By L. Stevens

My partner paces back and forth, clearly unsettled, recounting the latest conversation with Ben. “He said, ‘Something happened. Like the wind changing directions, she wasn’t who she appeared to be.’ His exact words.”

I shake my head. “Ben certainly has a way with words. ‘Like the wind changing directions.’ That’s poetic.”

Zenar glared. “This is serious. I’ve noticed something too. The surgery was less than perfect. We’re changing.”

“I’m not worried about Ben. He saw me without my make-up.” That isn’t exactly true. I’ve seen the differences myself, and it’s a concern. My lips are wrinkled, my eyes have lines and I see brown spots on my skin. I see it in Zenar, as well. Fortunately, as we’ve known, earthlings don’t stay focused on any one thing for very long.

My partner goes on. “Pretty soon he’ll start talking, making other people aware. We may not be able to stay here.”

“Relax, rookie. The next time Ben sees me, I’ll be made up, and he’ll have forgotten what he saw before.” Zenar is new to this line of work. We’re in serious trouble, but I don’t want to panic the novice. I’ve worked on this planet since humans dropped the A-bombs, in the year 1945. I don’t like to brag, but as everyone knows, that never happened again, not on my watch.

Back then, the technicians that prepared us agents for work on Earth were not able to build in aging. Nothing ever changed physically in the earlier releases of their work, a major disadvantage. In the Forties, I’d been placed in the U.S. Department of State. By the time the Cuban missile crisis broke in 1962, I drew attention for not looking a day older in seventeen years. Russia pulled the weapons out of Cuba, Kennedy did the same in Turkey, and headquarters killed me off and brought me home.

The lab guys still have work to do calibrating their aging process accurately. I never fully understood it, but on Earth, time moves much differently from our world, in ways that are difficult to scale. Our techies are very bright, but this has them stumped. When they sent me back to Earth this time, with a new partner, we saw the problem; Zenar and I look ten years older every few months. And feel it.

Zenar is right about our stay. For people working in intelligence service, NSA folks in New York aren’t the most observant people in the world (that explains why they put us there), but their spotting us isn’t the major problem. At the rate things are going, it won’t be long before we die of old age. It’s critical we leave Earth before that happens. I need to call home, via telepathy.

My talk with headquarters sobers me up. We aren’t going anywhere. It seems the game is over for us. The weapons of mass destruction we’ve held in check are now irrelevant. Biowarfare, in the form of a deadly virus, has been unleashed, and it’s mutating. They first called it Covid-19, but it’s become much worse. My boss, if he even knows, isn’t saying which nation set it off.

“It’s the one thing we’ve always feared.” he tells me. “We don’t have viruses here, don’t want them, and have never dealt with the ones on Earth. Nuclear reaction we can deal with. This is another story, and when a civilization is hell-bent on suicide, well…”

The problem for me and Zenar is that they won’t allow us back. We’re outcasts; pariahs. The good news is New York’s governor is putting us in a nursing home for our safety.