Excerpt of The Last of the Elvis Ninja Robots by Michael W Stephens

The most recent set was exceptionally so. It was unlike anything Lexi had ever seen. It took her days to solve and she wasn't even sure if the answers she provided were correct.

Indeed, her solutions to the enigmatic problems were correct. She smiled, envisioning the moment she revealed to Travis and his online clique that she, the girl they wouldn't let into their stupid coding club, was the one that solved the challenge.

Lexi's smile quickly flattened into a frown as she glanced at her notifications. There were seven messages from Watts Wilson, the project owner. Something was wrong. She clicked the latest message, "Please call ASAP, this is extremely important." She gulped.

She checked a few more messages, same thing, but one added, "Can we set up a video call?" and another said, "We tried calling. We really need to speak to you!" Lexi wondered who was “we"?

No project owner has ever called her. She fended off the unhelpful thoughts that ran rampant through her brain. Had she possibly gotten mixed up with the wrong people and might be in some kind of trouble? Again? Lexi's biology test score would be the least of her worries if her mom found out about this.

She snatched her burner phone off the floor. It was an older model, so out of fashion that it had become fashionable again. She flipped it open. Five text messages, all from Watts, and three voice messages. Who left voicemails? Lexi nervously fumbled with the phone trying to figure out how to retrieve the recordings. She listened to the last one first, a woman with a very proper British accent said, "Alex, hi. This is Bianca Snow with SETI at the Green Bank Observatory."

Setty, Green Bank Observatory? The stalking panic inched a little closer as Lexi peppered herself with thoughts and questions. A bank observer? That could not be good. Had she unknowingly been working on encryption of financial records? Definitely not good. Her anxiety morphed to disbelief as the recording continued.

"I'm calling - well, first I want to personally thank you. Your work with Watts has been invaluable, it's... it's extraordinary. In fact, we are - look, I'd like to discuss - I'd like to talk to you about joining our team, taking on a more formal role. We could arrange something full time, part-time, whatever works for you."

Well, that wasn't what Lexi was expecting. She was pretty sure the woman just offered her a job. Could it be a scam of some kind? The message continued.

"I believe Watts has shared with you that we're now facing some considerable... time constraints. So please call back soon... so we can discuss this further. Again, we're under - we're really pressed for time, so please call as soon as possible."

Lexi replayed the messages a couple of more times, then sat perplexed. Normally, a job offer for someone desperate to make money would be considered a good thing. And making money doing something they loved would be positively fantastic. For Lexi, however, there were a couple of problems; the main one being that Lexi, a 15-year-old girl, had been posing online as a 25 year old man named Alex Belvedere.

That was all the fault of Travis Harrison, a senior at Lexi's high school, leader of the ByteMe coder's club, and a relentless cyber bully. He and his cronies had mocked and harassed Lexi on hacker forums and social media until she finally retaliated. Which was how she got in so much hot water and was nearly expelled from school. Which related to problem number two; Lexi had been coding behind her mother’s back and shuddered at the thought of how her mom might react if she found out.

Lexi looked up Green Bank Observatory and was instantly relieved to learn it was an actual observatory. As in, for looking at planets or stars or whatever they did at observatories. More importantly, it had nothing to do with banks. Apparently, Green Bank was what those with naming rights had given to the town where the observatory was located. Lexi then searched for the woman who had left the voicemail.

Bianca Snow was a Xenolinguistics professor at University of California, Berkeley's SETI Research Center. Lexi looked up a couple more unfamiliar terms and she was immediately plunged into a dizzying world of bewilderment and intrigue. Xenolinguistics, she learned, involved languages spoken by non-human intelligences and SETI stood for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Things were beginning to get weird.

Lexi quickly searched for Watts, kicking herself that she hadn't done so before. He was a computer science graduate student at Berkeley, working on a PhD in something called technosignatures. She looked that up. Technosignatures were signs of technology used by extraterrestrial civilizations.

"Um, ok... Take a breath, Lexi," she said to herself. The words ‘non-human’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ swirled around in her head along with endless questions. Like, how were the 2Bits projects related to aliens? Had she been talking to ET the whole time? What did he say?

Stressing over what to do next, Lexi sorted through her options. Calling Watts or Bianca Snow seemed out of the question. How could she possibly talk to them when they thought she was a man? Maybe she could disguise her voice, but what about video? They sounded desperate, so maybe they wouldn't care if she was in high school. But even if they didn't freak out, her mom most certainly would. Disobeying her about coding would be bad enough, but talking to aliens? That would absolutely send her over the edge. Probably.

No patterns presented themselves to Lexi to help solve this puzzle. She could not come up with any answers that didn't result in her abject humiliation, possible legal problems, and a permanent grounding. So Lexi did what any teenager would do and decided she would just ignore the whole matter and hope for it to go away.

It did not.

 *****