"Let me ask you something, MC. Do you know any conspiracy theories? Did you catch the news on the UFOs in New Jersey last night?"


    "Umm, yeah", I replied, deliberately ignoring the first question, "I don''t remember anything from last night but I do remember reading about it a few days back".


    Dan frowned a little, having either missed how taken aback I was with the question or choosing to overlook it.


    "Yes, there were a few sightings around that time, but there was a pretty major one last night too."


    "I didn''t follow too closely, I guess they were just drones or normal small aeroplanes." I added cautiously.


    "Yes, yes, of course."


    Dan was silent for a while formulating how he was going to elaborate.


    "I was responsible for the one last night. Responsible not in a way that I was piloting it, but rather I arranged for it be viewed as an UFO. Imagine leading a project where the objective is to create a news item on a UFO."


    I had no clue where this was going, but I decided to bite.


    "Why did you do that?"


    Dan was silent again for a while. I was ready to believe that this was his first time having such a conversation based on how slow he was responding.


    "Think of it as a cover up of a cover up of a cover up and turtles all the way down. I can only guess what the cover ups were about for the first few iterations. I don''t know the full picture but my objective was clear: facilitate a UFO sighting."


    "I''m not sure I follow. You created a UFO hoax and you don''t know why?"


    "My guess is as good as yours. Actually, mine might be better since I''ve been in this for over a decade. I believe it was a follow-up to the UFO sightings you did hear about a week before, maybe just to show that they are still going on and that it wasn''t just a temporary thing. The original sightings might have been covering up some other event that they wanted off the news cycle."


    This was starting to make a little sense. I did see a meme about how the sudden spike in UFO sightings was just misinformation to distract the public from a polarizing assassination. I''m a little ashamed to admit but I get most of the world news through memes. Dan was encouraged a little seeing my facial expressions become a little less clouded.


    "So you make up fake UFO news for the government?" I enquired.


    "No, not just UFO news, and no, I''m not affiliated with the government. Sometimes work I do may appear to benefit the government, but I''m not on their payroll."


    "You don''t get paid? So it''s a hobby?"


    "Not exactly. Yes, we don''t get paid, it''s more like volunteer work, but there are funds and resources we can use if we have the justification. Actually, you are kind of right, I had been treating this as a hobby until recently, but I''m getting more involved now."


    Dan had switched to using the "we" pronoun. This was probably a tactic to get me more involved that I was since I was getting a bit distant from this crazy conversation.


    "What changed? Why are you more involved now?" I asked.


    Dan took a step back and tilted his head.


    "I don''t know, didn''t have time to do more. I still have my regular job and life, and I kind of struggled balancing it all for the first several years. This work became more like a hobby that I would sometimes get into and then forget all about. Things are quite ambiguous and I guess I didn''t grow into it fast enough. I''m a bit more settled in life now, so can devote more effort into this."


    "But you don''t get paid?"


    "No, there''s no regular salary or bonus or anything. Yesterday''s UFO thingy that I mentioned, it took me like $1000 to arrange that, and I made no profit as such. You really want to be frugal here to get noticed."


    I have no clue what the market for UFO hoaxes looks like and whether Dan got it done at a good price.


    "How did you do it? You''ve returned just now from East Coast?"


    "I haven''t been to New Jersey in months, I organized it all remotely, not gonna share details, but just imagine some lights, balloons, wires and a high speed drone. If you''ve seen The Dark Knight, you''ll have a decent sense of how it went. A couple of friends helped me set it up." Dan explained with excitement. "See that''s the important thing, it can''t get traced back to you, else they''ll put you on ice for a long time. I did some reckless stuff at the start of COVID and got a little too much in the spotlight so they told me to lay low and I didn''t hear from them until almost a year back."


    There was that pronoun again.


    "Who''s ''they''?"


    "I don''t have a name for them, so I just use ''they''. It''s better than the names some of the other folks use like Illuminati, NWO, CIA. The guy who got me into it never used any names, so I thought I''ll continue with the tradition. Trust me, I''ve tried to give them a name and find out more but that just got me going around in a spiral. The best way to learn about them is to actually just do as you are told."Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    This was starting to feel like an obscure pyramid scheme to me.


    "The guy who got you into this? You knew him? He told you to do the UFO thingy?"


    Dan''s expressions darkened.


    "No, the guy who recruited me died a couple of years back of a heart attack. We worked together at Cisco. He was a manager of a sister team, so not exactly together. I got an email from somebody who knew him and when I met this guy, he told me about getting this done and then get into recruiting. It had been a while since they reached out to me. I thought I would never get to work with them again, so I was a bit too eager to get everything done quickly. I emailed the few profiles he shared while working on the Jersey UFO in parallel."


    So there were multiple profiles and I was indeed being recruited into something that didn''t look anything like a startup.


    "What exactly did my profile say?"


    "You''ll definitely be surprised to read it, but I''m not going to share it with you. I know you were once into writing fiction and I think I have a way you can leverage that skill."


