Hello

The boy didn't know what to look at first. There was just so much to take in all at once that he wasn't sure what he should start with. This had been his state of mind since he and his father first entered the complex, from the above ground security building, all the way underground.

The massive facility, built directly on top of the bedrock, stretched miles underground. It was impossible to tell from looking at it but it encompassed the size of several dozen city blocks, a sprawling mega structure of laboratories, workshops, hangars and life support systems. It had its own power, water recycling, food production and manufacturing facilities.

The boy once overheard his father call it 'the world most Fa King expensive prison', although he had no idea who or what Fa King was.

The boy's father had brought him to the facility, nicknamed the Zoo, for reasons unknown. Personally, he didn't care. To him it was a grand adventure that he would have exclusive bragging rights over. Everyone knew the Zoo existed, but none of his friends had any hope of ever seeing the inside. School this coming Monday would be interesting.

Eagerly looking out the glass in the observation deck where he stood, the boy's expression filled with wonder. On the far side of the glass was the largest chamber in the Zoo, the one around which the entire place had been built. Contained were two creatures.

The first looked something like a giant man, in the sense that it was man shaped. With arms and legs the size of ancient oak tree trunks, a torso the size of two football fields and a head larger than the boys house, it was a truly giant man-thing. Its shoulders, waist, knees, wrists and neck were restrained by huge steels clamps and a hood covered most of its head. It was his favorite the boy decided, reminding him of his Saturday morning cartoon heroes.

The second appeared to be a mass of tentacles, just tentacles. The largest were secured with huge manacles and long lengths of thick chain. The whole assembly was secured inside a mesh sphere which the creature sat in the bottom of, writhing slightly but otherwise still. The boy didn't like this one as much. It was still cool but definitely the villain in this real life cartoon. It was too ugly to be anything else.

Besides the two of them, there was space for a third creature in the chamber, to the right of the other two. This space had the remains of a third cage, snapped and bent outwards. There were work crews crawling all over the structure, but they were tearing it down rather than rebuilding it.

The boy asked a lot of questions about the creatures and the chamber and his father did a reasonable job of answering them. There were the customary 'I'll tell you when you're older' and 'you're too young' lines on a few things but for the most part his father was and had always been very open with him.

It was whenever he asked about the broken third cage that his father started acting strange. He didn't even try to give his son an answer, just stared through the window with a distant, fearful look on his face and then immediately change the subject.

Three repetitions of this process fostered an intense curiosity in the boy. He'd spent the last fifteen minutes staring at the three cages, trying to puzzle out what they could possibly be holding and why one of them was empty.

Dimly, he became aware of a noise in the room. It was a strange noise, like every kind of scratching noise that had ever existed put together in one. It was interesting to listen to but it kind of hurt.

As the noise became louder in his head, the room around him sprang into action. Voices were raised by everyone present, screaming questions, orders and reading at each other. The sound of operators at computer terminals became a steady patter as they typed faster and faster. The door hissed constantly as people entered and exited until finally someone took a moment to jam it open.

At the center of it all was the boy's father, shouting the loudest as he directed the crowd. In a free moment, he glanced over at his son. The boy seemed enthralled by something, staring glass eyed at the prisoners. Recognizing what this was a symptom of, he abandoned his post and made a beeline for his son. Less than two feet from him, an invisible wall stopped threw the father back into one of the lab assistants.

Recovering, he watched as his son placed a hand on the glass. The first prisoner, the man shaped one, easily ripped its wrist free of the wall, tearing out a large chunk of the wall as it did so. It raised its freed hand and placed it over the window, which would have imitated the boy's action if its hand didn't completely eclipse the glass.

For a few moments, boy and creature stood in that pose, both stone still, the boy with his head tiled slightly to the left. Eventually the boy turned and looked at the cluster of people which had stopped everything they were doing to watch the sight in collective anticipation.

The boy said only three words.

"He says hello."

Then he returned his hand to the glass.