March 24, 2000

I finally got in touch with somebody from the Gannymede Corp. Turns out they’re actually pretty reasonable, and after I told them what happened to me, they agreed to help me.

The way it happened was, after my last journal entry, Nicole & I went back to that place, the broken-down shack with the tricky door. We took the van & this time Nicole drove. I told her to wait in the van, that I’d take it from there, so naturally, she wanted to come along too. (Truth is, I wanted her to come inside with me, but I knew that if I asked her, she’d say ‘no,’ so I used reverse psychology on her—Mom & Dad use that on her all the time & she always falls for it.) Anyway, I slipped in the back of the van & undressed, then when I turned around, I saw that Nicole had turned invisible and had followed me, undressing too. I asked her how she turned invisible so fast, did that formula of hers work super-fast or what, but she wouldn’t answer.

Anyway, the two of us went into the shack, just like I did before, and again I started punching numbers on the keypad. And again an alarm sounded, the door opened and the three goombahs came running out. But this time, Nicole & I slipped in behind their backs and through the door before it closed. We went down a flight of stairs into the basement. But it didn’t look like a basement, it looked like a high-tech lab, filled with all kinds of high-tech looking equipment & stuff, and people(?) sitting at these weird-looking consoles. Turned out they were computer terminals, but instead of a screen like you & I use, the screen was shaped like a big cylinder, like a barrel, almost, surrounding the user's head, so it gave them a 360 degree view of whatever they were looking at. And instead of a keyboard, they held this big ball in their lap, like a golden bowling-ball, and they’d sort of grope & stroke it and I guess that’s the way they did data-input. (Each one of the people using these things had webbed fingers, by the way.)

And there was this guy (I think it was a guy, but maybe not) walking around, looking over their shoulders, saying things like, "That’s it, people. Be happy in your work. A happy worker is a productive worker. Never forget the power of positive thought," etc., etc. I guess he was their supervisor or something. But what made it weird is the guy was wearing a gorilla suit and he had a silver diving-helmet on his head with two antenna sticking out. You couldn’t see his face at all, all you could hear was his stupid voice saying these stupid catch-phrases over and over… I don’t know, maybe he was a robot or something, it would explain it.

Anyway, we nosed around the place for awhile, looking things over, looking for clues. Nicole kept nearly giving us away by loudly whispering in my ear: "Whoa! Check this out! This is incredible! I don’t believe it!" I kept whispering back to her to shut up, but she kept doing it. She also kept clowning around, picking stuff up and waving them around behind people’s back, and then putting them down again when they’d look. She nearly got us busted a couple of times doing that.

We were looking at this weird-looking thing that looked like a giant mailing-tube that some of the people kept going into & coming out of. It’s kind of hard to describe, but you know the transporter on the original Star Trek, where they step onto the thing, then they sort of freeze-frame for a second or two and then they look like really bad reception for a moment before they finally disappear? Well, this was nothing like that! Instead, they’d step into this thing like they were going into a phone booth, then there’d be a flash of purple light like they were having their picture taken and POOF!  They’d be gone.

Anyway, we were looking at these things and I guess Nicole got too close to the thing, because there was a big flash of purple light and when I reached around for her hand and whispered her name, she wasn’t there anymore.

Just then I heard this angry voice behind me, saying "Hold it, lady!"

I turned around and there was this guy wearing these goofy-looking goggles (did you ever see those joke glasses with the big plastic eyeballs attached to slinkies? That’s sort of what these looked like, except the eyeball parts were glowing red) and holding a gun on me. The gun looked like a toy ray-gun, you know, the kind that shoots sparks? Well, this wasn’t a toy, this was a real ray-gun (I found out later that it was called the "Ollen Ray Gun," invented by some guy named Fred...)

Anyway, I’m totally shocked, ‘cuz this guy can see me (‘cuz of the goggles he was wearing, I found out.) I’m totally embarrassed, right? So I tried to cover myself with my arms. He gives me the "move along this way" shtik, and marches me off to a private side-room.

He didn’t seem too impressed with the sight of me in my birthday suit, so right away, I figure the guy’s not human (I was right, it turned out.) But he could tell I was uncomfortable, so he gave me something to wear: a form-fitting silver body-suit. I put the thing on and we both sit down at this long table. Now that he can see me (sort of), he took off his goggles and now I got a better look at him. He looked sort of like Bing Crosby, except he had green hair & orange eyes.

He gives me the whole third-degree interrogation, asking who I am, what I’m doing there, etc., etc.

I told him the whole story. I guess he believed me, ‘cuz by the time I reached the end of my story, his whole manner had changed and he put the gun away. Then he said he was really sorry about what happened to me, that he always knew something like this would happen to an Earthling one of these days, and that as a Gannymede Company rep, he was authorized to make full restitution to me, in exchange for my agreement not to file charges against the company (he was real scared of a lawsuit, it turned out.) He actually turned out to be a pretty reasonable guy (I can’t pronounce his real ("alien") name, so I’ll just call him "Bob" for now.)

