But the plane just stopped, and hung there, nose tipped at a slight angle, mere feet from the building.
And that’s when the figure — the one people call the Ambassador, or the Doctor, or the Outsider, or the Professor, or a hundred other names — appeared. Just a middle-aged man in a white lab coat, with steel-rimmed glasses and graying hair. His image filled the air above the jetliner, like the dome of the sky had been transformed into an IMAX movie screen.
He said, “People of Earth, I have a message for you.”
Rated PG for ennui and futility of life. (http://escapepod.org/)