The Interview

The office lights hummed electric blue, casting sharp shadows across the interviewer’s face. Sleek chrome and glass surrounded them, fifty stories above Neo-Angeles, the megalopolis stretching to the horizon in a jagged silhouette of neon and steel.

“Where do you see yourself in ten years, Mr. Chen?” The interviewer’s voice was pleasant, rehearsed.

Rzz’t—operating the skin-suit registered as Thomas Chen—blinked twice, the programmed human response to unexpected questions. The flesh-mask felt tight across his true features, the translator implant buzzing against his skull cavity.

Ten years?

Something stirred in the deep recesses of his infiltration programming. A fissure in the carefully constructed human persona. Ten years from now, there would be no Neo-Angeles. No job interviews. No humans asking pointless questions about a future they would never see.

In ten years, the Fleet would have arrived. The atmospheric converters would have done their work. The oxygen levels would be down to twelve percent—perfect for Rzz’t’s species, lethal for humans. The oceans would run purple with algae blooms seeding the terraforming process.

“I, um…” Thomas Chen’s voice wavered, a calibrated uncertainty.

But suddenly, unbidden images flooded Rzz’t’s consciousness. Not the training simulations of human subjugation, but strange, impossible scenes: Thomas Chen, the fabricated identity, sitting in a sun-drenched apartment, laughing with other humans. Thomas Chen celebrating something called a “promotion.” Thomas Chen holding a small human offspring, feeling an inexplicable warmth in his chest.

These weren’t programmed thoughts. These weren’t mission parameters.

The interviewer tilted her head, waiting.

“In ten years,” Rzz’t heard himself saying, the human voice strange in his ears, “I hope to have grown with your company. To have…” He paused, the alien intelligence behind his eyes racing through possibilities. “To have found a place where I belong.”

And in that moment, Rzz’t wondered: what if he did belong here? What if this world, so bright and chaotic and full of beings who asked questions about futures they couldn’t possibly predict, was worth more than what his commanders had told him?

What if, in ten years, there was still a Neo-Angeles, still humans asking their strange questions? What if, in ten years, he wasn’t Rzz’t anymore, but truly Thomas Chen?

The interviewer smiled, making a note on her tablet. “Excellent answer, Mr. Chen.”

Outside, the city pulsed and glittered like a living thing, unaware that its fate rested in the sudden, terrible doubt of a creature who had come to destroy it, but was beginning to wonder about belonging instead.

In the smoggy sky above, invisible to human technology, the advance scout ship waited for a signal that, for the first time in the history of the Invasion Fleet, might never come.