Creep Station

"Holy fucking shit. I knew it!" Mitchell punched the roof of the car in his excitement. "I knew it! I mean, I knew there was something crazy about all this but I- something close to human? Why not aliens? Why not ancient humans, something like that?"

"The HPI has in its possession several citizens of the Life Tree Collective. Some of them have answered questions. We know for certain that they arrived in 1883, statements backed by evidence we found at various sites. They came to Earth from another Earth, a different Earth. A few of them described it as 'skipping' though none knew anything about how or why. Our guess is that the hows and whys of most things having to do with them are kept at the top of their social structure, most of them function as your average human does, working their jobs day in and day out knowing nothing of what the leadership is up to."

Mitchell felt ready to burst. There was so much information flying at him and it was all so exciting! His entire life he had been mired in mediocrity, probably less than that it if he was honest about it, and now he was involved with a secret government agency that was secret from the government itself and he was going to be spying on human like creatures with powers from an Earthlike Earth from a parallel universe. His mind exploded inside his skull but his head remained intact.

"Any other questions that you might have you can talk to Rosa about. She will be your partner at this MOP. Leave the car running and grab your stuff." Heton opened his door and stepped out into the night.

Mitchell wondered what MOP stood for exactly as he swiveled around in his seat, gathering his meager belongings, a backpack and his phone, loose drink bottles and the wrappers from his snacks. He stuffed the trash into his backpack and popped the trunk of the car. As he reached for the handle, the car door opened and he looked up to see Heton looking down at him. Mitchell made to get out and Heton held his hand up in a halt gesture. Mitchell froze in his seat. The HPI agent maintained eye contact with Mitchell as he reached down and gracefully plucked the phone from his newest recruits hand.

"Rosa will have a company phone for you." Heton explained as he slid the phone into his pocket.

"There's a lot of personal stuff on my phone though." Mitchell said a bit to quickly.

"For you, there is no personal any more." The response came hard and fast, Mitchell had barely finished talking.

"What the hell man?" He said, still looking up at Heton.

"Mitchell, I am ok with explaining the things that are not obvious but if I have to start explaining the simple stuff it's going to get old really fucking fast. We live on the razors edge with what we are doing. I will never ask you to do something that I have not done or would not do myself. You will do as I say. You will do as any HPI agent says." Still holding on to the door, Heton reached into his pocket and pulled Mitchells phone out and held it towards him.

"Take it and leave or get out of the car." The anger had left Hetons voice.

Mitchell moved his backpack onto his shoulder glanced at his phone and sheepishly stepped out of the car, avoiding eye contact, avoiding even looking at his new boss. He walked to the trunk and grabbed his duffle bag and closed the trunk gently. He closed it too gently and it didn't latch so he shoved down hard and it clicked, the back of the car dipped. He looked up and Heton was in the drivers seat, looking back at him in the review mirror. Mitchell moved around the driver side of the car, an apology was on his mind when the car lurched into motion, rolling backwards past him.

Charles Heton nodded his head towards the office and Mitchell turned to see a woman standing in the frame of the back door. He raised his hand in greeting and the car pulled away from him. He turned and watched his rental car depart without him. Heton looked both ways, turned on his blinker and drove onto the highway, heading back the direction that Mitchell had come.

Mitchell watched the car recede into the distance. He felt a bit overwhelmed, what the hell had he gotten himself in to. He pushed out the breath he didn't realized that he'd been holding and reminded himself this was an amazing opportunity, provided they didn't kill him to keep their secrets, or that the Life Tree Collective didn't kill him to keep their secrets. His heart started to beat a bit faster. The warm evening air pressed down on him and he felt a bit dizzy. The taillights flickered through a patch of trees as Heton rounded the corner and then vanished.

He had no car, his phone was in what had been his car with a man he didn't really know. Even after their brief conversation, he knew almost nothing about the man that he hadn't read on the internet. Nobody knew he was here. He pushed down the terror that was rising and steeled himself with a deep breath and tried his best to hide how afraid he suddenly felt. He resituated his backpack on his shoulder and turned to face his new… co-worker? Boss?

They made eye contact and he called out to her, "Hi! I'm Mitchell. You must be Rosa." He gave her a little wave and started walking towards her. She had an olive complexion, black hair and dark eyes, a kind and genuine smile. He was surprised by how tiny she was, about a foot shorter than him, 5'1 at the most and she was thin. She was thin but he got the impression that she had a wiry strength, from the way she stood and her broad shoulders. He thought she looked like a gymnast. If someone asked his opinion she was on the prettier side of plain. She was wearing a mono-colored t-shirt and blue jeans, dressed up he imagined that she would turn plenty of heads. As he got closer, he held out his hand and she reached out to meet his.

