The being watched the man walk into the park with his lunch box.
Its mission, like so many others, was simple. It had been sent to obtain information about the level of advancement made by this person’s company’s medical research team. The man eating lunch was only an assistant, but he had access to every department within the building. The alien was a specialist; it had performed hundreds of these short-term habitations. They usually only required a few weeks of possession, sometimes only days, just enough time to find out whatever it needed to discover. Its race had been training and deploying beings such as this on a regular basis over the centuries. Information gathering was what it was all about. Having no visible form, it drifted closer. It looked into the man’s eyes for a moment, before travelling swiftly to his house to wait.
Compared with most of its assignments, this was an easy one. The target was a middle-aged bachelor with no children or pets. He lived alone and had very few friends. He was not a healthy specimen of humankind, and since the lift to his apartment had broken down months ago and had never been repaired, climbing the stairs to the twentieth floor each day didn’t help. Regardless of this, the being would take over his corporal form while he slept. Tomorrow was a work day. It may be possible to obtain enough information about the research being carried out, and to return to the craft, before the end of the following day. It liked quick jobs.
As predicted, it was only two days later that it prepared to leave the human’s body. It had all of the research material it had been asked to get and was waiting for him to drift off to sleep. Once he was completely unconscious, the being could exit.
That’s when the whole thing went pear-shaped. It had heard of this happening before. This failure, this malfunction, was very rare. The leaving process was simply not working. It was stuck. It was captured inside one of these human bodies, and as far as it knew, going on past events, it had never been figured out how to fix the problem when it occurred. It was trapped inside this dreary individual for the remainder of its miserable human life. Not until that time would it be released.
The situation was one that this entity, this being from such an advanced cosmic level, would have to endure, and with absolutely no way to prevent the ghastly inevitability of it. It was slowly coming to terms with the horrible truth that it was a prisoner, residing inside this rather boring individual who spent his life doing odd jobs around a research facility, day in and day out, who had hardly anybody he could really call a friend, who didn’t even have a pet for company, who had never married… in other words, this person, was as dull as ditch water!
There was only one way out.
It opened the window and jumped.