Offspring

After I had downloaded the recording I looked around for a place to reposition my camera. I was interested in the parking area. Apart from trucks there were buses and a number of small two seater type cars parked there. The small cars had no gas cylinders. The rows of vehicles were parked with their front end against low level barricades and seemed to be connected to the barricades by a cable. I guessed that the cars were being recharged. My hunch seemed to be confirmed when I discovered a light fixture on the roof of the vehicles, some were lit up others not. Presumably that meant the lit up ones were fully charged and ready to go.

I found a place where I could train my camera on this section and started the recording. There was no point in hanging around, I hid somewhere where I could shove the memory module up my butt and masturbate my way home.

I went to see Feng soon after I got back. We had something to eat and then Feng led me to the back of the restaurant where we entered a goods lift and rode a few stories up. We wound up in a small office that had little more than a computer terminal, a large screen, a fridge and a table with a few chairs. I guessed it was some sort of conference room.

Feng got us some beer from the fridge and put an ashtray on the table. I handed him the memory module and a short time later we were watching what the camera had recorded.

It took three hours to watch the whole thing. There was a time stamp on each frame, showing official spaceport time. While watching the movie we made notes of the times of key events so we could get back to it later for further analysis. There were no surprises. They worked twelve hour shifts from five in the morning to five in the afternoon. Each shift employed about a thousand people two hundred of them being human. All Oktonians wore saffron coloured overalls, their wing markings possibly indicating status within the organisation. There were humans in blue, green, black and bright orange overalls. Then there were men in business suits and men wearing white lab coats, presumably the administrative and technological elite of the enterprise.

Feng and I agreed that we were watching an efficient organisation with a rigidly defined hierarchy. About what one would expect in an outfit that handled huge amounts of hydrogen, not to mention the nuclear reactor, where even a minor slip could have devastating consequences.

It was already daylight, the ashtray was full and there were empty beer bottles all over the place when we finally called it a day. Feng erased the recording, there was no point in hanging onto it and risk exposure.

I walked back to the hotel, had some breakfast and went to bed. I was stuffed.

Nothing much happened when I went back to the complex the next day. I downloaded the recording and reset the camera to full resolution and normal speed. I positioned the camera so it pointed to the section where the small cars where and set the timer for recording to start just before shift change. No point in hanging around, I went home.

Analysing the footage did not take very long since we knew what times were of interest. We saw the Oktonians and working class humans get onto separate buses and leave. The suits and the lab coats got into the small cars and drove off. Privilege of office.

The next day brought more information. I had repositioned the camera again. We saw how a guy in a suit unplugged the charging cable and put it into a holder provided on the rail. He got into the car, reversed out of the spot and departed. There seemed to be no fixed pattern. The executives simply grabbed the nearest fully charged car. The cars were not individually owned by the look of it. That gave me an idea.

I had taken to turning up in a business suit like the executives wore. In case I was spotted there was little chance someone would query why I was there and what I was doing, so I hoped.

I timed it to arrive just before shift change on my next trip. When the workers went to the vehicles I came out of hiding and walked towards the area where the small cars were. I didn't pick the closest one but one on the far side. On a previous trip I had familiarised myself with the car. It had simple controls, easy to figure out. I unplugged the cable, like I had seen them do and climbed in. Just to be on the safe side I waited for a little while and followed the last one out of the parking lot. From then on I just tagged behind the traffic. No one drove fast. I soon found out why. The thing I was driving barely moved at more than twenty miles per hour. Drab buildings with high set windows and huge doors were on both sides of the road. There was no pavement. Warehouses I guessed. It was like driving down a prison corridor.

The buildings came to an abrupt end, making way for a big open area. I could see the sea to my left. Between the sea and the road was a green area about a hundred yards wide, like a big park. My first glimpse of Oktonian vegetation. To my right were what looked like a row of apartment buildings. The column in front of me turned right into a parking area. I followed, picking a parking spot as far away from the others as I dared and plugged the car into the charging rail like I had seen the others do.

Most of the workers went straight into the buildings, though some crossed over to the park, presumably to catch a few rays of the evening sun. Since I could hardly go into one of the buildings I went to the park too. No one paid any attention to me. I found a bench from where I could see a good portion of the park and sat down.

I had not sat more than five minutes when I got my first surprise. There on the promenade was a woman with a pushchair, accompanied by a man carrying a toddler. A proud dad, home from work. Feng had been right. There were breeding humans on Okton4. I took a picture of the three, downloaded the recordings I had onto the memory device and tied the camera onto a branch of a bush with some of that tough long grass that grew in patches between the bushes, made sure the camera was trained on the promenade and looked for a place where I could shove the memory module up my butt when I had an idea. The waterproof cover of the camera was much bigger than the memory module. If I used that I could fill the rest of the space up with some organic material. I took a leaf off a bush, some flower petals and something that looked like seeds on one of the plants. There wasn't room for much, but it was at least something. I sealed the cover and spat on it.

By that time it was getting dark enough to shove the thing up my butt without fear of being spotted. I stepped into the bushes for a quick wank and went home.

When I showed it to Feng he was excited.

"I'll get that analysed straight away," he said, "If I get this to our chemist now we can have a chromatograph in the morning. I'll give you call."

I got the results at around eight in the morning. I was told that the samples were too small to come up with a definitive analysis. One thing though stood out. The lithium levels were extraordinarily high. The chemist had never seen anything like it and had wanted to know where the samples had come from. Feng had told him he had found the organic matter in an ore shipment to which the chemist commented that this explained the high lithium content. Of course, we knew there was no such contamination.