I’m on campus at UCLA around dusk, because I have an appointment to see my counselor about a mistake that had been made on my record. There’s a long line in her office, and we all wonder why she’s seeing us all so late; usually they schedule appointments for the afternoon. After about a fifteen-minute wait, the secretary tells me I’m not going to be able to see her until tomorrow.

I walk out to the bus stop where the UCLA van service runs at evening, to take students back to the dorms and apartments nearby. My girlfriend is there waiting for a van. I ask her if they still run this late; she said the regular vans don’t, but there’s another sort of service running that we can take. I watch a pick-up truck approach the bus stop, but not slow down. As it drives past at about thirty miles an hour, several students leap into the truck bed and struggle to get in; one person doesn’t make it and falls onto the street, then dusts himself off and begins waiting for the next one.

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A remote orbital station above some forbidding planet. Cut to an interior: a huge, empty, hangar-like room, like a cargo area. Huge picture windows look down at the planet. A single turbolift door in one part of the room.

Familiar blue chyron titles in one corner of the view: “Cause of Death.”

An ensign, unsure, hesitantly exits the turbolift. He looks around the well-lit, empty space. Mounted in a corner of the ceiling, a viewscreen. It turns on, showing an alien wearing a Starfleet uniform. A superior officer.

“Ensign. This is the room where it keeps happening.”

The room isn’t completely empty though: a podium-like wooden pedestal stands next to a long jewelry-display-case like object, large enough to hold one person inside. On the podium on some kind of holder, sticking straight up, is a syringe with the needle pointing into the air. It is full of something. A little bit lower on the podium is a severed alien hand, complete with frayed Starfleet uniform cuff still at the wrist.

“The creature came up with one of our early shuttle runs, that much is certain. Everything else we know about it: it is completely invisible, soundless, undetectable via any means we have. We have reason to believe it’s susceptible to the tranquilizer in the syringe.

“We can’t explain why, when it kills, it leaves the left hand.” The hand belongs to the last ensign to enter this room.

“We’ll give you four hours. Good luck.” The screen switches off. The doors shut and lock.

Now I am the unsure ensign. I approach the podium in the deathly-silent room. The floor is carpeted, so I make no sound; not that anyone understands how it hunts. I pull the syringe off the stand and hold it out in front of me like a weapon. I begin to methodically sweep the room.