"Yes, I am. It's nice to finally meet you." Her wording of that made him feel a bit exposed. How much did she know about him?

As they broke from their handshake, she asked him to follow her inside and he did. The hallway was short maybe 15 feet, it opened in the front to what was obviously the office/lobby of the motel.

"He might seem like an asshole, but he's just very direct. He's also a bit socially stunted when it comes to the niceties." Rosa told him as they stood in the hallway.

"It makes sense, long time military guy in charge of a shadowy military organization." He waved his hands semi-dramatically around his head when he said the words shadowy military organization.

"We're not military, we're not part of the government at all actually. That's why I don't have you standing at attention." She said the last part with a wink of a smile.

"So you're not my commanding officer? No saluting at all?" Mitchell asked. His attempt at a cheeky smile fell short and his true emotions shone through, a smile painted a neediness on his face. A silent plea for orientation in his new world.

She read him like a book and chortled, "No saluting. Officially, you're a field specialist and I'm a field agent. We're both going to be doing mostly the same stuff. The biggest difference between us is just time on the job. In a few months we'll most likely be calling you field agent Mitchell Washburn. The HPI is pretty good at being a meritocracy though, if you kick ass out here, I may get the word to start taking orders from you. Until such a time as that though, when I tell you to do something, make like Nike. Understood?"

"Just do it. Rodger that field agent Rosa." He popped a quick salute. This time his cheeky smile was on point. Her earnestness had a calming effect on him.

"Good." She smiled at him, "Ok. Pecking order established. Lets get the grand tour started."

She started down the hall. There were three doors, she paused briefly at the first, pointing but not turning around.

"Bathroom, employees only, toilet and a shower." She said at the first door.

"Sleeping quarters slash kitchen." She informed him at the second door and she opened the door to show him. Inside he saw a small galley kitchen on the right side of the room, fridge, sink, two cabinets a bit of counter space mostly taken up by a microwave and a thin stove with two coil burners. None of the appliances matched. There was a half wall splitting the room, on one side the kitchen on the other side a bed and a standing closet and a twin bed with a surprisingly nice bed set.

"We'll both technically be working eighteen hours a day but when not working, we'll be hot cotting it, you sleep then I sleep, we work together for 8 hours. Rinse. Wash. Repeat." She said before turning off the light and continuing down the hall.

"This one," she twirled around and looked up at him, "is our operations center. Wait here a sec." She turned and walked down the hall into the office, turned off the neon sign indicating that the office was open and turned on the neon sign that made the claim of 'No Vacancies'. Rosa moved out of sight for a second and he heard a drawer sliding open and the closed. She appeared in the hallway and walked to Mitchell.

She held one phone out to him. "The password is MOPHOP2, when you're in, go to the settings and have it keyed to your finger prints," She was typing on her phone and spoke to him without looking up, "Once your phone has your finger prints, you'll have access to this room," she pointed at the door she had called their operations center, "right now you'll have limited access, Chuck trusts you so I trust you but I don't want you breaking shit." She smiled good naturedly, looking up from her screen.

"Thanks, I'll try not to break anything." Mitchell said, returning her smile. He unlocked the phone and started scanning his finger prints.

"MOPHOP2?" He asked, curious about the possibilities.

"This is a motel observation post, specifically the Helscion observation post, that's the MOP and the HOP. The 2 is because there's another MOPHOP, I think that one is called the Halibut, Haliput, Hali-something."

"There's more of these? More of us?" Mitchell asked, clearly the answer was yes but he was curious how free she was with information.

"Yup. There is at least one for each of the Branches and there's teams working them. When HPI learned that people had been fleeing the Branches, leaving the Collective they quietly bought up all the motels they could in the areas surrounding each of the Branches. It was the easiest way to find them, you know, to find the people running away. They gotta hide somewhere, they gotta sleep sometime." She never looked up from her screen. He believed that she was telling him the truth and that she was telling him everything she knew. He found himself profoundly trusting her which was very new to him.

"Is it," he stalled for a second, winching and hoping he didn't sound like a coward, "dangerous to do what we do?"

