The Refugees
Campfire Stories: Volume 2, Issue 4
Chosen prompt: ‘Multifarious’ from the English language dictionary screensaver.
Taro, Noemi, and Rob sat quietly in the kitchen as they all began to fully comprehend the vast and multifarious overlaps in the lives of their little tribe. Every one of the twelve people in the house worked for the Department of Defense in some capacity somewhere in the Bay Area. They pondered whether they had come to live together in the same neighborhood in the first place out of some grand design. It undoubtedly was beginning to seem that way.
As more of their roommates came to the kitchen to see what was the matter, they began to assemble a rather formidable roster of skilled, talented, and intelligent civilians in the employ of the DoD. Kelli decided making a spreadsheet of mobile numbers and emails would be a good idea. She also took it upon herself to create a spreadsheet of personnel, skills, and radio frequencies.
While Taro waited, he fiddled with the HAM radio that Rob had retrieved from his room and connected to a cord that Noemi had hidden in the floor heater register in the kitchen. Noemi had connected it to an antenna on the garage roof during the preparation phase, ensuring that it couldn’t be seen through any of the windows from the house.
Taro and Noemi began checking various frequencies for any chatter that might be useful. After several hours of painstaking frequency hopping, they caught part of a conversation between ‘Nautilus’ and ‘Frog Leader.’
“Frog Leader, this is Nautilus, how read me now?”
“Frog Leader. Good copy, over.”
“Nautilus. We don’t know what happened with the radios, but this is not a secured frequency. How copy?”
“Frog Leader. Good copy, over.”
“Nautilus. In brief, gather up those tadpoles. Bring them to port. Nautilus out.”
It didn’t sound like ‘Nautilus’ had any time to waste, and it certainly didn’t sound like anyone else was running the show. Taro asked Noemi if she knew who Nautilus was. Kelli answered before Noemi stopped stammering.
“Nautilus isn’t a person. It’s a submarine. I’m guessing the Frog Leader is the base commander, and we are the tadpoles.”
Noemi looked at Kelli with a side-eye that had taken her several decades to perfect. It was one of those looks that makes a person’s heart lurch in their chest, and all ability to speak suddenly is drawn out of them as if they are in a vacuum. Even Taro and Rob were frightened by her piercing glare; they were just collateral damage.
Kelli calmly sat down at the table and gently nudged Taro out of the way, then punched in a frequency on the radio that they hadn’t tried yet and probably wouldn’t have for several hours. Her roommate introduced himself as Terry.
“I work with Kelli and Noemi. Kelli is my supervisor.”
Rob chortled a little, “Bedding the boss isn’t always a good idea, bud.”
Kelli’s head spun around so fast that Taro wondered if it might keep going for the whole circle, “He is not my partner in that sense. He sleeps on the floor. Stop acting like a child, Roberto Mangkassara.”
“I’m an analyst. I do her paperwork and help her figure things out when she asks me to, other than that I am supposed to stay out of the way and do as I am told.”
Rob looked at him, “Sounds like my life, but I don’t get paid for all that! I just clean the offices and bring home the…”
The sound of the slap that stopped Rob’s words reverberated through the house for a moment. The house’s occupants instinctively stopped everything they were doing, and a moment of silence ensued for Rob’s dignity.
Noemi reset her weapon of a hand in its holster and whipped another ferocious side-eye at Kelli. Rob and Terry, knowing their adversaries, bosses, counterparts, or whatever you want to call the two women in the room, mutually and without communication, chose to return to their rooms. Taro, ever the academic, never too wise to social cues, stayed.
At about the moment that Kelli and Noemi were nose to nose with fixed glares wilder than anything he had ever seen, it dawned on Taro that this was not where he wanted to be situated.
The radio crackled faintly.
Kelli and Noemi were instantly diffused and intensely fixated on the radio like a pair of feuding falcons that had suddenly spotted a whole field of rabbits.
“Nautilus. Atlantis.”
“Atlantis. Nautilus.”
“Plan Alpha is a no-go. I say again, Plan Alpha is a no-go. Over.”
“Nautilus copies, Plan Alpha is a no-go. Over.”
“What is the status of Babbelfish? Over.”
“Tadpoles are in the pond. Over.”
“Move ahead on Plan Bravo with all haste and get that Babbelfish to the Eye. Atlantis out.”
Kelli and Noemi simultaneously fixed their frighteningly intense gazes upon poor Taro in the corner.
“If we’re collectively the Tadpoles, does that make me the Babbelfish?”
Terry poked his head back into the room, “That is the dumbest question I have ever heard an intelligent person ask. Yes. You have always been Babbelfish. You’re the most likely candidate we have to translate this language.”
“Wh-why’s that?”
“Because we have been trying to get you to crack it since you were five. We hid it in the games you played, made it a part of every facet of your life. You know all of these symbols.”
“I…”
Noemi interrupted Taro, “Young man, we have been contacted more than once by these unidentified aerial phenomena. The trouble is that we have never learned their language. Now, they are stealing our satellites for resources, and the ship hovering in our atmosphere has begun harvesting plastics and gold.”
While this wasn’t strictly true, it was a close enough representation of the truth that none of her coworkers objected openly. This may have also been out of fear of her ferocious glare or of being on the receiving end of one of those thunderous slaps.
Upending Wordism 