Meeting the SOS-dan

The youngster who was second into the room did a double take when he saw me sat in the corner, a paperback novel open in my hand. (I later found out that this was an oft-assumed pose taken by one of the other SOS-dan, but I didn't know this at the time).

The young woman in the lead didn't even slow down, simply stalking down the room. "What are your qualifications!?" she asked as she did this. "Are you an alien? A time traveller? An esper?"

I closed my book, using a playing card (from the only Battletech TCG, rather than a poker deck actually) as a bookmark. "Aren't you being rather narrow minded? What if I was an alien esper travelling through time?"

"Are you?"

"Merely, a stranger in a strange land, travelling time in much the same way as yourselves, I believe," I demurred, putting the book away. Another young man and two young women had also entered the room while these pleasantries were exchanged. "Which is to say, forwards and at a rate that varies only through perception."

Then I interlaced my fingers, causing a distinct cracking of the knuckles, half-turned on the chair, rested my elbows on the table and my chin on my thumbs, looking at them over my hands. "You can call me Mr. Morden. And you, of course, are Suzumiya Haruhi, the famous leader of the equally famous SOS-dan."

"Tell me, Suzumiya-san..." Behind my hands, I smirked at them. "What do you want?"

Suzumiya slapped her hands onto the table in front of me. "I want the espers manipulating the world from behind a veil of mystery. I want the shapechanging monsters who appear in a hundred faces in a thousand days and the kitsune whose tails cause hurricanes when she waves them. I want a coyote from America and the parrots of the Caribees. I want a legion of the daring and bold to rise up and cast down the evils of the world in the name of GREAT JUSTICE."

She put her face right in front of me, as if daring me to interrupt. Not that I'd have dreamed of doing so, of course. "I want alien wanderers who play with planets the way you do with your food and then vanishing to leave great cities for us to unearth. I want the old man with whiskers down to his knees who begged on a street corner to show me the hidden alleys that lead from Mars to Mercury in the blink of an eye. I want a utopia in the skies where robots are building a castle for people who haven't even been thought of, a dream of a library where all the books never written are recorded. I want all the mutants and changelings to step forwards to be pirates and ninja and giant robot pilots."

"I want weirdness; strange happenings; mysteries hidden in a thousand shapes; aliens who live in outer space and inside the Sun, the ones right amongst you and the ones who don't know about us, the ones from the future and the past and know secrets that the rest of the universe won't and can't find."

"How soon will you have that arranged that for me, Mr. Morden?"

One of the men in the group cleared his throat. "Um, we were trying to form an interFen fleet to deal with the pirates in the asteroid belt?"

"I said that already," she snapped. "Well, how long will it take?" she demanded of me.

I stood, the chair scraping back along the floor as I did so, and leant forwards until I was able to whisper almost directly into her ear: "My dear, it's no fault of mine if you haven't found them yet."

And then I went towards the door.

"Morden-san," asked the young man who had spoken, as I left the small meeting room with answers to some of my questions, questions for some of my answers and several more of both that as yet were unmatched. "How did you know where to find us?"

I glanced at him and then spread my hands. "I'm the man," I said, in my best David Carradine imitation.

Actually it had been the result of a few quiet enquiries to acquaintances among the permanent population of Phobos, a little eavesdropping and a more or less systematic process of opening doors in this particular sector that had led to my finding the sysadmin for the Phobos internet server, who had given me the directions. But I wasn't going to tell him that. For one thing, it's good business to protect your sources. For another, I have a reputation to maintain.