Dexter Gray, Alex Dalton, and Josephine Schmidt were all crowded around the computer terminal in the Banshees' downstairs living room. They were the only ones home. Lee Carter was away on business, Sam Beckett was away on Earth studying to become a doctor, and when they'd asked Max where she was going, Banshee Squad's XO had just growled before storming out. That left Dex and Alex the perfect opportunity to cajole Jo into snooping around Starfleet's classified computer files.
"You know we shouldn't be doing this, right?" said Jo from her position at the computer controls. "I mean, these are classified files."
From his perch behind Jo, Dex said, "You're the resident computer genius, Lieutenant. Nobody's going to catch you. Besides, we're just interested in a few old police records. Who's even going to care if we see those?"
"Somebody cared enough to classify them," countered Jo, but continued to input encryption busting routines into the system anyway.
After a few more minutes of tense waiting on the parts of Dex and Alex, Jo finally sat back and smiled in satisfaction.
"Did you get through?" asked Alex. She and Dex crowded closer to peer at the computer screen.
"Yes," replied Jo. Her smile diminished and was replaced by a look more akin to worry. "The files were buried under a lot more security lockouts than I expected. Someone really wants this information to stay out of the public domain. I can't believe I let you two troublemakers talk me into this."
"What does it say?" asked Alex, ignoring Jo's protests.
Banshee Squad's science officer sighed and began scrolling through the information on the terminal. It didn't take her long to understand why Starfleet was keeping a lid on this. She summarized for her two eager, young teammates. "According to this, a large, furry alien just like the one you two saw has been visiting Serenity since the first El-Aurian settlers landed here three-hundred years ago! He shows up every twenty years or so, wanders around looking at things and taking pictures, asking a few odd questions, handing out little treats whenever someone gives him a right answer, and then magically flies away into the air whenever the police show up."
Jo leaned back and looked at Dex and Alex. She smiled and said, "I thought you two were making up that part about him flying away!"
"Nope, it was real all right," replied Alex. "What else does it say?"
Jo resumed summarizing. "Not much. Starfleet has no record of his species, but they suspect he's from either far Corewards or else from one of the satellite galaxies. No one's ever detected a ship. His civilization is assumed to be extremely advanced, and his species considerably more evolved than Mankind. There are some worries here that he may be some sort of advanced scout for a military force."
Alex sputtered in derision. "That's nuts," she said. "He was just a nice alien tourist. Right Dex?"
But Dexter was lost in thought. "Huh? Oh. Well..."
Alex's eyes widened in disbelief. "Don't tell me you believe all that!"
"You have to admit, that alien was pretty strange, Alex. The technology he displayed, what little we saw of it, was ten-thousand years beyond us. And those little treats he kept giving us..."
"What about them?" demanded Alex. She placed her hands stubbornly on her hips.
"He always gave them to us after we answered one of his questions or did something he asked us to do. It seemed almost like he was..." Dexter paused here uncertainly.
"What?"
"That he was training us!" exclaimed Dexter after another moment's hesitation. "He was nice and all, but I got the definite impression he thought of us as lower forms of life. He was training us like we'd train dogs, giving us little treats every time we did something right! To his species, humanity must seem barely more evolved than dogs."
"That's stupid," said Alex, but by her expression she was beginning to wonder if Dexter wasn't right.
"We know that there are alien civilizations out there, Coreward and outside the Galaxy, that are very technologically advanced," said Jo. "The Preservers, the Cytherians, the Kelvans, the Doomsday Machine Builders--"
She was interrupted by an attention-getting squawk from the computer terminal. Red lights started flashing on the console, and the machine whirred and clicked frantically. "What the--?!?" exclaimed Jo.
"What is it?" asked Dexter.
"Someone's remotely erasing everything we've just downloaded from the security files!"
"Uh-oh," said Alex, taking an involuntary step back away from Jo and the computer terminal, as if the little extra distance could hide her involvement in their illegal computer hacking.
The terminal bleeped one last time -- a plaintive, defeated bleat -- and the screen went dark. A second later, the standard Starfleet logo appeared.
The three officers held their collective breath, but nothing else happened.
"Who has the power to do that?" whispered Alex.
"No one that I know of," replied Jo. Not even Starfleet Intel." She turned to the two instigators of this fiasco. "What have you two stumbled into here?!?"
"I don't know," said Dexter. "Right now I'm not sure if I should be more afraid of a super-powerful alien civilization that sees us as mere animals, or our own government, which somehow knew exactly what we were doing and erased it!"
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