Alerted

"I.D?" asked the security officer at the entrance to the building.

Without a word, the agent flashed her badge, and seeing that the system recognized it, the officer waved her through.

Samantha Walters was a surveillance operator of the Unknown Alien Defense ****, or the UADF. She was investigating various reports that unknown aliens had landed on Earth, and were secretly infiltrating the human populace. To the rest of the population, such a notion would be ridiculous, which is exactly what the UADF wanted people to think. The less people knew that there actually was an organization that knew of the existence of aliens, the better. For 50 years, the UADF had been the stewards of any aliens that had happened upon Earth, and had gathered a sizeable group, a group that had been living among humans on Earth for many years now, albeit under the close watch of the UADF. So far, extremely few of the aliens presented had been hostile fortunately, and the UADF sent Samantha, expecting any new reports to be no more different than the others. Nevertheless, the UADF was careful, and maintained to what essentially amounted to a small army at all times in the event they encountered any alien that was hostile.

Her heels clicked rhythmically as she made her way through the station to the surveillance office. Every day, thousands of reports were given by the system, itself flagging any potential alien event. 98% of the reports were easily explained random events, and could easily be ignored. The system was designed to look for anything potentially suspicious, and therefore typically overreported incidents. Samantha's job was to sift through these reports and determine which events were easily explained, human events, and which were not. If the report was genuine, she'd tag the report for follow up by a response team, which would usually be deployed within 2 hours of Samantha submitting the follow up. More and more these days, she and other operators who worked in surveillance found themselves reporting more and more genuine alien events, and not all of which turned out nicely. Just the other week, Samantha had reported an incident at an airport overseas, an event that the response team was still determining the aftermath of.

She said a few greetings to the other surveillance agents, but didn't linger, as everyone knew that this job was no place for small talk. She sat down at her desk, and booted up the system, and began to work.

After a few hours of tossing aside benign reports of no consequence, she came across a report sourced from a grainy parking lot security camera. Samantha couldn't see much, and the system had only provided "irregular behavior" as the reason for the report, the most common and least informative reason for a flagged event. Typically, any irregular behavior was just a person cheating on their spouse, or attempting to hide some low-level crime, or even the occasional ****, none of which mattered to Samantha.

She was about to throw out the report as another false flag, but she stopped, as Samantha noticed one of the cars in the footage felt familiar to her. She realized that the same car had been flagged a week back, and only vaguely remembered it because of the unique vanity plate on the back. As Samantha looked at the footage again, she realized it was the same license plate. Both events themselves didn't warrant a response team, but the same car being flagged twice in as many weeks deserved a follow up, as the chances of that happening randomly were extremely slim. With that, Samantha marked the event for "individual follow-up", and moved on to the next report.