I asked "Bob" how the heck I got invisible, and this is what he told me:

The Gannymede company came to Earth about 150 years ago to survey and catalog various life-forms on the planet. I asked if this was to colonize or conquer or invade the Earth in the future or anything like that.   He said no; it was just a job, a "works project" of the Galactic Bureaucracy and nothing more. Apparently, the Galactic Bureaucracy had all these researchers just sitting around with nothing better to do & they didn’t know what else to do with them, so they gave them the s*** job of surveying a worthless planet. Like the Earth. I asked him again if he was sure they weren’t going to take over the Earth someday and he laughed and said:

"Why would we want to take over this rock? Why would we even want to live here? There’s nothing here!  No intelligent life, nothing! I wouldn’t spend two nanoseconds on this dull rock if there wasn’t a regular paycheck in it!"

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or pissed when he said all that, but anyway, he said the machine that made me invisible was a relic from their early days on the planet, before they had perfected the "disguise field" that they use today to "blend in" with the Earth population. The Gannymede people knew they looked different from Earth people, so in order to do their jobs without attracting attention, they had to blend in somehow, and that’s what the invisibility machine was for. It (supposedly) only worked on their own people, and operated on special coins that they distributed among themselves for their own use.

Trouble was, the machine never really worked all that dependably, so instead they soon developed a "disguise field" that worked on a similar principle, but was a lot more reliable, and that’s what they use today. The company was supposed to go back and remove all the invisibility machines, and most of them were removed, but apparently a couple were overlooked ("A simple oversight," is what Bob called it.)

As for my turning invisible, Bob figured that it was just an accident, pure and simple. The electrical storm must have shorted something out inside the machine, and it zapped me by mistake. The fact that the machine and all other traces of the Gannymede company disappeared afterwards was part of a "fail-safe" device they built into it, in case an Earthling were to discover the true nature of the machine by mistake.

Bob explained that they got a warning blip when the machines disappeared, so he had a bad feeling that an Earthling might’ve got zapped by mistake, and that it was only a matter of time before one of us showed up on his doorstep.

But now that I was here, he said, he was willing to do everything possible to set things right...provided I signed an agreement not to file charges, of course.

So he took me into another room and introduced me to two Gannymede scientists (again, I can’t pronounce their "real alien" names, so I’ll just call them "Fred" and "Wilma") who assured me they could make me visible again… Or, at least they’d give it a real good try. They told me that, since a human’s anatomy & biology are so different from theirs, and that a human wasn’t supposed to get invisible in the first place (they couldn’t figure out why I was invisible—they guessed that maybe there must be something weird in my genetic background to account for it), so they weren’t completely 100% sure the procedure they had in mind would work. But they were willing to give it a shot if I was. I said okay.

So they walked me into one of those mailing-tube things I told you about before. There was a quick bright flash of light, and the next thing I knew, we were in another place altogether, a laboratory-type place, still on Earth, but thousands of miles away from where we were originally ("Saves a lot of time in commuting," Fred told me.) They walked me over to this big machine, sort of like a soda-machine, only it had what looked like a big eyeball at the end of a straw sticking in front of it. Fred & Wilma fiddled around with some knobs & switches on a console nearby and WHAMO! Another big flash of light and…

I was visible again!!  Hooray!!  I couldn’t believe it, but after months of being invisible, I could finally see my hands again and if I looked down inside the silver suit, I could see my body. Fred & Wilma handed me a mirror, and I almost jumped when I saw myself. I almost forgot what I looked like (I also wished I had a hairbrush and some makeup, to tell you the truth.) I was happy, Fred & Wilma were happy, everybody was happy.

They explained to me that the treatment they gave me should be permanent, but they weren’t 100% sure. They said there could be some side-effects, but that if there were, they should be only very mild and shouldn’t be a problem. I asked them what they meant by that & they said that it was possible that I might occasionally slip back into invisibility, but that if I did, it would only be temporarily. And anyway, the odds were against it.

They took me back to the mailing-tubes, stepped me inside and BAM! I was back again in the first place. Bob greeted me and gave me some papers to sign (one was called "non-disclosure," which I suppose I’m technically violating by writing all this down—even though I’m not using actual names or places) and then said I was free to go. And I was just about to walk out the door when I had a feeling that I forgot something. It had me completely baffled for a minute or two, and then I remembered:

Where was Nicole?

March 26, 2000

Well, I finally heard from Nicole.  Apparently, she got teleported to way across the country & ended up down South someplace.  She wandered around lost for awhile & ended up crashing with one of her guy-friends from the Internet.  I offered to come down there & pick her back up & take her home again, but she said no, she was going to stay with the guy for a while yet.

In other words, everything is (more or less) back to normal.

March 30, 2000

Well, it turns out that, just as "Fred & Wilma" said, there are some side-effects to that treatment after all.  It's the weirdest thing, but every once in a while, I turn invisible again!  Just like that, sometimes without warning.  I can sort of control it, though, and I seem to be getting better at doing that, so I'm not too worried about it.  But it sure is weird.  Looks like I'm going to be (occasionally) invisible for some time longer, yet.  Well, it's not so bad, I guess.  It does have its advantages, after all!  Besides, somebody ought to keep an eye on Nichole & try to keep her out of mischief, and who better to do it than another invisible woman? 


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