    I was not very surprised by Dan knowing I wrote fiction. I had posted a couple of stories on Facebook back when I was in college. What surprised me more was that somebody was willing to scroll through my profile to find them.


    "Why me?"


    "You should allow yourself to feel a little flattered, but not a lot. You aren''t very special or unique, an Asian immigrant working in a Big Tech company in the Bay Area is practically a stereotype, but that''s actually a good thing since you won''t attract a lot of attention, yet are curious and capable enough to get things done. Most importantly, they feel you have potential and that''s why they gave me your name. This is my first time doing recruiting so I don''t know what their criterion is, but I do know they plan to expand quite rapidly in the recruiting department."


    "Department?"


    "Yeah, think of it like any organization, except you aren''t constrained to just work in one department. There''s not even a formal name or anything, you are just given work and I internally classify it into ''departments''. There''s recruiting, ops, R&D, troubleshooting. There''s probably even finance and strategy, but I''ve never met anybody who''s done anything in those areas. There''s definitely no marketing. Most of my work has been in R&D and ops, but I''ve been asked to focus more on recruiting now."


    "But you don''t get paid?" I asked again.


    "Yes, no regular salary," Dan shrugged, "but the more I''ve worked with them the more I''ve realized that money doesn''t really matter to me. I feel they believe that just knowing more about the world and helping is payment enough. Besides, the work is quite good and fulfilling, it''s even helped me develop skills that I use now as a Product Manager at Meta. You are young and at an age where you can really plateau in terms of your career, so this might be a good chance to let things not get stagnant."


    I was still unsure what I was being asked to do and how it would help me, or if it would even be worth my time.


    "I''m not sure. I won''t get into any trouble for this, right?"


    Dan didn''t respond right away and seemed to be choosing the right words carefully.


    "I, personally, have never been asked to do anything illegal or anything that I''m not comfortable with. They''ve never even leveraged that I work at Meta or asked for any data or insider information. That being said, I know of people working on stuff that seems to be in a legal gray area. My Jersey UFO project is a good example. There are some laws around drones and such in certain areas and how high they can go altitude wise. I''m no expert, and that''s why I took precautions to ensure that it doesn''t get traced back to me if somebody was willing to investigate it. A fair bit of warning, somebody always does end up diving deep into such things. That''s the reason why I was ''kind of'' discovered earlier during COVID. You need to be smart and you don''t get a lot of chances if you mess things up. I think I kind of got lucky here since they wanna expand so badly, so I was given another shot."


    I still must have seemed unconvinced because Dan continued.


    "How about we do this? I''ll just let you know what your next steps are, and if you don''t feel comfortable, you don''t have to do it, you don''t even have to meet me again. No harm done."


    It wasn''t a bad offer and I was definitely curious to know more. I agreed with Dan, no harm in just listening.


    "Fine. Tell me, what do I have to do?"


    "Remember how I told you that your profile mentioned that you are into writing and all? I want you to start writing about this and start putting it out there on the internet. Don''t share any details you are uncomfortable with, but just try to get as many eyes on it."


    What secret organization puts stuff up on the internet?


    "Why?"


    "It''s something we are doing to expand out recruitment pool. You need to write about your experience and upload it on to a popular platform called Royal Road."


    This was the first time I had heard about Royal Road.


    "Why only that platform?" I asked.


    "We are doing some A/B experimentation, figuring out what works best. You are actually quite lucky you get to work with Royal Road, some poor girl has to maintain a public Google Doc and then share about it after a month on Reddit. I''m pretty sure you''ll fare better than her."


    Wait a minute. Was this all just a stupid plot to get me to use this website?


    "You work for this Royal Road?" I accused.


    "What? No." Dan denied after being confused. "I told you, I work at Meta, you can see my LinkedIn to confirm. Royal Road is just some nerdy platform that I myself don''t use. I have no stake in it, it''s just something I was requested to pass along should you be interested. We don''t work for this platform. I''m pretty sure we don''t go to all this trouble to drive traffic to a website. See, I can''t really convince you, because I can''t fully trust you either. However, the more work you put into this, the more I and everybody else can be sure about you, making it easier for us to share more things. Do you understand how this works now?"


    In hindsight, Dan didn''t look like somebody who''d be invested in Royal Road. He wasn''t even nerdy enough to watch DanDaDan and term UFOs as UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).


    "So you just want me to do this writing assignment and write about this encounter on Royal Road?"


    "Yes, don''t stop at just this meeting, you can continue writing about your experience working with them. Keep in mind, don''t use my real name or even yours and use your judgement when sharing things."


    "What things? You haven''t really told me anything concrete other than your claim to have created a fake UFO."


    I might have seemed a little impatient and angry which made Dan back off a little. I should probably have used The Five Whys technique to figure things out calmly instead of just focusing on what was asked of me.


    "You are the creative writing expert, you figure out how you want to spin it. Things are going to be open-ended and ambiguous here. You get this done quickly enough and well enough and I''ll forward you the invite for the session."


    "What session?" I asked.


    "An orientation."