Free Descent by Ken MacLeod

head, and what might be called the cheeks, were shielded by a mask-like helmet encircled by a jagged tiara. Antennae sprouted from the forehead. The eyes were faceted and convex. The chin was a closed pair of laterally aligned mandibles. The neck was segmented. Behind the neck, wavy vertical lines suggested something like coils of wire hanging from under the back of the helmet. The fingers had barbs along the inner surface, like the distal portion of a locust’s leg, and the hands had no palms.
    I felt my own palms sweat.
    At lunchtime I tracked Calum by his phone location to behind the bicycle shed, where he and a dozen other fourth and fifth years were sucking on (to all appearances) the hollow tips of retractable ballpoint pens and meditatively puffing out vapour. At the sight of me he stuck his fake pen in an inside pocket and joined me in a mooch around the playing field. The sky was overcast, the odd spit of drizzle enough to keep most people away from that particular stroll – apart from young-love couples, which no one (I hoped) would suspect we were. We exchanged a few jokes about the previous night’s episode of
Anachron
, a cult programme to the high school cognoscenti of the day, then I asked, ‘Where the fuck did that picture come from?’
    Calum cast me a smug glance.
    ‘Gave you a fright, did it?’
    ‘No,’ I lied. ‘But it’s fucking weird.’
    ‘Not what you saw, though? In your dream, like.’
    ‘Nope.’ I shook my head, with an uneasy effort at a dismissive laugh. ‘I saw the standard model Grey. Reptilian, I guess – I remember scales on its neck. That thing in the picture looks like some kind of insect.’
    ‘Fucking hell!’ said Calum, smacking fist to palm.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Just had a thought.’
    ‘I can see how that would be a surprise.’
    ‘Insects, right.’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘They’re like … good at mimicry, right? Remember that mole cricket we saw in the museum up at Glasgow Uni.’
    ‘Vaguely,’ I said.
    ‘And the leaf grasshoppers and that?’
    ‘Aye, sure, I’ve watched the odd David Attenborough in improving childhood moments.’
    ‘Well, there you go,’ said Calum, ‘there could be insects that mimic Greys.’
    ‘Fascinating,’ I said. ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’
    ‘Oh, aye. Well. Like I was telling yi. After my da gave me the third degree and the medical, so tae speak, he hoiks me out of the house and down to the garage. I swear if I’d been a wean he’d have dragged me by the lug, that’s what it felt like. Raging, he was, but scared wi it, know what I mean?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, although if I’d been more honest or less tactful I’d have said I had no experience of my own father in such a mood. I’d seen him angry with me, but never raging, and certainly never scared. In fact, I couldn’t easily imagine it of Calum’s father. Although a bit of big lunk – like his son was fast growing towards – with alarming beetle brows and a broken-looking nose, and hair on his swarthy face from chin to cheekbones whenever he forgot to shave, in my few dealings with the man from childhood onward he’d struck me as fair-minded and even-tempered, albeit with the sort of right-wing views one might (if one was as incurably snobbish as my sixteen-year-old self) expect from and make allowances for in a self-made small businessman who still got his own hands oily and fingernails broken in the repair pits.
    ‘The garage is closed on Sundays, unless there’s a special job on, which there wasn’t yesterday. Old man has the codes, of course, so in we go. Naebody’s around. He takes me to the office around the side of the main garage. On a shelf above the desk there’s stacks ae they file boxes, you know, the ones that haud the papers wi a spring clip? Old and greasy and dusty, doubt they’ve been looked at for years. Labels turning yellow and that. He hauls one down and blows the dust off it. He opens it and it’s bulging wi papers, dockets