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toward the large virtual display that encircled the room.
    “Hello, Jason,” his father said, his smiling face filling the screen. “How are you son?”  
    “What the hell is this? And who the hell are you?” Jason asked, looking first at Ricket and then at the man on the screen.
    “I can’t even imagine what a shock this must be for you. So before I say anything else, let me begin by saying I’m truly sorry.” The man on the screen looked weary. He had salt and pepper hair—more salt than pepper. Wearing a dark grey uniform and what appeared to be admiral’s insignias on his collar, he continued, “I have very little time to talk, Jason. I’m asking you to put everything aside—all your questions, even your anger, and just listen to what I have to say. Can you do that for me?”
    Jason was losing his patience. He turned to leave… he had a daughter to tend to.
    “Wait,” his father pleaded. “Please.”
    Jason hesitated and then turned back to face the screen. He nodded, almost imperceptibly, for his father to continue.
    “Sixteen years ago your Grandfather Gus discovered the ship you’re standing in now, The Lilly. A sinkhole had opened up at the back of his property after an extended rainstorm. Ol’ Gus spent weeks investigating. The sinkhole connected to an underground aquifer. Probably dried up for millennia. Gus eventually discovered The Lilly, the name I gave the ship you’re now standing in. Anyway, your grandfather never really trusted the government—so he called me. It took me several months before I could schedule leave. Truth is, I thought he’d lost his marbles and I’d be spending my time looking for a retirement home for him. Wrong! How that old codger managed to descend down hundreds of feet, and then dig a few hundred yards deeper into the aquifer—well, it’s pretty amazing. A spacecraft half buried and beat to hell. He showed me The Lilly, and that’s when everything, and I mean everything—changed!”
    “So you’re telling me Grandpa Gus knew you were alive for the past fifteen years?” Jason spat, exasperated. “It nearly destroyed our family; Brian took it the hardest. What was so damn important that you couldn’t let us know you were still alive?”
    “I couldn’t tell you, or anyone else, because I had discovered something that could literally alter the course of humanity.”
    “Oh for God’s sake, don’t you think that’s a little melodramatic?  Come on, Dad… your own family? Who would we tell? And why…” His father cut him off.
    “Listen to me, Jason. Right now, I’m twenty thousand light-years from where you’re standing—on another planet—in another solar system. What I’m doing now, and what I’ve been doing for the past fifteen years, is protecting Earth. I learned after breaching the vessel and reviving Ricket, that Earth had been visited thousands of times by numerous alien species. For the most part, we were simply watched, investigated… but all that changed in 1947, with what’s known as the Roswell Area 51 incident. Some of those alien-life forms we found? They’re actually called the Craing, and they were not here for auspicious reasons. Thirty-two Craing scout ships stayed in higher Earth orbit for twenty eight days—all for the sole purpose of cataloguing, mapping and germinating our planet for future, large-scale human harvesting.”
    “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? Why should I believe anything you say? How do I even know you’re really my father?”
    Admiral Reynolds hesitated, a sardonic smile levied on his worn face. “Can you really ask me that, Jason, as you stand there on a buried spaceship with a talking robot—two things that don’t exist in the 21st Century?”
    “Okay…” Jason paused, considering his father’s words. “You knew about this but didn’t involve the government or our military, for God’s sake. Why not?”
    “When I said germinate, I meant exactly that. Jason, thousands, no,