Page 35 of Rizzed Up By My Alien Neighbor
Most of the day is bureaucratic torture. I transfer funds through shell accounts bearing painstakingly backdated addresses. Each click of the compad keyboard is deliberate, precise—again and again I reinforce the facade of Richard J. Wilmont, “independent consultant,” all sanctioned by my forged return filings. A credit check pops green; the mortgage seizures clear. Each signature, each digital fingerprint, is another brick in my fortress.
Heard the term “paper tiger”? This is more like paper fortress, made of lies—but fortress nonetheless.
The basement is next. I open the trapdoor to the unfinished space, the stairs groaning beneath my weight. I scan the room with a hand-held spectrometer—moisture levels, electromagnetic interference, structural alloy resonance. Suitable. Good enough.
Now comes the retrofit.
Between the concrete walls I plant stealth shielding—thin film layers that absorb and scatter radio waves. I repurpose wiring from my wrecked Starfighter’s AI node to make a rudimentary network backbone in the walls. Power reroutes into a small bank of salvaged capacitors to ensure redundancy. Every decision is a calculated compromise—security vs. local signals, efficiency vs. stealth.
I drill the first hole, the sound echoing deep in the musty basement. Concrete dust hangs in the air. My hands are slick with grime, and I taste the grit when I wipe at my lips. There’s something deeply satisfying about the physicality of manual labor here, after weeks of code-driven survival. I am making this world mine—moment by moment.
An hour later, I break for a drink of water—crisp, cold—and admire the first stealth panel installed. I run my fingers over its surface: smooth metallic weave beneath a plaster face. It merges with the wall perfectly, like a tattoo beneath healed skin.
I’m interrupted by a faint hum through the structure. Collinsville’s Holonet node—functional. I locate the central splice and plug in my comm transmitter. A small light flickers green.
Connection secured.
I step outside, closing the basement door carefully, and survey the house. It has flaws, but it’s close. Close enough tomonitor Vanessa’s perimeter. Close enough to intercept leaks. Close enough to finally feel—almost—grounded.
A soft whisper cracks through—my inducer picking up a spike in ambient pheromones from next door. It’s Nessa, moving inside her house. Laundry. Dinner prep. Footsteps on stairs. A small sync pulse of unintentional contact, caught on sensors meant to remain impartial.
Lying beneath a perfect moonlit sky, I admit something I’d nearly forgotten: proximity matters. Presence matters. It’s not just wires and data streams; it’s shared atmospheric patterns, household rhythms. I’m not a ghost here. I am a neighbor now—by design.
I return downstairs and plug the last cable into the lab terminal. I retrieve a small toolkit, decades old, from under a tarp—microfiber cloth, sensor calibration rods, nano-filament matrix blades.
I pause.
I could leave.
I could erase every proxy link, flee back to rubble fields and empty skies.
But I don’t.
This place is flawed—wooden, messy, human.
The transformation begins the moment I wake. By sunrise, I’m already in motion—garage door up, toolkit laid out. The floorboards sometimes groan, but the air smells crisp—wood shavings, fresh paint, and kinetic potential. Progress tastes like grit and adrenaline.
First, the garage. The interior shelving comes down, revealing bare studs. I map out a false wall—reinforced with melted composite from ship hull plating. Behind it, weapons and tech can be concealed. The vault is hidden in plain sight. I tuck my plasma slugs into a lined vault, magnetically sealed. The tilessnap into place—fitted snugly so even a trained engineer would never guess it’s a hollow chamber.
The mailman arrives midway—I nearly freeze. He lopes down the driveway, carrying a bundle of letters. I greet him with a stiff nod and a five-second wave. He blinks twice, then offers a quiet, “Morning, neighbor.” And that’s it. I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. My inducer holds.
Next, the attic. Surrounded by dusty beams and sagging insulation labeled “vintage.” I reroute old ductwork to camouflage a stealth scanner array—a ring of dish sensors and repurposed lights that flicker once in a while. Moments like this, I can almost hear Vakutan censors screaming: “Why are you wasting prime warp conduit on a human crawl-space?”
Because this world calls me need.
Downstairs, the basement hums with ambition. I’m building something. Molecular replicator—rudimentary, crude, but functional. Pieced together from broken ship modules and microwaves, wired into Earth’s archaic battery systems. Every joint, every splice, is an experiment. Converting energy states. Reordering atoms. Making matter from static electricity.
The first test is… a rock. A gray pebble. It turns into a cube of smooth metal, warm to the touch. My breath shudders involuntarily. I hold the fragment up to the dim bulb—reflecting something in my hollowed chest.
I’m not home yet. But I’m close.
That evening, I step outside to test another module: a grill contraption perhaps an Earth innovation, but alien to me. I load charcoal. I light a match. Flames leap higher than I intended, licking the edges of the grill grate.
Smoke thickens.
Suddenly, footfall.
Sammy Malone.
