"Lisa Simpson Overdrive"

(the documentary scene)

"Here", Stone said, "I'll punch up a quick documentary for you."
He tapped out commands while Lisa put the headset back on.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Yes", she replied, and Stone hit the button.
Lisa suddenly found herself standing in a darkened room. She staggered slightly, not yet accustomed to the Net's sudden changes of scene. The room was a late twentieth century bedroom, comfortably warm. A gentle breeze licked at the curtains. An adult couple lay sleeping peacefully in a double bed.
A strong blue light appeared, filtering through the curtains, lighting the room. Momentarily dazzled, Lisa stepped back out of the glare, then crept to the window and peered out.
Something was hovering in the sky just above the house. A child of the nineteen-eighties and its television diet, Lisa knew what flying saucers looked like, and while this sinister object was not quite like any human depiction, it was unmistakable. It just sat there, perched on a pillar of blue light, radiating an aura of quiet menace.
It's not real, Lisa told herself, creeping back into the shadows of the room's furthest corner. It's just a projection. All in the mind.
The air beside the bed rippled, like a heat haze, and three creatures appeared. They were about the same height as Lisa. Their bodies were skinny, a flat uniform grey colour. Their heads were disproportionally large, the only distinguishable features a tiny slit of a mouth and two huge eyes, pure black. They were curiously lacking in detail, she noticed. Like cartoon characters. The thought made her shudder. Not real, she repeated silently. All in the mind. Not real.
The woman in the bed was sitting upright, staring at the creatures. The terror on her face was plain, but she didn't move a muscle. Her partner slept on, oblivious.
The three creatures - Greys, they must be Greys - lifted the woman effortlessly and carried her to the window. And vanished with her.
Lisa was about to scream when the scene abruptly changed again. The shock silenced her.
They were in a hospital - at least that was her first impression. The room was white all over. The woman was here, stripped naked, lying on some kind of operating table. She was screaming, over and over, while two Greys poked and prodded at her with strange instruments.
Not real. Not real. Not real. But a tiny voice in the back of her head reminded her that this was a documentary. These were accurate reconstructions of actual events.
She sensed something beside her, and turned her head very slowly. Another Grey had appeared and was approaching the woman on the table. It was slightly taller than the others.
"Do not be afraid", a voice said. A warm, reassuring male voice. "We mean you no harm". The creature's mouth had not moved. The voice seemed to come from its eyes. The Net whispered into her mind's ear, describing to her the Greys' techniques of mind control and emotional manipulation.
The woman stopped screaming. "You are safe", the voice continued. "You have nothing to fear."
The woman actually smiled at the thing, as if greeting a friend - or a lover. All the while the two smaller Greys rummaged around between her legs.
Lisa looked away from this vile tableau, and wished she hadn't. Nearby was another table, where a man was being attended similarly by two more Greys. Beyond that, another woman on another table. And another. There had to be at least a hundred tables, all in a row. The Greys took something from inside one woman, carried it to a wall lined with what looked like glass tanks. Inside each one floated a tiny human embryo. The Net spoke of breeding experiments, the production of obscene human-Grey hybrids for sinister purposes still shrouded in mystery.
The room vanished, the bedroom returned in its place. The blue glow was still there, and three Greys were laying the woman back in her bed, tucking her in. Then they and the blue light vanished with a ripple. The woman slept.
The bedroom faded to black for a moment, then returned, filled with morning sunlight. The couple woke normally and lay there telling each other what a good night's sleep they'd had. They didn't remember a thing.
Lisa wanted to grab the woman, shake her, scream into her face, "Don't you remember? Don't you remember what they did to you?"
The Net flooded her mind with statistics. Each night, thousands of people all over the world snatched from their beds. For how long? she wondered. Hundreds of years, came the reply from the Net. Maybe longer.
Another scene. Another spaceship, this one lying broken and twisted in a desert. Wreckage scattered all around. Trucks and jeeps drove up to it. Men in uniform, soldiers, climbed out, swarmed over the wreckage. Removed small, grey bodies to a waiting ambulance. The saucer was carried away on the back of a large truck, hidden under canvas sheet.
Fuzzy, two-dimensional archive footage of another saucer. This one was crudely-built, carrying US Air Force markings, rising unsteadily from a runway.
The Net told her of the covert military studies of captured Grey technology. Of tiny, secret skirmishes fought against lone saucers in far-flung corners of the globe. Until finally, the United States Army made the move which started a war - activating a series of field emitters, strategically located around the US, intended to disrupt the propulsion systems of the Grey ships.
Another scene - a city viewed from the sky. Three large Grey ships glided past, blasting the city with balls of light that exploded outwards behind them. The light faded to reveal a glowing crater. The Net reeled off a catalogue of particle beams, explosive devices, radiation weapons, neural disruptors, and other things far beyond the comprehension of the twentieth-century's very brightest eight year olds.
Her viewpoint returned to ground level, ruined buildings surrounding her. Humans burned and scarred by exotic weaponary crawled painfully through the rubble. This had the gritty feel of actual footage, none of the crisp clarity of a reconstruction. A small Grey saucer emerged into view, some kind of ray-beam picking off survivors who screamed in agony as it tore them apart.
The saucer moved closer to Lisa's viewpoint. She tried to move but the scene followed her every footstep. The ray flared, filling her field of vision for an instant, then the screen went black.
Another change of scene. Lisa found herself floating high in the sky, brilliantly sunlit clouds floating far beneath her. She lost her balance, tumbling over and over a few times before the Net helpfully righted her.
Shapes sped up out of the cloud at breathtaking speed. One huge Grey saucer, enveloped in a cloud of blue sparks, exchanging rays of burning light with eight smaller USAF craft that swarmed about it like wasps. One of them roared past inches from Lisa's head, and she tumbled again. By the time the Net set her upright, the ships were specks in the distance, soaring higher and higher into the sky.
There was a flash of light followed by the mighty boom of an explosion. Seconds later the burning shell of the Grey ship plummeted past, vanishing into cloud.
Then a shot of the Earth from space, a tattered formation of Grey saucers fleeing back to the stars.
The ground again, people crawling from shelter, people laughing, cheering, throwing arms round one another, crying with joy. A single man climbed atop a peak of rubble, shaking a defiant fist at the sky.
The final triumphant image faded to black, and Stone's office reappeared in its place.
"You get the picture?" Stone asked.
She nodded weakly. "Next time", she said, "just answer in words."