"It is if you're stupid. If you try to interfere with the Life Tree Collective. Before the MOP scheme HPI had tried a variety of different things. One of them was infiltrating local law enforcement, COP, is what they called it. The intention was to get information by pulling suspected LTCs over. Clever right?" She gave a small laugh and he chuckled what he hoped was an appropriate amount. She continued, "Twice while we were running that OP we lost agents that tried to help refugees. They died horribly. HPI needs to stay out of the Collective's line of sight, they're too powerful for us to be caught in their crosshairs."

"So, they put a stop to the COP OP and started with the MOPs?" He rhymed, angling for a bit of levity.

"Yop." She answered softly as she shook her head and smiled. "You kind of put an OP on an OP though, Collective Observation Post, Observation Post. I'll let it go. This time. We take our acronyms seriously in the HPI." She over enunciated each letter in HPI and her smile broadened.

"Yes ma'am he said," Snapping to attention with false seriousness.

Still smiling she told him, "Your finger prints should be good to open the door go ahead."

He moved for the door but stopped short, "What's up with the collective, are they a danger to us, to the, um, local humans. The of this earth variety?"

"Short answer, yeah. Long answer, we are confident that they are not here to help us, they have been known to kill steal and destroy opposition, they have power and influence all over the world. To what end exactly? We just don't know, so we watch them."

"Just watch?" He asked.

"Yeah, for now." She said solemnly.

"Ok, I can handle that."

He looked around the door for a second before realizing that there wasn't going to be a large pad somewhere to place his hand and eventually gripped the door handle. He hear a soft click and he opened the door. There was a set of stairs leading down, maybe 20 steps to a small landing and then more steps leading down to the left. He looked to Rosa.

"After you Mr. Mitchell." She gave a slight bow at the waist and waved her hand.

"My father is Mr. Mitchell, I'm just Mitchell." He regretted leaning so hard into the dad jokes but it seemed to be going over well.

"Ok, Just Mitchell, watch your step." Rosa said. She was hitting him with the dad jokes right back, he wondered if she was as nervous as he was.

"How long have you been on the job with the HPI?" Mitchell asked as she opened the door and ushered him through.

"I've been with the HPI a long time. They let me bounce around a lot, I've been here for about 11 months. Before that I was on the opposite end of the country at another branch. Moving keeps it from getting stale." He walked past her as she spoke to him.

Transferring was an option, good to know.

He made his way down the stairs and she was a few steps behind him. At the landing there was another set of steps but this one ended in a door. The air was getting cooler as they descended. At the bottom of the last flight he gripped the handle and the same soft click sounded. Turning the knob he walked into the room.

He was shocked. The room was cavernous. There was a set of monitors on the wall to his right, there must have been at dozens, a desk with two chairs faced the monitor. Directly ahead of him the room stretched out to what he realized was the size of the entire motel area. Every 15 feet or so there was a ladder ascending through the concrete, there must have been one for each room. Where did they come out? Probably the closet he decided. Lined up against the wall was crate after crate of God knows what.

"Wow." Was all he said.

���I know right?" She said, then as if reading his mind, or just intuiting the obvious questions, "Each ladder goes into the closet of a different room. It can only be opened from our side." She eyed him with curiosity as he stared at the ladders.

"Observation only?" He asked.

"Hope for the best, plan for the worst." Rosa responded.

A beat later she continued, "The crates are supplies of everything that we might ever need, food, weapons, tech, toilet paper, you name it and it's probably in one of them somewhere. They've got inventory lists attached on the side." She turned to the monitors and tapped him on the shoulder, indicating that his gaze follow hers.

"Now, this, the creep station. We observe and report. We'll go over the stuff you need to flag and log and how all of that works but don't be doing…" disgust could be heard in her voice, " something else down here. "

"Something else?" He asked, he almost imitated masturbating but felt that might be pushing it a bit far and left his fist balled up on his thigh, his question hanging in the air.

"Your predecessor was doing something else down here," out of the corner of his eye he saw her moving and turned his head to fully look at her. She was mimicking masturbation. To describe it as best as possible Mitchell would have said she was mimicking furious masturbation.

He moved his eyes from her lewd but comical imitation to her face as she said, "a few weeks later he was," her hand opened on the imitated upstroke as if something exploded in from of her face, making a sound akin to a ketchup bottle with not quite enough ketchup being squeezed.

"Really?" he copied the sound she made as best he could. He assumed she'd meant they had, splattered him? Blown his brains out from the sound of it.

