky depths, you’re sure you see something move behind her eye. You fight the urge to vomit.

She gives you time to recover. Gazing over the sunrise she shouldn’t be able to see. Once you’re ok you ask her what she wants. She answers honestly. Her candidness no longer surprises you.

“The World. All of it.”

You nod. You don’t think there’s anything you could do to stop her.

“This isn’t the invasion, you know. Just the beginning.”

You nod. An invasion would be more… flashy, you suppose.

“I can’t let you leave.”

You nod again. You’ve known that for some time.

In a voice that’s incredibly calm given the circumstances, you ask her why you’re still living.

She smiles.

“A choice.”

Her hand goes into the pocket of her suit and withdraws what looks like a worm, if worms had barbed spines and were a pasty white.

You gulp, remembering the thing wriggling behind her eye. You ask your alternative. She nods towards the rocks, down below. You peer at them, and you can see what you think is the broken body of the receptionist, Darla.

A rustle of movement behind you makes you turn. Logan’s removed a Colt 45. with a silencer attached from the inside of his coat. Behind him you think you can see Keith, if he fit into a pressed suit and wore a white tie instead of a black one.

He looks surprisingly good in sunglasses.

You ask if you can have a moment to think. The woman nods a little.

You walk to the balustrade, overlooking the ocean

She promises, whatever your choice, it won’t hurt.

The railings are made of wrought iron, with three horizontal bars curving around the building with vertical ones dug into the concrete every three feet.

Your feet climb the first rung.

She tells you that if you wish to die you don’t have to be shot if you don’t want to, that Logan’s gun’s only meant for you if you resist. She tells you Darla jumped. The wind buffets around the Orange Bay Observatory. You gaze out over the ocean again. It really is quite beautiful.

You make your choice.

And the sunrise over Orange Bay’s the most beautiful one you’ve ever seen.

Grant Gargaliano