"He was jerking it, on the job. No way they'd keep him around. I not even sure what he was... doing it to. Probably the hookers though, he was always extra extra nice to them. Discounts, lingering hands on lower backs, you know what I mean, it was gross. It doesn't matter why, just that he was doing it. After that, he had to go."

"Did you do it?" He asked, wanting to know if she had been the one to kill him. He began to feel a bit afraid of her and unconsciously turned so he could see the exit.

"What?" She sounded confused. "Was I creepy with the hookers? What?"

"No!" He almost laughed at the misunderstanding and probably would have if he wasn't about to make his actual question clear.

"Were you the one to… " he once again attempted to duplicate the sound she made, "him? Kill him?" He asked, worried about the answer and what it would mean. Working with someone that had killed their partner, would she kill him too? Of course she would, once you kill one partner, what's one more?

"Oh." She laughed, "Oh God, no. I didn't kill him. We didn't kill him. He isn't dead. He was uh, removed from HPI."

"Just, like, fired?" He was surprised, maybe he could just walk away if he ended up being in over his head.

"No. Not him. He was a liability. He," She squinted for a second, "He had his memory erased and was put back out into the regular world."

"The memory thing, you guys can do that? That's real? You can just Men In Black flashy thing people?" He had heard a lot of crazy things in the last hour or so, he wasn't surprised but again, he was a little surprised.

"It's not some sophisticated tech or something, it's a rigorous torture PTSD thing they've perfected. Think 'A Clockwork Orange'. They call it rememorizing." After she finished talking she stared off into the distance, not focusing on anything, just staring. "It's necessary to have things like that."

"Jesus H. Christ." Mitchell said, a little surprised. He figured that they would just reassign someone, maybe kick them out, at the most extreme kill them. Somehow the rememorizing seemed a fate worse than death. He thought it over for a second then decided that death was probably worse but only narrowly.

There were a few seconds of silence. Images moved on a few the monitors. A woman walking into the bathroom. A father tucking his children in. A car leaving the parking lot.

"It sounds like a bogus therapy to help remember past lives or helping people quit smoking, not... not that. That got dark real quick." He worked his hand over his mouth, scratching his stubbly cheek and running his hand through his brown hair. He thought to himself that he was happy that he'd had it cut before coming on board with the HPI, two fingers on top and a fade up from zero on the sides. Then he was thinking about his haircut and was probably just trying to think of anything but what the HPI might do to him someday.

"Yeah, well, HPI doesn't fuck around." Rosa said, eyes unfocused even though she faced the monitors. Her head bobbed up and down as if she was nodding to herself, reassuring herself.

"Chuck had told me that he was a risky hire, they don't exactly have the biggest pool of candidates. Kinda gotta take what you can when you're running something as cloak and dagger as this." She smiled an almost sad smile as motioned her hands around the room.

"Shit, replacing someone like that, how bottom of the barrel am I?" Mitchell asked feeling suddenly worried.

She scoffed, "Don't be like that, don't be insecure. Chuck was excited about you." To his ear, she almost sounded offended. "Not super excited that you were on the CIA's radar though. He had to have you blacklisted to keep everyone from hiring you while he did his evaluation."

"What the fuck!" Mitchell said loudly. His mind raced. He had been ready to commit to this all. Now he felt entrapped, he felt forced and tricked.

He attempted to start saying something and it came as a shout,"He kep-"

Rosa cut him off, her voice hard, "He kept you from wasting your life. You wanted this, deep down. You wanted something like this. That's why you spent your life digging into things like the LTC before you had an inkling as to what the hell it even was."

She turned on him and poked him in the chest, "That was why you joined the military."

She poked him again, "That was why you got back up when you were knocked down. Every time. Your entire life. When you were knocked down you got up and you kept looking. You never stopped trying to figure it all out, always questioning. You didn't know what you were looking for but you were looking. That's why Chuck sought you out. That's why he spent months vetting you. You're an asset. We need you and you need us. We have what you need. Purpose."

Her hand dropped, no longer a danger to poke him again and she stepped back, "The world needs you, me. Us. Humankind needs us." There was real fire in her eyes. She was breathing hard, she looked harder than he had thought possible. She looked ready to take on the world. This world and whatever others might be out there.

He swallowed, his heart was trying to hammer it's way out of his chest. He took a deep breath and felt an overwhelming sense of belonging for the first time in a long time. Maybe for the first time ever.